Click here to listen to Moonstruck with Selene and Hecate in the Season 1 archives on Buzzsprout
Summer is almost here, bringing warm nights perfect for stargazing and communion with the moon. A full moon rises here in the United States on Saturday May 18th, so this podcast includes stories and information about two Greek moon goddesses, Selene and Hecate, and an invitation to develop your night vision and capacity for magic.
Bathe in the silver shimmer, get moonstruck, and maybe a little bit mad.
Here is a transcript of this program:
Moonstruck with Selene and Hecate transcript 051619
Hello everyone and welcome to Myth Matters, a biweekly podcast of storytelling and conversation about mythology and why it’s important to our lives today. I’m your host and personal mythologist, Catherine Svehla. I have been creating these programs for you under the name Myth in the Mojave for the past six, six years. Wow. Myth in the Mojave for six years. The name is changing but the format and content remain the same, although I am always aiming for improvement. I want to thank you for joining me on this mythic exploration. Wherever you may be in this wide, beautiful, crazy world of ours, you are part of this story circle.
Talk about crazy. The other day I sat down to put this podcast together and I was going to open with the words “summer is coming here in the Mojave and elsewhere,” and then the wind started blowing and I looked at the weather forecast and I see that there are amazing winter storms predicted for big parts of the United States. Who knows what’s going on elsewhere around the world.
Seasons are shifting and yet there is something upon which we can depend, which is the topic of this program. That is the moon, changeable, yes and predictable in her changeability. The connection between the moon and the summer for me has to do with the unpleasantness of our daytime temperatures. Nighttime becomes very important here in the desert in the summer. Many of us spend a lot more time enjoying the coolness under the stars and the light of the moon, and although it’s not as extreme elsewhere and many of you are not escaping the heat in quite the same way, there is an association isn’t there? Between soft, gentle, warm nights and summer relaxing, kicking back and reacquainting ourselves with the night sky?
There is a full moon coming up this Sunday or Monday, depending on where you live, and I want to invite you to experiment this month and over the next few months, the summer months, developing your night vision and your relationship to the moon.
In our last podcast we started an extended exploration of the ancient Greek pantheon. I talked about Aphrodite and I want to turn to the Greeks again, and invoke a trio of goddesses that the Greeks associated with different aspects of the moon. Artemis, the hunter who’s horns are the crescent moon, , the goddess of magic and the dark or new moon, and Selene, who was the full moon incarnate, the personification of that silvery brightness and beauty, moisture, dew, refreshment, fecundity and fulfillment. Now actually, I guess I’m going to reserve Artemis, who is a very large topic, for another podcast. But she is in the background of course, because all three of these define and shape each other. I’m going to tell you a bit about Selene and Hecate to give you some ideas about who you’re addressing when you step outside every couple of weeks to stand in the velvet darkness of the new moon under that bright scattering of stars, or go out for a bath in the silvery moonlight of the full moon.
There are not many stories about these two goddesses. There are some fragments here that I’m going to impart for you to elaborate on. As James Hillman said, myths don’t tell us “how” anyway, they simply give the invisible background, which starts us imagining, questioning, and going deeper. In addition to these bits and pieces of story that I’m going to share my friends, you do of course have the moon herself. Of all the celestial bodies the moon is special, special because she is so close, so beautiful, so bright and so dependable. She disappears and reappears monthly, modeling for us the existence of an invisible world that gives birth to this one and encouraging us to have faith.
Now I refer to the moon as “she,” as did the Greeks, but I want to point out that this gender identification is not hard and fast all around the world. For example, the Sumerians saw the moon as male, the god Nana who was the father of Inanna, just to mention one story that I shared as Myth in the Mojave.
On this question of faith. I know that might be a loaded word for some of you. So I want to say that placing faith in things is not the same as “believing”– personal experience here being the key, and remind you that the ancient Greeks didn’t “believe” in their deities in the way that we use that word now. Now belief seems to mean a willingness to suspend reason and personal experience in order to accept the existence of some unseen and supernatural God, but these personifications, which is what the Greek deities were and are still for us today, these personifications of natural forces and common life experiences are very useful as personages.
We are better able to engage with them and whatever veneration or worship we might engage in comes from a knowledge of our dependency on those forces, and on the psychological dynamics of human life. Abstractions, my friends, don’t really elicit devotion or move us. They don’t spark the imagination. They don’t lead us to love. And here I am harkening back to some of the themes in the last podcast on Aphrodite and Eros. Whatever or whomever you love, what it is that you serve, what you value— this is meaningful and real because you have a particular vision or image of it or an experience of someone or something in particular. We need those particulars to give form to what is otherwise a sterile concept. And that is what moves us to love. Our ancestors knew this and although most of us aren’t schooled in it today, we need little more than a suggestion and a willingness because we are imagining narrating, responding, permeable beings still.
