page_title: Hecate
section_title: Modern reception
hierarchical_section_title: Hecate / Legacy / Modern reception
caption_attribution_description: HEKATE
context_page_description: Hecate or Hekate is a goddess in ancient Greek religion and mythology, most often shown holding a pair of torches or a key and in later periods depicted in triple form. She is variously associated with crossroads, entrance-ways, night, light, magic, witchcraft, knowledge of herbs and poisonous plants, ghosts, necromancy, and sorcery. Her earliest appearance in literature was in Hesiod's Theogony in the last third part of the 8th century BCE as a Titan goddess of great honor with domains in sky, earth, and sea. Her place of origin is debated by scholars, but she had popular followings amongst the witches of Thessaly and an important sanctuary among the Carians of Asia Minor in Lagina.
  Hecate was one of several deities worshiped in ancient Athens as a protector of the oikos, alongside Zeus, Hestia, Hermes, and Apollo. In the post-Christian writings of the Chaldean Oracles she was also regarded with rulership over earth, sea, and sky, as well as a more universal role as Savior, Mother of Angels and the Cosmic World Soul.
  Regarding the nature of her cult, it has been remarked, "she is more at home on the fringes than in the center of Greek polytheism.
context_section_description: In 1929, Lewis Brown, an expert on religious cults, connected the 1920s Blackburn Cult (also known as, "The Cult of the Great Eleven,") with Hecate worship rituals.  He noted that the cult regularly practiced dog sacrifice and had secretly buried the body of one of its "queens" with seven dogs. Researcher Samuel Fort noted additional parallels, to include the cult's focus on mystic and typically nocturnal rites, its female dominated membership, the sacrifice of other animals (to include horses and mules), a focus on the mystical properties of roads and portals, and an emphasis on death, healing, and resurrection.
  As a "goddess of witchcraft", Hecate has been incorporated in various systems of modern witchcraft, Wicca, and neopaganism, in some cases associated with the Wild Hunt of Germanic tradition, in others as part of a reconstruction of specifically Greek polytheism, in English also known as "Hellenismos". In Wicca, Hecate has in some cases become identified with the "crone" aspect of the "Triple Goddess".
caption: Hekate, pastel on paper by Maximilian Pirner, 1901.
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