In Greek mythology, Hecate was the goddess of the crossroads who could see three ways at once. When you arrive at a fork in the road, she is there. She can see where you are coming from, and where each of the two paths at the crossroad might take you. If you are someone who pays attention to dreams and synchronicities, draws upon a store of past experiences and uses intuition to decide which direction to take, you know this archetype.
Hecate is a goddess of intuition. Her three-way perspective allows her to see the connection between past, present, and future. This ability to see patterns that link past situations or relationships and present circumstances is an intuitive way of perception. Seeing how a situation evolved—or where someone is coming from—is not uncanny or mysterious to an intuitive person. At significant junctures, Hecate is silently present as an inner witness. Hers is wisdom learned from experience; she is what makes us grow wiser as we grow older. At significant forks in the road, she recalls the shape of the past, honestly sees the present, and has a sense of what lies ahead at a soul level. She does not make your choices, nor judge you. To know her wisdom, you must come to a stop and consult her. You must listen to what she says in the voice of your own intuition.
Sometimes in life something happens and you know that nothing in your life will be the same again. You know it is no longer an option to go on as before, but you are not sure what to do. A younger you might have responded impulsively by letting your emotions carry you away without much thought or consideration. Those same emotions may arise, but a maturity (often having to do with being responsible for others) stops you from acting on them. You know that whatever you decide to do here matters. It is time to call on Hecate to help you see the larger picture, to stay at the crossroad until it is clear to you which path to take.
You may find yourself at a significant fork in the road not because of some external event, but because your psyche is urging you to make changes. It’s not uncommon for the focus—or archetypal direction—that a woman has had for decades to shift as a woman enters the third phase of her life. If you feel that you have reached a point where whatever you are doing no longer holds much interest, you are at a crossroad with Hecate.
Hecate is the goddess at the threshold of major transitions. She is embodied by the midwife who assists at births, and by women who help ease the passage of the soul as it leaves the body at death. Metaphorically, Hecate is an inner midwife, whose perspective aids us when we birth new aspects of ourselves. She helps us let go of what is ready to die: outmoded attitudes, outgrown roles, whatever elements in our lives are no longer life-affirming.
Hecate can be found at the threshold between old and new millennia. We anticipate the possibility of a new age for humanity, but until we arrive there, we are betwixt and between—in a liminal time (from the Latin word for “threshold”) where a shimmering potential has not yet become solid. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, humanity is at a critical juncture where change is needed to avert turning where we live—from neighborhoods to the planet—into a wasteland. Many women enter the crone phase with some sense of wanting to make a difference, or have an urge to “give back” in appreciation of opportunities that feminism provided them and first-hand experience that it is possible to bring about change. Women born just before, during, and in the first decade after World War II were in a movement that was peaceful and yet revolutionary in its influence.
Hecate is at the crux of the situation when a woman enters the third phase of her life and heeds a pull inward. She appears indecisive or as if her energy is lying fallow, when she is in this liminal phase. If she stays at the crossroad until she intuitively knows what direction to take, she emerges renewed and replenished.
HECATE THE GODDESS
Even if you took a course in Greek mythology or have a current interest in the gods and goddesses as archetypes, at best Hecate is a vague figure. She is mentioned as accompanying Demeter in the story of the abduction of Persephone, depicted as the third and least important goddess. Hecate is invariably the crone goddess when classical mythology describes goddesses in threesomes; a pattern derived from the unacknowledged triple goddess of pre-Olympian times. Besides Persephone the maiden, Demeter the mother, and Hecate the crone, there were three goddesses who personified the phases of the moon: Artemis, goddess of the waxing moon; Selene, goddess of the full moon; and Hecate, goddess of the waning and dark moon. A third triad was Hebe the maiden, a cupbearer of the gods; Hera, the goddess of marriage; and Hecate, the goddess of the crossroads. Women who saw themselves in the archetypes of Persephone, Demeter, Artemis, or Hera in Goddesses in Everywoman, may realize that by the third phase of their lives, the paths converge in the wisewoman archetype of Hecate.
Metaphorically and mythologically, she is dimly seen. She is associated with the underworld but did not reside there. Her time was twilight. Offerings—“Hecate suppers”—were left for her at crossroads, usually when the moon was dark, sometimes when it was full. In later times, when women were feared as witches, Hecate was called a queen of the witches or queen of the ghostworld, and seen as a diabolical figure. The poet Sappho called her queen of the night.
