§ 6
It is simply the invasion of human life by the sinister creatures of the daimonic world that the clairvoyant mantis is supposed to avert with his “purifications”. Among these sinister influences Hekate and her crew are particularly noticeable. This is without doubt an ancient product of religious phantasy—though it is not mentioned by Homer—which did not till a late period emerge from the obscurity of local observance and obtain general popularity: even then it only here and there ceased to be a private and domestic cult and reached the dignity of public city-worship.[89] The cult of Hekate fled the light of day, as did the wild farrago of weird and sinister phantoms that surrounded her. She is chthonic, a goddess of the lower world,[90] where she is at home; but, more easily than other lower-world creatures, she finds her way to the living world of men. Wherever a soul is entering into partnership with a body—at birth or in child bed—she is at hand;[91] where a soul is separating from a body, in burials of the dead, she is there. Amidst the dwelling-places of the departed, the monuments of the dead and the gloomy ritual of their worship, she is in her element.[92] She is the queen of the souls who are still fast bound to the upper world. It shows her deep-seated connexion with the primeval worship of the dead at the household hearth,[93] when we hear of Hekate as dwelling “in the depth of the hearth”,[94] and being honoured together with the underworld Hermes, her masculine counterpart, among the domestic gods who “were left to us by our forefathers”.[95]
This domestic cult may be a legacy from times when in familiar intercourse with the lower world men did not yet fear “pollution” therefrom.[95a] To later ages Hekate was the principal source and originator of all that was ghostly and uncanny. Men came upon her suddenly and to their hurt by night, or in the dreamy solitudes of midday’s blinding heat; they see her in monstrous shapes that, like the figures in a dream, are continually changing.[96] The names of many female deities of the underworld of whom the common people had much to say—Gorgyra (Gorgo), Mormo, Lamia, Gello or Empousa, the ghost of midday—denote in reality so many different personifications and variations of Hekate.[97] [298] She appeared most frequently by night, under the half-light of the moon, at the cross-roads. She is not alone but is accompanied by her “crew”, the hand-maidens who follow in her train. These are the souls of those who have not had their share of burial and the holy rites that accompany it; who have been violently done to death, or who have died “before their time”.[98] Such souls find no rest after death; they travel on the wind now, in the company of Hekate and her daimonic pack of hounds.[99] It is not without reason that we are reminded of the legends of “wild hunters” and the “furious host”, so familiar in modern times in many countries.[100] Similar beliefs produced similar results in each case; perhaps there is even some historical connexion between them.[101] These night-wandering spirits and souls of the dead bring pollution and disaster upon all who meet them or fall into their hands; they send evil dreams, nightmares, nocturnal apparitions, madness and epilepsy.[102] It is for them, the unquiet souls of the dead and Hekate their queen, that men set out the “banquets of Hekate” at the cross-roads.[103] To them men consign with averted faces the remains of the purificatory sacrifices[104] that they may not come too close to human dwelling places. Puppies, too, were sacrificed to Hekate for “purifications”, i.e. “apotropaic” sacrifices.
Gruesome inventions of all kinds were easily attached to this province of supernaturalism: it is one of the sources which, with help from other Greek conceptions and many foreign creations of fancy, let loose a stream of anxious and gloomy superstitiousness that spread through the whole of later antiquity and even reached through the Middle Ages to our own day.
Protection and riddance from such things were sought at the hands of seers and “Kathartic priests” who, in addition to ceremonies of purification and exorcism had other ways of giving help—prescriptions and recipes of many strange sorts which were originally clear and natural enough to the fantastic logic of superstition and were still credited and handed down as magic and inexplicable formulæ after their real meaning had been entirely forgotten. Others, again, were driven by a fearful curiosity to attempt to bring the world of surrounding spirits—of whose doings such strange stories were told in legend[105]—even closer to themselves. By magic arts and incantations, they compelled the wandering ghosts and even Hekate herself to appear before them:[106] the magic power forces them to do the will of the spirit-raiser or to harm his enemies.[107] It was these creatures of the spirit-world that [299] magicians and exorcists claimed to banish or compel. Popular belief was on their side in this, but it is hardly possible that they never resorted to deceit and imposture in making good their claims.