In a November 2024 article exploring different magical approaches to Hekate, I described the goddess as the Cosmic World Soul. This interpretation is common among her devotees and is usually attributed to the Chaldean Oracles. Sarah Iles Johnston’s 1990 publication Hekate Soteira, which I read in 2023, made this point. This year I read Ruth Majercik’s edition of the Chaldean Oracles, and the fragments left me puzzled.
The Oracles are a collection of verses from the Roman Empire that mix religious revelation with Platonic philosophy. In them, Hekate appears as a divine power linked to the generation of life, the structure of the universe, and communication between humans and the gods. Yet her name occurs in only five of the 226 surviving fragments. Five is more than any other traditional deity receives, but it remains a slim basis for a goddess said to structure the cosmos. The rest of her cosmological role comes from fragments that never name her. Johnston reads at least 66 of them as concerning Hekate, using her own analysis and the comments of ancient interpreters.
That reading has since been revised, and Johnston helped revise it. This article follows the change: what the fragments say, how Johnston first read them, why the World Soul identification ran into trouble, and what the picture looks like now.
A note on spelling: I write Hekate throughout, except inside quotations from Majercik’s translation, which uses Hecate.
Hekate before the Chaldean Oracles
Hekate’s association with thresholds predates the Chaldean Oracles by centuries. In Greek religion, she received offerings at crossroads and entrances, and she watched over the passage between the living and the dead, the movement of souls, and the spirits of uncertain places.
Crossing a threshold changes a person’s condition. A traveller leaves one territory and enters another. A child leaves the protection of the household for the wider world. A dying person passes from embodied life into another state. Hekate’s protection mattered at each of these points. Her epithet Kleidouchos, Key-holder, demonstrates her authority over the underworld’s gates and boundaries in general.
Johnston argues that this older role made Hekate a natural fit for the Chaldean system. A goddess who guided people across earthly boundaries could guide souls across cosmic ones. I find that continuity convincing, and it runs through the rest of this article.
What are the Chaldean Oracles?
The Chaldean Oracles are a collection of Greek verses in hexameter, the six-beat line of Homeric epic, generally dated to the late second century CE. Ancient tradition credited them to Julian the Chaldean and his son, Julian the Theurgist, who were said to have received or passed on divine revelations. The name “Chaldean” recalled Babylonian wisdom and astrology, but the verses belong to the Greek-speaking world of the Roman Empire, and no one knows exactly how the collection came together.
The original has not survived. We have fragments later authors quoted, mostly Neoplatonists such as Proclus and Damascius, along with material preserved by the Byzantine writer Michael Psellus. Neoplatonism is the philosophical movement that grew out of Plato’s teachings from the third century CE, and its thinkers treated the Oracles as sacred revelation that agreed with Plato. Some fragments survive because a philosopher wanted to illustrate a metaphysical point. Others concern ritual, divine beings, or the fate of the soul.
John F. Finamore, a scholar of ancient Greek philosophy and Neoplatonism, co-wrote a 2010 chapter with Johnston for The Cambridge History of Philosophy in Late Antiquity that revisits her 1990 study. They note that scholars disagree about which of the 226 numbered fragments belong to the original collection, and that it is hard to separate the Oracles’ own teaching from what later interpreters added. Every claim about what the Oracles say therefore carries a caveat about the commentators who preserved them. Nicola Spanu, an independent researcher in Neoplatonism, takes up the same problem in his 2021 study of how Proclus read the collection. He argues that Proclus’s interpretations can still help us recover Chaldean doctrine, and he also shows places where Proclus bends a fragment to fit his own system.
Despite those limits, the fragments show a religion concerned with the divine origin of the cosmos, the relationship between intellect and matter, and the soul’s return to its source. They also describe rites. The people who performed them were theurgists, and the practice is called theurgy, from Greek words for divine work. I return to it below.
The Chaldean cosmos in brief
The cosmology of the Oracles draws on Middle Platonism, the tradition that developed Plato’s teachings in the centuries before Plotinus. It divides reality into two realms. The intelligible realm holds divine intellect and eternal realities, including the Forms (or Ideas), the patterns by which things exist. A Form has its own objective reality, more fundamental than the changing things our senses meet. The sensible realm is the world of sight, hearing, and touch, where things come into being, change, and perish.
