By Embreis23
Note: Athens Area Pagans Inc. is open to all paths, ways, and practices. The following is the author’s opinion and is not intended as a statement of opinion, theology, ideology, or faith on the part of AAP.
Introduction: What follows is the fourth of a series of attempts to describe and communicate the experiences I have had with entities that I choose to call Goddesses or Gods, and also with other spirits. Sometimes I just call them “Those Ones.” There is a longer version of this introduction attached to the first installment, but please understand:
- These essays reflect my experiences, and are not intended to be taken as dogma, some special revelation, or The Exclusive and Only Truth.
- For this purpose, I’m not really concerned about historical authenticity or claims of cultural property, or scholarly niceties.
- I am not, nor do I aspire to be, a prophet, pope, high priest, anointed one, cult leader, epopt, or gatekeeper.
- Although I necessarily use metaphors and poetic imagery in writing about Those Ones, I am not speaking of archetypes, or psychological states, or dwellers in some airless otherworld; I am writing about PHENOMENA, just like stars and stones and your own too solid flesh.
- I assert that, whatever names you call them or stories you tell about them, the real gods are with us, in our blood, in the dirt beneath our feet, and in the stars and in the void. When we come to know them, we must love them because they are beautiful, and graceful, and even terrible. But we are neither their property nor their slaves, although we may sometimes be their prey. To know them and reach them is ecstasy, even if it’s sometimes a painful ecstasy.
- Follow these links for Parts I, 0, and II
III. Hekate Soteria
“We are the point, we are the edge,
“We are the wolves that Hekate fed.”1
Hekate is another of the first children of Chaos. Like Nimble Jack, she hates prisons, bondage, and oppression. But while Jack will show you the way to liberate yourself, Hekate urges you to storm the prisons and liberate everyone. She is the Mother of Revolutions and the Queen of all True Witches. Hence, I call her by one of her many classical epithets, “Soteria,” which is to say “Savior.”
I suppose I will get into trouble by using the name of a well-known classical Goddess, who has many modern followers. I have struggled to find the right name for the Witch Goddess, although I was aware of her early in my quests and meditations. I first really met her at the end of a difficult pathworking. In that pathworking, I imagined that I must reach a cave on top of a rocky hill, surrounded by a thicket of thorns. As I do in these exercises, I was striving to suppress my self and let the experience dictate what would happen. Indeed, the pathworking shifted and changed, throwing unexpected obstacles: the thorns became animate, but then I found I had to discard my armor before they would let me through. And after I had passed the thorns, I scaled the rock to the top, and just as I reached the top, something struck and sent me tumbling down to the bottom. The next time, when I reached the top, I saw the thing: about the size and habit of a chimpanzee, but made all of what looked like black stone, but moved like flesh. And it had no face or other features.
This went on through a week or more of meditative journeys, as I slowly learned about the thing at the top of the hill. I could not outwrestle it or outrun it, or outwit it. I found, though, that I could reach its mind with my mind, and, after much sizing up, it accepted me, reached out a paw, pulled me up the top of the ledge, and led me into the cave.
There I met her. She was a tall stern woman with an austere face that was beautiful but you would never call petty. Hounds and wolves, big cats and other, less understandable animals lounged around her as she stood by her steaming cauldron. I stood, scared and uncertain, but she gestured to me and drew a cup from Her cauldron for me.
At first, I thought she was just another aspect of She Who Must Be Adored, of the Great Mother. When I first came face-to-face with That One and embarked upon my Pagan path, I tended to the theory that all goddesses were manifestations of one goddess (and all gods manifestations of one god).2 But as I came to know Those Ones, the idea that all of them sort of emerged from and merged into a clump of deity came to seem untenable.
They resemble each other as members of any family resemble each other but Isis, or Aphrodite, or Brigid, they are no more “emanations” of the Great Mother than you are an emanation of your mother (or father). You are probably like them in more ways that you realize (or want sometimes), and there’s an obvious causal connection, but you are not appendages of their being.
There are many minds, many Gods and Goddesses, and they all have their own Will and Ways. As I came to realize this, I also realized I could and had to distinguish The Great Mother from the Goddess of the Witches.
Eventually, I realized the Witch Goddess was a different personality than She Who Must Be Adored. Although That One can appear to one in a very personal way, she is mostly remote. The Witch Goddess is not remote; she is present whenever you seek for her. And She who Must Adored loves all of creation indiscriminately. The Witch Goddess loves those she loves without reservation, but is not hesitant to judge those she does not: the cruel, the unjust, and the greedy.
