Most classical studies scholars hope to make significant contributions to the understanding of Greek and Roman texts and what they can tell us about religion, culture, and society in the ancient Mediterranean.1 It is rare for those contributions to travel far beyond the academy and even rarer for them to influence popular culture and religion. But that is exactly what Sarah Iles Johnston has done through her work. In this Preface, we will argue that her scholarship, from her ground-breaking first book, Hekate Soteria (1990), to her latest, Gods and Mortals: Ancient Greek Myths for Modern Readers (2023), has had a broad influence outside of the academy, from shaping narrative, ritual and belief among modern goddess worshippers, to re-presenting ancient Greek myths to a new generation of readers, all contributing to a reshaping of the notion of classical myth as a living genre. This ability to transcend disciplinary boundaries and the academy itself makes Johnston rather extraordinary in the world of scholarship. In large part, what gives her contributions such broad influence and lasting power is her openness to the world beyond the academy, and her continued willingness to interact with it and have it inform her work. In this Preface to her festschrift, we consider the nature of Johnston’s contributions and the characteristics that have made them go beyond the limits of most academic work. In so doing, we will also consider the observations of other contributors to this collection who have remarked on new versions and interpretations of Greek myths which make these sacred stories a living tradition. Our observations and those of the other contributors build on Johnston’s contention that stories, even non-religious ones, can shape lived religion.2
We begin by considering Johnston’s first major academic work, Hekate Soteria: a Study of Hekate’s Role in the Chaldean Oracles and Related Literature (1990). This book was among the first academic texts that brought Hekate into public consciousness in an accessible way. As such, it was largely responsible for the re-imagination and popularization of the goddess Hekate among contemporary witches, Neopagans, and magical practitioners. Encompassing both Wicca and the goddess movement referenced by Jan Bremmer in “From Goddesses to the Goddess: An Itinerary from Ancient Greece to Modern California” (in this volume), modern Paganisms are a diverse set of new religious movements that draw inspiration from ancient polytheistic worship. Today, Hekate is worshipped by Wiccans and witches, Hellenic Polytheists, Luciferians, and magical practitioners who do not affiliate with a specific tradition of modern Paganism. There is a plethora of trade books devoted to her, as well as numerous online courses in which practitioners can deepen their devotion to her through rituals and spells inspired by the Chaldean Oracles, the PGM, and the many classical texts in which she appears as a character. In the course of thirty years of ethnographic fieldwork with Neopagans, Sabina Magliocco has observed countless rituals invoking Hekate, including numerous Hekate’s suppers, ritual offerings at crossroads performed on the dark moon in accordance with descriptions from Aeschylus and the Orphic Hymn to Hekate, as described by Johnston in her work. Hekate is the tutelary deity of numerous covens, or groups of contemporary witches, and many witches and Pagans consider her their personal matron goddess. She also appears in spells and invocations on WitchTok, a section of the social media platform TikTok dedicated to magic and spell craft.3 The worship of Hekate is thus very much a living phenomenon. Folklore scholar and performance artist Kay Turner calls Hekate “a goddess for the twenty-first century.”4
Hekate’s overwhelming popularity is due in no small part to the publication of Johnston’s book. As Magliocco argued in Witching Culture: Folklore and Neopaganism in America (2004), her ethnography of the modern Pagan movement, many members of this new religious movement are what Michel DeCerteau would call “textual poachers,”5 consumers of popular culture who put the elements they appropriate to uses never intended by the authors. Henry Jenkins elaborated on this concept in his study of television fandom,6 arguing that viewers engage in a form of bricolage in which they recombine elements from popular culture in ways that satisfy their own aesthetic desires.7 Magliocco proposed the early Neopagans as academic poachers, “poaching in the stacks” for academic scholarship to use as inspiration for their rituals, texts, and narratives.8 Their sources were mostly nineteenth-century anthropology, classics, archaeology, and folklore studies texts about the practices and beliefs of pre-Christian societies. The process of poaching in the stacks continues to be central to this new religious movement; many practitioners are unusually well-informed about academic scholarship and may even be academics themselves. These readers avidly consume new scholarship related to their areas of interest. Johnston’s Hekate Soteria was published at an important juncture in the development of modern Paganism: a time when witches and Pagans were searching for sources on the worship of ancient goddesses, especially Hekate, who has long been associated with magic and witchcraft. It was perfectly poised to inspire a new generation of textual poachers among contemporary Pagans.
