#erika simon

[pink-lemonade-rose]

Begin from Hestia

Socrates: "Shall we begin, then, with Hestia, according to custom?"

The ancient Greeks had a saying: begin from Hestia. Hestia is the goddess of the hearth, and had the honor of receiving the first share of the offerings during religious rites large and small. "No divinity in the Greek pantheon radiated as much warmth as Hestia," writes Erika Simon in The Gods of the Greeks. "She was the divine personification of the domestic hearth. She was not just the fire; she embodied the entire household revolving around it."

Hestia was a sacred presence within every home, and is largely associated with homey things and with family life. There is a common misconception that Hestia was only associated with those things, and that she is somehow the "shy one" of the Hellenic pantheon, never leaving the house or getting involved in goings-on outside of it. But Hestia isn't just a household goddess; she's a civic goddess. Simon goes on to say that "She represented the center for human communities both large and small—communities of families, villages, and cities. " In ancient Athens, Hestia's statue dwelled next to the civic hearth inside the Prytaneion, along with that of Eirene (Peace). The community was understood to share a common hearth, a common center.

If it can be said that there are specific "Hestia values," things that she stands for, those things would include the sanctity of home and the simple joys and nurturance to be found there, kindness, humility, but also community, the offering of asylum, the sharing of meals and connection with others, with all. Above all else, Hestia stands for hospitality, a virtue treasured by the Greeks.

I live in the United States. Our nation is currently caught in a battle between the majority of us, who believe in those Hestia values and believe that immigrants are our welcome friends and neighbors, and a deeply evil government that is assaulting our cities, our rights, and our democratic institutions. The fascists would extinguish that symbolic fire that Hestia is goddess of, the fire that offers warmth and light to all.

I have been very troubled trying to imagine a path forward out of so much devastation and violence inflicted by the Trump regime and by ICE, its army of racist, rot-souled goons. I believe the resistance effort in Minnesota is showing us all the way. As Adam Serwer wrote in The Atlantic, “If the Minnesota resistance has an overarching ideology, you could call it “neighborism”—a commitment to protecting the people around you, no matter who they are or where they came from.” If we're to survive this current hellscape, we will need to do it by caring for and protecting our neighbors, all of them, no matter what. As one who honors Hestia, I see this as not only a good and necessary thing in and of itself, but also an act of devotion to her and all she represents.

Let's tend the light of our communal hearth and extend our ideas of what "home" means. Let's let that radiance shine from our individual hearth-fires to our neighbors next door, our neighbors in our towns, our neighbors who were born here, our neighbors who are immigrants, our neighbors in other lands who deserve to be free from the threats and insults of "our" government that does not represent its people and their true values.

Let's begin from Hestia.

Let's keep that fire lit and never let it go out.

Sources:

Socrates quote from Plato's Cratylus, translated by Benjamin Jowett (https://classics.mit.edu/Plato/cratylus.html)

Erika Simon, The Gods of the Greeks. Translated by Jakob Zeyl.

Adam Serwer, "Minnesota Proved MAGA Wrong" (https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/01/the-neighbors-defending-minnesota-from-ice/685769/ - unfortunately paywalled)

[pink-lemonade-rose]

Callimachus (Diegesis fr. 101 Pfeiffer) and other sources state that a lion’s skin lay at the feet of the statues of Hera in Argos and Samos. [...] Hesiod reports that Hera was instrumental in raising the Nemean lion (Theogony 328). Bacchylides also mentions that “in the blooming plain of Nemean Zeus, white-armed Hera approached the dark-roaring lion,” whose strangling fulfilled the first of the famous labors of Heracles (9.6ff.). Hera is even seen holding a lion in representations of the Judgment of Paris, as she still does, for example, on a drinking cup of the late fifth century B.C. In the Heraeum on Delos, French archaeologists have found Archaic clay statuettes of a goddess sitting with a lion in her lap. If the site of these finds were unknown, these seated figures would be classified according to type as Rhea.

Erika Simon, The Gods of the Greeks

[pink-lemonade-rose]

The mysterious Cronus must have been a god highly honored by the original population of the Aegean. This god, pushed aside by Zeus, remained a friend of the oppressed until Late Antiquity. During his festivals in Greece and also during the corresponding celebrations in Rome, the Saturnalia, slaves were treated as equal to the freeborn. His peaceful character—in ancient myth Cronus was the ruler during the Golden Age, in which there were no wars, and was also the lord of the Blessed Isles—fits with what we know from archaeological evidence about the pre-Greek population. No more than the name of the month of Cronion is required to contradict the opinion of Nilsson and other scholars that Cronus existed only in myth and scarcely in cult. Greek months are customarily named after festivals held in honor of a deity, not after purely mythological figures.

Erika Simon, The Gods of the Greeks

[pink-lemonade-rose]

While the link between Hestia and Demeter is immediately obvious, that between Hestia and Hermes may seem surprising at first. What they share is a role as intermediaries. The smoke from the hearth’s altar, where the sacrifices burn, provides, like Hermes, a means of communication between the realm of mortals and Olympus.

Erika Simon, The Gods of the Greeks

[pink-lemonade-rose]

No divinity in the Greek pantheon radiated as much warmth as Hestia. She was the divine personification of the domestic hearth. She was not just the fire; she embodied the entire household revolving around it. She represented the center for human communities both large and small—communities of families, villages, and cities. Since such associations flourish only when their members are in harmony, Hestia was the goddess who always avoided strife, in contrast to a goddess like Hera. No one understood this better than the Athenians. They set up statues of Hestia and Eirene, goddess of peace, next to their civic hearth inside the Prytaneion in the Agora.

Erika Simon, The Gods of the Greeks