An ABC of Witchcraft Past and Present - Doreen Valiente 2018

Hecate

Hecate is the Ancient Greek goddess of witchcraft. She is represented on a Roman engraved gem of the classical period as enthroned in triple form, with three heads and three pairs of arms, which hold daggers, whips and torches. Coiled at her feet are two huge serpents. Engraved gems of this kind were carried as amulets, especially by people interested in the occult sciences.

Hecate is a very ancient goddess, considered to be older than the Olympian gods and goddesses of classical myth. She was venerated by Zeus himself, who never denied her time-honoured power of granting or withholding from mortals whatever their hearts desired.

For this reason, Hecate was a goddess much invoked by magicians and witches. Her power was threefold: in heaven, upon earth and in the underworld of ghosts and spirits. One of her symbols was a key, indicating her ability to lock up or release spirits and phantoms of all kinds. Euripides, the Greek poet, called her “Queen of the phantom-world”.

Her statue stood at the cross-roads, or where three ways met; and here those who wished to invoke her foregathered by night. In later years, witches assembled at the cross-roads to celebrate their rites.

Although her rulership extended over heaven, earth and the underworld, Hecate came to be particularly associated with the moon, and with the other moon goddesses, Diana, Artemis and Selene, with whom she was identified. Her triplicity mirrored the moon’s three phases, waxing, full and waning.

She was depicted as being accompanied by howling dogs, probably because of the way dogs have of baying at the moon, though dogs are also said to howl when a ghost is nigh, even though no spectre is seen; and they react strongly to haunted places.

The Gnostic philosophers, who foregathered in the Egyptian city of Alexandria, revered a collection of ancient fragments of poetry called the Chaldean Oracles. Some of these have come down to us, written in Greek; and in them Hecate appears as the Great Mother, or the life of the universe. Nature is her garment or mantle: “And from her back, on either side the Goddess, boundless Nature hangs.”

The name of Hecate may not be a Greek word; some authorities doubt this, and in general there is much uncertainty about its derivation. Some have suggested that it means ’the Far-off One’, or ’The One who Stands Aloof’. There is a resemblance between the name Hecate and the Ancient Egyptian hekau, meaning ’magic’. Two of Hecate’s ancient titles are Aphrattos, the ’Nameless One’, and Pandeina, the ’All-Terrible’.

Robert Graves, however, in his Greek Myths (Penguin Books, London, 1957 and Baltimore, Maryland, 1955), gives the name of Hecate as meaning ’one hundred’, and connects it with the Great Year of one hundred lunar months, during which in very ancient days the Sacred King was permitted to reign. At the end of it he was sacrificed, so that his blood might enrich the land and renew the prosperity of his people. This institution of the divine king who was sacrificed was very widespread in the ancient world, and goes back a long way into human history. It is intimately connected with the matriarchal order of primitive times, when the Great Goddess of Nature, the Magna Mater, was pre-eminent.

Shakespeare in Macbeth represents his three witches as worshippers of Hecate; not as invokers of the Devil or Satan, although the latter was what witches had for centuries been accused of being. A number of Shakespeare’s contemporaries also introduced ’Dame Hecate’ into their plays and poems, as the goddess of the witches.

In Thomas Middleton’s play The Witch, his principal character takes the name of Hecate, naming herself as a witch after the goddess of witchcraft.

If, therefore, we wished to choose a name which was probably used by people in Shakespeare’s day and afterwards, to invoke the goddess of the witches, ’Hecate’ would be a natural choice. The Greek pronunciation of this name is Hek-a-tee; but this became Anglicised into Hek-at.

The sigil used by magicians to invoke Hecate is a crescent moon with the two points upwards, and a third point in the middle between them.