Melinoe

Melinoe is a chthonic goddess known almost solely from the Orphic hymns — a daughter of Persephone, conceived (the hymn tells) at the very mouth of the underworld. Half-black and half-white, she roams the earth by night with her train of ghosts, bringing terrors, nightmares, and madness to mortals.

Closely akin to Hecate as a goddess of the restless dead and of the frightening powers of night, Melinoe is invoked in her hymn so that she may be soothed and her maddening apparitions turned away — a vivid glimpse of the darker, apotropaic side of the Orphic cult of the underworld.