In this post I mentioned that Hecate has been a mythological mainstay in my life, and that partly because of a poetry reading I attended on the subject of Demeter and Persephone Hecate has become active in my subconscious again. Since then, I’ve been actively listening for Hecate, for that part of myself, that constellation of attitudes, behaviours, and perceptions which I give that chthonic archetype’s name.

I have learnt that one cannot rush listening and so it has been several days since Cathy asked me what Hecate said when I asked her to speak to me.

As for methodologies – I “speak” to my non-linguistic mind in much the same way other people do. I attend to the signals, the signs, that part of the body/mind “speaks” with: feelings, sensations, desires, hunches. I have some experience with Hecate from old dreams and so I already know the kind of environments that she constellates in dreams. Such environments are always liminal in some way and so I go to a shoreline, or wait for a day that is neither wet nor dry. Then I add things I sense Hecate likes: lavender and mustard; human silence and crow calls; safe harbours like a niche between two rocks or a pocket in a large tree. Then I wait. And listen to the world around me, and the world within.

It’s no science, but usually something comes and this time it was a question that quite startled me and based on that, and other, reactions, I “knew” it was Hecate speaking. The question was What would Hecate do with my body were she to take over? The sense of humour (I mean really WWHD instead of WWJD), a bit biting, a bit mean, told me she was present and attentive to my questioning even if she thought I was being obtuse. (Is there any better way to insult an atheist than compare one’s questions to a Christian icon?)

The question was asked a couple of days ago and since then I’ve been trying to answer it. I’ve been reading (and compiling a list of Hecate references in Classical literature). I’ve been paying attention to those little phrases that arrive through my fingers on a keyboard.

More on this later, but the very first answer that came was that she’d be (in my body) out walking the roads for the next decade or so.  Even one as weak as I have become can go a very long way in 10 years of walking. The second thing that became clear is that Hecate is not human. This is critically important because I am human and so can only accommodate some of what she “needs”.

What she appears to be is a kind of mythocatalyst in the way the Na+/K+-ATPase is a biocatalyst. So for those of you whose eye’s just glazed, I’ll explain how that might work with respect to the narrative function in humans (it’s not that complicated) in the next Hecate post. The critical thing here is that Hecate seems to me to be a chemical/biological function that exists to regulate narrative expression and/or density or more simply she’s a pattern regulator—she keeps us snapped to the much larger world outside the (realistically still minor) conscious aspect of mind that delights in confusing narrative and reality. Of course since we often would rather slide away on a narrative stream instead of dealing with what is, she can be a real bitch when she does her utmost to force us back into a more stable (realistic) conformation with the world. But, to be honest, her ‘tude is much of what I like about her. And like the Na/K pump, without her we’d swell up and ultimately stop functioning.

Later.