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Hecate
Hecate is the chief goddess who presides over magic arts and spells, and she is the mother of the sorceresses Circe and Medea. She is invoked in the idyll of Theocritus, in the incantation to bring back a woman's faithless lover. As a chthonian (relating to the underworld) power, she is worshipped at the Samothracian mysteries, and is closely connected with Demeter. She witnessed the abduction of Persephone, and, torch in hand (a natural symbol for the moon's light), assisted Demeter in her search for her daughter.
On moonlight nights she is seen at the cross-roads accompanied by the dogs of the Styx and crowds of the dead. Here, on the last day of the month, eggs and fish were offered to her. Black puppies and she-lambs (black victims being offered to chthonian deities) were also sacrificed. Pillars like the Hermae, called Hecataea, stood, especially in Athens at cross-roads and doorways, perhaps to keep away the spirit of evil.
Like Artemis, Hecate is also a goddess of fertility, presiding especially over the birth and the youth of wild animals, and over human birth and marriage. She also attends when the soul leaves the body at death, and is found near graves, and on the hearth, where the master of the house was formerly buried.
Hecate plays little or no part in mythological legend. Her worship seems to have flourished, especially in the wilder parts of Greece, such as Samothrace and Thessaly, in Caria and on the coasts of Asia Minor. In Greece proper it prevailed on the east coast and especially in Aegina, where her aid was invoked against madness.