The two realms pose a problem for Platonists: the changeless divine has to produce and sustain a changing world while remaining changeless. The Chaldean system answers with a hierarchy of divine powers that link them. At the top stands the Father, a transcendent principle whose own fire is his ultimate essence, fully removed from the world. A second Intellect, often called the Demiurge or cosmic craftsman, takes the Forms from the Father and uses them to order the physical world. Between the two Intellects stands a Power that emanates from the Father, meaning it flows from him without diminishing him. Below them lie the World Soul, a host of lesser gods and daimones, individual souls, and Nature.
The World Soul comes from Plato’s Timaeus, which describes the universe as a living being with soul and intelligence. Soul pervades the cosmos and gives it proportion and ordered movement. In the Chaldean scheme, the Forms pass from the Father to the second Intellect, divide into individual Forms, and descend into our world by way of the World Soul.
What the fragments say about Hekate
Fragment 50 gives the clearest statement of Hekate’s position. Damascius introduces it with the words “it is said by the gods”, and the verse reads: “the center of Hecate is borne in the midst of the Fathers”. Finamore and Johnston report a consensus that the Fathers are the first and second Intellects, so the most natural reading places Hekate in the intelligible hierarchy between the highest principle and the Intellect that orders the cosmos. Scholars then disagree about whether that rank belongs to Hekate herself, to a higher form of her, or to another goddess, as I explain below.
Two other fragments describe her through the image of a womb. Fragment 35 speaks of “the lightning-receiving womb of the shining ray of Hecate, who is generated from the Father”. Fragment 32 says that something “fills up the life-giving womb of Hecate” and then pours a force of fiery power on the Connectors, a class of divine intermediaries.
Fire is the Oracles’ symbol for intellect, divine activity, and life-giving power, and the thunderbolts and lightning of fragment 35 stand for the Forms. Johnston’s 1990 reading takes the womb as the receiver of those Forms from the Paternal Intellect: Hekate becomes “pregnant” with the patterns of the cosmos and passes them on towards the Demiurge. The imagery describes cosmic generation, not human reproduction, but it borrows from ancient Greek ideas of pregnancy, in which a womb receives what the father provides and nurtures it.
Fragment 6 does not name Hekate, but it describes a Power that acts like a girdling membrane and divides the first fire from the second. The word noetic, which Majercik and others use for this membrane, means “belonging to intellect”; here, the divine intelligible order, not ordinary human thinking. Majercik’s commentary connects this girdling principle with Hekate as a World Soul. Finamore and Johnston read it differently. For them, the Power is an intelligible intermediary that separates the two Intellects, preserving the Father’s transcendence while leaving a channel open to the world below. It is not the World Soul.
Hekate and the World Soul
Hans Lewy, author of a major 1956 study of the Oracles and theurgy, offered a different interpretation of fragment 50. He understood the Fathers as the three cosmic rulers of the empyrean, the highest, fiery heaven; the ethereal realm of the fixed stars and planets; and the material world below the Moon, rather than as the First and Second Intellects. He took Hekate to stand for the Moon, her abode, and read the verse as linking her with the middle Father, the Ruler of the Sun. This interpretation supported his identification of Hekate with the World Soul.
Although later scholars generally interpreted the Fathers as the First and Second Intellects, the identification of Hekate with the World Soul persisted. Johnston developed the most extensive argument for it in her 1990 study. She argued that the Chaldean Hekate fulfils the functions of the Cosmic Soul: she transmits the Forms, separates the intelligible world from the sensible, and ensouls living things. Her argument draws partly on fragments that name Hekate and partly on passages that describe the Soul without naming the goddess.
The equation has a positional problem. If Hekate stands between the first and second Intellects, she belongs to the intelligible hierarchy. The World Soul sits below the Intellects. As Finamore and Johnston summarise the debate, Luc Brisson, a French historian of Plato and Platonism, argued that Hekate stands too high to be the World Soul. Robbert van den Berg, a scholar of Proclus, proposed that she appears at more than one level, one above the Demiurge and one below. John Dillon, a historian of Middle Platonism, and Majercik had allowed that the Oracles can double a figure in this way. The objection was already in print before the 2010 chapter. Edward Butler, a philosopher whose doctoral work and journal articles concern Proclus, argued in 2009 that the Oracles associate Hekate closely with soul but still distinguish the two, and he observed that Proclus saw the source of life for souls more directly in Rhea.
