Hecate- Roman GodDeity"Goddess of the Crossroads"

The Crossroads

The Romans called her Trivia, she of the three ways, and they left her food at crossroads on moonless nights. The offerings were called Hecate's suppers. No one stayed to watch. What came to eat was dogs and the poor and, the Romans supposed, the dead.

Her statues stood where three roads met: a figure with three faces or three bodies, looking in every direction at once. Varro records the name in his De Lingua Latina. Crossroads belonged to her. So did everything that happened there after dark.

The Witches

Latin poets gave Hecate her worst company. In Ovid's Metamorphoses, Medea invokes her before gathering herbs by moonlight, calling Hecate the companion of her secret rites. The herbs that Medea picks under Hecate's watch will poison a cloak and burn a princess alive.

Horace's Fifth Epode is grimmer. Two witches, Canidia and Sagana, perform their rites under Hecate's name: burying a boy up to his chin and starving him to death so his liver can be dried into a love potion. They work at night. The dogs howl. Hecate, the poem implies, is present.

Avernus

Virgil gives Hecate her other role. In the sixth book of the Aeneid, the Cumaean Sibyl is Hecate's priestess. When Aeneas comes to enter the underworld, the Sibyl tells him that Hecate herself appointed her to guide souls through the paths below. Before the descent, Aeneas sacrifices to Hecate at the threshold of Avernus. The earth groans. Dogs howl in the darkness. The gates open.

She stood at the entrance, as she stood at every crossroads: torch in hand, facing both directions at once.