excerpt from The Rotting Goddess

The accounts of Hecate as the goddess of the witches, all literary, only begin in the fifth century BC, 200 years after a completely un-demonic Hecate was introduced into the Olympian family and Greek literature by Hesiod. My task here shall be to demonstrate that the Hecate of the witches is not a suppressed aspect of the goddess, but the result of a long a methodical, albeit unconscious, demonization of her benign and ordinary traits.
The actual rites and practices associated with Hecate are reliably attested to only by inscriptions, and the tid-bits of social history one finds in the comic authors and antiquarians. We can trust this material because there is no motive for falsification. We can probably assume that whatever we have attested for in this manner is true for a few hundred years back as well: religion tends to be rather conservative, and typically preserves wording, dress and ritual even after the original meaning has long been forgotten.
Perhaps the best testimony to Hecate’s original rites are the inscriptions from the Lagina temple in her Asia Minor homeland, dating from the fourth to second centuries BC. These mention eunuch priests — a commonplace for the great goddesses of Asia Minor — and the mysterious office of “key-bearer,” apparently filled by a priestess who carried a key in some sacred procession. This constitutes virtually our entire fund of information on her native rites, but is happily paralleled by the earliest (sixth-century BC) inscription for Hecate’s cult in Greece — on an altar in the temple of Apollo Delphinius at Miletus, where she shares with him the title “protector of entrances.”
In Greece Hecate was regarded as a universal door-warder and gate-guardian, and so stood before palaces, temples and all private homes. A character in Aristophanes’ play The Wasps says:

You see, the oracles are coming true: I have heard it foretold that one day the Athenians would dispense justice in their own houses, that each citizen would have himself a little tribunal constructed on his porch, just like the Hecate-fetishes they have at every door.

The pole-like Hecate-fetish (hekataion, plural: hekataia) was regarded as conferring a general protection on all who dwelt within a house or passed through its doors. An ancient commentary on the Aristophanes’ play says:

Hekataion: Hecate-fetish: the Athenians set her up everywhere as guardian and child-nurturer.

This good influence seems to have extended to travel as well. Various sorts of fortune-telling were routinely performed by the priests at pagan temples: Hecate was consulted (through an oracular priest) before taking a trip. Aristophanes has a character in his play Lysistrata say:

Theagenes’ wife is sure to come at any rate; she has actually been to consult Hecate.

Likewise, a safe return was an occasion for giving Hecate thanks. Among the many inscriptions included in The Greek Anthology (a sort of ancient Norton Anthology which continued to be re-edited and expanded from the first century BC to the tenth century AD), is this one to Hecate:

Hecate, goddess of travelers,
Antiphilus dedicates to you this hat
that protected his head all through his journey,
because you heard his supplication and blessed his path.
The gift is not great, but given with pious awe.
May greedy travelers think twice about snatching away my offering:
It is not safe to steal even little gifts from a shrine.

However, Hecate’s association with travel, exits and entrances had become demonic by the third century BC. A poem from this period by Theocritus depicts an amateur sorceress who invokes Hecate saying:

O Hecate, just as you can open the steel door of Death,
so you can move all else that is is unshakable.
Listen, Thestylis, the dogs howl in town,
Hecate is surely appearing at the crossroads.

As late as second to fourth centuries AD Greek Magical Papyri, Hecate is conjured up on a night “in which the bar of Hell-gate is opened” and addressed by a magician who says: “I . . . posess your key. I opened the door of Hell, the door Cerberus guards . . . ” Elsewhere in the Magical Papyri she is invoked in the name of her key and thrice-locked door and called “. . . you who’ve opened the gates of steel unbreakable,” “gate-breaker,” and quite simply “key.”

Another of Hecate’s standard roles seems to have been to receive remnants of household propitiatory and purification offerings, as well as the sweepings from ritual housecleaning, that were burned before the Hecate-fetish of the crossroads or the doorway. The potsherd on which the rubbish was burnt was carried away, thrown, and abandoned without looking back. The Greek playwright Aeschylus has a character in The Libation Bearers say,

Or shall I pour this libation on the ground, for Earth to drink,
without a word, without respect,
the way my father was slain and left to lie?
Shall I go home without a single backward glance,
just throw away the libation bowl, as if I were flinging
out, on the public road, for Hecate,
the dirt from a ritual housecleaning?

The purpose of the ritual housecleaning was the removal of earthy substances inimical to the veneration of the celestial Olympian deities. Hecate’s custody of rubbish, dirt and uncleanness, a natural and minor specialty for an earth and fertility goddess, reappears in the Magical Papyri bizarrely emphasized. Her original positive, if undignified, relation to earthy substances has been perverted into a negative theophany. Now Hecate is called Borborophorba, “the Eater of Filth.” She takes her dinner in the graveyard, a characterization which is unpleasantly developed in:

O nether and nocturnal and infernal
goddess of dark, grimly, silently
munching the dead,
Night, Darkness, broad Chaos, you’re Necessity,
hard to escape are you: you’re Moira and
Erinys, Torment, Justice and Destroyer,
and you keep Cerberos in chains.
Serpent-scaled, you are dark, with hair
made of snakes, serpent-girdled, you drink blood,
you bring death and destruction, you feast
on hearts, flesh eater, you devour those untimely
dead and you make lamentations ring out . . .

By the epithets Necessity, Justice &c. it becomes clear that Hecate is equated not only with earth, but with all that earth implies: material existence, which carries an implicit death sentence for all that come into being. So profound is Hecate’s dirt theophany that it extends to the cosmic limit of Greek philosophical pessimism!
According to the Magical Papyri, this rotten Hecate can be simply and respectfully regaled with cow-dung incense, but in special cases one prepares for her a perfume of goat-fat, baboon-excrement, garlic and the like — a concoction so noxious that it is an effective curse to accuse someone else of having prepared it! Strong smells, such as are associated with decay, now constitute the ambiance of earthy-dirty Hecate.
Another reflection of this developed dirt-sacrality is to be found in The Sacred Disease, a treatise on epilepsy by the fourth-century BC Greek physician Hippocrates. This states that Hecate is responsible for people defecating on themselves during a seizure. Since the other symptoms reflect the nature or associations of various gods (e.g., if the patient foams at the mouth and kicks, that’s due to the war god Ares), we must understand the stink of excrement as Hecate’s calling card.