01 November 2017

Hecate in the Roman Tradition – Trivia of the Crossroads

"Hekate" by Blake (1795)
Hecate (or Trivia, to use her Latin name – as this is now also an English word with a very different association I will retain her Hellenic title) is an enigmatic Goddess of the triple crossroads, the stygian night and magic; though she walks through the dark she is not a Goddess of darkness itself, for it is her torches which lit up the way for Ceres when she searched for her abducted daughter. Hecate is associated with both Diana,* who lights up the night, and Proserpina, who gives us hope that life can emerge from death. Hecate's rites were not recorded on the official Roman calendar (Beard at 384), but her veneration was well known in Rome. Cicero tells us that altars and shrines to her were commonplace in Greece, though not apparently in Rome at this time, however, she is referred to by a number of contemporaneous Roman poets, such as Horace and Catullus, which suggests that Hecate had already been successfully synchronised into Roman polytheism by the 1st century BCE. By the 4th century CE her worship was apparently prominent enough for Roman senators to be counted among her priests. This was during the last gasp of overt Paganism in Italy, when Christianity had become the religion of emperors; Paganism was increasingly mocked as a set of superstitions befitting peasants and barbarian Germans. Perhaps in an effort to assert greater spiritual legitimacy, some affluent and well educated Pagans were embracing an increasingly more sophisticated species of polytheism, by fusing it with mystery religions and philosophies from the east (a process which had been ongoing for centuries in any case). Roman veneration of Hecate appears to have gone hand-in-hand with this, for she almost certainly featured prominently within the well known Eleusinian Mysteries – a Pagan sect that was apparently so spiritually fulfilling that initiation into its secret rites brought about the apostasy of Constantine I’s nephew Julian, who would later be known as the last Pagan emperor of Rome.