Hekate! Soteira! Chthonia! Helia!
Behold, Hekate as the Chthonic Sun. Justice and oathkeeper of the underworld.
I don’t know, precisely, what it means. I need to be clear on that from the outset. To the best of my knowledge, there is no historical precedent: Hekate is not descended of Helios, like the other great witches of Greek myth (Pasiphae, Circe, Medea). She is traditionally associated with the light of torches. Traditionally, she is sister to or even synonymous with the moon. But she is also Ourania: heavenly. And she is the the lightbearer: Phosphorus.
This epithet and its accompanying image first appeared to me during my morning ritual some time in January. I wish that part of the operation made a better story, but not all mystic visions come amidst lurid ecstatic rituals or in a drug-induced haze (most of mine don’t, honestly, which is both a relief and a disappointment). I stewed on the image for a couple weeks before I produced the first pencils, which I am still extremely pleased with. A few days later, I redrew the image on watercolor paper. I inked the image the night of the Full Moon, and have spent the last week applying watercolors over three sessions.
Artistically, this image was very much a series of experiments. I rarely re-draw anything after I’ve been as pleased with the pencils as I was with this, but the first draft was in my sketchbook and I needed it to be on watercolor paper. I’ve played around with watercolors a little bit, but not in years. Most of the color scheme was planned from the beginning, but the lavender robe was a very last-minute decision/inspiration. (I also considered pale blue, and almost left it paper-white.) I was not at all certain that I’d gotten my order of operations right – should I have done the watercolors between the penils and inks? After the black lines but before the gold? But the gold held up to the watercolor beautifully, and while I did ultimately decide to repaint the gold on both suns, I only needed to touch up a handful of the radiating gold lines, and ultimately found that layering of color and texture to be exactly what the image needed.
The scan obviously didn’t capture the metallic gold ink the way I’d like; it washed out the background a little, and almost completely ate the purples and greens. Strangely, it also increased the saturation of her lavender chiton. I may yet fuck with that. I still plan to digitally ink the scan of the original pencils, and may well do another watercolor and ink version, as well, just to see if I can do it better. Eventually, I’ll either mat or frame it for my altar. Some day, I might make them for sale. For now, though, I think I’m just going to bask in how well this turned out.
For those wondering about the Greek words around her, they are (going clockwise from the upper left): Hekate, Soteira, Kthonie, and Helia. The last (with the final eta rendering into English as an “a” like Athene -> Athena), for those who haven’t studied Greek, is a slapdash and technically unnescessary but probably not wrong feminization of Helios, which yes is the name of the Titan but also just the Greek word for “sun”.
Finally, it would be inappropriate to post this without linking to the art of Micah Ulrich, whose art so obviously influenced my composition.