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| "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.