Finamore and Johnston add a second difficulty. Fragment 51 describes “a great stream of the primordially-generated Soul” gushing from the hollow of a flank, and fragment 52 places the source of virtue in the left flank of Hecate. Fragment 51 says “her” without naming the goddess, and Proclus reads it as describing a life-giving principle from which Soul emerges. Van den Berg argues that these lines make Hekate the cause of Soul, not the World Soul itself. Spanu supports attributing this to Hekate on two grounds: statues of her show hollows on both flanks, and fragment 52 names her left flank.
Later scholarship supports the distinction between Hekate and the World Soul, although her precise position in the divine hierarchy remains disputed. Spanu’s 2021 study agrees that Hekate stands above the World Soul, citing the 2010 chapter, but his own reconstruction differs in detail. He proposes that Hekate appears at two levels, one between the Father and the Demiurge and another below the Demiurge. He also suggests that the higher Hekate could be the Power in the Chaldean triad of Father, Power, and Intellect. Finamore and Johnston assign that position to Rhea, although they acknowledge van den Berg’s argument that Proclus probably equated Rhea and Hekate. Spanu likewise reports that Proclus identified the two goddesses, as Lewy had observed earlier. Helmut Seng, an editor of the Chaldean Oracles, and Philippe Hoffmann, a scholar of Neoplatonism, reject identifying Hekate with the Power. While Finamore, Johnston, and Spanu distinguish Hekate from the World Soul, they still contest her precise position in the hierarchy.
A note in the 2010 chapter records Johnston’s change of mind. Brisson and others had persuaded her that the relationship between Hekate and Soul was less direct than she had argued in 1990. She acknowledged this reconsideration in print and broadly agreed with Finamore’s reconstruction of Hekate’s place in the divine hierarchy.
I think this matters for Pagans, because modern religious interpretations often draw on decades-old scholarship, and scholarship keeps moving. I repeated the 1990 reading. By 2010, its author no longer held it in the same form. I wrote to Johnston to ask whether her thinking had developed further, and she replied that she had not thought carefully about the issue in years. I have found no later statement from her, so the 2010 chapter is the most recent account of her position that I know of.
Hekate Soteira: what "Saviour" means
Johnston’s title uses a Greek word, Soteira, the feminine form of Soter, “Saviour”. In ancient religion, a saving god protected people from danger or secured their welfare, and several goddesses, including Hekate, carried the title in different settings. In Platonic and Chaldean thought, salvation also concerns the soul’s fate. The soul has a divine origin. Embodiment ties it to the changing material world, and its fulfilment lies in returning to the divine, a process that requires purification and a changed relationship with the world.
Hekate’s place as a life-giving intermediary connects her to that journey. Johnston’s 1990 study traces how her old role as a guide of souls could grow into a place in the philosophical account of the soul’s descent and ascent.
Modern devotional writing sometimes calls Hekate the “World Saviour”. The title of Johnston’s book reflects her scholarly interpretation of the goddess’s functions, and the surviving fragments do not proclaim Hekate the world’s saviour. The Greek word has a longer religious history, and here it points to the soul’s return. That does not shrink Hekate’s saving role. It tells us what salvation meant to the people who used the word.
Theurgy, the wheel, and the appearance of Hekate
Theurgy was a ritual practice that aimed to bring divine powers into contact with the human world and to help the soul rise towards the divine. Its rites grew out of the philosophy, and they resemble contemporary magic and religion in their use of substances and sacred words. Theurgists worked from sympathy: the idea that parts of the cosmos are linked through shared participation in a divine order. A plant, stone, sound, or name could correspond to a particular god. Finamore and Johnston call such correspondences sumbola, and the theurgist used objects and words that resembled the god in nature to draw the god closer.
