A mystic understanding of lunar pantheistic Hekate, her domains, identity, and how she relates to theurgy and magic from the perspective of living practice.
(This draws very heavily from pagan-Platonism and chthonic magical practices)
Hekate as a Goddess is most simply understood as one who presides over the triple realms and phases of the Universe - she is a Goddess who is at once hypercosmic, cosmic, and worldly - presiding over the As Above and the So Below, while existing also as a third unmentioned kind in the cosmic formula; the mediation between. This among other reasons why she is Prothyraia (before the threshold or literally ‘by the door’) - the divine membrane separating, cohering, and defining all things.
The Gods are transcendent beings, but they also encompass and manifest themselves across all of existence. Proclus in his six books on the theology of Plato notes that of the Mundane Gods (the Gods who shape the physical universe, including the 12 Olympians) there of two divisions; the Celestial (heavenly) and Sublunar (terrestrial). And of the Gods manifesting in the terrestrial world, the Moon is their monad, their sovereign and summit and the principle ordering power down here at the lowest circle of reality. Therefore the world of embodying is itself a kind of Underworld, the world under the Moon, which is directly tied to the earth itself. And the Moon is none other than Hekate, the lunar pantheistic Goddess and synectic power of the (sub)lunar Gods. She is the mistress of Fate, its chief spinner and apportioner (as the magical papyri call her Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos), the cause of all generation and corruption. She is also a co-sovereign with the Sublunar Demiurge, but we will not elaborate on him here.
Her epiclesis Prothyraia ties her to Eileithyia not just by association from the Orphic hymns, but also directly. In an oracle attributed to Hekate herself recorded by Porphyry the Goddess declares she is both light-bringing Eileithyia and unmarried Phoebe, the generatrix of birth and life who accepts souls into the world, brings them to the light as there born, nourishes and finally devours them in death. And this is at the heart of understanding the principle manifestation of Hekate in our world, whose three phases reflect her triple powers of birth, life, and death. Her invocations in the magical papyri speak of her womb as being covered in the coils of serpentine scales, the serpent is a chthonic animal who sheds its skin as a universal emblem of life, death, and regeneration. So not just a portion, but the entire sensible universe itself, the generated Cosmos, is the dragon womb of Hekate. Our sphere being the lowest reflection of the highest circle also carries the same nature, the terrestrial world is a womb filled to the brim with perpetual generation.
The Cosmic Gorgon - Medusa Unveiled
Generation is the physical part of the process of emanation that gives rise to everything. Simply put, generation in the world is the constant engendering of phenomena - it’s gathered, cohered, torn apart and regenerated successively in one giant, Bacchic frenzy like the body of Zagreus himself. This is symbolically represented in mythic theology as the sparagmos of Zagreus, which gave birth to humanity and the potential salvation of the human soul itself. The Orphic myth also relates to Hekate because Hekate is the Mother of Gods and Necessity (Ananke), and we identify her with the khôra of Timaeus and it as Chaos, the foundational realm that contains the primordial substance for creation. But Necessity appears like the Intellect of Chaos herself, she must be contended with on her own terms and the resulting dialectic is what enables the great work of the cosmic demiurge (Zeus). Chaos receives the Eternal into Becoming like a vessel receives water, but the vessel is not passive for it contains and constrains the liquid. Consequently the liquid takes its shape according to whatever limits the vessel imposes, and that constraint is Necessity in the world.
Necessity in the world is limit of creation, things are created according to what is necessary, not according to absolute perfection. This is what’s required for Nature to function, manifesting her three powers of birth, growth, and dying to create a beautiful ordered whole. But none of these powers are actually separated, although it appears that way to human eyes, rather they are each happening all-at-once. When it comes to the new age imagery of the triple Goddess that’s blended into the general witchy zeitgeist this is where you’d hear about the beautiful magical harmless creative empathetic supportive divine feminine nursery of the menstruating maiden-birthing mother-menopausal crone, but sorry, the buck stops here. In as much as things are Becoming, they are not absolutely perfect, all is suffering, we decay and die and feel pain, and for all the wonder and beauty of the world its also a place where baby deer get torn apart by wolves.
