Dark and dangerous, gloomy and goth, ancient and relevant, wild and wise – the goddess who holds our hands as we enter the liminal moments in life, isn’t here to make us comfortable. She’s not here to tell you everything is gonna be ok. She’s holding a torch in her hand so you can see that the territory you’ve entered is not a clear path. She has a bundle of herbs in her apron pocket – not all of them are safe. She’s accompanied by a pack of howling dogs. Some of them have blood dripping from their mouths. She hands you the key. But finding the door is up to you. Hecate’s symbols, like the goddess herself, are thresholds that encourage us to pause before proceeding. 

Read at your own risk. 

She’s the energy of night – mysterious and full of shadows, dream-like in its uncertainty, edgy and liminal. She’s the primordial power of bones, breath, and blood. She is a guide through death, and the grounded support that holds it together so that you can fall apart. She’s dirt and  decay – ever changing, ever relational, ever present. She’s the continuous movement between life and letting go, receptivity and boundary, deep grief and delicious gratitude. 

If you are at a crossroads right now (who isn’t?), and you need a moment here, at the place where the road forks and a decision must be made, read this essay first. Then come back here, and we’ll unpack some of Hecate symbols to help you dive deeper into the mythic magic of the goddess of crossroads. 

The Symbols of Hecate: Keys, Torches, Dogs, Serpents, and the Moon

Life is living in the dilemma – between two sides of an argument. What’s determined? What’s open ended? The process of wondering, of questioning, of doubting, of being unsure is the goddess herself. And I would argue that the power of uncertainty in these chaotic times is the sacred medicine we need. 

The Keys: Guardianship and the Power to Open or Close

We think of the key as that which will offer some sort of clarity. We’ll know what’s behind that closed door. Or we’ll be able to lock the past behind us. But the truth is, we are in the realms of Hecate, and such simplicity won’t do. 

A goddess of crossroads, Hecate is an underworld guide. She protects and ushers the souls of the dead on their journey downward. In ancient times, the key was a symbol of afterlife wisdom, of mystical knowledge of the world beyond. Deities holding a key were known as gatekeepers – ones who allow or refuse a soul’s entry. And also ones who guard the gates so no one could escape the realms of death.

This is where Hecate’s symbols interweave, where the key and the dog meet. The gatekeeper in Greek Mythology’s underworld is the three headed dog, Cerberus, who guards the threshold between life and death. We’ll find our way into his jaws in a little bit. 

The Door We Shut, the Path that Reappears – Hecate’s Lesson in Cycles 

A key is also here to lock the door behind us, and move away from an unhealthy relationship, a bad habit, a toxic environment. Something that weighs you down is left behind. Something that served its purpose but is no longer helpful can be let go of – sent to the underworld. 

There’s something here that I think is important to remember: No matter how tight you think you’ve locked the door behind you, the shadows of our past can always find their way through. It can be frustrating and disappointing. But it’s the very key to our growth. Meeting our issues again, as much as we want to roll our eyes, kick, and scream, is an invitation to do deeper work. Life is cyclical. It’s the reminder that we are never done. Our power is not in denying, slaying, or ridding ourselves of their presence. Our power is in integrating, and finding ways to weave the shadow and make patterns of meaning. 

Whenever we think something is no longer there, we might actually discover that it’s lurking in the dark. This is precisely what Hecate is here to guide us through. Her key is not for locking the door behind us on certain aspects of ourselves. Her key opens the path of our ability to move in the shadows without negating any part of ourselves. 

Unlocking Hidden Realms – Hecate’s Symbols of Mystery and Passage

A key is a symbol of unlocking mysteries, of opening the door to something new, something hidden, of entering a realm that wasn’t available before. Words of power, new information, big insights and realizations. Something that wasn’t available before becomes available with the power of the key. 

When you need to keep something private, you place it behind locked doors. When you love someone deeply, they have the key to your heart. In fairytales, a locked room represents the hidden parts of the psyche – those that conceal the possibilities hidden in us, and those that hide in them great danger, the realms of hidden desires, and the exiled pieces we don’t want to look at, wonderful treasures, or horrible demons. 

It’s not just the symbolism of goddess Hecate, it is the part of us that knows how to move through the hidden realms, move in and out of areas that are not open to the public. She’s the energy in nature that shows us that there’s always more, that life is supported by so much more than what we can see. 

Hecate’s key secures the underworld. She is a psychopom, and can move freely in and out, between the realms. When you give yourself as a student to her, you learn to move through the threshold of death and rebirth, to shed and reinvent yourself, to release and regenerate who you are, what you do, and your relationships with others.   

The Torches – Illumination in Darkness

When you’re in the process of transformation and you go through the dark night of the soul, and you can’t tell where you are, and all feels lost, you don’t always feel into a presence that supports you through the experience. Sometimes it’s utter darkness. Sometimes you’re not sure you’ll come out of it alive. 

But there is something in you that keeps going. You grieve. You shed. You feel like you’ve disappeared into nothingness. And somehow, in the depth of it all, there’s something that keeps stirring the pot of who you are, something that knows how to put one foot after the other, even if you can’t quite see where you’re going. You might still feel enraged and lost, depressed and hopeless. It’s not a problem solving tool. Sometimes we need to be in complete darkness before we’re ready to let a little spark light up the torch, and see the path in the dungeons. 

