Hekate – Dark…
Hekate – Dark Mistress of the Soul.
“The Black Goddess is so far hardly more than a word of hope whispered among the few who have served their apprenticeship to the White Goddess – she will lead man back to that sure instinct of love he long ago forfeited by intellectual pride……………….”
Robert Graves
Both Hekate and Hermes share the role of psychopomp and protector of the crossroads and by-ways of the mental and physical planes. ‘Herm’ posts often stood beside those of ‘Hectarea’, the Triple-Formed Hekate, complete with three heads and six arms. Popular myth presents them as lovers or companions, as healers, patrons of Lunar energy and harbingers of death. Bridging the worlds, they reveal past, present and future simultaneously, bestowing prophetic visions and ancestral communication. From their shadowy twilight world of illusion their gifts of enchantment secure the rapture and bliss of their devotees. Another, less well-known epithet of ‘Hekatos’, meaning – ‘Distant-One’ (the airborne magic that strikes its target), is one that Hekate (as a form of Artemis), shares with Apollo. Legends also tell of her as a phosphorescent angel, shining in the darkness of the underworld, where her hypnotic light of trance-formation is revealed within the decaying mounds of the dead. Here her role merges with that of Persephone and of Demeter, with whom she became associated within alternative Greek mythologies.
It must be remembered that the Greeks always saw Hekate as the youthful maiden; she became Crone only to the Romans when Artemis and Selene supplanted her in this form [ibid.]. Martha Ann & Dorothy Myers-Imel [1993:157] also remind us that within the Eleusinian mysteries, the role of Brimo (the destroyer of life – the terrible one), who births Brimos (the saviour) is associated with Kybele, Demeter, Persephone and Hekate! She also guides Persephone back to the Upper world from Hades. Yet she is Phosphorous – Dawn and Twilight, Mother and Guardian, Bringer of the Dawn, of Life, Birth and Death, she is the Morning Star, the bringer of Gnosis, the ‘propylia’, the one before the gate and ‘propolos,’ the guardian of the threshold, and ‘psychopomp’ – the leader of the ‘way’. [2]
The shadowy world of dreams is where Demetra George [1992:148] suggests we are cocooned; within the nurturing breast of Hekate, suspended in liminal time, we reach a still-point (magical praxis of non-being). This, our moment of becoming, is where she is true mistress of our fate. Our total submission to her brings the rewards of true gnosis. Hekate guides the true seeker, Hekate blesses the newly born child, and Hekate shields and guides the soul upon it final journey. Remember, this young and beautiful fairy godmother wears a crown of stars. It is noted that devotees of the Chaldean Oracles contrived to promote Hekate as Sorteira (Saviour), an epiphanic celestial deity and cosmological principle of the cosmic soul, not unlike the ‘World Soul’ of the Neo-Platonists. [2] In Asia Minor (c800BCE), Hekate was a member of the Mother, Daughter & Son trinity of Kybele, Hekate and Hermes. Yet by 400CE, her role had devolved into the dark and sinister stalker of graveyards, snatcher of souls, Queen of Witchcraft and Sorcery, Patroness of Circe and Medea [ibid.]. The Romans, who deemed her roles connected to female blood matters surrounding birth and menstruation as impure, had shifted her, allying her to Diana Triformus, once again shared with Proserpina (Persephone).
[extract Above taken from hekate article written in 2002, printed in The Cauldron 2003 was published in ‘Tubelo’s green fire’ – mandrake of oxford 2010]
IMAGES= WIKI COMMONS
People of Goda, the Clan of Tubal Cain 