Her mythological origins are unclear, with discrepancies in the few accounts of her genealogical tree. Usually she is described as a Titan, who remained a goddess after these earlier divinities were defeated by Zeus and the Olympians. Hesiod, in Theogony (about 700 B.C.E.), said that her name means “she who has power far off” and that she was honored more highly than other divinities and given power over land, sea, and sky by Zeus. These were realms clearly divided among and ruled over by male divinities, thus for Hecate to be accorded “power over” them must not have been the same as ruling over a domain. This may have had to do with a psychic ability or clairvoyance. It also may have acknowledged another once valued aspect attributed to her, that of goddess of magic and divination.
Hecate is described as a moon goddess who wears a gleaming headdress or a headband of stars, and holds flaming torches in each hand. She was thought to walk the roads of ancient Greece accompanied by her black hounds. She was an invisible presence at the three-way crossroad, or materialized in the form of a pillar or Hecterion, a statue with three faces that looked in the three directions. Over time, as she was denigrated, Hecate became transformed into the goddess of trivia (from the Latin word trivia—three ways—which meant “crossroads”).
Demetra George in Mysteries of the Dark Moon describes an ancient image of Hecate, depicting her with three heads and three pairs of arms. She carries three torches and a key, a rope, and a dagger. Her torches allow her to see in the dark, the key unlocks the secrets of the occult or hidden mysteries and knowledge of the afterlife; the rope is a symbol of the umbilical cord of rebirth, the knife, which became a symbol of ritual power, the power to cut through delusions.
Greek divinities were linked with animals who were sacred to them or had their characteristics and became symbols of them. The dog was Hecate’s primary symbolic animal. She was sometimes addressed as a black bitch. When people saw black dogs howling at night, she was thought to be invisibly present. Instead of having three faces or three heads, statues representing Hecate sometimes were composites of three animals: the dog, the snake, and the lion; or the dog, the horse, and the bear. Besides the dog, the other animal strongly associated with Hecate was the frog, a symbol of the fetus and of gestation, a totem image of the midwife.
The yew, alder, and poplar were funeral trees associated with Hecate as the goddess of the gateway between the upperworld of the living and the underworld of the shades. The yew has an association with immortality, which sees death as merely a transition.
DESCENTS INTO THE UNDERWORLD AND THE ACQUISITION OF WISDOM
The story of the rape or abduction of Persephone is told in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter. The maiden Persephone was gathering flowers in the meadow. Attracted to a particularly beautiful, large bloom, she left her companions in order to pick it. As she reached for it, the earth opened up before her. Out of a deep, dark vent in the earth, Hades the Lord of the Underworld emerged in his black chariot drawn by his black horses, abducted her as she screamed in terror, and took her with him back into the underworld. When Persephone disappeared from the meadow, her mother, Demeter, searched the entire world for her, to no avail.
Finally, after nine days and nights, Demeter returned, defeated and in grief, to the meadow. There Hecate came to her, saying that though she could not see what had happened, she had heard Persephone’s screams. Hecate suggested that they seek information from the god of the sun, who was overhead when Persephone disappeared. He could tell them what had happened. Accompanied by Hecate, Demeter now hears the truth: Persephone was abducted by Hades, with Zeus’s permission.
Hecate is not mentioned again in the myth, until Persephone returns from the underworld and is reunited with Demeter. Hecate greets Persephone with much affection, followed by a cryptic line that reads, “And from that day on that lady precedes and follows Persephone.”1
For Hecate to precede and follow Persephone would be impossible physically. It suggests that Persephone would now be accompanied by a spirit or consciousness that she acquired upon her return from the underworld. The story of the rape of Persephone and her abduction into the underworld applies to everyone. We’ve all had periods when we were Persephone gathering flowers in the meadow, when all was well. Then the unexpected happened, and we were terrified as our secure world was violated by a sudden loss. It could be a betrayal and the end of a relationship, a death, the onset of an illness, financial loss, or an end of innocence. If we are plunged into the dark world of hopelessness, depression, or despair, or into cynicism, bitterness, or revenge, we are for a time held captive in the underworld, wondering if we will ever return.
If you return from your own descents into the underworld, you have learned that love and suffering are parts of life. By making it through the hard times, you grow in depth and wisdom. A wise Hecate then becomes an inner companion. Women friends or women in support groups gain this perspective by listening, and witnessing, and caring about each other as well.