Let’s turn to the moon, to Selene and Hecate. I’ll start with Selene, the goddess who was a personification of the full moon. Selene was descended from the Titans, the old race of gods, the old race of gods that represent the foundations of our natural and civilized worlds. She was described as a very beautiful goddess with long wings and a golden crown. Aeschylus called her “the eye of the night” and she rode, just like her brother Helios the sun, across the sky in a chariot drawn by two white horses or in some instances two white cows or even mules. The story that we have about her involves the great love of her life. It seems that one night when she was making her crossing, lighting up the earth so beautifully as she does, the shepherd Endymion was out with his flocks. She saw him and he was a very, very beautiful young man, and she met him in a cave near the peak of Mount Latmos where he was grazing with his sheep.
She had to put him to sleep in order to kiss him and he experienced her in his dreams. She had to put him to sleep because mortals cannot apprehend the full glory and power of an archetype or a phenomenon like the moon directly. That’s just too much for our physical and mental frames to absorb. And there’s a famous story about that limitation actually that has some associations with the moon. It’s a story of the mortal woman Semele and her affair with Zeus, an affair that resulted in the birth of the God Dionysus, who is also associated with the moon. I will be talking about him in a podcast in the not too distant future. Selene and Zeus had an affair and Zeus’s wife Hera found out about this and was jealous, and she disguised herself as a nurse and went to go and see this young woman Semele, who was a princess in the city of Thebes.
She approached Semele and engaged her in conversation and elicited the secret of her affair with this being man who claimed to be Zeus. “Well,” said the nurse, “I don’t really want to suggest that you’re naive, but how do you know that he’s Zeus?” Semele said, “He, he’s quite remarkable and he tells me that he’s Zeus and it sure feels so and… I mean, I, I, I, well, I, I just think he is the god.” Hera in her nurse disguise said, “Okay, so you just believe that he Zeus and um, I suppose he tells you that he loves you too.” Seleme said, “Well, of course he does. Of course he loves me.” You can see where this is going. Hera managed to plant some seeds of doubt in Semele’s mind. And so Hera suggested that maybe the young woman would like to challenge her lover to prove himself by revealing himself as the God in the form that he revealed himself to his wife Hera, in all of his glory.
When Zeus came to Semele that evening, she asked him if he loved her and he insisted that he did. And she asked him if he would prove it and he told her that he would. He said that he would grant her any wish. Semele said, “I want to see you the way that your wife sees you. I want to see you and all of your thunderbolts and glory.” Zeus tried to dissuade her. He knew this was a very bad idea, which is one of the reasons why he adopted disguises of various sorts when he had his affairs with mortal women, but she was insistent. And so he did. He let her see Zeus and she caught on fire. She just burst into flames and it so happened that she was pregnant with the God Dionysus. Zeus knew this and before the baby could be destroyed, he plucked Dionysus from Semele’s womb, cut a slit in his thigh, put the baby in there, and Dionysus was incubated in the thigh of Zeus until he was born.
So you see, this is what happens if we try and approach these things directly. And that is an interesting thing about the moon, because the moon allows us to experience the otherwise fatal lights and energies of the sun by reflection, by deflection, and makes it safe for us. So Selene the full moon’s, great love was Endymion, and she came down and put him to sleep and kissed him. And it was such a beautiful experience that the lovers asked Zeus to grant Endymion a wish, and he wished to sleep eternally, and to have an ageless sleep so that he would never grow old and die, so there would never be a natural, mortal end to his relationship with Selene. They met for a long time. Maybe it’s still going on, and apparently there was more than a kiss because Selene became the mother of 50 daughters by Endymion.
In this brief fragment of story we hear present day associations with the full moon and romance, with completion and fulfillment ,and there’s also transformation. We’re reminded that moonlight brings a certain beauty. It changes things, right? The familiar looks different under the soft silver light of the moon. This is part of the moon’s association with magic and also with lunacy or being a lunatic, with certain kinds of madness. Selene’s Latin name was “Luna.” The word lunatic originally meant “moonstruck” in the mid 16th century. Around the time that the Enlightenment and our delusional fantasies about rationality and objectivity were taking root in the Western civilization, that word started to accumulate a lot of very negative connotations.
Now when we think of lunatics and lunacy, we think those are politically incorrect words for insanity, craziness, various forms of wild extravagance, and folly. They are attributed or they were then anyway, to phases of the moon, and today we still have this idea that the full moon brings a certain state of mind, a certain irrationality. The question is, do we embrace that or not?
