Hecate

Hecate is the goddess of crossroads, boundaries, the moon, magic, and the restless dead — a torch-bearing power often shown triple-formed, facing three ways at once. Mistress of the liminal, she haunts the threshold between worlds, and she alone helped Demeter in her search for the lost Persephone, becoming thereafter the torch-bearing companion of the underworld queen.

In the Chaldaean Oracles so prized by the later Platonists, Hecate is exalted far beyond this folk role: she becomes the cosmic World-Soul, the mediating power set between the transcendent Father and the created world, the womb from which souls and the powers of nature flow. So the goddess of the crossroads became, for the theurgists, the very hinge between the divine and the cosmos.

Epithets

• Trioditis Τριοδῖτις — of the three-way crossroads
• Enodia Ἐνοδία — of the roads
• Propylaia Προπυλαία — before the gate
• Phosphoros Φωσφόρος — the light-bearer
• Chthonia Χθονία — of the underworld
• Trimorphos Τρίμορφος — the three-formed
• Kourotrophos Κουροτρόφος — nurse of the young