HEKATEII) is arguably the most mysterious and formidable of all the Goddesses(2 ) of the ancient world. Although she is often thought of today as the archetypal triple lunar deity, a glance at her history reveals a Goddess who is much
more complex, and one with a broader and deerer range of symbolism.
There is now a consensus amongst scholarslJ that Hekate's origins are to be
found not in Greece but in Asia Minor, and more particularly in Caria (in modern south-west Turkey), where the town of Lagina was home to her most important cult center. It has also won general acceptance that she was not originally a moon Goddess,(4) and that her triple nature derived, as Farnell was the
first to point out (pp 25-7 below), not from the moon, but from her role as Goddess of the crossroads, which in ancient Greece was a meeting of three ways.
Helwte's three ancient phases
Hekate's ancient cult shows, appropriately enough, three main stages. In the
first she shows her origins as an eastern Great Goddess,IS) with, so it seems,
solar rather than lunar attributes,I61and with the uncanny features of her second phase less in evidence-but this rather than indicating that they were absent, may be due to them having been suppressed in our extant sourceSj much
as Artemis' darker side often wasP) Our chief witness for this first period is
Hesiod's Theogony where a hymn to the Goddess allots her a position of honour in every domain.
In her second phase, from Hellenistic times onwards, she has the features
which have ever since defined her character in popular thought. Here she is
preeminently Goddess of ghosts, magic and the moon. The texts which define
this image of her most vividly are the hymns to her in the Gr~ek Magical Papyri, one of which is translated on pp 75-7 below.l 8)
In her third phase, Hekate shows her most remarkable developments.l9 ) Because of the enormous influence of the Chaldean Oracles on Pagan circles in
late antiquity, their image of Hekate came to be an important feature in late
Pagan religion. In this phase her lunar attributes were marginalised and, although she indubitably remained a terrifying deity, the emphasis shifted to her
role as Goddess of the Cosmic life-force, and soul-nourishing Virtues. The
Chaldean image of Hekate, with its stress on her Great Goddess aspects, recalls her original nature and seems to reflect eastern traditions which preserved these early features.
Darklady's Occult