By Ruth Asch
Word Count: 1849
Rating: PG (Discussion of kidnapping)
Summary: Hecate, the goddess of night mourns for her daughter Scylla.
A flaming torch in either hand to light the way, Hecate found Persephone in the eternal night and returned her to her mother. Yet she cursed an innocent parent and child, condemning them to pain and separation. An immortal with powers in earth, underworld, and sky – she knows what it means to lose a child. Let me tell you her story…
Before humanity came upon the earth, before the Olympian gods existed, a race was born, immense in power, in whose hands lay the ordering of the universe: the Titans. Chronos, god of Time itself, and the brothers closest to him, were so dreadful that the later-sprung Olympians made war upon them and, after an unimaginable struggle, chained them down in Tartarus for eternity. But younger Titan siblings, especially the feminine deities, peacefully took their places creating and guarding the natural and supernatural world we know. Hecate was among the youngest of these.
Hecate was a virgin goddess, free and wild and pure, wearing a short maiden’s tunic to hunt by moonlight, black locks blending with windswept night sky, eyes shining like the stars they sometimes named her for – Asterea. Yet she was a warmhearted deity, loving domesticity and invited by good Greeks to bless their hearths while her youthful presence brought fertility upon the crops and animals and men. Her ability to see through time into the past, present, and future, made her the goddess of crossroads where people left offerings, invoking her protection in their comings and goings, her wisdom in their choices. And rare amongst the gentler gods, Hecate was also welcome below the earth, entrusted with her own keys to the underworld.
This beautiful, spirited being, many ages past, fell in love with a triton: Phocus. Phocus the mesmeric, the splendid and terrible – he of the sparkling blue eyes, wild green mane, sunshine smile, and the treacherous temper of grey waves – later to be known, when he withdrew into mystery, as the Old Man of the Sea. And from their passion came a child, whom they named Scylla.
Scylla was nymph-like, slender-limbed and girlish. No one would have guessed sea-god paternity, unless it were by the strange green ripples in her auburn hair. Hecate, a lover of new life, took to motherhood and nursed her baby, raising her alone for many years, until she was old enough to live with nymphs as regular companions, in a place chosen by her mother. This remote and idyllic spot, where the ocean kissed the earth, human interference kept at bay by mighty cliffs, was where many years ago Hecate had first met Phocus – though, (for reasons best known to himself and perhaps disputed by Hecate) he had rarely been seen there since. Perhaps Hecate hoped the girl would meet her father, perhaps she loved it only for nostalgia’s sake. Scylla, who was half (by instinct) of the water, loved to swim and bathe where the untamable sea withdrew into repose. She spent hours in or near the waves, and when her mother came home, this was she usually found her.
Hecate travelled far and wide to places in her patronage, but came back frequently to see her daughter. She sought good friends for her child, and to avoid influences like the honey-tongued, glamorous witch Circe, who liked to visit and practice sorcery whenever the divine Hecate was home, and sometimes when she was not. While Hecate was abroad, she would exchange news with her girl by birds who bore their messages. News of Scylla’s pets and the weather, of her friends the nymphs, and their loves. News of an admirer – Glaucus, a handsome fisherman-turned-merman who was head-over-tail for her, but whom Scylla found rather strange; she didn’t want a half-fish for a lover! If Hecate was hurt by this, she did not say so; she could not bear to lose her little girl yet, and was relieved Scylla was not involved with such a changeable young man. So, she heard rumored, was Circe, who had a taste for extraordinary young men, and a very jealous temper.
When the goddess returned from the games held at her Temple in Lagina, she agreed to meet her daughter as usual, down in the bay. But when Hecate arrived, Scylla was not there. The reason was quick to see: a monster! It was a terrible beast with long tentacles wildly whipping up the waters, a circle of dog-like, slime-scaled heads which seemed to fight amongst themselves, and another head above them, vaguely human in shape but distorted beyond reason, with snaking mane, a large mouth full of sharp teeth, and giant rolling eyes.
Turning away in haste, Hecate searched a long desperate time and called her daughter so that her voice filled the air, speeding cries like arrows to pierce the woods, skimming waves for miles around, and dropping words resounding down cracks leading to caverns below…before she would understand what the evidence before her showed so clearly. Her daughter Scylla, the fairest of nymphs, had gone forever, consumed by a monster – no doubt a creature of Circe’s creation, which thrashed in the waters where the maiden always bathed.
