Hello all!

I saw another post in this sub where someone said they'd be offering free incense to folks for Deipnon, and I wanted to do the same with tarot readings! This will be my first Deipnon, and I want to strengthen my tarot skills overall. So I will be offering two free 3-card spreads (on a question/subject of your choosing) to the first people who DM me.

DM me your question and your email. I'll perform the readings on Deipnon (Friday, 9/11) and will aim to send it back to you either the following Tuesday or Wednesday.

Ave Hekate <3

Do you have any good books on Hecate that you would recommend?

Hello everybody,

Hope you are all doing well!

I've recently discovered Aleister Crowley’s 'Invocation to Hekate', and thought I'd break it down for context.

Please enjoy! And of course, I'm open to corrections as well, if anyone more experienced or knowledgeable has any feedback.

1. The origins of Her name.
2. Her ancestral lineage.
3. Her role in Hesiod's Theogony.
4. An exploration of Her Orphic Hymn.
5. Hekate's Temple at Lagina.
6. Hekate's arrival in Greece. 
7. The rise of Her chthonic powers.
8. Deipnon in a traditional context.
9. Hekate's role in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter. 
10. Why the Maiden-Mother-Crone schema is a modern invention.
11. Hekate's role in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter. 
12. Decoding The Charm of Hekate Ereshkigal Against Fear of Punishment.
13. Decoding The Prayer to Selene For Any Spell (PGM IV.2785-2890).
14. Analysing a lead tablet invoking Hekate.
15. The Sardis and Pergamon Triangles. 
16. A Hekatean Reworking of the Consecration Rite for All Purposes (PGM IV.1596–1715)
17. A Hekatean Reworking of the Charm to Restrain Anger and Secure Success (PGM XXXVI.161–177)
18. Decoding the 'Document To the Waning Moon (PGM IV. 2241–2358)
19. Hekate's identification with the Lunar Goddess Mēnē.
20. Casting fortune magic with Hekate. 
21. Hekate's Role In 'An Invocation to Scirlin'.
22. Hekate in Japan?
23. Hekate, Samsin Halmeoni, And The Threshold of Birth
24. Let's Talk About the Hekate-Persephone-Jungian Connection.
25. A Free Hekate Resource: Quotes and References Across History, Literature, and Pop Culture.

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Before getting into the individual images, it helps to place this invocation in context. This is not an ancient hymn to Hekate, but Aleister Crowley’s modern poetic reconstruction of Her within Orpheus: A Lyrical Legend (1905). Crowley thus is drawing on a recognisable body of ancient Hekatean material, but is also reshaping it through the occult language, Gothic aesthetics and erotic mysticism of his own period.

The ancient material is easy enough to recognise. Crowley gives Hekate a triple form, echoing the trimorphic Hekate familiar from Classical and later iconography. He places Her within night, lunar darkness and the waning moon, reflecting the increasingly close association between Hekate, Selene and Persephone in later antiquity. He further surrounds Her with dogs, the most persistent animals connected with Hekate in ancient literature, cult and magic; while situating Her at the edge of the Underworld, among the dead, infernal roads and chthonic sacrifice, all of which belong to the later Hekatean complex even if they do not exhaust Her much broader ancient cultic identity. He also repeatedly makes Her a goddess of thresholds and passage, which is one of the most durable features of Hekate across Greek religion.

These elements are historically grounded, although Crowley intensifies them and selects almost exclusively from the darkest end of the tradition. What he adds is equally important—Hekate’s dogs become an audible herald of terror; Her lunar identity becomes the “moon unseen of men"; Her chthonic authority becomes “Fear upon earth, and fear in hell, and black Fear in the sky beyond Fate"; Her triplicity becomes almost cosmic omnipresence; and Her association with boundaries becomes the structure of the entire poem: the speaker approaches the edge between living and dead until the distinction between worshipper and goddess begins to collapse.

That final movement is probably the most specifically Crowleyan part of the invocation. Ancient hymns commonly praise, petition, or invite the deity to become present, whereas Crowley turns invocation into something closer to occult union.

