From witch queen to modern goddess

Your goal in this lesson: to follow Hekate from the Roman poets to modern witchcraft, and to see which popular ideas were added along the way.

The learned witch goddess

Later tradition When public pagan worship ended in late antiquity, Hekate lived on in the books educated Europeans read. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses (book 7), the sorceress Medea calls on her before a night rite. In Lucan’s Pharsalia (book 6), the Thessalian witch Erictho threatens the underworld powers, Hekate among them. Seneca’s Medea has a dark incantation scene too. From these poems a picture formed: Hekate as goddess of the night, the moon, the underworld and of sorceresses like Medea and Circe. Medieval mythographers and Renaissance scholars such as Boccaccio passed it on.

Shakespeare’s Hecate

Later tradition In Macbeth (printed in the First Folio of 1623), Hecate appears in two scenes. In Act 3, Scene 5, she scolds the three witches for meddling with Macbeth without her and calls herself “the mistress of your charms”. Many scholars think these scenes were added by Thomas Middleton, whose play The Witch contains the songs they cue. That is a scholarly judgment, not a certainty. Because Macbeth is performed everywhere, its witch queen spread further than any ancient hymn.

Translators and occultists

Later tradition The English Platonist Thomas Taylor translated the Orphic Hymns in 1787 and 1792, including the hymn to Hekate, and later published Chaldean material. Members of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, founded in 1888, studied these texts, and William Wynn Westcott published an edition of the Chaldean Oracles in 1895. These versions are old-fashioned and sometimes wrong, but they gave English readers a Hekate who was more than Shakespeare’s.

Graves and the triple goddess

Modern In 1948 Robert Graves published The White Goddess, a passionate book about poetry and a great goddess he believed lay behind all myth. He tied her three faces to the moon’s phases and to stages of a woman’s life. Later popular writers fixed this as maiden, mother and crone, and Hekate was often cast as the crone. The triple statue is ancient. The maiden, mother and crone reading of it is modern.

Wicca and Hekate devotion today

Modern Wicca, made public by Gerald Gardner in the 1950s, honors a Goddess and a God, and Hekate became one of the goddess names most often invoked in witchcraft circles. Since the late twentieth century, books, groups and online networks centered on Hekate alone have grown, some careful with history and some not.

None of this is a betrayal of an “original” Hekate. The ancient Greeks themselves had no single image of her. Every age has added something, and our age is part of her story.

Try this

Today’s exercise: take the list you made in lesson 1. Mark each belief again as ancient, later tradition or modern, using what you have read. How many guesses did you change? Write one line on the change that surprised you most.

Quick recap

• Roman poets made Hekate the patron of sorceresses such as Medea.
• Shakespeare’s Macbeth spread the image of Hekate as queen of witches.
• Taylor, Westcott and the Golden Dawn revived her for English readers.
• Maiden, mother and crone comes from Graves (1948) and later writers.

Keep going

Press “Mark as done” and continue with Symbols, animals and places. For the wider story of witches in the European imagination, see the history of witchcraft.

Need a refresher? Go back to Magic and philosophy or see the whole course.

Sources

• Ovid, Metamorphoses, book 7.
• Lucan, Pharsalia, book 6.
• William Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act 3 Scene 5 and Act 4 Scene 1 (First Folio, 1623).
• Thomas Taylor (trans.), The Mystical Hymns of Orpheus (1792).
• Robert Graves, The White Goddess (1948).

Go deeper: the Hekate pages on this site

Mark as done