Hekate of the Chaldean Oracles (1)

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The Greek chthonic goddess Hekate as the Platonic Cosmic Soul in the Chaldean Oracles shares many traits with Inanna or Ištar. In the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, she acts as the guide for Persephone when she descends to and later ascends from Hades. In later literature, she is the mistress of souls, as she regularly guided the dead back and forth from Hades to the upper worlds. Thus Hekate was associated with mundane liminal places, doorways, crossroads, gates, etc., while she helped people daily to pass these places.

According to the Chaldean Oracles, the creation took place when the Paternal Intellect, a hypostasis of the absolutely transcendent and untouchable Father, the supreme God in the Chaldean system, sowed the basic seeds of the material world, identified as “lightning” or Ideas; these Ideas then entered the womb of Hekate, i.e., the Cosmos, who was born of the Father. While it was the Paternal Intellect (male) that provided the Ideas for Hekate, it is the other hypostasis of the Father, Paternal Power (female) that enlivened them. From the Cosmic Womb, all began to stretch forth towards the place beneath the wondrous rays, i.e., to the hylic world, where genesis was completed when physical structures were created. Thus Hekate played the same role as the Cosmic Soul in the Middle Platonic doctrines. The final creation was performed by the Second “Fire,” i.e., the Second Intellect, identified with the Demiurge of Plato’s Timaeus. The Oracles agree on such a being though never use the word Demiurge, but instead they speak of an artisan of cosmic fire or second mass of fire. In other words, after Hekate had received the Ideas in her womb from the Paternal Intellect (God, the Father), she then transmitted these to the Demiurge, who embodied them in the Sensible world. Because of her role in receiving and then transmitting the seed (Ideas) onward, Hekate/Soul was understood as the “Mother of the World.”

Bibliography

Pirjo Lapinkivi

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