Hecate consoled Demeter in her grief and loss but she was more than a comforter and a witness. She suggested that they seek information from the god of the sun who saw what happened to Persephone. Hecate’s counsel was to seek the truth. She accompanied Demeter and was with her when Demeter learned that Persephone was abducted by Hades. The god of the sun urged her to accommodate and accept Hades as, after all, he was an Olympian like herself, and thus would not make a bad son-in-law. When Demeter heard this, and that it was done with Zeus’s permission, her grief turned to anger. She decided to leave Olympus and, in disguise, wander among people, and her determination eventually led to Persephone’s return.
People may think that they cannot face what is true, and so they adapt, often by keeping the truth at a distance through rationalization, denial, or addictions that serve to numb us to the truth. Only when a woman has learned from experience that reality can be faced, is she a wisewoman like Hecate.
A Hecate Meditation/Active Imagination
Ask yourself: “What have I learned about life from my own experience?” and “What truth do I need to face?” Answers are likely to come when you really want to know and are receptive. They may come into your mind if you are quiet and wait.
Or you might visualize Hecate and ask her these questions.
HECATE THE WITNESS
Hecate is a witness within us at every juncture, even if the ego denies, represses, distorts, and cannot acknowledge what is happening. This observer makes connections and speaks to us in the symbolic language of dreams. Dreams come to you in the half-light, they are liminal messages that come from the dreaming unconscious and require conscious effort to grasp and remember, just as the insights that could illuminate a painful emotional situation also come and will recede and be forgotten unless you pay attention and learn.
As an archetypal figure, Hecate, too, can be ignored. She can also become an observing part of your psyche that you draw upon daily. Psychotherapists come to depend upon Hecate, and to some extent serve as embodiments of Hecate for their clients. People are at a crossroad when they seek psychotherapy. A therapist observes, hears, and bears witness to what is revealed. Like Hecate was for Demeter, the therapist encourages the client to seek the truth of the situation, which includes her genuine feelings and perceptions that denial covers. Hecate the witness is there when you pay attention to your dreams, heed your intuitive perceptions, or listen to an inner voice. It’s as if she accompanies us, holding up her torches so we can see in the dark.
People with multiple personalities reach Hecate’s juncture each time a new personality emerges. This disorder arises out of terrible abuse in childhood when the child learns to dissociate from pain and memories too awful to bear. Multiples are usually unaware of the existence of other personalities in them, experience unaccountable lapses of time, and puzzling and distressing occurrences. In the absence of a consistent “I” there is a hidden observer who functions like Hecate and bears witness to the “birth” of each personality. Ralph Allison, M.D., a psychiatrist who worked with integrating multiples, called this part of the psyche the “inner self-helper.” Allison characterized the inner self-helper as androgynous, as feeling only love and goodwill, and knowing all of the personalities and the circumstances in the patient’s life.2 Allison and other clinicians have found that with the help of this inner witness, the many fragmentary personalities can become aware of each other, and eventually integrate into one personality. The inner self-helper is another name for Hecate.
Unlike people with multiple personalities, we may not have amnesia and have chunks of time we cannot account for, and yet we, too, are “multiple selves.” Observing this in others is easy and begins in childhood, when we see how adults put on a “different face.” Seeing the “multiples” in ourselves is harder. The compassionate gaze of Hecate the witness does not blame or shame anyone, and so does not foster defensiveness or denial. Instead, she enables us to see ourselves, especially those parts that might otherwise be kept hidden. While Hecate may develop early in a person’s life or come into the foreground of the psyche when traumatic circumstances call her forth, Hecate usually grows in significance as we grow older and can see patterns and reflect upon events that have taken us unaware into dark places of depression, jealousy, vengefulness, or hopelessness. The older we become, the more likely it is for us to know Hecate as a wise counselor who reminds us of lessons learned from experience. In these ways, Hecate facilitates the integration of our multiple selves into becoming a consistent and authentic person.
HECATE AS MIDWIFE
A midwife stays with the pregnant woman throughout the stages of labor. She is a reassuring, experienced presence, who reduces fear and pain as the woman labors to give birth. She knows when labor is progressing normally and recognizes the signs of trouble. The midwives were the first to be condemned as witches during the Inquisition because they eased the pain of childbirth. Quoting the Old Testament account of the banishment of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, to ease difficulties and pain in labor and delivery went against God: women were supposed to give birth to children in travail and pain.* For midwives to ease labor was a sin and against the will of a punitive God. Women also sought the help of a midwife for various women’s ailments and ways to avoid or abort pregnancy.
