Hekate: An Unexpected Devotion

This week has marked an anniversary, half-forgotten in the madness of 2018. This time last year, my working group participated in the global Rite of Her Sacred Fires. It was not the first time I had invoked Hekate, but it was the most significant up to that point.

I must emphasize “up to that point”. Hekate began to appear more frequently on our docket, culminating in a devotional Samhain ritual in which I make made myself a vessel for her so that my compatriots could approach and petition her for aid. Three months after that, Jack Grayle’s Hekataeon went live. Aradia and I dove in head first. Our copy arrived just in time for Paganicon, and we started the work as soon a we got back.

I am 38 years old. I have been practicing magic since I was 16. But I was raised with the blandest (functionally atheist) sort of Protestantism, and I did not reach out to the gods until I was 28. Excepting my easy relationship with Dionysus, I did not manage to cultivate anything resembling a devotional practice until I was 30, and that was very much rooted in the particular circumstances of the Sunrise Temple. I have had relationships with a wild variety of spirits and an eclectic assortment of gods and powers, but little of it resembled anything akin to worship. And until a year ago, Hekate was never even on my radar.

I began to work the Hekataeon at the end of March, as I was coming out of a deep depression, a descent that began early in 2017 and bottomed out last Thanksgiving. The ascent has been steep but rocky, and it is difficult to say how much of my improvement is the native cycle of my fucked up brain and how much is as a result of the work. I could not have begun the work had I not begun to feel better at the first of the year. Any daily practice would certainly have improved my life. But also, the calming and cleansing of mania is a recurring theme in the Hekataeon.

Now, a year after that first significant contact, I have participated in the Rite of Her Sacred Fires for the second time. I had just completed the twenty-seven days of devotional meditation that comprised the second section of the Hekataeon, studying the facets of Hekate, and was about to make the transition from Devotee to Adept. By the time this post goes live, I will have completed that initiation.

Jack Grayle’s vision of Hekate is Gnostic, cosmic — the beginning and end of all. As I dig in to his ancient sources, and compare them to other modern visions, I find that he is not alone in this. I wish that I were in a financial position to take Jason Miller’s Hekate Sorcery course.

I am a sorcerer. A witch. A heretic. A Gnostic. I make handshake deals and back alley bargains with spirits. I treat with gods and demons and angels as equals. I seek ecstasy. Not Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel, but rather Gnosis — knowledge of the divine power from which mortal and immortal life both spring, and which I cannot believe is a person of any kind, not even a god. I reject the capital G.

Though I have courted a few, with varying degrees of success — Apollo, Hephaestus, Aphrodite, Baphomet — Dionysus is the only god I have truly loved. I did not seek out Hekate, but rather met her through my friends. One thing led to another. And now … I have graduated from disinterested third party Reader to Devotee … and now to Adept. Degrees of priesthood follow, culminating in a binding contract that will last into future lives.

Devotion in this life I am prepared for. I do not know, however, that I am prepared to make any promises about the next.

For now, though, the road ahead of me is obscure. I do not know, precisely, what will be asked of me. The work may reject me before I am forced to reject it. Or the goddess and I may come to more complex and nuanced arrangements. Decision, after all, is her sacrament.

Until then, it seems, I am Devoted. Very much to my own surprise.