Part 2 of The company Hekate keeps
In Part 1, we met Hekate‘s family: her Titan parents, the other parents later writers gave her, and Zeus, her benefactor and civic partner. This second part turns to the deities who travel alongside her.
Persephone and Demeter share her most fully told story, Hermes shares her roads and thresholds, and Artemis and Selene came to share so much with her that their identities began to merge. Each relationship shows a different side of Hekate: the gentle companion, the guardian of passages, and the lunar goddess familiar to many of her devotees today, whose roots are later than often assumed.
Persephone and Demeter: companions in the mysteries of life and death
Of all Hekate’s relationships, her bond with Persephone and Demeter is the most fully told in early Greek myth. The Homeric Hymn to Demeter, probably composed in the seventh or sixth century BCE, tells of Hades’ abduction of Persephone and her mother’s search for her.
As Hades carries Persephone down to the underworld, she cries out. Two deities hear her. Hekate, sitting in her cave, hears the cry but does not see who took her. Helios, the sun god, sees everything his light touches. For nine days Demeter roams the earth with blazing torches in her hands. On the tenth day, Hekate meets her, carrying her own light, and tells her what she heard. Together the two goddesses go to Helios, who reveals that Hades took Persephone with Zeus’s consent.
The hymn’s portrait of Hekate is strikingly gentle. It describes her as atala phroneousa, a phrase usually translated “tender-hearted”, though the adjective also suggests youthfulness, and gives her a shining headdress. This is far from the goddess of ghosts and magic who dominates later Greek literature. Those darker associations become prominent only from the fifth century BCE, though her cave and her place beside the queen of the underworld already point in that direction.
After Persephone returns and reunites with her mother, Hekate comes to her and embraces her many times. From then on, the hymn says, Hekate became Persephone’s propolos and opaon. These words are usually translated as “attendant” and “companion”, but propolos literally means one who goes before, and opaon one who follows. Hekate both leads the way and walks behind.
The partnership suits them both. Persephone must spend part of each year below the earth with Hades and the rest above with her mother. In the Theogony of Hesiod, the Boeotian poet whose genealogy of the gods became the standard reference for later Greeks, Hekate’s honours reach across earth, sea, and sky, so she is well placed to travel with her. Persephone’s descent and return speak of passage between realms, the turning seasons, and mortality, and Hekate’s place beside her draws her into the same mysteries of transition between life and death.
The Hellenistic poet Callimachus tells the relationship differently. By making Hekate the daughter of Zeus and Demeter, he makes her Persephone’s full sister, and her search for Persephone takes her into the underworld itself (see Part 1).
Hekate and the Eleusinian Mysteries
The story of Demeter and Persephone formed the mythic foundation of the Eleusinian Mysteries, one of the most important initiatory cults in the Greek world. Celebrated at Eleusis, near Athens, the rites honoured the two goddesses and promised initiates a happier afterlife. Initiates were forbidden to reveal what they saw and did, so our knowledge of the ceremonies remains incomplete.
We cannot reconstruct Hekate’s role in the secret rites, but she belonged to the world around them. Torches were central to the Mysteries, and one of the chief priests at Eleusis was the dadouchos, the torchbearer, a title that an ancient commentary on Theocritus, the third-century BCE poet who pioneered pastoral poetry, also gives Hekate. Athenian vase painters show her in the story. A bell krater from around 440 BCE, attributed to the artist known as the Persephone Painter and now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, shows Persephone rising from the earth with Hermes beside her, while Hekate, holding two torches, turns to lead her towards Demeter. You can see details of the painting here. At the entrance to the sanctuary, the second-century CE travel writer Pausanias saw a temple of Artemis Propylaia, “Artemis before the gates”, a goddess some scholars have connected with Hekate.
In later religious thought, the goddesses drew closer still. Hymns in the Greek Magical Papyri, a collection of ritual texts from Roman Egypt, address a single goddess as Hekate, Persephone, and Selene at once. The long prayer to Selene in PGM IV.2785–2890, for example, treats them as faces of one power over passage between the living and the dead.
Hermes: a fellow traveller between worlds
Hermes and Hekate share several responsibilities in Greek religion, particularly those concerning roads, boundaries, movement, and transitions. Hermes is the messenger of the gods, the patron of travellers, merchants, and communication, and the guide who conducts souls to the underworld, a role reflected in his title Psychopompos, “guide of souls”. Hekate is also strongly associated with roads, entrances, crossroads, and passage between different regions of existence.
Both stood guard at the points where people crossed from one space into another. Hermes was commonly represented by a herm, a stone pillar bearing his head and an erect phallus, set up beside roads, at doorways, and on boundaries. Hekate had her hekataion, a protective image placed at house entrances and crossroads. The Athenian comic playwright Aristophanes could joke in his comedy Wasps, staged in 422 BCE, that there was one in front of every door. Some hekataia showed her with three bodies or three faces, as if to watch every direction at once.
The connection between the two gods is old. In the Theogony, Hesiod says that Hekate, together with Hermes, can increase or diminish the livestock in the stalls at will. Here they share a concern with prosperity and abundance rather than with the dead.
They also meet at the end of Persephone’s story. In the Hymn to Demeter, Zeus sends Hermes to bring Persephone back from the underworld, and Hekate greets her on her return. The Met krater shows them escorting her together: the two gods who travel between worlds bring home the goddess who must live in both.