Consecrating a statue was one such work. The statue served as a receptacle, a hupodochē, for the god, and the theurgist built it from materials chosen for their likeness to the deity. Fragment 224, which is of doubtful authenticity, has Hekate giving instructions for her own statue: wild rue, resin, myrrh, frankincense, and the small lizards that live about the house. Finamore and Johnston suggest this may be our earliest reference to such a receptacle. Once consecrated, the statue let the god be called in to instruct the theurgist or to shed divine light on the theurgist’s soul.
Another aspect of theurgic practice was anagoge, “leading upwards”, in which the theurgist made his own soul and its vehicle as fiery and light-filled as possible. Two fragments suggest inhaling sunlight, and Finamore and Johnston compare a similar rite in the Mithras Liturgy of the Greek Magical Papyri (PGM IV.475-829).
The Oracles describe several classes of divine intermediaries, and these help explain how the rites worked. The Iynges are thoughts of the Father that themselves think, and they carry his thoughts through the cosmos. The Connectors and Eros help bind the levels together. Fragment 32 shows power starting with the Paternal Intellect, unfolding through Hekate, and passing to the Connectors as life-giving fire. Ordinary Greek magic used the word iynx for a bird, the wryneck, and for a wheel spun on a looped string to draw an unwilling person to one’s bed. Theurgists kept a version of the wheel to call gods down to earth or to bring rain. Fragment 206 tells the theurgist to “operate with the magic wheel of Hecate”, and the commentator adds that the wheel’s movement carries ineffable power. The surviving line does not describe the wheel’s design. Johnston devotes a chapter of her book to Hekate’s top and the iynx wheel.
Some of the most vivid passages concern what the theurgist sees. Fragments 146 to 148 describe a fire leaping over the waves, a light whirling in a spiral, a horse brighter than light, and a child riding a horse. The heavens darken, and a formless fire speaks. Johnston reads the fragments in the order 147, 146, 148 and takes the speaking, formless fire as Hekate herself, which fits the Chaldean association of divine purity with fire and the incorporeal. Finamore and Johnston draw on Iamblichus for the larger picture: a direct visit from a god was rare; it disturbed the terrestrial realm, and the theurgist could tolerate the god’s light only briefly, enfeebled and struggling to breathe. Spanu shows that the collection also gives Hekate a conventional form. In fragment 72, she arrives armed from head to toe, and fragment 142 says that bodies were attached to the divine apparitions for the theurgist’s sake. Following Proclus, he sorts apparitions into three kinds: human form, shaped fire or light, and formless light, which ranks highest. On Johnston’s interpretation, the formless fire represents one of several ways Hekate could manifest to the theurgist.
Hekate herself speaks in up to eleven fragments, and five of them (219 and 221 to 224) are doubtful. Her voice in the Oracles rests partly on the weakest evidence. A wider body of late antique oracular material also describes her appearance or gives instructions for making her image, some of it through Porphyry’s Philosophy from Oracles. Scholars debate how that material relates to the Chaldean Oracles, and they do not treat every oracle attributed to Hekate as a secure fragment of the collection.
What happened to Hekate's darker side?
Earlier Greek tradition associated Hekate with ghosts, restless souls, frightening apparitions, and dangerous spirits. She protected people from such beings, and she also held authority over them. That sits awkwardly with a philosophical system that places her among the highest divine powers.
Johnston argues that the Chaldean system separated some of these older, troubling associations from Hekate’s celestial identity and gave related functions to Physis, or Nature. Damascius says the Oracles describe Nature as suspended from the great Hecate. The material realm was also associated with certain daimones, spiritual beings that could influence human experience. Although daimon did not necessarily mean an evil spirit in Greek thought, the Oracles describe dangerous or deceptive beings, including the so-called dogs of matter. Spanu’s 2019 study of evil in the Oracles describes these beings as irrational demons, the “dogs without reason” of fragment 156, whom fragment 157 associates with animals. They keep the initiate tied to material passions and lead souls away from initiation. He adds that scholars have paid little attention to the subject. In a system concerned with the soul’s return, embodiment and attachment to matter obstruct the way. Johnston’s interpretation explains how Hekate could keep her identity as a goddess of transitions while holding an exalted place in Chaldean cosmology.