Johnston is not unaware of the popularity of her work on Hekate among Neopagans. In “Whose Gods Are These? A Classicist Looks at Neopaganism,” she attributes it to her tendency to impose a “coherence and singularity of meaning” on material about Hekate, creating a consistent story about the goddess that makes it appealing to readers.9 Building on Johnston’s work, Laura Feldt notes in “From Myth to Religious Narrative: Mediality, Emotion, Experience” (in this volume) that such stories are also dynamic and relational and rely on cognitive and emotional engagement to form identity, as well as mediality, which refers to how form and content influence the way stories are received. While we would not disagree with Johnston on this particular, it is important to understand why Hekate’s story is so appealing to modern Pagans. As presented in Hekate Soteria, it transformed Hekate in the popular imagination from a shadowy goddess associated with graveyards, ghosts, and malefic magic to a torch-bearing light-bringer, a guardian of the crossroads, a queen of the cosmos whose realms include earth, sea, and sky: a soteira, or saviour, which made the goddess more approachable to modern Pagans, witches, and magical practitioners.
In order to fully understand the appeal of Johnston’s Hekate to this demographic, it is necessary to know more about contemporary witches, Pagans, and magical practitioners. The movements have historical roots in nineteenth-century Romanticism, with its idealization of nature and location of authenticity in the ancient past.10 Arising in opposition to both Christianity and Enlightenment hyper-rationalism, modern Paganisms share a view of the natural world as sacred and animated; humans are part of nature and stand in relationship with other-than-human beings, from deities and land spirits to the spirits of animals, plants, and the earth itself.11 As practitioners of minority religions, they see themselves occupying a marginal role in society, yet find the power of resistance in the margins. They exalt the liminal, what Victor Turner would call “anti-structure,”12 for its rich creative and regenerative potential. While not every denomination is polytheistic,13 all include goddesses in their pantheons. Goddesses embodying strength, power, healing, and protection are particularly favoured: in addition to Hekate, Brigid, the Morrigan, Cerridwen, Diana/Artemis, Demeter, and Persephone are among the most popular.
Practitioners of these new religious movements are very diverse but come mostly from middle-class backgrounds and have a higher-than-average level of education.14 They have a complex relationship with academia: whereas they draw from academic sources to inform themselves about ancient pagan customs, they often lack interest in theory and interpretation, which would help them put the sources they read into a broader, more critical perspective. Some are even hostile to academia, especially when scholarly interpretations contrast with their own sacred narratives. When Hekate Soteria was first published in the early 1990s, Neopagans frequently turned to academic sources due to the lack of trade publications on esoteric topics. In contrast, today’s practitioners get their information from the Internet, drawing on a vast body of material, from websites and YouTube videos to social media posts, memes, and online games, which is of uneven reliability. Some of this material builds on academic scholarship, but the information is digested, reinterpreted, and at times distorted.
In Hekate Soteria, Johnston emphasizes two aspects of the goddess: her liminality and association with boundary crossings and transitions, and her role as cosmic soul in the Chaldean Oracles. These parts of Hekate’s mythos are extremely appealing to contemporary Pagans. While her role as the witch goddess appeals to Wiccans and other Pagans who identify as witches, her association with liminality and transitions, particularly her role as guardian of Persephone in her underworld journey, gives her broader appeal among a group of religionists who identify with liminality and see themselves as walkers between the worlds, mediators between spiritual and material realms. Modern Pagans who see themselves as boundary-crossers on many levels can easily claim Hekate as their matron deity. They also invoke her as a guide through significant life transitions.15 In addition, Hekate’s association with theurgy appeals to both theurgists—Wiccans practice a form of theurgy when they “draw down,” or embody deities as part of their rites—and magical practitioners, who call upon her to assist them in their spells. Hekate’s worship has developed to reflect her modern devotees’ individualized needs and their pursuit of spiritual growth as well as their longing to establish personal relationships with the divine. It is Hekate’s multiple facets and complexities that make the goddess appealing and explosively popular among contemporary Pagans.