Hecate, triplicate goddess, stood overwhelmed with grief, and the air grew dull and burned around her. She did not notice as the awful creature, quieter now, moved very slowly nearer until she could look into its faces. But all the while maternal anguish swelled, pulling her into it like a black hole within her womb, swallowing her in pain and tearing her old self to pieces. Then came the urge to strike: vengeance for her child! Hecate drew herself up, dark, fearsome, and dolefully beautiful as night; spreading her arms wide and facing the creature with unseeing eyes, she declaimed in a voice which echoed from rock to rock down to the seething sea.
“Cursed be you, creature of the deep, for you have eaten my child, my beloved! May you remain here, foul beast, forever bound to this strait, that you shall devour none but those who are foolish enough to desecrate this spot.
“But more, far more – for you are dumb, and cruelly bewitched – cursed be the mother who made you! May her breasts flow with black milk, in mourning for my daughter, and may she be barren forevermore. May the grass she stands upon be poisoned, and the place where she lives riven with tempests.
“Your mother shall not die for her crime, but live to see her own creation suffer this fate, in remembrance of mine. By the powers given to me in sky, on earth, and in the realm beneath the ground, thrice strengthened and thrice bound, I cast this curse.”
And as she uttered the last words, she looked up defiantly into the eyes of the creature before her – and froze. There, in the expression of those giant orbs, she recognized the eyes of Scylla, her daughter, crying out to her as they had when she was a lovely slip of a girl, but with more agony than she had ever seen. Those eyes were hopeless, and the meaning in them swiftly receding, as though her child were fading, being absorbed into the monster she saw before her. Horror gripped Hecate; incoherent questions teemed her mind. How could it be Scylla? She would not believe it. Yet, in the extremity of her maternal feeling, her breasts swelled as she watched the creature before her, and from them, as from needles of fire, dripped liquid upon her robe. She looked down, and saw that it was black.
Then such a storm as mortal never saw, raged around mother and offspring, together and yet now far apart. Within her clouds of fury, Hecate at last saw how Circe must have enchanted her daughter, in spite over her beauty, and perhaps through jealousy over Glaucus; she knew Circe all too well, who had once been a pupil of hers in the magic arts.
At long length, subdued, and rocked in the arms of the sea, Scylla, the monster, drifted into a restless sleep, ready to wake and howl, and reach in loss and fury for any ship or soul that passed by. And Hecate departed, cloaked in shadow.
From that day, there was great change in Hecate and in her dealings with men. She who had been sought for kindly help in matters of fertility, now was feared by all living things. There followed in her train serpents and spirits which cast fear into those who saw her, so that they swiftly turned another way. Whether in sympathy with her disfigured daughter, or to manifest her own inner turmoil, she often transformed her beauty into a terrible serpentine being with three heads: of a dog, a horse, and a lion. She avoided the laughing nymphs, friends of her daughter, and the comfortable hearths of good homes, until they forgot to invite her; happiness and prosperity could never fill the void inside her. Two creatures only – both women fallen by guilt under the spell of evil transformation – she invited into her intimacy as dumb retainers: Gale and Hecuba (their stories are for another time). Where she used to frequent the fields openly, now she roamed earth only by night, in the daytime withdrawing into deep forests, caves, or the kingdom of the Underworld.
And that is how it was that she alone saw Hades abduct Persephone from the flowery meadow, and carry her below. A bitter moment of choice that must have been: to let Demeter suffer as she suffered, a companion in grief, losing a daughter to horror? Or to try and save her. Good remained in Hecate, for she sent word to the mother of what had happened…then descended to the dark realms of the dead, to find the girl.
Persephone sat as though half-dead herself, pale and still, the heavy metal jewels of Hades piled at her feet. She was unresponsive to everything, everyone… until Hecate talked to her for a long time, below her breath, in words which nobody else heard. Hecate stirred her, gave her pomegranate seeds to nourish her, and when the dread verdict was pronounced – that Persephone must spend half of every year beneath the ground – Hecate promised to be a companion where her mother could not come.
True to her word, she takes care of Persephone there in the palatial darkness, as lovingly as though she were a child of her own. But until the day when Scylla is able to speak and offer her mother forgiveness, Hecate remains in the shadows, and her milk is black for the daughter that she lost.
Footnote:
In further fulfilment of Hecate’s curse, the straits between Scylla and Charybdis were henceforth famed for treacherous weather and the famous whirlpool Charybdis; and there is a plant, picked from that time for use in spells by those who invoked Hecate, ‘juicy with the milk of black poison’ as Virgil attested in Aeneid IV, 513-14.