The interpretation has critics. Spanu argues that Lewy’s case for a shadowy side of Hekate rests on scarce but seemingly solid evidence, including her armed appearance in fragment 72 and Proclus’s report that foreign peoples called her a terrible and fearful goddess. He notes that Johnston herself links Hekate to the underworld in earlier Greek religion and to the Moon, where Plutarch says souls spend time between lives, and he concludes that Lewy’s and Johnston’s readings could each be partly right. Butler offers a third reading. He takes the “chthonian dogs” of fragment 90, the driver of dogs in fragment 91, whom he suggests may be Hekate, and the earthly beasts of fragment 157 as forces that bind souls, with nothing evil or vengeful about them. He sees it as beneficial that they stay under her control, because she can always lead a soul out of bondage.
Ancient text, scholar's reconstruction, devotional reading
Our understanding of Hekate in the Chaldean Oracles depends on several layers of interpretation. The surviving fragments provide the ancient evidence, but only five explicitly name her. Scholars such as Johnston have drawn on additional fragments and later Neoplatonist writings to reconstruct her cosmological role. These scholarly interpretations have, in turn, influenced contemporary Pagan theology, particularly the identification of Hekate with the World Soul. Distinguishing the surviving text from its later interpretations helps us understand how that identification developed and why it remains debated.
The Neoplatonists who preserved the fragments read them through philosophical systems that kept developing long after the Oracles were composed. When Proclus or Damascius explains a fragment, we receive both an older text and a later interpretation. The Oracles retained their authority well beyond antiquity. The Byzantine philosopher Georgios Gemistos Plethon produced an edition with commentary in the late fourteenth or early fifteenth century under the title The Magical Oracles of the Magi of Zoroaster. His promotion of Plato’s philosophy in Florence helped inspire Cosimo de’ Medici, a wealthy Florentine patron, to support a revival of Platonic studies. Under Cosimo’s patronage, the humanist philosopher Marsilio Ficino translated ancient philosophical and religious texts, helping transmit Neoplatonic and theurgic ideas to Renaissance thinkers, including the German occult philosopher Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa and the Italian philosopher Tommaso Campanella.
The identification of Hekate with the World Soul began as a scholarly interpretation and became an established part of contemporary Pagan theology. Yet scholarship continues to develop, and scholars may revise once-persuasive interpretations as they reconsider the evidence. For those of us who draw on historical sources in our religious practice, it matters that we understand where these ideas come from, how they developed, and what the evidence supports.
I would write my 2024 sentence differently now. In the Oracles, Hekate stands at the boundaries of the cosmos as a life-giving intermediary and a source from which Soul flows, and Finamore, Johnston, and Spanu have since placed her above the World Soul while still debating exactly where she belongs in the hierarchy. That suits a goddess of thresholds. A boundary, whether at a crossroads or at the edge of the cosmos, orders what lies on either side and permits passage between them. The Chaldean Oracles carry a goddess long tied to the passages of human life to the boundaries of the cosmos.
References
Butler, Edward P. 2009. “Flower of Fire: Hekate in the Chaldean Oracles.” In Bearing Torches: A Devotional Anthology for Hekate, edited by Sannion et al., 140 to 157. Eugene, OR: Bibliotheca Alexandrina.
Finamore, John F., and Sarah Iles Johnston. 2010. “The Chaldaean Oracles.” In The Cambridge History of Philosophy in Late Antiquity, vol. 1, edited by Lloyd P. Gerson, 161 to 173. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Johnston, Sarah Iles. 1990. Hekate Soteira: A Study of Hekate’s Roles in the Chaldean Oracles and Related Literature. American Classical Studies 21. Atlanta: Scholars Press.
Majercik, Ruth. 2013. The Chaldean Oracles: Text, Translation, and Commentary. 2nd ed. Westbury: The Prometheus Trust.
Plato. Timaeus.
Spanu, Nicola. 2019. “The Concept of Evil in the Chaldean Oracles.” Revue roumaine de philosophie 63 (1): 87 to 99.
Spanu, Nicola. 2021. Proclus and the Chaldean Oracles: A Study on Proclean Exegesis, with a Translation and Commentary of Proclus’ Treatise On Chaldean Philosophy. Routledge Monographs in Classical Studies. Abingdon: Routledge.