Hekate in ancient Greece

Your goal in this lesson: to know the two oldest texts about Hekate and the ways ordinary Greeks honored her at home.

Hesiod’s generous goddess

Historical Hesiod’s Theogony, a poem about the origins of the gods, was probably composed around 700 BCE. Its passage on Hekate, lines 411 to 452, is long and warm. Her mother is Asteria, a starry goddess, and her father is Perses, which makes her a cousin of Apollo and Artemis. In Evelyn-White’s 1914 translation, Zeus “gave her splendid gifts, to have a share of the earth and the unfruitful sea. She received honour also in starry heaven.”

Hesiod’s Hekate is not a dark figure. She helps kings in judgment, soldiers in battle, athletes, horsemen, fishermen and herders, and she nurses the young. Some scholars wonder whether Hesiod had a personal devotion to her, others whether the passage was expanded later. Neither idea can be proven.

The torch in the Hymn to Demeter

Historical The Homeric Hymn to Demeter, probably from the seventh or sixth century BCE, tells how Hades carried off Persephone. Her mother Demeter searches for nine days with torches. On the tenth dawn, “Hecate, with a torch in her hands, met her” and told her she had heard Persephone cry out but had not seen who took her. Together they go to Helios, the sun, who saw everything. When Persephone returns at the end of the hymn, Hekate embraces her and becomes her companion.

This small scene gave Hekate two of her lasting roles: the torch-bearer who lights the way, and the one who hears.

Triple statues and doorways

Historical A hekataion is any shrine or image of Hekate, and especially the type with three female figures standing back to back around a column. Many survive, mostly Hellenistic and Roman, often small enough for a household or a roadside. Pausanias, writing in the second century CE, believed the sculptor Alkamenes, active in the later fifth century BCE, was the first to make her as three figures. His statue stood on the Athenian Acropolis.

Greek writers mention small shrines of Hekate at house doors, where she guarded the threshold. She was honored at crossroads, the places where three roads meet. One of her titles, Trioditis, means “of the three ways”.

Suppers for Hekate

Historical Athenian sources, such as Aristophanes’ comedy Wealth (388 BCE), mention “Hekate’s suppers”: food set out for her at the crossroads at the end of the lunar month. The evidence is scattered, and much of the detail comes from later commentators. We will return to it, and to a modern version, in lesson 7.

Try this

Today’s exercise: read the Hekate passage of the Hymn to Demeter, lines 51 to 63 in Evelyn-White’s translation, which is free to read online. Write one sentence on what Hekate does in the scene, and one on what she does not do. Notice how small her part is, and how much later people made of it.

Quick recap

• Hesiod (around 700 BCE) gives Hekate honor in earth, sea and sky.
• In the Hymn to Demeter she meets Demeter with a torch and hears Persephone.
• Triple statues and doorway shrines show household and roadside worship.
• Suppers for Hekate were set out at the end of the lunar month.

Keep going

Press “Mark as done” and continue with Magic and philosophy: the papyri and the Oracles. To look at her emblems more closely, see Hekate’s symbols.

Need a refresher? Go back to Who is Hekate? or see the whole course.

Sources

• Hesiod, Theogony, lines 411 to 452, translated by H. G. Evelyn-White (1914).
• Homeric Hymn to Demeter, lines 51 to 63 and 438 to 440, translated by H. G. Evelyn-White (1914).
• Pausanias, Description of Greece 2.30.2.
• Aristophanes, Wealth (388 BCE).

Go deeper: the Hekate pages on this site

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