The full story

Hecate has had more makeovers than almost any figure in Greek myth. Over about a thousand years she went from a generous goddess who helped fishermen to the queen of witches, and each version left something behind. Here is how it happened, in order.

1. She starts as Zeus’s favorite

The oldest text about Hecate is Hesiod’s Theogony, written around 700 BCE. Hesiod calls her the only child of the Titans Perses and Asteria, and he clearly admires her. When Zeus took power he stripped most of the Titans of their honors. Hecate kept all of hers, with a share of the earth, the sea and the sky.

Hesiod then lists the people she helps: kings giving judgment, speakers in the assembly, soldiers, athletes, horsemen, fishermen and herdsmen. She also watches over young children. There are no ghosts in this passage, no spells and no moon. She is simply a powerful goddess who is worth having on your side.

2. The torches come from a rescue

Her next big appearance is in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter. When Hades carries off Persephone, only two gods notice: the Sun, who sees it, and Hecate, who hears the girl cry out from inside her cave. On the tenth day of Demeter’s search, Hecate comes to her with a torch in her hand and tells her what she heard.

When Persephone finally returns, Hecate embraces her and becomes her companion from then on. This one story gives Hecate two things she never loses: her torches, and her job as the goddess who can walk between the world of the living and the world below.

3. Athens puts her at the door and the crossroads

By the 400s BCE, ordinary Athenians kept a small shrine to Hecate outside the front door. The comic playwright Aristophanes mentions them as a normal part of a house. She guarded the threshold, the place where inside meets outside.

She also guarded the place where three roads meet. Once a month households carried a meal out to the crossroads and left it for her. These were known as Hecate’s suppers, and Aristophanes jokes that the poor grabbed the food as soon as it was put down. Crossroads belonged to nobody, and Greeks believed the restless dead gathered there. A goddess who could move between worlds was the natural one to keep them in line.

4. Then she gets three bodies

For her first few centuries Hecate had one body, like any other goddess. The travel writer Pausanias saw an old statue of her on the island of Aegina with one face and one body. He says the sculptor Alkamenes was the first to make her as three figures standing back to back, for a statue on the Acropolis in Athens.

The design suits a goddess of three-way crossroads, since she can face down every road at once. All three figures are the same young woman. They are not three ages of life, and none of them is old.

5. The playwrights hand her to Medea

Hecate’s link to witchcraft begins on the Athenian stage. In a lost play by Sophocles called The Root-Cutters, Medea gathers poisonous plants with a bronze sickle while the chorus prays to Hecate, crowned with oak leaves and coiling snakes. In Euripides’ Medea, the heroine swears her revenge by Hecate, the goddess she says lives at the heart of her own hearth.

Later poets turned up the horror. In the Argonautica by Apollonius of Rhodes, Jason sacrifices to her at midnight and she rises wreathed in snakes, with torches blazing and hounds howling around her. This is the Hecate most people picture today, and it is where the snakes on the card come from.

6. Rome renames her, and the moon moves in

The Romans called her Trivia, which means “of the three ways.” Roman poets blended her with Diana and with Luna, the moon. Virgil writes of threefold Hecate as the three faces of the maiden Diana, and has Dido call on the Hecate whose name is howled at city crossroads by night. The moon goddess idea comes from this period, hundreds of years after Hesiod. The Greeks already had a moon goddess, and her name was Selene.

7. Why she carries a key

Hecate’s largest temple stood at Lagina in Caria, in what is now southwest Turkey. There she was the patron of a whole city, with no witchcraft involved. Her main festival was a procession in which a girl carried the goddess’s key from the temple to the nearby city of Stratonikeia. The key marks her as the keeper of gates, including the ones between worlds.

8. Her last ancient role is savior

In the last centuries of the ancient world Hecate rose higher than ever. Spell books written in Greek in Roman Egypt call on her as a many-named power merged with the moon and with Persephone. A set of mystical verses called the Chaldean Oracles made her a cosmic go-between, standing between the highest god and the physical world. Her followers gave her the title Soteira, which means Savior.

So the goddess who ended up as the patron of witches spent most of her ancient career as a helper, a guide and a guard. The crone came much later, and from somewhere else.