Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen Hecate.
The gallery
Hecate Chiaramonti (triple-bodied marble statue)
Unknown Roman sculptor (after a Hellenistic type), Roman, c. 2nd century AD
This Roman marble in the Vatican's Museo Chiaramonti (inv. 1922) gives the canonical triple form of Hecate: three identical women set back-to-back around a central pillar, each facing a different direction so the goddess watches every road at once. The arrangement embodies her cult title Trioditis or Trivia, 'she of the three ways' — the deity of crossroads honored at the junctions where her shrines and offerings stood. The sculptural type, known as the hekataion, was set up at gates and triple roads to ward off harm by night, and this triple-bodied image is the most widely reproduced ancient representation of the torch-bearing goddess of the crossroads.
Hecate, gilt-bronze statuette in triple form
Unknown Roman craftsman, Roman, 1st century AD
A small gilt-bronze statuette in the Capitoline Museums in Rome (inv. S 2173) showing Hecate in her three-bodied aspect, three figures joined around a column with their attributes raised. Such portable hekataia condense the goddess's iconography — the twin torches she carries to light the way through night and the underworld, and the keys that open the gates between worlds — into a votive object for household and crossroad worship. As the goddess Hesiod's Theogony singles out for honor across earth, sea and sky, and the deity who alone aided Demeter in the search for Persephone by torchlight, Hecate was invoked at thresholds, and triple bronzes like this carried her protection into the home.
Hecate, or The Night of Enitharmon's Joy
William Blake, c. 1795
William Blake's color-printed drawing in the Tate (c. 1795, Butlin 316), long known as 'Hecate', shows a brooding triple figure of the goddess crouched over a book in restless spectral light, flanked by two shadowy companions who echo her into a single three-headed presence. Around her gather the creatures of her nocturnal domain — an owl, a bat, a thistle, a serpentine ass and a long-snouted beast — emblems of the night, witchcraft and the lunar underworld over which Hecate, the Greek goddess of the crossroads, magic and the dark of the moon, was thought to preside. Blake fuses the classical triple Hecate of the crossroads with his own mythic vision, making this the most celebrated post-classical image of the goddess.
In play
Hades II
Supergiant Games
Supergiant makes Hecate Melinoë's stern mentor at the crossroads — the torch-bearing witch who trains the princess for the war above.
Macbeth
William Shakespeare
Shakespeare brings Hecate onstage to chide the Weird Sisters — the classical crossroads goddess as mistress of the play's dark magic.