A continuation of my series on Hekate. If you missed it, here’s Part I.
I’ll open by making the point that we are exploring myth, and by that virtue, we are exploring Weird Time™. Archetypal stories and beings fall outside linear continuity, instead favoring embedded, overlapping cycles. We are thinking in terms of waves and realms, rather than lines. In a living system, truth is not a static destination, but an interdependent alchemical process. Any experience of truth is first-hand and integrated, rather than given or found. To make an attempt at exploring these mysteries from that perspective is great exercise, and necessary for deeper engagement.
Convergence
While it is known that Hekate was not originally depicted in triformis, it is also not accurate to say that her three-fold depiction is a modern overlay, or something without context and substance. There is a rich and multifarious history of triplicate mystery to explore, with none of its facets having clear origins that historians can identify.
The Trivium1 as a linguistic phenomenon has been constricted and reduced down the ages, neutralized along with many other things by the flattening, utilitarian march of modernity. I think it’s time for a refresh. Not that I seek to exclude any historical aspect of this process, but I’m challenging the associative monopoly. I, for one, would like to use the word based on its actual merits:
Trivium, etymologically, means three-fold path. Trivia is its pluralization, meaning a myriad of three-fold paths. This maps to the fractal nature of triplicity; the hyper-dimensional nexus of all things three-fold, and so is more fit to refer to a host of strange phenomena, and not The Kevin Bacon Game. This brings to mind one meaning ascribed to trivialis that I’d like to highlight: “found everywhere”. For example:
Three is famously the magic number, and also the minimum number of vertices required for geometric shape. The Triskeles and Valknut are representations of Trivia. As are the faces of Hekate and her triple-convergence path, the Holy Trinity, and that one thing from Charmed. You know the one. None of these Trivia are necessarily interchangeable, but all are somehow connected to whatever Grand Threeness exists in the foundational patterning of things.
Through the fog of history, an important question arises: How is Hekate actually related to triplicity? What is the original link?
As near as scholars can tell, she was originally a supreme earth goddess celebrated in the religious traditions of Anatolia going back to at least the first millenia B.C.E., bearing most similarities to the fertility goddess of the region, Cybele. Hekate had her own pre-existing temple in Caria when the Greeks colonized the region, which was appropriated to the Greek settlement, where she became cast as Artemis. At that time, she was a singular figure. She was later described in Hesiod’s Theogony (the oldest literary source that mentions her) as a singular figure in around 8th Century B.C.E.
Her earliest representations in tripartite include the pottery of Alkamenes in 5th Century B.C.E., and the Orphic Hymns in 2nd Century C.E. A triform Hekate was also reportedly included in the metaphysics of the Chaldean Oracles. The ceremonial rites described in that wisdom tradition proceeded in three primary stages:
Consecration of statues of the gods
Induction of a trance state
Invocation of epiphany
These are the earliest hard associations of Hekate with any sort of triplicity. So that particular turn could be of Neo-Platonic origin, although there is plenty of indication of her link with Trivial mysteries going back much further (which I will discuss later in this series). None of the links explored here are definitive, but these data-points should all be held up together.
Surviving the syncretic whelm of the last few thousand years, Hekate is ascribed a richly-layered symbolic Trivia, depending on who you ask:
Life, Death and Rebirth
Past, Present and Future
The Heavens, Earth and Underworld
Artemis, Selene and Persephone
Descent, Search and Ascent (in keeping with the myth of Persephone)
Mother, Father and Child
Macrocosm, Microcosm and Synthesis
I suppose I’ll also mention Maiden, Mother, Crone, which is now widely regarded as a baseless neo-pagan overlay at the hands of Robert Graves.2
While these seem to be static overlays at best (and at worst, Explanations), they do speak of a figure whose intermediary influence stretches across time, domain, state, image and belief.
When I first looked into this, I came away from my search pleased, but still apprehensive. These ideas felt powerful in a way I couldn’t ignore.
That said, it turns out my research would have been mostly unnecessary if I just knew how to read and pronounce Greek. If I’d known it at first, I might not have gone on a journey that taught me a great many other things.3 So it goes:
τριοδῖτις - Pronounced “Triovia”, according to this website.
And there it was.
A word in the first line of Hekate’s hymn (the one right under my nose) translated in most versions to mean “…worshipped at the meeting of three paths…”
Other versions simply say “…of the crossroads…”
Looking at how it’s used, “worshipped at” appears to be an arbitrary insertion. To simply read it, it seems that the hymn actually refers to Hekate herself as the crossroads, specifically the triple-convergence. One Roman epithet for her was simply “Trivia”.
To be somehow the keeper of the crossroads, and the crossroads itself, gives more to the depth of a polymorphous goddess of liminality and dimensional transgression. It gives to her power as something indefinable, and perhaps more importantly, as something self-possessed.
Join me as I discuss this further in Part III of this series.
I’m just capitalizing these words from now on in order to distinguish and reinvigorate them. Kind of giving it the ‘magic with a ‘k’’ treatment, in hopes that some day it will be equally useless. Fight me.
There’s also the “Wheel of Hekate” which has no source context before, like, the 80s.
The reason I wrote the article in this way is to attempt to take you on the same path of discovery that I walked. Sometimes you go in a circle (or something takes you in a circle) to work something out for yourself and get confirmation later, which is infinitely more valuable as first-hand experience. I was led through these discoveries by piecing together fundamentals, which became its own meditation.
Central to that meditation was my own ignorance and folly. So it goes.