Hekate Chthonia

Hekate, the mistress of the hidden faces, whose power extends over the three realms of Earth, Sea, and Sky, bears her countenance in veiled grace. Both a chthonic goddess and a sky divinity, She is the axis that binds the cosmos and her titles and functions unravel Her as the hidden initiatrix and witch queen, guide to the underworld and ruling power of crossroads and liminal places. It is to her that we turn our infantile faces, in the game of shadow and twilight.

We call you now, Mistress, by the holy names of Dog, Bull and Lioness, to guide the hand that reaches through thy Many Guises.
Hear now, “You, o Hekate,
Who know untold desires that work our will
And art the mistress of our secret spells.”
                                                                  Metamorphosis, Ovid.


Chthonia – Earthly one, I call thee

In book 6 of Aeneid, the work by roman poet Virgil that details the events that followed Aeneas escape from the fallen Troy until his arrival to Italy, the hero encounters the Sibyl of Cumae who helps him travel to the underworld. The Sibyl was Hekate’s appointed keeper of the Avernus Wood, the entrance to the underworld, and she was by the Goddess shown all the punishments of Tartarus and how to control and tend to the holy entrance. 

“Hear now, o Infernal Teacher, thou who appointest the keeper to the earth’s bowels”

As Chthonia, this goddess bears a terrifying nature as a ruler of daimones and a night wanderer amongst the graves surrounded by a host of specters. Her power over the dead made her a figure commonly invoked on the defixiones. One such example invokes her nature as the dread queen in a homoerotic piece of Alexandrian provenance:

 “I call upon you, mistress ruler of all mankind, all dreadful one, bursting out of the earth, who also gathers up the limbs of Meliouchos and Meliouchos…”

This bursting out of the earth, or breaking the earth open as it is referred to in some sources also granted her the name of Nexichthon, closely related to her function has the key bearer of the underworld.
Dogs are sacred to Hekate, being both her offering, companions and announcers:

“And to Hekate Chthonia, before who even the dogs tremble as she moves among the graves and the dark blood of the dead” – Idylls, Theocritus.”
“Then the earth began to bellow, trees to dance and howling dogs in glimmering light advance. Ere Hecate came” - Aeneid, Book VL, Virgil


Of relevance to this title is what is described in the Orphic Argonautica as Hekate’s Garden, a collection of plants that were associated with the goddess, some of which include aconite, ebony, garlic, mandrake and oak.


Open the thrice folding Ebony gates and lead us into your pleasure garden, where we can taste of thy poisoned fruit and partake in thy forbidden arts.