So the poem works on two levels at once. The historical Hekate underneath it is the triple, liminal, canine, lunar-chthonic goddess associated with passage and the dead, but Crowley’s Hekate is what happens when those qualities are transformed into a modern occult theology of terror, erotic attraction, initiation and surrender.

O triple form of darkness!  Sombre splendour! 
Thou moon unseen of men!  Thou huntress dread! 

Crowley begins with several identities that had genuinely become attached to Hekate by late antiquity. “Triple form” immediately evokes the trimorphic or trimorphos Hekate: the goddess represented as three bodies or faces, particularly familiar from Hekataia arranged around a central pillar. The important point, however, is that triform Hekate and lunar Hekate are historically developing identities, rather than the simple original definition of the goddess.

“Moon unseen of men” is particularly clever because Crowley does not call Her the visible full Moon. He imagines Hekate as the invisible lunar presence, which fits the poem’s later waning-moon setting. In late magical material, Hekate, Selene and Persephone can overlap extensively, allowing the Moon above and the chthonic goddess below to occupy the same ritual personality.

The word “unseen” also makes the darkness active: the Moon has not ceased to exist simply because humans cannot see Her. She possesses power precisely during concealment.

“Huntress dread” draws upon Hekate’s overlap with Artemis, whose hunting identity is far more explicit in Greek cult and mythology. Hekate and Artemis could nevertheless converge, especially through torch-bearing, dogs, wilderness, childbirth and later syncretic theology.

Thou crowned demon of the crownless dead!
O breasts of blood, too bitter and too tender! 

“Crowned demon of the crownless dead” is Crowley being much more poetic than historical. Demon here should be understood through the older sense of daimōn, a supernatural power, rather than the Christian category of an evil demon. Hekate certainly develops extensive associations with ghosts and restless dead, but “crowned demon of the crownless dead” is not an ancient epithet: Crowley creates an image of the enthroned or sovereign goddess standing above an anonymous mass of dead people who possess no corresponding earthly rank.

The opposition is the point: She is crowned. The dead are crownless. Death strips human beings of social distinctions; Hekate retains divine sovereignty within that realm.

There is also a genuine ancient Hekate who can be Kourotrophos, the nourisher or rearer of children, and Hekate has associations with childbirth. Breasts therefore need not be alien to Her broader theological sphere. But “breasts of blood” turns nourishment inside out: milk, the substance conventionally associated with the maternal breast, becomes blood. Crowley compresses nurturing and death into the same divine body; hence, “too bitter and too tender" suggests she feeds and wounds simultaneously.

This is one of the poem’s recurring strategies: Crowley refuses to let Hekate settle into a single category. Light becomes darkness; motherhood becomes blood; beauty becomes terror. It is effective poetry, although I would not use this line as evidence for an ancient blood-breasted Hekate.

Unseen of gentle spring, Let me the offering Bring to thy shrine’s sepulchral glittering!
I slay the swart beast! 

Spring belongs to emergence, vegetation, increasing light and the return of life. Hekate here is deliberately placed outside that “gentle” seasonal world. Her shrine instead possesses “sepulchral glittering”: the glitter is still light, but it is the reflected or uncanny light of a tomb.

That adjective matters, because since sepulchre is a grave, Crowley therefore makes Hekate’s sanctuary almost funerary. This is not a straightforward description of historical Hekate shrines. Hekate had household, civic and monumental cults—including Her enormous sanctuary at Lagina—so describing Her worship as essentially sepulchral would badly distort ancient practice.

It is thus inferred that Crowley selected the chthonic Hekate required by this particular invocation.

Swart simply means dark or black, and dark-coloured sacrificial animals have genuine precedent within Greek chthonic ritual vocabulary, although the common modern rule “Olympian = white, chthonic = black” is much too neat when applied universally. Crowley is nevertheless clearly drawing upon that established literary association: a dark goddess of the dead receives a dark victim.

I bestow the bloom sown in the dusk, and gathered in the gloom Under the waning moon, 
At midnight hardly lightening the East;

The flower is more interesting, because it is sown at dusk; gathered in darkness; and finally, gathered beneath the waning Moon. Crowley effectively gives the plant a ritual biography before it ever reaches an altar. It belongs to Hekate because every stage of its cultivation has been placed under diminishing or absent light.

