Among Greek deities, few have undergone a transformation as profound—or as misunderstood—as Hekate. Modern readers often encounter her as a goddess of witchcraft, ghosts, and nocturnal terror, yet the earliest extended literary account presents a strikingly different figure: a powerful, benevolent deity honored above many others. The evolution from Hesiod’s Hekate to the spectral mistress…
Haloa: Winter Ritual, Women’s Authority, and the Chthonic Imagination
Among the lesser-known festivals of ancient Greece, Haloa occupies a particularly intriguing place. Celebrated in mid-winter in Attica, most securely at Eleusis, Haloa combined feasting, ritual obscenity, and fertility symbolism at a time when fields lay dormant and survival depended on stored resources. Though often sensationalized in modern retellings, the festival is best understood not…
Ghosts at the Gate: Hekate’s Deipnon
Hekate’s Deipnon (Δεῖπνον τῆς Ἑκάτης), the monthly “Supper of Hekate,” constituted one of the most significant recurring household rites in classical Athens. Although popular imagination often associates Hekate with witchcraft, nocturnal liminality, and crossroads, surviving literary, archaeological, and historical evidence indicates that her worship was deeply embedded within domestic religion. The Deipnon in particular functioned…
Speaking with the Dead: Necromancy in Ancient Greece
Necromancy—nekromanteia, literally “divination through the dead”—was a small but significant part of the Greek religious imagination. It was never a mainstream practice, but it was deeply woven into Greek ideas about the soul, the underworld, and the permeability of the boundary between the living and the dead. Modern scholars such as Daniel Ogden and Sarah…
Queen of Those Below: The Night-Wandering Daughter of Persephone
Among the many shadowy figures of Greek myth, few are as intriguing—or as elusive—as Melinoë. She appears only rarely in the surviving ancient material, yet the texts that do speak her name paint a vivid picture: a nocturnal wanderer, half-dark and half-light, who moves between worlds and brings frightening dreams to mortals. Modern scholars see…
Magic in Ancient Greece
It’s likely that early Greek religion and magic were entwined, and not considered separate practices. These included initiations into various mystery cults, necromancy, purification rites, private religious practices that were not part of any civic cults, and trance ecstasy. The historian Fritz Graf is of the view that these practices were hived off from socially…
Khthonivm 