Later magic often invoked them side by side. Athenian curse tablets, inscribed lead sheets buried in graves or wells to bind an enemy, frequently call on “Hermes the Restrainer” and “Chthonic Hekate” together, asking them to hold the victim fast. “Chthonic” comes from chthōn, “earth”, and describes the powers of the earth and the underworld beneath it. The Greek Magical Papyri continue this pairing, calling on both gods in rites involving spirits and communication with unseen powers.
Hermes and Hekate are often described today as fellow psychopomps, but the ancient evidence supports a more careful comparison. Hermes has a clearly established role conducting the souls of the dead. Hekate’s bond with the dead took a different shape: she came to rule the restless ghosts who could not settle, rather than escort ordinary souls, as Part 3 will explore. Their responsibilities overlap, but each retains a distinct identity and range of powers.
Artemis and Selene: goddesses who merge with her
Hekate’s relationships with Artemis and Selene differ from those with Persephone and Hermes. They are less companions or kin than goddesses whose identities overlapped with hers, and over time the boundaries between them grew increasingly fluid.
Artemis: the huntress and guardian of boundaries
Artemis is the daughter of Zeus and Leto, the twin sister of Apollo, and a goddess of hunting, wild animals, childbirth, and the protection of the young. In Hesiod’s genealogy, she and Hekate are cousins through their mothers, the sisters Leto and Asteria.
The two goddesses share much. Both are associated with dogs, with the protection of the young, and with places and moments of transition. Artemis oversees the great passages of human life, particularly childhood, adolescence, and childbirth, and Hekate likewise oversees protection, nurture, and the safeguarding of boundaries.
Their identification is old. The Hesiodic Catalogue of Women, a genealogical poem from the sixth century BCE, said that Iphigeneia did not die at Aulis but became Hekate by Artemis’s will, a claim Pausanias preserves. In the fifth century, the Athenian tragedian Aeschylus has a chorus pray to “Artemis Hekate” to watch over women in childbirth, and his younger contemporary Euripides has a character address Hekate as the child of Leto. The commentary on Theocritus, which calls her a torchbearer, simply states that Hekate “is called Artemis”. In later Greek and Roman religion, the merging went further: Hekate was treated as an aspect of Artemis, Artemis acquired attributes more typical of Hekate, and in magical texts their names and epithets often accumulated in a single invocation.
These identifications do not mean that ancient worshippers always regarded Artemis and Hekate as the same goddess. Their relationship varied by place, period, and religious context.
Selene: Hekate and the Moon
Selene personifies the Moon. In early Greek myth, she has her own identity and genealogy: she is the daughter of the Titans Hyperion and Theia and the sister of Helios and Eos.
In Theocritus’s second Idyll, a young woman named Simaitha casts a love spell by night to win back the lover who has abandoned her. She first calls on Selene to shine brightly, then on chthonic Hekate, whom even dogs fear. Selene presides over the spell from the sky, while Hekate is invoked as the power below. You can read the poem in translation.
Hekate’s identification with Selene became prominent later, especially in the Greek Magical Papyri, where her lunar character comes to the fore.
This history should inform the familiar modern image of Hekate as a Moon goddess. Her identification with Selene developed later and should not be projected onto Hesiod’s account of her.
The same applies to the popular arrangement of Artemis, Selene, and Hekate into a maiden, mother, and crone trinity. Ancient writers grouped these goddesses in threes, but by realm rather than age. When the Roman poet Virgil, in the Aeneid, calls Hekate “the three faces of the virgin Diana”, his fourth-century commentator Servius explains the three as Luna in the sky, Diana on earth, and Proserpina below. The age-based scheme comes from the twentieth century, popularised above all by the English poet Robert Graves in The White Goddess (1948).
Travelling companions
Each of these relationships turns on passage. Hekate hears Persephone’s cry, searches with Demeter, and accompanies Persephone between the worlds. She stands with Hermes at doors, roads, and boundaries. With Artemis she guards the young and the thresholds of life, and with Selene she came, in later centuries, to share the night sky. These deities kept her company, and over time they also helped shape how she was understood.
The Hymn to Demeter leaves us with Hekate as Persephone’s companion, going before her and following behind. In Part 3, we will follow her into stranger company: the lovers and children later authors gave her, the restless dead, the torch-bearing Lampades, and her dogs.
Sources and further reading
Ancient sources
- Aeschylus, Suppliants
- Aristophanes, Wasps
- Callimachus, fragments
- Euripides, Phoenician Women
- Hesiod, Theogony and Catalogue of Women
- Homeric Hymn to Demeter
- Pausanias, Description of Greece
- Theocritus, Idylls, with the ancient scholia
- Virgil, Aeneid, with the commentary of Servius
Modern works
- Betz, Hans Dieter, ed. 1992. The Greek Magical Papyri in Translation, Including the Demotic Spells. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
- Graves, Robert. 1948. The White Goddess. London: Faber and Faber.
- Kern, Otto, ed. 1922. Orphicorum Fragmenta. Berlin: Weidmann.
- Pfeiffer, Rudolf, ed. 1949. Callimachus. Vol. 1, Fragmenta. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
- Wendel, Carl, ed. 1914. Scholia in Theocritum vetera. Leipzig: Teubner.