The gate of the year

Statue illustrating the Triple Hecate, Roman copy of the I century A.D. from a Greek original attributed to the V century B.C., now in the National Museum of Antiquities (Rijksmuseum van Oudheden), Leiden, Netherlands.
Hecate was a goddess of the dead and of the fertility of the earth and the crops as well. She was closely associated with Demeter and with the latter’s daughter, Persephone, so much so that she is portrayed, in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, as “minister and companion to Persephone” (v. 440). The goddess Hecate belonged to the stock of the Titans, the generation of gods preceding that of the Olympic deities, who were defeated and submitted by Zeus. Hecate was the only one who maintained her power even under the rule of the supreme god. It was believed that Hecate wandered on earth in the company of the spirits of the dead, announced by th howling of dogs: an image which anticipates the beliefs on the Wild Hunt and of the processions of the dead reported by Medieval sources, referring to a diffused and deep-rooted popular tradition. For these nocturnal activities, Hecate was sometimes identified as a lunar goddess, and perhaps her attribute of Triple made reference to the cycle of the moon phases. She was also patroness of the magical arts and of incantations. As a goddess of every dangerous and precarious passage, like birth and death, Hecate was venerated at the crossroads, places in which the borders between the living and the dead were confused. The Athenians were used to left “suppers”, plates of food, at junctions for the goddess and her retinue (Johnston 2005). Still in the XII century A.D., Orderic Vitalis in his Historia Ecclesiatica (History of the Church) narrated of the apparition occurred to the young priest Walchelin, at a crossroad, of an immense troop of the dead, during the night of the first day of January of the year 1091.

[Source: http://www.rmo.nl/english/collection/highlights/roman-collection/hekate-triformis]




Female Symbols

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Statue illustrating the Triple Hecate, Roman copy of the I century A.D. from a Greek original attributed to the V century B.C., now in the National Museum of Antiquities (Rijksmuseum van Oudheden), Leiden, Netherlands. Hecate was a goddess of the dead and of the fertility of the earth and the crops as well. She was closely associated with Demeter and with the latter’s daughter, Persephone, so much so that she is portrayed, in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, as “minister and companion to Persephone” (v. 440). The goddess Hecate belonged to the stock of the Titans, the generation of gods preceding that of the Olympic deities, who were defeated and submitted by Zeus. Hecate was the only one who maintained her power even under the rule of the supreme god. It was believed that Hecate wandered on earth in the company of the spirits of the dead, announced by th howling of dogs: an image which anticipates the beliefs on the Wild Hunt and of the processions of the dead reported by Medieval sources, referring to a diffused and deep-rooted popular tradition. For these nocturnal activities, Hecate was sometimes identified as a lunar goddess, and perhaps her attribute of Triple made reference to the cycle of the moon phases. She was also patroness of the magical arts and of incantations. As a goddess of every dangerous and precarious passage, like birth and death, Hecate was venerated at the crossroads, places in which the borders between the living and the dead were confused. The Athenians were used to left “suppers”, plates of food, at junctions for the goddess and her retinue (Johnston 2005). Still in the XII century A.D., Orderic Vitalis in his Historia Ecclesiatica (History of the Church) narrated of the apparition occurred to the young priest Walchelin, at a crossroad, of an immense troop of the dead, during the night of the first day of January of the year 1091. [Source: http://www.rmo.nl/english/collection/highlights/roman-collection/hekate-triformis]