Hekate, Ananke, Phoebe, Eileithyia, Nature, Moon, Fate, her power is the triple union of generation, corruption and regeneration that bodies experience all at once. Being born is not cute, it’s a bloody and brutal affair and is eminently wild and dangerous, within the womb of the Goddess is a coiling brood of poisonous serpents - growing and rotting simultaneously as they multiply without end. In Orphic myth the dead bodies of the Titans become humanity to symbolically represent this aspect of Becoming, it is awe-inspiring and bloody and frankly insane, we are emerging from an ocean of blood, dead bodies mired together in the black earth of the Great Mother. And what becomes of this orgy of death, growth, decay, birth? It all mixes together and returns to the chalice of the Earth - whom Servius identified as Hekate, the blood-drinking, corpse and filth eating Goddess of the magical papyri. Indeed, this is why the far-off daemons who emanate from her order - Lamia, Empousa, Mormo, are blood drinking vampires who target the newly born or young men, life is the marriage of birth and death.
This fact terrified even the philosophers and the composers of the Chaldean Oracles, who dreaded the chthonic daemons of Hekate who took the form of shaggy black dogs said to lead the Theurgists astray. The body was often feared and reviled in later strains of pagan-Platonism, but hatred of the material itself devolves into a distraction from the Great Work. Orphic fragments speak of a terrible dragoness born directly of the womb of her father Phanes - with the face and upper body of a beautiful girl, a nest of writhing serpents for hair, and the lower half of a giant serpent. This clearly corresponds to the appearances of Hekate given by later oracles - a Gorgon, beautiful and terrible, covered in coiling serpents. Her apparitions were also known to be gigantic and serpentine, and she is one of the few Goddesses of Hellenic polytheism who appears in genuinely monstrous forms. This is not a sign of evil or maliciousness, it is radical truthfulness about Nature herself. Stones signify material and spiritual heaviness, and if your ego cannot bear looking upon the face of the Gorgon you will turn to stone, forever weighed down by your own delusions of the world. Her epiphanies also evoke Ekhidna, the mother of a brood of calamitous monsters just as lunar Hekate is the mother of all the poisons and daemons of life.
But the blood of the Gorgon Medusa was both poisonous and healing, and so too does the Goddess hold the keys to our salvation. For in the Demiurgy Chaos is the receptacle of all Becoming, receiving and expressing the eternal in the mortal as the Gods sowed their signatures in Creation. The pathway back to the Infinite is also held within the Finite, so the mystery of Chaos is the expression of the primordial formlessness mediating between divine eternity and all mortal becoming, which we call the cosmic Now of Eternal-Becoming. The fact that we are the children of earth and starry Heaven, the Gods are our siblings and the Great Mother is our mother too.
And that is what enables Theurgy and Magic itself, total union with the divine through the ritual activation of its own direct continuity in the Gods. And as much as the trials of fortune and Nature can hinder our progress, she is our savior (Soteira) - the implacable triple formed virgin Goddess of boundless Empyrean fire, with the heads of bulls, lions, and horses, a snake haired drakaina covered in writhing vipers, girdled by dragons. She carries keys to open all the fetters that bind us and all the gates, she carries torches to illuminate all realities, she holds a whip to dominate all the spiritual obstacles to liberation, and she carries a sword so that any obstinate power is destroyed and cast to the depths of Tartarus.
On a cosmic level that is as much a sign of the boundless divine light and love she radiates as it is a warning on the sublunary level. In mysticism the spiritual significance of the Moon is sometimes portrayed as being a passive, submissive receptacle of the Sun. This is completely wrong, it is the lack of her own light that is emblem of all the luciform natures of the Sublunary Gods. Lacking her own light, she dwells in pure tenebrious darkness, not merely accepting the solar light but actively reflecting it back - as said by Iamblichus the Sublunar Gods unfold themselves into light, emerging from the depths of Erebus, it is the very act of creation itself. In the magical papyri she is called “the bender of proud necks” and Pasikrateia “the All-dominating” and for good reason. Nature and the material is not an evil prison meant to be trampled on, as the Eternal Becoming it is the locus of all radical spiritual awakening and activities - you cannot achieve Henosis without first being embodied. And anybody who attempts to side step their own embodying, denigrate Nature, and bemoan the humiliation of having a body is in for a very rude awakening. Because she is the gatekeeper of all the realms of the Cosmos, and nothing can progress without her say. Writ upon the iron-gates of the world below the Moon is this; “Abandon ego, all ye who enter here. You are not above me,” and if you think you are she will bend your proud neck until it snaps, drag you until you are kissing the earth, all while extending her hand to raise you up to the truth of the divine within the all.
[Roman coin of three formed Hekate, AD 241–4, Aspendus in Lycia-Pamphylia]