Midwifery is an earthy calling, one that assists nature and calls upon an instinctual awareness as well as an observing eye about the signs of physical transitions—the stages of labor and the stages of dying. Like mothers are with their children, a midwife has to be unbothered by the body fluids of birth, sickness, and death, knowing all are part of nature.
The midwife is a priestess to the Great Mother who, like the earth itself, is womb and tomb for all life. To see divinity in nature and her creatures, and to be able to assist at such times, is a sacred calling. Physicians who are most trusted by their patients are archetypally midwives, as well. When what you are doing draws upon the archetype of the midwife, you know that you are engaged in sacred work. Your skills or knowledge can help bring forth new life or assist healing.
The midwife may be a hospice volunteer, who is concerned that a dying person not suffer in pain or fear. She is a midwife at the time of death, this time helping a soul to leave the body. Her presence at this natural passage is comforting and may ease the passage. Just as there are stages of pregnancy preceding the onset of labor, there are stages in which the body and soul prepare for this delivery. Many women instinctively seem to know the first time they are with a dying person when the end is near and what to do or say, even when the dying person has been in a coma for some time. When the soul leaves the body of a person who is ready to die, the moment of passing is a holy moment shared by those present.
Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s On Death and Dying grew out of listening to patients who had terminal illnesses and were dying. She noticed that there were four stages that people go through when they are told the diagnosis, and also recognized that they sensed that death was close, even when it was not obvious to a physician. Kübler-Ross and others who work with the dying to ease the transition are enacting Hecate as midwife.
For the soul to leave the body, there is sometimes a period of labor—when the groans of a dying person (who may be in a coma) even sound similar to those made by a woman in labor, particularly in the transition phase immediately before the delivery. This is when the mother often must gather up whatever energy she still has for one last intense push, before the baby will leave her body, and it will be over. Sometimes labor is easy and the delivery is also, just as dying can follow a quiet and peaceful last soft breath. In either case, it helps to have Hecate there, in the comforting presence of an experienced, wise woman.
Hecate as the archetype of the midwife is present in those who assist others who are going through a difficult birthing process: in vocations such as editing, coaching, directing, teaching, or psychotherapy, where it is possible to be a midwife for the expression of another person’s creative life. Caroline Pincus, for example, understands this perfectly well. She is an editor who calls herself a “Book Midwife” on her business card. The older and wiser you become, the less invested you are on an ego level, thus making it more likely that you will be able to assist the creative process of another.
HECATE AS MEDIUM AND PSYCHIC
Hecate the psychic is at home in the “twilight zone” of the medium, who mediates between the visible and the spirit worlds. She may be a clairvoyant who sees with the third eye, or the mind’s eye, or through visions. She may have intuitive or extrasensory ways of gathering information. She may understand the precognitive meaning of dreams. Hecate’s time was twilight, that threshold zone through which we pass from day to night. She was in her cave when Persephone was abducted; in myths, caves are the entrances to the underworld, a passageway between the world of the living and the “shades of the dead.” In Greek mythology, afterlife existed in the underworld, where the shades of the dead were transparent and recognizable figures; metaphorically, the underworld is the personal and collective unconscious. A channeler or trance medium who receives information either from her own unconscious or the psyche of the inquirer or from the spirit world, the medical intuitive who is able to diagnose accurately without information or examination, the psychometrist who can hold an object in her hand and tell you its past are uncanny Hecates.
Reading omens, using oracular means of knowing such as the Tarot, or the I Ching, Medicine Cards, or Runes, interpreting dreams, or going on soul retrieval journeys are all nonrational ways of perceiving, knowing, or healing that are in Hecate’s realm. Since psychic abilities are discounted, ridiculed, or feared, people with Hecate’s mediumistic gifts usually don’t develop them when they are young. As women grow older, they have had opportunities to learn from experience to pay attention to psychic or intuitive perceptions.
As women enter menopause, circumstances enhance the likelihood that they will become aware of Hecate. When parents and friends are dying, you may become aware that they are sensing the presence of loved ones, often long-ago deceased. Or, after their death, you may feel their presence yourself, or have what I think of as a “visitation” in a vivid dream that usually does not take place in a recognizable location. In the dream itself, you know that the person has died and that you are seeing them after their death. They look very well and often have something to say to you. Such dreams commonly let survivors know that their deceased loved ones are all right, and that the dreamer is loved. It is a dream that is so real that you may have a sense of not just seeing and hearing the person, but of touching, even smelling his or her scent. You awake with the memory of an experience that was so much more than just a dream—it was as if you entered Hecate’s between-the-worlds realm.
