By
Catherine Archer
To transitions and liminal spaces;
They are the times when Hekate is nearest.
In our work with Hekate, we often practice within the liminal space and meditate on how Hekate manifests in it. At times we have the opportunity to become the liminal space itself, or even the threshold. This can occur in many ways, and our closeness to the experience varies from person to person–whether you thin the veil between yourself and Hekate through ecstatic dance, hypnotic chants, or fevered writing and art, there are many ways to feel Her presence in the ever-coursing stream of the liminal space and flowing of ideas.
Childbirth can be one of those times, and I would argue that pregnancy is an opportunity to experience a small piece of Hekate as the Cosmic World Soul within the context of our own microcosm. In this state we are the universe, creating life, and then transitioning this life through the threshold into a new world. From that point on we engage in an eternal practice of letting go as the child grows older, learns more about themselves and the world, and begins to navigate and exist within a foreign place. If we do it right, we are the familiar, the safe space, the Wise One, as Hekate Soteira can be for us. But like Hekate, we cannot be coddling or overly protective, as this does a disservice to the child. How can they learn to navigate this foreign land if we do everything for them and protect them from all possible harm? They must approach the crossroads of life decisions themselves. We can hold space for them, give them advice, provide guidance, but they are the ones who must choose. So Hekate does the same for us.
In Hekate Soteira, Sarah Iles Johnston explores the argument that Hekate is the Cosmic World Soul as described in the Chaldean Oracles. This Cosmic World Soul is the creator of the physical (or “Sensible”) world and source of individual souls in the universe, and is woven throughout the physical world itself. So Hekate acts as not only the Creatrix of souls, combining parts of Herself with a “lightning of Ideas” from the Intelligible World in her “lifegiving womb,” and with pieces of the physical world to create us, but She also exists around and throughout the physical world as well, acting as a permeable boundary between our world and the spiritual realm. I find this conception of Hekate to be striking and profound–knowing that She is hewn all around us, and we exist inside of Her, and were molded by Her, as she serves as a shepherd and guide for us between worlds. I believe that we follow some humble version of this process when we create our own children.
When I discovered I was pregnant, it was on a cold and early morning in December 2019. Three pregnancy tests confirmed that I wasn’t just seeing things–that I was about to embark on a completely new chapter of my life. I walked to my train for work in silent joy, savoring the falling snow and the chill in the air as my mind buzzed with excitement. A new and unknown world was waiting for me, both in pregnancy and eventually in parenthood. I knew working with Hekate would help me navigate the pain of childbirth and provide me with the peace I needed in the light of Her torches, on those days when I had no ability to predict what would be coming next, and I had no choice but to trust the process and trust in Her.
As my belly grew, and the months of my pregnancy stretched into 2020, the world seemed to suddenly start falling apart around us. The COVID-19 pandemic lead to a mass lockdown as millions of people across the globe reckoned with tragic loss and death. There were nights that the stress would keep me awake, and I would cry, apologizing to my unborn child, the guilt stabbing my heart for bringing her into such a dangerous and chaotic world. Would I have even tried to get pregnant knowing what was coming in 2020? It’s a question I cannot answer. In the death and destruction of those months, and the hopelessness and isolation, I needed Hekate’s guidance more than ever. I meditated on Her and left offerings at the Deipnon for the restless dead, asking Hekate to provide the poor souls with peace on their journey. I wished the dead and dying safe passage as my child grew steadily inside me.
Leading up to my labor, I meditated frequently on the concept of becoming the threshold through which my child would pass. In this role I would be both active and passive—though it’s not clear what initiates labor, there is evidence to indicate the child sends hormone signals to the mother, and thus plays an active part in their journey to the world outside of the womb. The child, consciously or not, is leaving the comfort of her known world, where all her needs are met and accounted for, to engage in a tumultuous journey to enter a world of unknowns. This journey is dangerous, and frequently both the child and mother can be in peril during this process. Indeed, childbirth can still be quite dangerous for women and childbirthing people in the United States where I live, and even more so for black women, as the rate of mortality for people in childbirth is higher than any other high-income country in the world. To decide to give birth in our society is not a decision to be taken lightly.
