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Kidadl provides inspiration to entertain and educate your children. Hecate - A mysterious nature goddess associated with sorcery and witchcraft, who went with Demeter to the Underworld to fetch Persephone, but then stayed to assist Persephone. In fact, Hecate might have been another goddess altogether! Her main jobs were to control boundaries, witchcraft, and the Underworld. This article incorporates text from Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology (1870) by William Smith, which is in the public domain. outlandish in her infernal aspects, she is more at home on the fringes than in the centre ofGreekpolytheism. She rules wisdom, choices, expiation, victory, vengeance, and travel. A mysterious divinity, who, according to the most common tradition, was a daughter of Persaeus or Perses and Asteria, whence she is called Perseis.1 Others describe her as a daughter of Zeus and Demeter, and state that she was sent out by her father in search of Persephone;2 others again make her a daughter of Zeus either by Pheraea or by Hera;3 and others, lastly, say that she was a daughter of Leto or Tartarus.4 Homer does not mention her. She has long been associated with witchcraft and the occult, even necromancy. The goddess, on the other hand, usually has human heads. In her form as a triple goddess, Hecate was closely linked to intersections. They are sometimes represented with the familiar aspects of the maiden, mother, and crone. A competing theory says that Hecate did not develop in Greece at all. Kidadl has a number of affiliate partners that we work with including Amazon. Hecate is a Goddess shrouded in mystery, for there is continuing debate about Her name, origin and character. And when men arm themselves for the battle that destroys men, then the goddess is at hand to give victory and grant glory readily to whom she will. In this manner, pillars known as Hecate stood at key intersections and entryways, possibly to ward off malevolent spirits. She convinced her daughter Eiliethyia, the goddess of childbirth, and the Moirai, the Fates, to prevent the birth. Hecate, however, is routinely described as the goddess of witchcraft and associated with characters like Medea and Circe, the witch of Homers Odyssey. She also assisted the gods in their war with the Gigantes, and slew Clytius.5, This extensive power possessed by Hecate was probably the reason that subsequently she was confounded and identified with several other divinities, and at length became a mystic goddess, to whom mysteries were celebrated in Samothrace6 and in Aegina.7 For being as it were the queen of all nature, we find her identified with Demeter, Rhea (Cybele or Brimo); being a huntress and the protector of youth, she is the same as Artemis (Curotrophos); and as a goddess of the moon, she is regarded as the mystic Persephone.8 She was further connected with the worship of other mystic divinities, such as the Cabeiri and Curetes,9 and also with Apollo and the Muses.10, The ground-work of the above-mentioned confusions and identifications, especially with Demeter and Persephone, is contained in the Homeric hymn to Demeter; for, according to this hymn, she was, besides Helios, the only divinity who, from her cave, observed the abduction of Persephone.