In menopause, with its sleep disturbances and introspective times of solitude, “the veils between the worlds” may seem thinner. An awareness that you are entering the last third of your life, which ends in death, is, after all, a major shift in direction, when questions about an afterlife become relevant. Or it may be that after menopause, you no longer care if people think you a little weird, 3 and are willing to come out of the psychic closet. When you emerge, Hecate will be accompanying you.
When a woman develops her psychic abilities, what she does with them can be an issue for her. Manipulation of people, misuse of information, being exploited, becoming obsessed with occult power, are shadow possibilities. The more integrity and maturity a woman with occult abilities has, the more likely it is that she will use her psychic powers well. I have seen younger women heed an inner wisdom of Hecate, and hold off on pursuing the development of their psychic abilities until they are crones. Hecate’s counsel has also cautioned psychic women to keep their psychic abilities hidden and to use them discreetly in their work. This is especially true of physicians whose diagnostic and healing abilities are enhanced by these talents, and yet their reputations would suffer if others knew about this. Some are aware of having healing ability in their hands. Others are able to perceive energy fields around organs, or can sense what treatments will work, or have telepathic connections with their patients, and when something they do as a consequence is uncannily accurate, fall back on “professional intuition” as an explanation.
HECATE AS FEARED WITCH
Hecate was said to have power over earth, sea, and sky, not in terms of ruling over these realms, but in being able to affect them from a distance. Occult powers were attributed to older women who were supposed to be able to cast spells and enchantments, hex people, or practice black magic. Hecate has become the archetype of the witch because of her uncanny powers and association with twilight. We can speculate that old women were irrationally feared because of mankind’s suppression of the triple goddess, whose crone phase was the most mysterious and awesome.
Women fear being called a witch, for good historical reasons. The Inquisition was established in 1252 by Pope Innocent IV, and continued with officially sanctioned torture for five and a half centuries until it was abolished by Pope Pius VII in 1816. Between 1560 and 1760, the persecution of women for witchcraft was at its height. Feminists have called this “the women’s holocaust” with the number of women condemned to the stake estimated from over a hundred thousand to as many as eight million.
The women who were most feared or respected became the most persecuted. The first women to go to the stake were the midwives and healers; older women who eased the pain of childbirth and delivered babies, who knew herbal medicine, whose powers came from observation and experience. Women with authority, independence, or knowledge, eccentric women, or women with property (usually widows) were also denounced, tortured to confess, and condemned. Any woman of crone age was at risk for having supernatural powers including poor, outcast, powerless, demented old women, who were routinely persecuted as witches. It was, in fact, heretical to say that such old women were harmless. Any woman of crone age was at risk. To survive, an older woman needed to be unnoticed and undistinguished; only “invisible” older women stayed alive.
Barbara G. Walker’s encyclopedic compilation of information on witches and witchcraft4 is an appalling litany of pathological fear and persecution of women, especially crones. Witches had descriptive titles such as “one who gathers herbs,” “one with the evil eye,” “screech owl,” “keeper of an ointment box,” “wisewoman,” “worker of charms,” “poisoner,” “seeress,” or “evil doer.” In Italy a witch was a strega or Janara, an old title of a priestess of Jana (Juno). In England a witch was called a hag or a fairy.
One epithet for a witch was “stick rider.” Broomsticks were associated with witches because of their use in pagan rituals of marriage and birth. In Rome, the broomstick was a symbol of Hecate’s priestess-midwife, who swept the threshold of a house after each birth to clean it of evil spirits that might harm the child. Old wedding customs included jumping over a broomstick, which was retained in gypsy weddings and unsanctioned ritual weddings between slaves in nineteenth-century America. Broomsticks were phallic symbols, especially when ridden. The woman astride or “on top” was considered a perversion of power as well as a sexual perversion.
Today the inquisitors’ fear of old women and their power would be diagnosed as pathological. There was a preoccupation with sexual intercourse between the devil and women designated as witches who were blamed for anything that went wrong, from miscarriages to impotence. Inquisitors’ handbooks directed them to wear a bag of salt consecrated on Palm Sunday, to avoid looking in a witch’s eyes, and to cross themselves constantly when in their presence. When these tortured women appeared before them, the inquisitors required them to be naked, walk toward them backward, and never look at them.