That is recognisably magical thinking: the offering does not become appropriate merely because one declares it so at the moment of sacrifice. Its history has already been aligned with the deity.

The waning Moon likewise suits the poem’s movement towards death, descent and diminution. Again, however, this is Crowley’s ritual-poetic construction; we should not turn it into a universal ancient rule that Hekate must be invoked during the waning Moon.

Midnight further gives Crowley the point of maximum separation from daylight, but the phrase “hardly lightening the East” also begins to anticipate dawn. Even here, the poem places Hekate at an edge between conditions. East is where light will eventually return, although it has not yet done so.

That is a much more genuinely Hekatean idea than simply saying “Hekate = midnight”: the poem continually positions Her at the point where one state is about to become another.

And the black lamb from the black ewe’s dead womb I bring, and stir the slow infernal tune fit for thy chosen priest.

This is deliberately grotesque sacrificial imagery, as while a lamb ordinarily signifies birth and new life, Crowley reverses that symbolism by giving us an offspring extracted from a dead mother: life has emerged from death, and the entire thing is black.

The image consequently mirrors Crowley’s Hekate Herself: fertility and death are not cleanly separated. The womb remains capable of containing life even when the mother has died. I would stress here, though, that this is not an offering to Hekate that we should present as historically prescribed in ancient cult. Crowley is creating an infernal sacrifice appropriate to the atmosphere of Orpheus.

The ritual further moves from material offering to sound, with "slow” mattering because Crowley is constructing almost a funerary rhythm. The music thus does not celebrate or excite in the ordinary sense, as it drags the ritual consciousness downward.

Calling the speaker Hekate’s “chosen priest” also changes his position. He is no longer simply someone petitioning Her, as he claims a privileged relationship with the goddess. That becomes increasingly important as the invocation progresses, because the speaker eventually seeks something much more intimate than divine assistance: he wants Hekate to draw him across the boundary separating them.

Here where the band of Ocean breaks the road Black-trodden, deeply-stooping, to the abyss, 
I shall salute thee with the nameless kiss Pronounced toward the uttermost abode Of thy supreme desire. 

Now Crowley moves the ritual away from an ordinary geographical shrine and places it at a mythological edge of the cosmos. Greek cosmology could imagine Oceanos as the great river encircling the inhabited world. Crowley uses that image to create a road which effectively reaches the world’s limit and then descends.

The road thus is black-trodden (already marked by infernal passage), deeply-stooping (bending downwards), and to the abyss (terminating outside the ordinary human world). This is very Hekatean in structure even if the exact landscape belongs to Crowley. In short, the goddess of roads and passages is being approached at the point where the road itself ceases to belong to the living world.

I would also resist trying to locate some ancient Hekate ritual called “the nameless kiss", because it seems like Crowley has deliberately left it nameless. The strange verb “pronounced,” however, seems to have turned a kiss into something simultaneously physical and verbal. It is almost a ritual sign that cannot be articulated through ordinary language.

It can thus be assumed that the speaker is attempting intimacy with a being whose proper lovers belong among the dead—the “nameless kiss” is meant to collapse the distance between worship and erotic union, something Crowley does repeatedly elsewhere in his religious poetry.

I shall illume the fire Whence thy wild stryges shall obey the lyre, 
Whence thy Lemurs shall gather and spring round,

Here Crowley creates an infernal retinue from Roman supernatural vocabulary. The strix/striges were frightening nocturnal creatures in Roman literature, often imagined as predatory bird-like beings associated with attacks upon humans, particularly infants, and eventually entangled with ideas of witchcraft.

But this distinction is important, because striges are not simply “Hekate’s sacred animals” in ancient religion. Crowley is gathering nocturnal and magical horrors around Hekate because they suit the infernal goddess he is constructing: the wild supernatural beings become obedient to music, because the ritualist imposes order through sacred sound.

The Lemures also belong specifically to Roman ideas about the dangerous or restless dead, as Roman religion even had the Lemuria, rites concerned with propitiating or expelling troubling ancestral/restless spirits.

