It is time again to right some wrongs done to some ancient deities! Who’s this headless wo

It is time again to right some wrongs done to some ancient deities! Who’s this headless wonder, you might ask? Well based on the long dress and double torches, safe bet this is Hecate (HE-ka-tee), the baneful goddess of witchcraft and puppy sacrifice! There used to be something written under her–but somebody scratched away all the writing. For shame. Now we will probably never know what the Hellenistic (4th-1st century BCE) inscriber wanted us to know. Like many ancient deities but especially, it seems, the girl ones, Hecate has got an awful lot of baggage she never asked for. You may know her now as a terrifying witch or as the “triple goddess” or as the crone, as in mother-maiden-crone, but she wasn’t born old! She became old, or maybe: sensationalist elite Greek writers made her old. From the earliest evidence in the archaic period (starting in the late 8th century through the 6th BCE) Hecate doesn’t seem to have any of these witchy powers that are so fascinating to us and the ancients alike. She has some torches, sometimes a couple little kids who hang around her ankles, but she’s not wandering around the Hogwarteium with a wand. So what is she doing? Well, those torches must come in handy for dark passageways, and in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter (late 6th-mid 5th century BCE), Hecate lives in a cave and hears the god of the underworld abducting Demeter’s teenage daughter. Sort of like Hecate has an ability to understand the world of the living and the world of the dead! Sort of like she might even be able to pass between those worlds…and maybe even lead souls to the underworld when people die! Man, Hecate was a great communicator. What’s more, early images of Hecate don’t show a creepy old lady, but a young woman, not quite old enough to be married. Hm! Unfortunately for her, this between-worlds thing apparently started to weird the Greeks out sometime in the late Classical or Hellenistic periods (4th century and forward), and the benevolent peer mediator of earlier days became a witch with snakes in her hair (keep up your hygiene, seriously) in stories like Apollonius of Rhodes' Argonautica. This didn’t happen overnight, but the sensationalist picture sure stuck! Stay tuned for more popular miscommunications about gods, goddesses, magic, and antiquity in general! -- source link

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