Another interesting thing about the full moon as you know, is that shadows of things appear. All three of these goddesses that I mentioned, Artemis who we’ll talk about in another podcast, Selene, and Hecate, are very comfortable at night and they invite us to develop a night vision and ability to be comfortable in the dark and with darkness. One other thing I want to note about Selene and Endymion— she is moved by his beauty as he is moved by hers. There’s a reciprocity there, a mutual appreciation and this takes us back once again to themes in the earlier podcast about Aphrodite and Eros. We’re reminded that what the world needs from us is appreciation, attention, that those things are a form of love and they can lead to more visceral and fully experienced forms of love as well.
So when you’re standing out beneath that full moon, imagine that you are being seen and being appreciated as well as seeing and appreciating the beauty of that full moon.
Well as you know, every couple of weeks after the full moon, we complete a cycle and go to the dark moon or the new moon. So let me tell you a little bit about the Greek Goddess Hecate, who was associated with that moon, with magic, witchcraft, ghosts. Hecate also descended from the Titans and she helped the Olympians in their war against the giants back in those early, early, early days. So Zeus let her keep her place and her powers in the very earliest stories, the stories told by Hesiod. For example, Hecate grants all kinds of favors and forms of abundance to mortals. She fattens cows, for example, or provides someone who needs to win an argument with persuasive rhetoric.
Over time, with greater differentiation of the gods and the goddesses and the demotion of the female goddess forms, this became more about magic and spells and later on sorcery, with a lot of negative connotations. In the time when she was still honored as a magician, Hecate presided over the crossroads, which are the best place for magic. She was often accompanied by a black dog. I mention this to my dog Steinbeck sometimes. He’s the perfect companion for a witch.
The crossroads, the crossroads, our favorite location of tricksters, tricksters like the Greek Hermes or Eshu from West Africa and the American diaspora. Crossroads are powerful places because they are places where all ways are open, they are a place of possibility. They are also meeting places, metaphors for synchronicity or chance, and so they are related to the idea of opportunity. The ability to see opportunities in what would otherwise merely be chance events is a gift of the trickster and it is a type of magic. Magic at its heart is the ability to change reality by changing sight. What appears, appears differently, and opens the question of whether or not what is changing is the thing being viewed or the viewer, or both.
Hecate’s name comes from the Greek word hekatos and means “worker from afar,” a reference to her methods—magic–you can do magic from a distance– and her location. She lived on the outskirts in places where she had solitude, or more commonly in later times, the underworld. This association with the underworld seems to be one that the Greek tragedians built using the Homeric Hymn about Demeter and Persephone. This is a story that I shared a few podcasts ago. You recall in that myth of Demeter and Persephone, that Persephone is abducted. It’s Hecate who is in her cave, who hears Persephone’s cries and reports this to Demeter. In telling Demeter what she heard, she inspires that mother goddess to ask Helios’s the sun what he saw, because he sees everything. Thus is Hades’s role in this abduction is revealed.
Hecate is in a cave because that is a place of solitude, and a place where focus is possible. She’s in the earth and it refers to the mystery that surrounds her, to the fact that what she does and brings about needs to take place in the dark, hidden away from regular consciousness. Keep all of this in mind when you are standing with the new moon and asking Hecate’s help with what you would like to plant in that darkness.
Now I mentioned witchcraft and some linked Hecate to Circe and Medea. About a year ago I did a podcast on Madeline Miller’s novel Circe, which is the story of the goddess told in her own words. I highly recommend that book if you didn’t read it. In that novel, what we understand is that Circe builds power in a world where she doesn’t have any by collecting knowledge about plants and the powers in natural elements. This is a knowledge that is largely but not completely lost in the West, and the demotion or the devaluing of this information is not the result of it being ineffective, but because of its historical association with women.
Women who gather their own knowledge, skill, and power to affect healing and transformation are dangerous and subversive to the patriarchy. When I look at this world today and I considered the historical burden of females, I see that it is coming to include anyone and everyone of any gender, who wants to be the center of their own authority, who wants to accumulate their own knowledge and not succumb to group think or play assigned roles. There have been many male witches and it’s time for us to see a lot more.
Now, one benefit of engaging with the old myths and the stories, the personifications or characters, is for a broader view and perspective on things, to be in conversation with the mystery and that broader view. What I mean by that is to be able to move beyond the personal, the paltry contents of your own ego and the cultural preoccupation with human constructs and creations, into the mystery. I often think of a comment made by C.G. Jung, who said that neurosis is accepting answers to life’s biggest questions that are simply too small and too limited. If we tell ourselves that there’s no meaning in things, that there is no mystery to things, if we look at something and go, “oh, that is only,” or “that’s just,” we’re boxing ourselves in and we’re robbing ourselves of our heritage as human beings.
The answers that we give ourselves are connected to the questions, and those are connected to the options that we have, so let’s not limit our thinking and imagination. It generates a false loneliness and it traps us in the wrong conversations and debates. In this transformative time, let’s do what we can for ourselves and the world, to open to the new, to something beyond history. Paradoxically, we must use our history to do this.