She is an underworld guide. There’s not always light in the darkness. Hecate’s torches are not always in her hands. Sometimes the light is just in her eyes, in the way that she teaches you to see in the dark, in the ability to tend to the fire on the inside, to the glow of inner conversation, and the heat of hidden transformation. 

The fire of the torch in the underworld is a reminder of the sun, a reminder that the fire of the heart burns even within the depth of sorrow. It’s an invitation to hold the power of illumination in your own hands, in your own eyes, to walk with the flame of alchemy. The torch is a symbol of protection from that which lurks in the unseen, and the energy in you that lights up and carves a path even when the going gets more rough than rough. 

The Dogs: Loyal Companions Between Worlds

In the space between things, deep in the unknown, the dogs of Hecate howl at the moon, and sniff the ground for clues about where to go. They are liminal; holding the space between wild and domesticated. They are an animal, but they are shaped by humans (and at the same time, they shape humanity). They move between worlds, a bone in their mouth, a sweet, loving look in their eyes. They can be murderous or life saving, protective or begging, fierce hunters or cuddly fluff balls. 

Dogs accompany humans on their journeys, and guide us on a path when we’re lost. They know how to find the way because of their superior instincts and senses. They guard the camp, the home, the person. The dog can help us find what we’re looking for. They are guides through the unknown. 

Goddesses, Witches, and Bitches 

The dark feminine is surrounded by dogs. Maybe that’s why we’re called bitches. The witch has been traveling with a dog as her familiar for a long time. Hecate is not the only goddess who is accompanied by them. Canines have been the companions of many goddesses from many different ancient cultures. It seems that they were a woman’s best friend before they were a man’s.

Hecate’s Hounds as Guides Through the Shadow Realm

They have secured their place in the mythic mind as a guide through the liminal woods of the psyche, and as gatekeepers of the underworld. 

From Osiris in Egypt, who was the god of death and rebirth (read more about Osiris here), and took place in the sky as the bright dog star, Sirius, through Vedic storm god, Rudra, who took the form of the howling dog on the outskirts of society, to the Greek Cerberus who guards the gate to the underworld – in almost every culture’s mythology around the world, the dog befriended death – the loyal company of life. 

The dog is the mythic guardian of the crossroads, the underworld’s gatekeeper, the guide on the pathless path of liminality. Their bond with humanity mirrors the bond between life and death. 

They bark to announce something at the threshold. They are here to tell you that someone is at the door. What’s arriving into your life? What’s standing at the gate? What must you leave unanswered? What is your inner dog announcing? Are you listening?

Turn Hecate’s symbol – the dog – into an embodied ritual with this yoga practice. 

Serpents – Transformation and the Eternal Return

Many religions deemed the dog dirty and unholy, but our best friend found a way to keep its dignity and its place in our loving arms, even though it howled with the dark feminine archetype. The serpent hasn’t had that kind of luck. It has been a symbol of the goddess for a very long time. The rise of the patriarchy, along with the spread of monotheism, sent the goddess and her serpent down into the underworld, deep into the darkness of a subterranean kingdom. The snake, the darkness, death, and of the feminine, have been demonized, suppressed, and denied for thousands of years. 

The serpent moves between sides, between realms, weaving a vision shaped by more than one perspective. They slither back and forth, between right and left. They burrow into deep subterranean worlds, and climb up trees. They coil around branches, and give us a world that isn’t divided into binaries, but made of paradox and nuance. 

Hecate is a walking paradox. She is the sacred song of chaos, the holy hum of uncertainty, turning that which we’re afraid of and uncomfortable with into a temple of wonder. She is the deep call to question, the wild howl of not knowing, the dangerous and necessary hiss of doubt.

The serpent is a symbol of knowledge, and the audacity to want to know. The feminine (as an archetypal presence, not a gender) is the serpentine, non-linear, ever undulating path on which we discover and rediscover that there is more to know. There’s more than what meets the eye, more under the surface, more than what we’ve been told, more than what is allowed under the rule of the patriarchy.

Hecate guides us on this serpentine path of unknowns, steeped in the desire to learn. She’s the power that pulses between Eve and the serpent in the Garden of Eden. She’s the pause between the temptation to know and the fear of what that means in a world that wants to keep you small. You want to bite into that which makes you smarter. But in a world made by an insecure god, who doesn’t want you to surpass him, knowledge is dangerous. She’s the uncertainty in Eve’s choice, and the empowered decision she makes; taste the forbidden fruit, and fall into an imperfect reality, full of questions, doubts, and endless opportunities for a woman to push against a tyrant god.  

Hecate is a snake goddess, the energy of questioning. She’s the courage to pause and to wonder, as well as the courage to keep walking on a serpentine path of uncertainty. The serpentine path twists and turns. It’s a winding path full of crossroads. She’s the energy that reminds us that certainty is tyranny! Not knowing, wondering, questioning – that’s the antidote to authoritarianism. This goddess of the crossroads is medicinal in these chaotic, uncertain times.