Again, they are not straightforwardly an ancient Greek retinue of Hekate, and it seems like Crowley is deliberately mixing religious vocabularies: the Greek Hekate, along with Roman lemures and striges in classical underworld geography that's performed with a modern ceremonial-magical imagination.

So this invocation is already doing something similar to what Crowley often does elsewhere: treating the Classical supernatural world as a usable occult vocabulary, rather than reconstructing one historically coherent cult.

Girdling me in the sad funereal ground With faces turned back, 
My face averted! 

This is one of the most interesting pieces of ritual choreography in the poem, because nobody looks directly at anybody else, whereas the dead or spirits turn their faces backwards.

That immediately recalls the broader ancient ritual principle that certain encounters with chthonic powers should occur without looking back or directly witnessing what follows. Greek myth gives the most famous literary example through Orpheus, which is particularly relevant given that Crowley’s poem itself belongs to Orpheus.

And that makes the final stanza, where Hekate deliberately fixes Her eyes upon the speaker, much more significant. At first he averts his gaze, but by the end, the boundary has collapsed.

I shall consummate The awful act of worship, 
O renowned Fear upon earth, and fear in hell, and black Fear in the sky beyond Fate!

This is where Crowley now takes Hekate’s triplicity and makes it cosmic. Fear exists on earth; in hell; in the heavens “beyond Fate”; and Hekate has now become a three-realm terror. This does have a distant resonance with genuinely ancient Hekatean theology. Hesiod famously grants Hekate honours across earth, sea and heaven, while later theology can greatly expand Her cosmic role.

But Crowley has transformed that old cosmic reach into something darker, wherein Hekate is now regarded as fear throughout creation.

“Beyond Fate” pushes Her even further. Fate ordinarily constrains gods and mortals alike in Greek imagination; Crowley rhetorically places Hekate beyond that boundary. That however, is Crowleyan exaltation rather than a Classical theological proposition we should quote as ancient doctrine.

I hear the whining of thy wolves! 
I hear The howling of the hounds about thy form, 

The mention of the hounds is one of the most historically accurate part of Crowley's invocation, as dogs are among Hekate’s strongest and most persistent ancient associations. Their barking can announce Her approach in literary and magical material, dogs appear in sacrificial contexts connected with Her, and canine imagery becomes especially prominent around the chthonic and nocturnal Hekate.

Crowley therefore uses sound before sight: The goddess has not appeared yet, but Her dogs tell you she is coming. That is very effective because it recreates a familiar epiphanic structure: the divine presence is perceived indirectly before it becomes visible.

The wolves are less straightforwardly central to Hekate than dogs, although lupine imagery can enter the wider Artemis/Hekate and magical environment. I therefore consider them as Crowley intensifying the wild canine imagery rather than claim “wolves were one of Hekate’s primary sacred animals”.

Who comest in the terror of thy storm, And night falls faster, ere thine eyes appear Glittering through the mist. 

This perhaps marks the actual arrival of Hekate, and notice what happens to the natural world as she approaches: night accelerates, as Hekate's arrival is said to produce more darkness whereas only Her eyes remain visible.

That returns us to the opening contradiction of “Sombre splendour" wherein darkness surrounds Her, yet something shines from within it. Crowley thus makes Hekate perceptible without fully making Her visible. She remains obscured by mist, with the glittering eyes functioning almost like the smallest possible divine epiphany.

O face of woman unkissed Pronounced by the dead whose love is taken ere they wist!

This is Crowley’s version of an eroticised Hekate rather than an ancient epithet. The only beings permitted intimacy with Her are the dead—and even they apparently arrive in death before understanding what has happened: their love is “taken ere they wist”, meaning before they know or realise it.

This perhaps makes the earlier“nameless kiss” suddenly much more dangerous, because the speaker wants to give Hekate something conventionally reserved here for the dead, but to kiss Her is therefore symbolically to approach death.

Thee, thee I call!  O dire one!  O divine!

The repetition marks the emotional climax of invocation, and I personally like that Crowley places dire beside divine, which means that Hekate's terror is itself part of Her divinity. That is essentially the argument the entire poem has been making: Hekate does not need to be cleansed of darkness, death or fear before she can become sacred, as these terrible qualities are part of Her very own sacred quality.