When you start studying mythology or looking for the mythological backgrounds to your ideas, one thing is immediately clear. Our ideas coexist in the present with those of our ancestors. I’ve given you a couple of small examples of that in this podcast. When you think about holding hands with your beloved under the light of the silvery moon and Selene and Endymion, the past is not locked up in a trunk in a dusty attic separate from the present. It’s more like a river that flows through and shapes our current moment. All of the ideas and beliefs, the questions and answers that we have resolved, rejected or integrated, the metaphors, the symbols, the constructs, the deities. These are all like so many drops of water in that river, which makes us the fish.
And so I invite you to experiment with a simple ritual under this coming full moon. The full moon is in Scorpio, the sun in Taurus. And by the way, this is a very important full moon. It’s considered to be Buddha’s birthday, and in this Taurus Scorpio pairing, we have earth and body, water, transformation, rebirth. We also see the relationship between these goddesses. I said that the three— Artemis, Selene, and Hecate— exist in relation to each other, that each has different aspects of the moon. They give way to and define each other. In this particular full moon, Selene is the full moon and Hecate as that dark moon/new moon, underworld magician, is connected to the rebirth and the magic of the sign of Scorpio.
This is a good time to release things, to shed your skin like a snake, maybe release doubts and fears about cultivating your power in this time. There are many forms of power, to create beauty, to foster a sense of relatedness, even fleetingly by a smile. These are important powers and we need to know this and feed this understanding.
So here’s the ritual. Write a letter to Hecate. You might begin with these words. “Hecate, crone goddess of the dark moon, standing alone at the crossroads. You wait for lost travelers who seek their destiny…” and then just let the words flow. Don’t make a copy. Don’t put this in your journal. It’s best to use scrap paper. And then you might want to put on an article two of clothing that’s appropriate for this as ritual dress helps us. It tweaks the imagination and it can be very, very, very simple. And yes, Selene and Hecate are goddesses, but this is not the flowing robes and dangly jewelry type of event. Hecate, like Artemis and Miller’s Circe, is a working goddess. So put on your boots or your jeans or your shorts, maybe put on your work gloves or put them in your back pocket. Whatever signals to you, practical endeavors.
Go outside alone under the moon. Mark, the four directions. Do you know East, West, North, and South from where you live? This marking can be as simple as four stones or objects and you see, you created crossroads, right? Place yourself in the center at that crossroads. Read your letter out loud to the moon and then burn it or bury it. Remember reciprocity. Give thanks, give thanks to the moon and resolve to release whatever it is you’ve communicated to her. Don’t make copies, don’t make records, don’t engage in extended ruminations. It’s interesting. Sometimes the attachment to what we say we want to release is revealed in this desire to create artifacts, to remember that we acted. Don’t do it.
And there you have it. It’s that simple.
You can do this exact same thing under the new moon. Again, you’ll be with Hecate. That new moon energy is usually about what you want to plant, the possibilities that you would like to seed.
I want to close with a poem by Li Po from the eighth century China, that I think speaks to the themes and the spirit I’m trying to convey. It may give you some other ideas about how to celebrate the end of your ritual with Selene and Hecate, and that invisible presence of Artemis, the hunter with her night vision. Here’s the poem:
Amongst the flowers I
am alone with my pot of wine
drinking by myself; then lifting
my cup I asked the moon
to drink with me, its reflection
and mine in the wine cup, just
the three of us; then I sigh
for the moon cannot drink,
and my shadow goes emptily along
with me never saying a word;
with no other friends here, I can
but use these two for company;
in the time of happiness,
I too must be happy with all
around me; I sit and sing
and it is as if the moon
accompanies me; then if I
dance, it is my shadow that
dances along with me;
while still not drunk, I am glad
to make the moon and my shadow
into friends, but then when
I have drunk too much, we
all part; yet these are
friends I can always count on
these who have no emotion
whatsoever; I hope that one day
we three will meet again,
deep in the Milky Way.
— Li Po (8th century China)
And that’s it for me. Catherine Svehla and Myth Matters. Feel free to contact me if you have questions or comments about today’s program. Yes, we are in transition from that old name Myth in the Mojave, so if you are looking for links to the archives like the podcasts that I’ve mentioned, try searching under both. I am trying to be very efficient in this transition, but there are lots of little details and like the snake I mentioned in that full moon ritual, I am shedding a skin right now, so please have some patience with me. Look for Myth Matters and Myth in the Mojave and if you can’t find what you need, contact me.
I’m very grateful to all of you who support this program by sharing it with others and doubly grateful to those of you who also give me your financial support. Thank you so much for listening. Please tune in next time and until then, happy myth-making and keep the mystery in your life alive.
