User:Paul August/Hecate

Hecate

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• Oxford Classical Dictionary
• Brill's New Pauly Online
• Tripp
• Grimal
• Parada
• Smith
• Gantz
• Hard
• Fowler
• Loeb search
• LIMC

Sources

Modern

Burkert

p. 171

Hecate seems to have roots among the Carians of Asia Minor; her most important sanctuary is Lagina, a temple state of oriental type where there are sacred eunuchs.¹⁸ The theophoric name Hekatomnos, which is non-Greek in formation, is Carian.

Hard

p. 193

HEKATE is ...

To judge by the spread of related place-names and other evidence, Hekate originated in Caria in the south-western corner of Asia Minor, where she would have been worshipped as a principal goddess; but she was introduced into Greece quite early, certainly by the seventh century BC, as a goddess who was honoured in private cult.

Henrichs

Oxford Classical Dictionary

s.v. Hecate

Hecate was a popular and ubiquitous goddess from the time of Hesiod until late antiquity. Unknown in Homer and harmless in Hesiod, she emerges by the 5th cent. as a sinister divine figure associated with magic and witchcraft, lunar lore and creatures of the night, dog sacrifices and illuminated cakes, as well as doorways and crossroads. Her name is the feminine equivalent of Hekatos, an obscure epithet of Apollo (Chantraine, Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque (Paris 1968–80) 1. 328 on ἔκατος‎, ἑκατηβόλος‎), but the Greek etymology is no guarantee that her name or cult originated in Greece. Possibly of Carian origin (see caria), and certainly outlandish in her infernal aspects, she is more at home on the fringes than in the centre of Greek polytheism. Intrinsically ambivalent and polymorphous, she straddles conventional boundaries and eludes definition.

Johnston

Brill's New Pauly

s.v. Hecate

(Ἑκάτη; Hekátē). Into the modern age, the goddess H. has been known as the mistress of ghosts, as the demonic mediator par excellence between above and below. In this function, she is closely associated with magic in which the ‘use’ of the spirits of the dead plays an important role (Eur. Med. 397; Hor. Sat. 1,8,33). H. probably stems from Caria and came to Greece around the archaic age, from where her worship spread to the entire Graeco-Roman world. Her cult in Caria (above all in Lagina) and other places in Asia Minor remained significant into the Imperial period [5. 11-56, 166-168; 6; 7. 257-259].