Hekate’s contemporary devotees venerate her in a wide variety of acts of worship, such as by creating altars, making offerings, adapting or writing invocations and hymns, and creating other art forms such as illustrations.16 Modern worshippers encourage dedicating a sacred altar space to the goddess, which can include images of Hekate, symbols associated with her, as well as tools, correspondences, and personal items to express their devotion and immerse themselves in magical practices.17 Offerings are left on the altar as a “symbolic gesture” to show affection and gratitude and include traditional foods such as bread, cakes, or garlic, as well as the more contemporary offering of moon water: water that has been left overnight under the full moon to absorb its light.18 Some devotees also regard volunteering at animal shelters, cleaning up at home, donating to food banks, performing rituals on the dark moon, and practicing green witchcraft involving plants and herbs as acts of devotion.19 According to Brannen (2019), the best way to honour Hekate is through personal development, during which devotion becomes a dynamic process that helps strengthen the practitioner’s personal and intimate relationship with Hekate.20
Across the diversity of solitary practitioners, covens, and traditions working with Hekate, all focus on achieving a sense of connection to nature and search for “personal, ecstatic and embodied experiences,” mainly through rituals.21 One of the central devotional acts that continues to be practiced and adapted by various contemporary Pagans is the Hekate Deipnon or Hekate’s supper, which entails a ritual and leaving offerings at the crossroads, typically on a dark moon. These offerings originally included garlic, eggs, cakes, wine, bread, and several types of fish, as well as oxothumia and katharmata—the remains of burnt offerings and ritual litter, respectively. Pagans today may also include as offerings crystals, dog fur, and anything else that feels intuitively appropriate and is environmentally degradable or safe to leave at the crossroads. As typical for modern witchcraft, practitioners cast a protective circle when arriving at the crossroads and invoke Hekate so that the goddess knows the offering is intended for her.22 In the past, Hekate suppers were mainly intended to ask for protection from dangers at the crossroads.23 In modern times, they express gratitude and honour the goddess.
Naturally, the ways Hekate is worshipped have undergone significant changes and adaptation over time, reflecting her devotees’ transforming needs and values in the modern world. Many traditional acts of devotion and practices have been altered or discontinued altogether. For instance, the sacrifice of black dogs was one of the primary devotional practices in antiquity but is considered taboo today. Instead, volunteering at dog shelters should substitute “the sacrifice of old with a modern approach.”24 Thus, even though contemporary Pagans know they cannot reconstruct ancient rituals completely, they creatively and intuitively adapt them to a modern context to “form a bridge through time and space” that links the contemporary world with antiquity, technology to nature, and humanity with the divine.25 However, Hekate’s symbolism, such as keys, torches, daggers, and animals like dogs and serpents, remains as relevant today as in antiquity.26 Moreover, devotees calling for Hekate’s aid still interpret dogs barking or black dogs appearing as an announcement of her presence.27
To summarize, Hekate’s significant roles as a liminal goddess, guide and intermediary, light-bearer, mistress of the moon, as well as the World Soul in late antiquity, as described in the work of Sarah Iles Johnston, have been highly influential for modern Pagans. In contemporary times, Hekate is perceived to be the goddess of physical but also of spiritual crossroads and thresholds. Hekate’s ancient role “as a goddess who lights the path of transitions” persists to this day; she is still called upon to oversee the worshipper’s crossover of liminal points during physical journeys, rites of passage like birth and death but also during inner transformational journeys such as shadow work.28 Finally, Hekate is a popular deity because she goes against the mainstream; her complexity is alluring, and she is also often referred to as the “Guardian of the Marginalized.”29 As Jack Grayle argues in his online classes on Hekate and the PGM, “Hekatean magic is outlaw magic for difficult times.” Hekatean magic was illegal in antiquity, yet it drew the interest of many people who felt marginalized and excluded from power by the larger events of the period. Grayle sees many parallels between late antiquity, the period in which the Chaldean Oracles were compiled, and the early twenty-first century: globalization (in late antiquity, this comprised Eurasia and the Mediterranean world), climate change, wealth inequalities, and corrupt leadership. He believes that the resurgence of interest in Hekate is due to a similar desire of those excluded from the power structures to access a source of control in their lives (Grayle, personal communication, 12/27/2023). Folklorist and performance artist Kay Turner agrees. Writing about the relevance of Hekate’s mythos today, she states:
How does Hekate’s story—her story within stories—matter? If stories tell stories that link to concepts and systems, I have suggested several important ways in which Hekate speaks to twenty-first century urgencies. … A guardian moving effortlessly through her domains even as she dwells simultaneously in all of them, Hekate maps a unified ecosystem of which we are only a small and ultimately disposable part. At this point, her realms are under the relentless threat of human incursion, opportunism, and brutality: razing the rain forests, mining the ocean floor, poisoning the air, eroding the ozone layer, and sending rich white men on rocket ship joy rides to the moon. That greed and avarice upsets natural balance and harmony may strike as a dusty moral cliché, but Hekate reminds us that long before and long after we fail to learn its obligatory lesson, her Kosmic story of death and renewal will prevail, even if we do not. … A goddess of all matter, and all that matters, Hekate’s reign over materiality—the very stuff that comprises all nature and the cosmos—will not end. What is made she unmakes, reverses, and rearranges. Her mandate is change or be changed.30
In giving modern readers access to Hekate’s mythos through her book Hekate Soteria, Sarah Iles Johnston contributed significantly to the reconstruction of the goddess’ worship today, giving modern Pagans a deity whose aspects uniquely satisfy the needs of worshippers in the twenty-first century.