Though Hekate is often depicted as a virginal maiden goddess, she has also been associated with childbirth, likely due to her conflation with Artemis. Texts such as Aeschylus’s play “The Suppliant Women” shows Artemis-Hekate being invoked to protect mother and child during the birthing process. Though in these contexts Hekate does not have children of her own, we can understand why she would be invoked in these moments due to the liminal nature of childbirth, as well as the thin line between giving life and encountering death in this space. A friend of mine who had given birth to her son a year prior to my own pregnancy had direct experience with this dynamic flickering of life and death, as she severely bled out after giving birth and forceps were used to extract the child. Her husband recalls her hospital room painted in the bright red of her blood as she fought with death; he could do nothing but watch helplessly by her side. We are all eternally grateful that both she and her son survived.
The night after my child’s due date, I felt the telltale waves of cramping that signaled her imminent arrival. I summoned my doula who worked with me through the night, feeding me tea and energy-giving concoctions as I prepared for birth. As the contractions crashed over me, crushing my insides like a vice, I wrapped my meditation beads around my arm and prayed to Hekate, begging for Her to watch over my child and myself as I began my descent into the frightening and unknown liminal space of childbirth.
Labor was long and difficult–for 19 hours I felt wave after wave of the relentless contractions, in spite of my epidural, which had failed. I writhed in pain with every contraction, unsure of how I would make it through. I pushed for almost three hours, grasping my meditation beads and visualizing Hekate as I worked to move my child through the threshold of my body. With no sleep from the previous night, I frequently fell asleep for a few seconds at a time in between pushing, adding to the fever-dream nature of my birth experience. For an hour my child’s head was caught inside the birth canal, and I fought like hell to move her forward. I feared that if I couldn’t do it myself, I would be wheeled into surgery, or someone would try to use forceps to pull my child out. In my mind I begged Hekate to grant me the strength to birth my child in the way I wanted.
With Her guidance and strength, coupled with the support of my medical team and husband, I worked harder than I ever have in my life to breathe and push, and after an eternity I felt my child pass through me and finally enter the world. My beautiful girl was presented to me, and I held her close, feeling the warmth of her skin as she clung to me, new to this world, but not new to me. For a moment the world stopped, all of the death and sickness beyond our walls forgotten; for a moment there was only her and me, physically separated but melting into one another, spiritually connected. Through the pain and sacrifice we both experienced, she and I could now know her not as a part of myself, but as her own person.
Human children are born into the world much more helpless than other animals—unable to sit, walk, or even know how to eat. This is because the child must be born before their heads become too large to pass through the birth canal. They must make this journey before they’re ready to be fully independent. This is an important lesson for those of us following Hekate; the journey to follow Her and to function in this world is full of ambiguities, and we are often not fully equipped to deal with them at the start of our journey. We often feel not fully formed, awkward, not worthy of Her as we begin to follow Her and perhaps even to lead others to Her. Indeed, encountering the paradigm shift of the COVID pandemic turned our world upside-down, and it serves as a reminder that the best-laid plans will often go awry. Imposing order onto our chaotic world is a flimsy gossamer structure that crumbles in our hands and must be remade, over and over, as the world around us changes. But we cannot allow that to stop us from continuing forward.
If we accept help, and we are compassionate and forgiving towards ourselves, and we are humble, then we can accept that we do not know, and that we will learn as we go. It will be hard, and we will need to do many things for the first time in our lives, but we will learn, and it will be as breathtaking as bearing witness to our own creations. This is only the beginning of a magnificent series of developments, and like our children do for us, we will crawl for the first time, run, create art, dance, form relationships with others, and possibly create new life, under Her watchful eye.
The universe is full of chaos, and death, and darkness, but in that darkness is Hekate Soteira’s ensouling chains, wrapped tight, reminding us of Her presence in the liminal, that all we can predict and plan for is that things will change. And knowing Her presence is to know peace.
Bibliography
Amis, Debby. “Healthy Birth Practice #1: Let Labor Begin on Its Own.” The Journal of Perinatal Education, 2014 Fall, pp. 178 - 187, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4235056
Athanassakis, Apostolos N, Wolkow, Benjamin M. The Orphic Hymns. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013.
Gunja, Munira Z, Gumas, Evan D, Masitha, Relebohile, Zephyrin, Laurie C. “Insights into the U.S. Maternal Mortality Crisis: An International Comparison.” Issue Briefs, June 4, 2024. The Commonwealth Fund, https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/issue-briefs/2024/jun/insights-us-maternal-mortality-crisis-international-comparison
Johnston, Sarah Illes. Hekate Soteira: A Study of Hekate’s Roles in the Chaldean Oracles and Related Literature. Scholars Press, 1990.
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