This entry belongs to the lexicon of Acenes of Sparta: The Dragon Slayer, free on Kindle Unlimited.

Hecate

HEK-uh-tee

Attested elsewhere in ancient sources

Goddess of the crossroads, of witchcraft, and of the hidden places. Hesiod gives her a long and strange passage of praise, saying Zeus honoured her above all and left her a share in earth, sea and starry heaven, and that she can grant or withhold at will.

It is the oddest section of the Theogony. A pre-Olympian power given more space than most Olympians, and treated as retaining her privileges under the new order rather than losing them.

She appears at the trial offering the Path of Power. The spells she offers to teach are named in no other source. The character of the offer, help extended by a power that owes nothing and stands to gain nothing obvious, is exactly Hesiod's.

Sources

References are to the standard divisions of the ancient texts, not to any one edition.

Discussed in the papers

The Moirai's Crossroads

Acenes of Sparta: The Dragon Slayer

A dragon is the reason the 300 died. Leonidas used the magic of the gods to bind Kalaxes beneath Taygetus, and the price was his life and his men's. Sixty-two years later a seven-year-old of the agoge falls into the dragon's crypt and inherits the unpaid balance.

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