But while many scholars might feel resentful or annoyed at having their work poached by non-academics to create a whole new mythos, Johnston, to her credit, leaned into this realization, allowing it to stimulate further theoretical insights. We have already discussed how, in her article “Whose Gods Are These? A Classicist Looks at Neopaganism” (2011), she muses on the specific features of her presentation of Hekate’s story that led modern Pagans to embrace her scholarship. In 2012, Johnston decided to attend PantheaCon, one of the largest Neopagan conventions in North America, and ask Neopagans themselves for insights on one of her research questions. She was intrigued by how Neopagans created rituals based on ancient myths and curious about their interpretation of a ritual associated with the worship of Demeter Cthonia involving the sacrifice of four heifers at her temple. In front of a packed convention room—her much-anticipated presentation was attended by several hundred audience members—she solicited interpretations and listened attentively to Neopagans’ observations, insights, and suggestions. Her active engagement with this new religious movement was quite extraordinary for a Classics scholar. It also led her to new insights on the relationship between myth, ritual, and experience, ultimately contributing to her later work, The Story of Myth (2018). This work explores how Greek myths created complex relationships between the Greeks and their gods, leading to life-changing personal experiences both in and outside of ritual contexts. Her insights were informed in part by contemporary narratives that inspire audience participation, textual poaching, and creativity—for example, the Star Trek and Harry Potter worlds—but also by her experiences with Neopagans, for whom Hekate and other deities are very real persons with deep influences on their everyday lives. Johnston concluded that for the ancient Greeks, as well as for modern readers, myths are powerful, living stories. Perhaps this understanding inspired Johnston to try her hand at the business of reinterpretation, as she subsequently did in her latest work, Gods and Mortals: Ancient Greek Myths for Modern Readers (2023). This book, aimed at a popular audience that includes young people (her grandsons were among its intended readers), retells the classic Greek myths in accessible language, often telling the story through women’s eyes.
The arc of Johnston’s scholarship has taken her from writing for other Classicists to writing for a general audience; from focusing on a set of often fragmentary mythic narratives about Hekate, to a broad view of myth as a type of narrative that engages both religious belief and experience in a living relationship with its ever-changing audience. We see this theme reflected in the contributions of several authors to this volume. As we have already noted, Jan Bremmer traces the story of Hekate from ancient times, to her embrace by contemporary goddess worshippers, attesting to the adaptability of the Hekatean mythos. Julia Nelson Hawkins and Tom Hawkins show how Chickasaw poet Linda Hogan reinterpreted the story of Medea, based in part on Johnston’s scholarship, to create her performance piece Indios, in which she juxtaposes Medea’s story with that of her titular character, an Indigenous North American healer who experiences the violence of European colonization. Both women are outsiders in the cultures into which they are forced to marry; both are skilled healers, perhaps magicians—though as the authors write, “medicine and magic are difficult to disentangle,” and both are accused of the unspeakable crimes of witchcraft and killing their own children. From her perspective as an Indigenous writer, Hogan is acutely aware of the colonialism implicit in the myth of Medea. She identifies with Medea as another victim of betrayal by a foreign husband and his culture. Laura Feldt demonstrates how Classical myths have consistently been reinterpreted in various contexts for different purposes. Feldt’s work also exemplifies how Johnston’s narrative of Hekate evolved into a popular religious narrative that is shaping personal and collective identities without transmitting beliefs, one kind of truth or reality model, but by inspiring Neopagans to establish relationships with “superhuman beings and powers,” immerse themselves and engage in embodied experientiality.
This wide-ranging scholarship on the lives of myths inspired by Johnston’s work begs the question of whether Jenkins’ metaphor of “textual poaching” is adequate to describe the processes we are witnessing. “Poaching” implies illicit activity, as if the inspiration that poets such as Hogan and creatives such as Sorita D’Este, Grayle, and Jason Miller derived from Johnston’s scholarship were somehow illegitimate. Yet Johnston has demonstrated that this deep engagement with stories is a vital part of culture, from ancient Greece to the present day. We need a different theoretical model to describe the process: one that recognizes the centrality of scholarly contributions to the creation of tradition. The lives of myths have never been confined to the academy; they have always been and will always be part of our shared imaginaries.
