Overview: Hecate waits for us at the crossroads, torches in each hand. The goddess of land, sea, and sky is wise and wondrous, terrifying and holy. Triple-faced Hecate does not tell us the way; she shows us what can happen when we step into our power.

With practices, trances, spells, and immersive exercises, you can build a relationship with Hecate: light-bringer, gate-breaker, and star-walker. The Goddess of Magick and Witchcraft inspires, guides, and grants safe passage in the darkest moments.

Verdict: For me, growing up, I was told that Hecate was a goddess of the underworld. Some say she was an aspect of Persephone, Hades’ queen, in her most deadly phase. But she is usually depicted as a self-sufficient deity, very ancient, very cruel - a torturer of ghosts and mistress of the brass-winged, brass-clawed Furies, whose task it is to torment those who have offended the gods.

She was known also as queen of the roads, because, in ancient times, the dead were taken beyond the city walls and buried along the side of the roads. Hecate’s cult outlived those of all the other Greek gods. She was adopted by the medieval witch covens as their patroness and was worshipped in their secret rites.

Indeed, because of her role as a goddess of ghosts and witchcraft she wouldn’t fit into most myths. We see her helping Demeter search for her daughter Persephone (hence she is called “tender hearted”) and she fights alongside the other gods in the gigantomakhia and Hesiod speaks highly of her. The witch Medeia is considered her priestess, as is Kirke.

Perhaps her most famous — but at the same time, often obscure - myth places her as the eldest child of Zeus and Hera, born under the name Angelos or Angelia. When Zeus carried off and seduced Europa, Angelia gives the princess a pot of her mother Hera’s rouge. Hera, finding this out flies into a rage and Angelia flees to the earth to hide. She takes refuge in a house of a woman giving birth, and Angelia acts as her midwife.

She later helps a family bring a corpse to a tomb. As such she is considered to be “impure” by both the childbirth and death, and Zeus sends her to the underworld to be purified. It is there that she, having the secrets of Heaven and Earth, also learns the secret of the Underworld and becomes the mistress of life, death, and rebirth, goddess of ghosts and magic.

Thus, here in Pagan Portals: Hecate from prolific author Irisanya Moon (Moon Books), she brings forth a well-researched, eloquently structured study of the central figure. An invaluable resource for any and all thinking about taking it upon themselves to start to learn more about the goddess, the book also serves as a highly intoxicating, and historically alluring backstory on her mythological heritage and traditions.

About the Author - Irisanya Moon (she/they) is an author, witch, international teacher, poet, and Reclaiming initiate who has practiced magick for 20+ years. She has taught in the US, Canada, the UK, and Australia, bringing her blend of grounded, graceful, and radically authentic facilitation to inspire transformation and liberation at the personal and collective levels.

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