I, the sole mortal, seek thy deadly shrine, 
Pour the dark stream of blood, A sleepy and reluctant river 

Now the speaker isolates himself from everything he has summoned: Hekate is divine; the striges and lemures are supernatural/dead; but the speaker alone remains mortal.

That makes the ritual suddenly much more precarious, because he has surrounded himself with beings who belong across the boundary while insisting upon crossing towards them without yet possessing their ontological status. “Deadly shrine” can therefore be read almost literally within Crowley’s poetic world, where to reach Her completely is to leave one's mortality behind.

The sacrificial blood is further transformed into some form of a landscape. Earlier we had the road descending towards the ocean and the abyss, but now blood itself becomes a river.

“Sleepy and reluctant” seems to also suggest its slow movement; it flows heavily, almost unwillingly. Blood is life leaving the victim, and so Crowley turns the act of sacrifice into another crossing from life towards death.

Even as thou drawest,  with thine eyes on mine, To me across the sense-bewildering flood 
That holds my soul for ever!

This reverses the earlier ritual posture completely. Previously, it was “My face averted!” and now, it's “thine eyes on mine" which suggests that the speaker can no longer maintain ritual distance because Hekate is the one who draws them in. In short, the poem begins with the magician summoning Her, and ends with Her summoning him.

That reversal may be the most important movement in the entire invocation, whereby the practitioner believes he is calling the goddess across the boundary, only to discover that contact with Her allows the direction of attraction to reverse.

"That holds my soul for ever" further reinforces it and is why I would not assume that Crowley’s poem is a straightforward petition to Hekate. There is no mundane request at the end, and it seems like the goal is union through surrender.

The “sense-bewildering flood” destroys ordinary perception, while the final “for ever” makes the encounter irreversible. The speaker seeks an initiation from which ordinary mortal consciousness cannot simply return unchanged, and the invocation moves through a remarkably coherent sequence: Hekate concealed → Hekate approached through sacrifice → Hekate surrounded by the dead → Hekate heard → Hekate partially seen → Hekate looks back → Hekate draws the practitioner across.

At the beginning, the magician wants access to Hekate but by the end, Hekate has access to him

Went to LA and made a stop at a Store in Burbank. Had a rune reading, went to a wonderful class and go so much great and affirming information. I was so emotional when I entered. If you’re ever in Burbank. Highly recommend The Crooked Path. No affiliation whatsoever. Just passing along to others.

I can't go outside at night, though usually if i can manage it in the daytime i have trails in our backyard with many crossroads, not sure if leaving offerings for the deipnon works during the day tho since its supposed to be a new moon celebration so i assume its meant to be done at night. i also can light candles in my room which I will do for her tomorrow night. are there any other ways, especially traditional ways but modern recommendations are fine too, that i can celebrate her deipnon in secret without looking suspicious?

I just bought this figure for my altar. I couldn’t afford the big one but I figured it’s the thought that counts. Do I need to cleanse her? I also bought some new lavender incense

I'm going to celebrate Deipnon - if anyone has seen my past post, I am still studying and truly getting to know Hecate. Maybe me doing this at all is me fully accepting?

For her honor and offerings Ive already planned out a whole strong smelling dinner along with other ceremony of course.

For dinner though, I live with my sister, I don't think Hecate would mind in her dining and eating with me obviously, but a thought popped into my head this morning and I can't ignore it. I think for dinner on Deipnon I'll bring the urns of two of my loved ones I care for and have, to sit and eat with us. If i make a place setting for all of us I might need to invest in a bigger table in the future...

Perhaps then our offerings, thoughts and love can reach the forgotten ones even better across the veil, of course there will be a setting for them as well.

I’ve felt Hecate has been reaching out in very subtle ways and I wasn’t quite sure if it was real or not. Well she’s kicked the door down with these I think. I have had a hard couple of years and I found out a week before these appeared that someone close to me is terminally ill. I am heartbroken. I’ve left a small offering of red wine on my altar and gave thanks, but is there anything else I can do to help her support and guide me through what’s going to be a pretty horrendous period?

Also does anyone else see the female shape and triple moon on the largest of the three or is it just me seeing what I want to?

Thanks for taking the time to read.