I remembered these words I had read years ago and realized that these are the Her words:
“Once in the month, and when the moon is full,
Ye shall assemble in some desert place,
Or in a forest all together join
To adore the potent spirit of your queen
My mother, great Diana. She who fain
Would learn all sorcery yet has not won
Its deepest secrets, them my mother will
Teach her, in truth, all things as yet unknown.
And ye shall all be freed from slavery,
And so ye shall be free in everything;
And as the sign that ye are truly free,
Ye shall be naked in your rites, both men And women also: this shall last
until The last of your oppressors shall be dead …”
That quotation is from Aradia: the Gospel of the Witches, by Charles G. Leland. Leland was a fairly well-known collector of folklore in the late 19th Century, and Aradia is (or purports to be) translations of stories told to him by an elderly Italian Strega (witch) about the Pagan practices she grew up with. 3
However, I first read those words in another book, Never on a Broomstick, by Frank Donovan. I first read this when I was 13 and it was the first time I understood that Paganism and witchcraft might still exist outside of fiction.4 More immediately, Aradia’s words spoke to my nascent anti-authoritarian political consciousness.5
Since Leland’s informant named her, I first thought of the Witch Goddess as Diana,6 but I never was completely happy with that. I perceived Diana as the athletic huntress and virgin, which didn’t seem completely consistent with the Goddess who taught poor peasants in the woods to break their bonds and kill their masters. In fact, it sounded a lot like Nimble Jack.
I realized part of the problem was that my general idea of Diana was too influenced by the Interpretatio Romana, the project of Augustan age intellectuals in Rome to identify all their native gods with the Greek Olympian pantheon, particularly Homer’s version. Most of what I grew up thinking I knew about the classical pantheons was from bowdlerized English versions of stories from the Augustan Age Latin poet Ovid. Ovid was a brilliant artist, but exemplified the desire to completely submerge Italy’s native deities in Greek culture. This has tended to hide the special character of the original Italian gods.
Diana is a Latin name and, although there is academic dispute about her origins, it’s accepted that she was the primary goddess in Aricia, a Latin city that was a rival of early Rome, and that Diana was incorporated into the Roman Pantheon after that city fell to the Romans. Her sanctuary near modern Nemi remained well-known as the home of her sacred king/priest, the Rex Nemorensis, and the Golden Bough. The story of the Rex Nemorenisis was the starting point for Sir James Frazer’s famous anthropological study, The Golden Bough, which had a major influence on Modern Paganism. Even though Frazer’s conclusions are largely dismissed now.7
But there seemed to be another goddess who was a better fit. I first learned of Hekate from Frank Donovan, also. He described her in the fashion of the later Classical poets as a terrifying crone who walked the night with her pack of hounds, and haunted the crossroads.
But as I learned more, I learned that there was more to Hekate (often spelled “Hecate” after the Latin versions of her name). In one of the Orphic hymns, she is described as:
“Destructive One, Loner, irresistible Queen,
You roar like a beast beneath the moon’s gleam.
Unarmored, unconquered, chariot drawn by bulls,
Holding keys of the cosmos and heavenly rules.8
Hesiod in the Theogony devotes 47 lines to her, saying of her:
Among those
Born of both Earth and Ocean who possessed Illustriousness she was likewise blest.
Lord Zeus, the son of Cronus, did not treat
Her grievously and neither did he cheat
Her of what those erstwhile divinities,
The Titans, gave her: all the liberties
They had from the beginning in the sea
And on the earth and in the heavens, she
Still holds.9
Whoever Hekate was, the poets spoke of her more respectfully than they would if she were no more than a night-wandering goblin. There was more to her.
I learned later that one of the epithets of Roman Diana was “Trivia” while one of Hekate’s epithets in Greek was “trioditis”; both mean “three-fold” and Hekate, in later literature, was sometimes represented as having three faces or three bodies. More importantly, the late Roman writer Statius identified Hekate as the third in trinity with Diana and the nymph Egeria. This was enough to convince me that I was on the right track in identifying Diana of The Witches with Hekate. In both cases, the name of the Goddess of dangerous magick that so frightened the patriarchal civilization of the horse-lords and their successors that she had to be overwritten and parodied as a nightmare grotesque.
