ritual · Greek

Prayer to Hecate

Come to me, O' beloved lady, three faced Selene, listen, with kindness, to my sacred chant. Youthful, exulted Jewel of the Night, bringing light to mortals; child of early dawn, riding joyfully on fierce bulls, O' Queen, driving the chariot along the path of Helios; In triple form, You dance, three-headed, with the three Kharites, revelling with the stars, and Dike and the threads of the Moirae; Klotho, and Lakhesis as well as Atropos, and Persephone, Megaira and Allecto. Multi-formed, your hands armed with the dreaded dark lamps, your mane of terrifying serpents shakes upon your brow, from your mouth is heard the roaring of bulls. Solitary, night-crier, bull-faced, bull-headed, you have the eyes of bulls, you have the voice of dogs, you hide amongst lions by taking their shape. Your ankles are wolf-shaped, fierce dogs are your friends, hence they call you Hekate, illustrious Mene, you dart through the air as arrow-shooting Artemis, four-faced goddess, of the four names, of the four roads. Artemis, Persephone, deer-shooting, night-shining, triple striking, triple sounding, triple headed, triple named Selene; three-pronged, triple-faced, triple-necked and of the triple roads. Come, graciously hear my call, You who oversees the wide world of the night, darkness voyaging Goddess; famed, easy-birthing, bull-faced, horned, mother of Gods and men, Nature's All-Mother. You frequent Olympos, traversing the broad and boundless abyss, You are the beginning and the end, You alone rule all.

Commentarius · Commentary

A genuine text, and its origin is quite different from that of the other cards in this class. The Greek magical papyri are the working notebooks of practising magicians in Roman Egypt: a recipe, the materials required, and the words to be spoken. Not theology and not poetry, but a manual.

Hence the character of the hymn. Selene-Hekate is here fused with everything at once: three-faced, three-headed, with the three Graces, with Dike, with the three Fates by name, with Persephone, with Megaira. Names are piled up without discrimination and without hierarchy; in the papyri Greek names stand beside Egyptian and Jewish ones, and the compiler was not troubled by it. The more names spoken, the surer that one of them is the right one.

"Child of the early dawn … driving your chariot along the path of Helios" — the Moon described by way of the Sun, in another's track.

The Greek exists but did not reach this card. The text is published by Preisendanz as PGM IV 2785-2870; in the new critical edition the same papyrus is GEMF 57. The Preisendanz scan on archive.org (papyrigraecaemag0001unse_x4f6) does have a text layer, and in seven hundred kilobytes of it there is not one Greek letter: the machine took the Latin script and the German apparatus and never saw the Greek pages at all. The papyrus itself is digitised by the Bibliothèque nationale de France, but those are images. The remaining route is manual.

Compare the neighbouring card (greek-hekate-orphic-001): there the text is labelled modern and is in fact ancient; here it is ancient and unobtained.

Fons · Source

AuthorAnonymous

WorkGreek Magical Papyri (PGM IV)

Section2785-2870

Period3rd-4th c. AD

Classificatio · Taxonomy

CultureGreek

Formritual

DeitiesHecate

FunctionsInvocation · Praise

SpherePersonal