What's behind the name

Hekate (Ἑκάτη) is one of the most misunderstood figures in the Greek pantheon. Later tradition cast her as a goddess of witches, ghosts and dark magic — but that is a narrow, late portrait. In Hesiod's Theogony, composed around the 8th century BC, she is something far greater: a Titaness whom Zeus honours above all others, keeping her ancient share of power across the earth, the sea and the starry sky. Hesiod describes her granting favour throughout the whole of daily life — to those who go to assembly, to war, to the games, to the sea, to the herds, and to the raising of children. She gives, and she withholds; her reach is wide and her honour immense.

Above all, she is a goddess of thresholds. Her emblems are the torch and the key: as Phôsphoros, the light-bearer, she carries fire through the dark; as key-holder, she guards the doorway between one state and the next. She stands at the crossroads — the meeting of three ways — where offerings were left to her, and where the paths of the living, the dead and the divine cross. In the story of Persephone, it is Hekate who moves between the upper world and the underworld as guide and companion.

That is the spirit we have named ourselves for: a torch at the threshold and a guide at the crossroads. A place where the many paths of Hellenic knowledge — the deities, the myths, the calendar and the practice — meet, and where the way into them is lit for anyone willing to walk it.