But I never saw her as monstrous or ugly, but majestic and beautiful. I have seen her walking the night, holding her torch, surrounded by her pack.
She is best seen on the darkest nights, the New Moon nights, because those who are lost in darkness are the ones she cares for most, the ones who most need her. In some Greek myths, her companions are the ghosts of people who could not get into the Underworld because they couldn’t pay the ferryman’s price.
She and Nimble Jack share mastery of crossroads and gateways. They are not lovers or siblings, but old comrades. They don’t always approve of each other’s tactics, but they respect each other as fellow warriors in the same fight.
Hekate’s Magick is the Magick of allies, of learning the ways of plants and animals and stones and other spirits in the world. But this is not the prettified Magick of New Ageism. Hekate leads you on the Poison Path.10 On the Poison Path, you can break your mind free, but also learn to make the smug and powerful tremble with fear.11
She walks the Earth at night surrounded by her pack of howling canine – hounds or wolves, depending on your source – carrying her torch high, holding the keys to every gate.
Only the cruel and unjust need fear her hounds, though she will sic them on those who deserve it. You can join her pack if you dare and are up to the job. All the best Witches are Hekate’s wolves.12
This is the fourth in a series of at least 8 and possibly more aspirationally weekly essays. Next time, Thrice-Great Thoth-Hermes and Gray-eyed Athena.
- Part of the war chant of Clan MacKenzie in S.M. Stirling’s Emberverse novels, but I am told it was heard in Pagan/Wiccan gatherings before the first novel was published. A variant of this brought to my attention by my invaluable editor, Lachele Foley:
We are the point, we are the edge
We are the weavers, we are the web
We are the living, we are the dead
We are the wolves that Hekate fed
↩︎ - I suspect this is an inevitable hangover of Platonism and Christian hegemony, but I caution young Pagans to be careful of it. Obviously, though, some people find this model satisfying, and If it works for them or you, okay.
↩︎ - Of course, respectable scholars both in 1899 and now have dismissed Leland’s story as a fabrication. In fact, nearly everyone who has advanced claims that there is a living Pagan or Witch tradition which survived continuously since the distant pass – Margaret Murray, Gerald Gardner, Alexander Sanders – have been similarly dismissed, as has the work of the archaeologist Marija Gimbutas, who has theorized the existence of a Goddess oriented neolithic culture in south eastern Europe. If one were given to such suspicions, one might suspect a grand conspiracy among respectable scholars to suppress knowledge of Pagan and Magickal survivals.
↩︎ - When I was 13, my mother had foolishly sent me loose a bookstore I had never been to in South Montgomery. A section for young people’s supernatural fiction or something of that sort, there was a whole set of hardback books on the top shelf out of my reach, I reached up to try to pull some of them down to look at them and I came down with that. Someone in the bookstore apparently had thought it was a book of scary stories for kids, but they were deceived. This is not the only time misfiled books made an impression on me.
↩︎ - Never on a Broomstick is a strange book in a way. Published in 1971, it relates a history of witchcraft that follows Gerald Gardner’s account: the worshipers of the Neolithic great goddess were driven underground by the dominance of patriarchal horse-warrior cultures, but survived first as Mystery Cults, then as an even more underground tradition after the rise of Chrisitanty. Donovan is harshly critical of the Catholic Church and its persecutions. And the climax of the story is the revelation of the survival of the witch cult by Gerald Gardner in 1954. Now, this narrative was widely and uncritically accepted in the early Pagan and Wiccan circles of the 1960s and 1970s. What’s weird about Never on a Broomstick is the author. I can’t find much information about Frank Robert Donovan, but everything I can find indicates he was a very respectable fellow, with no known interest in the occult or witchcraft outside of this one book, published when he was 68 years old. To that point he had had a long career editing the letters of historical figures like Benjamin Franklin, and also writing books about military and naval history, mostly aimed at young adults. This book was published by Stackpole Press, a small press devoted to military and naval history. Stackpole had published much of Donovan’s earlier work, but nothing remotely like Never on a Broomstick.
↩︎ - Specifically, the body of the Gospel is spoken by Aradia, daughter of Diana, who was said to be the first true Witch.
↩︎ - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Golden_Bough also https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3623
↩︎ - Translated by Sarah Mastros in Orphic Hymns Grimoire
Hekate, Enodia, Trioditis most lovely,
We call to you now, oh saffron-robed lady.
You rule the heavens above and the black depths below.
You skate across waves and flow with the seafoam.