A motivation for making accusations of witchcraft was greed, to acquire the witches’ property or be rid of competition. The accusers of the midwives, for example, were physicians. Widows who owned anything that someone else coveted were denounced. There was avarice on the part of the Inquisition itself. The estate of a woman of any means who had been denounced as witch and burned at the stake was charged for the cost of her jailing, her torture, and even for the cost of burning her.
It was decidedly dangerous to be noticed, envied, or feared. Any unusual ability in a woman instantly raised a charge of witchcraft. “The so-called Witch of Newbury” was murdered by a group of soldiers because she knew how to go “surfing” on the river.
Country women burned as witches were nominally Christian, but if they observed the summer and winter solstices, spring and fall equinoxes, planted according to the phases of the moon, could predict from animal behavior how cold a winter could be expected, and had knowledge beyond the learned churchmen, they became personifications of evil. All of this because their herbal remedies worked like magic for some people and their knowledge of the cycles of the seasons, which came from the old religion of the goddess.
The Catholic Church called any woman who criticized church policies a witch. For example, women allied with the fourteenth-century Reforming Franciscans and burned for heresy were described as witches, and as instigated by the devil. Jewish Talmudic scholars also viewed women in a similiar light. Walker quotes them as writing, “Women are naturally inclined to witchcraft,” and “The more women there are, the more witchcraft there will be.”
While being called a witch no longer leads to the torturer and then to the stake, it still feels dangerous. This was the cause of the tension in the air at a large conference on Women’s Spirituality held in Seattle in the 1980s. Negative newspaper attention had been focused on the conference, especially on Starhawk, an author and teacher of Wicca. Outside of the auditorium, we encountered men handing out flyers that proclaimed across the top: “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live” (Exodus 22:18), a Biblical quote that had given scriptural support to the Inquisition. The flyer had a small blurred photograph of “Starhawk the Witch” on it. Rather than avoiding the man in her path who was handing out these flyers, Starhawk engaged him in a friendly conversation about what was on his flyer, and then introduced herself and spoke to him for several minutes about Wicca beliefs and how she felt reading the flyer he was handing out. Her quiet courage and manner were impressive; maybe the encounter left him a little more enlightened than he had been.
A more recent incident had the emotional impact of a burning cross, which served as the Klu Klux Klan warning. The words “Burn the Witches” were spray-painted on the garage door of an ordained woman minister in Northern California who had attended “The ReImagining God” conference held in the midwest in the early nineties, which brought feminine imagery into Christian worship. She was one of over several hundred women who attended, mostly clergywomen from major Protestant denominations. Many were censured from pulpits, had letters written attacking them, and found their positions in jeopardy. The accusation of being a witch is (unofficially) still used against women who challenge church authority.
HECATE PRESIDES OVER MOMENTS OF TRUTH
“Let us go to the god of the sun, who was overhead. He saw what happened to Persephone and can tell us,” were Hecate’s words to Demeter. To seek the truth rather than stay in ignorance or denial, or speak the truth rather than remain silent are critical, at-the-crossroad decisions.
Whenever you tell the truth to someone else, especially if that truth shakes a premise, this moment becomes a fork in the road. Likewise, whenever you ask for the truth, Hecate is the inner wisdom that prepares you to hear it. Sometimes, you may unexpectedly find yourself at Hecate’s junction when something is being done or said that puts you on the spot. It may be a public moment that will put you on record. Or, knowing that “silence is consent,” you alone may realize that this is a moment of truth that calls on you to do what you know will be hard but true to yourself. Apart from the effect that you may or may not have on the situation itself, such moments of truth decisions are soul-shaping.
Sometimes when you know that what you are about to do will appear “heretical,” an irrational fear arises, an emotional reaction that seems to anticipate hearing the cry, “Burn the witches!” This is a transpersonal fear that seems to lie just below the surface in women’s psyches, where the fear of being labeled and persecuted as a witch lurks. To feel this fear and do it anyway takes courage. With a morphic field effect, the more women confront this collective fear, the easier it will become for others.
When Persephone returned from the underworld, Hecate accompanied her from then on. This is so for us as well. Hecate’s wisdom is acquired through our own life experiences—from having lived this long. With Hecate, older is, indeed, usually wiser.