Some of the research in this article on contemporary Pagan practices surrounding Hekate was done by Caroline Stampliaka in a paper entitled “The Revival and (Re)construction of Hekate’s Worship among Contemporary Pagans,” submitted in Sabina Magliocco’s class RGST 400 Advanced Seminar in the Study of Religion at the University of British Columbia in April 2023.
Sarah Iles Johnston, The Story of Myth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018).
Angela Puca, “Working with Hecate Today,” Angela’s Symposium, July 3, 2022, video, 22:20, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_-9X08-Zxg.
Kay Turner, “Hekate: Goddess for the Twenty-First Century,” in Enchanted Pedagogies: Archetypes, Magic, and Knowledge, ed. Kari Adeleide Razdow (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2023), 183.
Michel DeCerteau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984).
Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (New York: Routledge, 1993).
Jenkins, Textual Poachers, 26.
Sabina Magliocco, Witching Culture Folklore and Neo-Paganism in America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 54.
Sarah Iles Johnston, “Whose Gods Are These?: A Classicist Looks at Neopaganism,” Dans Le Laboratoire De L’historien Des Religions (2011), 126.
Ronald Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).
Kirner (2016); Sabina Magliocco, “Beyond the Rainbow Bridge: Vernacular Ontologies of Animal Afterlives,” Journal of Folklore Research 55, no. 2 (2018): 39–67.
Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (London and New York: Routledge, 1969).
Some Wiccans are duotheistic, venerating a goddess and a god; others subscribe to a Neoplatonic ontology, in which all deities are reflections of a single nous, or divine force. Some goddess monotheists see “the goddess” as a single divine entity, of which all goddesses are reflections.
Sabina Magliocco, Witching Culture Folklore and Neo-Paganism in America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 61.
Marguerite Johnson, “Drawing Down the Goddess: The Ancient Female Deities of Modern Paganism,” in Handbook of Contemporary Paganism, eds. James Lewis and Murphy Pizza (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 316; Sarah Iles Johnston, Hekate Soteira: A Study of Hekate’s Role in the Chaldean Oracles and Related Literature, American Classical Studies 21 (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1990), 144.
Tina Caro, “Goddess Hekate: Prayers, Symbols, Books & More,” Magickal Spot, February 19, 2023, https://magickalspot.com/hekate/; Cyndi Brannen, Keeping Her Keys (John Hunt Publishing, 2019), 65.
Brannen, Keeping Her Keys, 224–225.
Brannen, Keeping Her Keys, 114; Caro, “Goddess Hekate.”
Brannen, Keeping Her Keys, 115; Teaandrosemary, “Hecate: How to Work With the Goddess of Magic & Necromancy,” Tea & Rosemary, January 4, 2022, https://teaandrosemary.com /hecate-goddess/.
Brannen, Keeping Her Keys, 114.
Sabina Magliocco, “Neopaganism,” in The Cambridge Companion to New Religious Movements, eds. Olav Hammer and Mikael Rothstein, Cambridge Companions to Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 154, https://doi:10.1017/CCOL97805 21196505.011.
Teaandrosemary, “Hecate: How to Work with the Goddess of Magic & Necromancy.”.
Sarah Iles Johnston, “Crossroads,” Zeitschrift Für Papyrologie Und Epigraphik 88 (1991): 219, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20187554.
Sorita D’Este and David Rankine, Hekate Liminal Rites: A Historical Study of the Magic, Spells, Rituals, and Symbols of the Torch-Bearing Triple Goddess of the Crossroads (London: Avalonia, 2009), 150, 156; Brannen, Keeping Her Keys, 115, 173.
Magliocco, “Neopaganism,” 161–162.
D’Este, Hekate Liminal Rites, 152–153; Caro, “Goddess Hekate: Prayers, Symbols, Books & More”; Brannen, Keeping Her Keys, 166, 171.
D’Este, Hekate Liminal Rites, 150; Brannen, Keeping Her Keys, 173.
Johnson, “Drawing Down the Goddess,” 318, 324; Nereas López Carrasco, “The Conception of the Goddess Hecate in Plutarch,” in Plutarch’s Religious Landscapes (Boston: Brill, 2020), 268, https:/fdoi:10.1163/9789004443549; Erin Dragonsong, “Invoking Hecate * Wicca,” Wicca-Spirituality, accessed April 16, 2023, https://www.wicca-spirituality.com/invoking -hecate.html; Teaandrosemary, “Hecate: How to Work with the Goddess of Magic & Necromancy.”
Brannen, Keeping Her Keys, 111.
Kay Turner, “Hekate: Goddess for the Twenty-First Century,” 193.