Restless Dead: Encounters between the Living and the Dead in Ancient Greece

CHAPTER 6. Hecate and the Dying Maiden

CHAPTER 6 Hecate and the Dying Maiden How the Mistress of Ghosts Earned Her Title My God, where they'll put you, Beauty, so you can't speak. You, Mari, beautiful bride, Like a flower in the window: First you see that it is blossoming; All of a sudden, it has withered. Oh, little beauty, my beauty— Your face is like a carnation And will blacken like the earth. Your face is like whey And will blacken like mud. From a contemporary Transylvanian lament for a girl who died unmarried, quoted by Gail Kligman in The Wedding of the Dead (1988) No figure is more closely associated with the returning souls of the dead than Hecate. Her role as their leader was well enough established by the fifth century for the tragedians to allude to it without further explanation . In an unassigned tragic fragment, one person asks another, "Do you fear that you will see a phantom in your sleep? Do you expect to be attacked by the band of chthonic Hecate?" and in Euripides' Helen, Hecate is credited with the ability to send phantoms against the living even when they are awake.1 As time went on, leadership of the ghosts As recorded and translated by Kligman, 233-34, reprinted here with the kind permission of the University of California Press, i. Trag. Adesp. 375; E. Hel. 569-70. 203 204 Divinities and the Dead became one of her best-known traits. The fourth-century Hippocratic treatise on the sacred disease connects Hecate-Enodia with nocturnal ghostly attacks. By the imperial period, she could be described as psychais nekuon meta bakcheuousa—"raging among the souls of the dead."2 It was this dominion over restless souls that led to Hecate's familiar role as a magicians' goddess as well, for control of a soul was essential to most ancient magical procedures. Our first hints of this idea come from a fragment of Sophocles, where Hecate is asked for help in preparing a spell, and from Euripides, whose Medea refers to Hecate as the goddess who dwells close to her hearth. Later, Horace's dreadful witches demand that Hecate help them to invoke the souls of the dead, and she frequently is asked by magicians of the imperial age to help them gain control of aoroi and biaiothanatoi—the souls of those who have died before their time or violently. This is the side of her personality that persisted even after classical antiquity was over; in Shakespeare's Macbeth, Hecate urges on the chorus of three witches.3 And yet, none of the earliest evidence for Hecate presents her as anything but a normal—indeed rather benign—goddess. The first archaeological artifacts attesting to her worship are two pieces dated to the late sixth century B.C.E. One is an altar found in the precinct of Apollo Delphinios in Miletus, inscribed, boustrophedon-style, to Hecate.4 The inscription itself does not give us much information, but the fact that it was found in front of the prytanneum underscores the fact that Hecate had a part in official cult there—she was no marginalized goddess, associated only with ghosts. The other piece is a terra-cotta statuette of a seated woman wearing a crown, also inscribed to Hecate, which was found in Athens.5 The dedicator was a man, which suggests that the statue was meant to portray Hecate herself. If so, then at this period she was imagined to look like any other goddess. Hecate's entry into Greek literature is the famous "Hymn to Hecate" from Hesiod's Theogony, where far from displaying any frightening traits, she is highly praised as a goddess who can bring a variety of bene2 . Hp. Morb. sacr. 4.30-33; Orph. Hymn 1.3. 3. S. fr. 535; E. Med. 397; Hor. Sat. 1.8.33; PGM IV.I39O-I495; Macbeth 3.5. 4. Milet, i: 3, 153, illustr. #41 (Kawerau); ibid., 2,75, no. 12,9, illustr. #71 (Rehm). Cf. the remarks of Wilamowitz 1931-32,, i: 169; Nilsson 1967, 72,2,; Yavis 1949, 137 53, i. 5. Berlin Staatl. Mus. TC 772.9. Discussed at Frankel; Knoblauch 183 n. 361; Kraus, 2,6-2,7, Farnell 1896-1909, 2,: 508 and 549, with plate 38a, and Sarien 1992,, #105. The inscription (IG I2 836) reads: AIFON ANE0EKEN 0EKATI. Hecate and the Dying Maiden 205 fits to different people...