Sorcerous soul, you dance with the dead
And the deer and the dogs who delight in your tread.
Destructive One, Loner, irresistible Queen,
You roar like a beast beneath the moon’s gleam.
Unarmored, unconquered, chariot drawn by bulls,
Holding keys of the cosmos and heavenly rules.
Hierophant of the nymphs who haunt the high places,
You nurture children with charm and good graces.
We pray, hallowed maiden, please make our hearts light,
Goddess, indulge your initiates and visit our rite.
↩︎ - From Hesiod’s Theogony, Tr. by Christopher Kelk
© Copyright 2021 Christopher Kelk, All Rights Reserved.
Please direct enquiries for commercial re-use to chriskelk@sympatico.ca. ↩︎ - Also from Aradia: Gospel of the Witches. Diana’s instructions to her daughter Aradia:
And thou shalt be the first of witches known;
And thou shalt be the first of all i’ the world;
And thou shalt teach the art of poisoning,
Of poisoning those who are great lords of all;
Yea, thou shalt make them die in their palaces;
And thou shalt bind the oppressor’s soul (with power) ….
↩︎ - For more on what I mean by the Poison Path, I suggest Dale Pendell’s three volumes: Pharmako: Gnosis, Pharmako: Poeia, and Pharmako: Dynamis. See also The Poison Path Herbal by Coby Michael.
↩︎ - I’m going to refer to Peter Gray and Alkistis Dimech’s “Manifesto of Apocalyptic Witchcraft.” Although Gray identifies Babalon, not Hekate, as the Goddess of Witchcraft, I find the Manifesto is perfectly Hekatean:
A Manifesto of Apocalyptic Witchcraft
1. If the land is poisoned, the witchcraft must respond.
2. It is not our way of life, it is life itself which is under threat
3. Witchcraft is our intimate connection to the web of life.
4. We are the Witchcraft.
5. Our World has forever changed. The trodden paths no longer correspond. Witchcraft thrives in this liminal, lunar, trackless realm.
6. We are storm, fire and flood. 7. We will not be denied.
8. Witchcraft is the recourse of the dispossessed, the powerless, the hungry and the abused. It gives heart and tongue to stones and trees. It wears the rough skin of beasts. It turns on a civilization that knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.
9. If you have no price you cannot be bought. If you do not want you cannot be bribed. If you are not frightened you cannot be controlled.
10. Witchcraft is folk magic, the magic of the people and for the people. 11. We call an end to the pretence of respectability.
12. We will not disarm ourselves.
13. The war is upon us.
14. Choose then to become a Mask.
15. Those with nothing left to lose will dare all.
16. There is one Witchcraft under many names. There is one Grand Sabbat on one mountain. There are many ways to fly. There is no witness present at the Sabbat.
17. Witchcraft is a force, not an order. Witchcraft is rhizomatic, not hierarchic. Witchcraft defies organisation, not meaning. We simply bear the marks.
18. Witchcraft is power and possesses this in ekstasis, sex and ordeal. Witchcraft is unbridled sexuality.
19. In witchcraft it is the woman who initiates. We challenge man to be the equal of this woman.
20. Witchcraft is the art of inversion.
21. Witchcraft is the beauty which is terror.
22. Witchcraft is a myth, which drawing on the past, clothes itself in the symbols of (its) time. Witchcraft does not mistake myths for history, it harnesses them to transform the future. Witchcraft knows the ground upon which it stands.
23. Witchcraft honours the spirits. Witchcraft enchants for the lost. Witchcraft will not forget. 24. Witchcraft embodies our ancestors and saints, they carry us with them.
25. To Her is offered the blood, to use the care of the ask and bones.
26. The example we follow is our own.
27. The practice of witchcraft is one of revolution and of the power of woman. 28. The Goddess who speaks through us is known among men as Babalon.
29. Witchcraft concerns itself with mystery. Through the gates of mystery we come to knowledge. Knowledge enters us through the body. The highest form of this knowledge is Love.
30. Every drop of blood is sacrificed to the grail. Love cannot be bought with any other coin.
31. We seek and drink this wine together.
32. Will is finite, passion infinitely renewed.
33. Witchcraft is present, it is ensanguined and vivified. Witchcraft is prescient, it gazes on the future. Witchcraft is oracular, it will not hold its tongue. Our time has come
from Apocalyptic Witchcraft by Peter Grey, published by Scarlet Imprint
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