We need the energy of questioning more than we need the certainty of an answer. Most people choose to seek certainty, because it offers comfort. If we stay in the question, the doubt, the not knowing, we risk the discomfort that comes with a darkening season, with subterranean worlds, with underworld journeys of transformation. If we keep asking questions we will feel triggered, unsafe, and unsure. But if we stay on the serpentine path of questioning, we stand a chance in a culture that pulls us into fascism, establishes the rule of authoritarianism, stupefies us with superficiality, and polarizes us through binary vision. 

The Moon: Hecate’s Symbol of Cycles, Shadows, and Sacred Sight

The serpentine path is also cyclical. The serpent puts its tail in its mouth and becomes the oroboros, teaching us about the seasons, about death and rebirth, about change and recursion, about phases and revisiting places we thought were no longer on our path. It establishes us in the feminine. Yes, here she is again. 

When I say feminine, I mean it in code, in archetype, not in gender. I mean it across gender, in a crossgender and beyond gender kind of a way. I mean it as womb power – physical and metaphorical, neither and both. I mean it in milk and in nourishment and in nurturing, but not limited to those qualities. I mean it in cycles, in phases, in moon-like patterns.

The cycles of nature are a continuum of birthing and dying, of shedding and growing, of disappearing and re-emerging, of rising and falling, of waxing and waning, of decay and regeneration, of creativity and dissolution. Hecate is present in the Ouroboros. She’s the way that the mouth of the snake holds its tail. And she is also the power to open the mouth and let the tail come out.

Pattern-Breaking Magic in the Phases of Hecate’s Moon

Cycles don’t hold us captive. While we cannot avoid the cyclicality, we do have the capacity to break patterns and carve new pathways. We can lock the door behind us with the key, discover that what we thought was left behind is making a comeback, and empower ourselves to do something different with it. 

The moon, along with the serpent and the dog, has been the keeper of the mysteries of the Goddess. Hecate is among many other goddesses who are seen in the phases of the moon. She is a triple goddess of moon cycles – of maiden, mother, crone, of waxing, full, and waning, of birth, life, and death, of rising, peeking, and descent. 

Hecate and the symbolism of the moon cross and commingle in many ways. From the cyclical, triple goddess power, through the shadows of the liminal space, to the ability to see in the dark, and live in the sacred complexity of vision within the unseen. 

Hecate’s symbols remind us that chaos and complexity, shadows and uncertainty, death and doubt are sacred. Not to bypass the horrible things happening in the world, not to say that all the shit that we’re experiencing and witnessing is somehow a good thing, but to remember that the mess and the decay and the destruction are part of the cyclical nature of reality. To remember that collapse gives birth to renewal. We can make a temple within the ruins and make art and meaning within the rubble, the fear, the horror, the grief.

She is honored in all the phases of the moon, but most common in ancient times was to worship Hecate with dark moon rituals. She is the queen of the unseen, the potency of the spaces in between. The liminality of a dark moon night evokes the power of this goddess of transformation. 

At the Crossroads – Invoking Hecate’s Power

Any moment of transition can be an invitation to step into a sacred relationship with the goddess of the crossroads. It doesn’t have to be huge. It doesn’t have to be fancy. You don’t have to leave her a whole meal as an offering at an intersection. You don’t need to partake in death rituals from ancient times (Please don’t!). Developing a meaningful relationship with change, and a sacred approach to transformation can take on many forms. The key is for it to feel authentic and true to you. 

Hecate’s symbols are doorways into mythic magic, into deep conversations with real life experiences and the wild landscapes of the imagination. Hecate rituals, like any mythic ceremonial work that we engage in, can be an exploration of sacred secularism, and provide profound support for life in these chaotic, uncertain times. 

In the next essay, we’ll explore some ritual ideas and threshold practices to connect with life’s crossroads and invoke the goddess of the witches. We’ll play with Hecate offerings, energetics, intentions, and contemplations. 

In the meantime, if you want to create your own ritual and want a deep, grounded guide for the process, download my ritual guide for the secular soul. It’s free and rich with magical and practical ways for you to dive into archetypal alchemy and ceremonial magic on your own. 

To get a fuller picture of the liminal goddess, read this essay about the Crossroads with Hecate. 

We’re deep in the pool with this goddess this month! If you want to embody the goddess of the crossroads, try this ritual on the mat – a 37 minute practice of twists, forward bends, and deep breaths, to ground and move you through the thresholds of your life. 

Also, this Substack piece is a conversation with Hecate. I was wondering what to do when you don’t know the way and feel like the path is gone, and Hecate showed up with some words of wisdom. You might get a kick out of it. And while you’re over there on Substack, make sure to subscribe – Muse Medicine drops every Monday with mythic magic and prompts for your own journey of making this time of upheaval into an art piece. 

This embodied practice for liminal times is also a great way to connect with Hecate’s magic. I think you’ll love the somatic spells I share over on YouTube, so subscribe there too. 

I’m so grateful to be on this serpentine path of myth, magic, sacred secularism, and archetypal alchemy. 

Much love,

Hagar