HEKATE AND LEGBA
THE ‘HER’ STORY OF THE GREAT WITCH-GODDESS :
ANALYZING THE NARRATIVES OF HEKATE.*
Jacob Rabinowitz
I.
THE LOCI OF THE HECATE-MYTH’S MAIN NARRATIVE. RELIGION, LANGUAGE, GEOGRAPHY.
We can begin our discussion** of the ancient witch as literary myth with examining in depth the figure of Greek ‘nocturnal’ Goddess Hecate as it existed in the various literary and archaeological narratives and physical artifacts.
It will be shown that the witch myth, which begins in the 5th century, has relatively little to do with Hekate-worship as civil, mystery or household religion. It only preserves, in distorted form, certain striking traits of Hekate and her cultus.
Though the clear features of the Ur-Hekate are lost in the “dark backward abysm” of archaeology, such information as can be gleaned from her genealogy, geography, and relation to the prehistoric culture of Asia Minor as well as her links with Crete, Eleusis and Phrygio-Hittite Anatolia, all help to place Hekate in the tradition of the Near East's agricultural great goddesses, and will justify our using these latter to enhance our fragmentary image of Hekate.
Further, the shape of the hekataion, as well as other features of her depiction, will provide essential clues to her history, attributes and cultus.
As regards Hekate's antiquity, geography, etymology and genealogy, and role in esoteric religion, I have merely brought, albeit for the first time, into one convenient account, the researches of previous scholars. The placement of her depiction, as sacred pole, in its context of Near Eastern fertility fetishes is however entirely new.
By Hesiod's genealogy and explicit statement (Theog. 424-425) Hekate is a contemporary of the Titans, and has held such powers as are hers from the beginning (ap arches (1). I am inclined to take this statement almost literally, as I believe Hekate had, in Asia Minor, a real continuity with Neolithic, and perhaps even Paleolithic goddess worship. The pre-Olympian and even pre -Titanic wilderness, the bizarre eld which attaches to Hekate, to which Hesiod here alludes is due as much to her autochthonic as her chthonic spirit. Anatolia in Asia Minor, the very area that was home (2) to Hekate, saw the most impressively developed of the Near-Eastern Neolithic cultures, for which (by definition) the worship of a goddess or goddesses closely associated with the agricultural cycle played a most central role, and, what is most suggestive, a culture of demonstrable continuity with Paleolithic religious and artistic patterns. I shall here briefly survey these periods to refresh the reader's memory as to the historical setting. By 40,000 BP, in the upper Paleolithic, we find the “Venus” figures of which Willendorf furnishes the best known example -- stylized female forms with big fat attributes. The radical conventionalization of these figures, in a context of contemporary naturalistic painting and sculpture, suggests that a deliberately symbolic quality was sought -- the abstract quality of fertility which the images fairly proclaim.
Though too much can be made of the goddess worship, these figures imply (they occur in a much larger context of animal images and unexplained abstract symbols) they attest that fertility in land and animal, symbolized by a generous female form and regarded as numinous, was a concept dawning by 40,000 BP (3)
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THE ‘HER’ STORY OF THE GREAT WITCH-GODDESS :
ANALYZING THE NARRATIVES OF HEKATE.*
Jacob Rabinowitz
III
HECATE AND HER ‘STYLES OF PIETY
AN EXCERPT
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Ecstasy.
The ecstatic, orgiastic and frenzied character of Hekate and witch-rites is so well documented that we are justified in looking deep for its roots. On the one hand it is an ambiance generally associated with the rites of an agricultural Great Mother. Thus it comes about that the Roman Ceres has the power to send madness, as do her ghostly attendant spirits, the
Larvae; the early Latin word for madness is
larvatus (Plaut. frg. 48; Amph. frg. 6 and 8, Leo.) and “the insane are called
cerriti or
larvati. those who are attacked by Ceres or a Larva (“cerriti, larvati, qui aut Cerere out larva incursentur” (C.G.L. 5: 650).)
(60)
A more direct parallel would be Hekate's sister-goddess from Asia-Minor, Kybele, whose wild rites so astonished the ancient world that Kybele became almost an abstract emblem of frenzy.
(61) We have Apuleius’ circumstantial though biased description of her rites as involving cross-dressing, shouting, dancing, music, self-flagellation and wounding, and a trance from which the priest returns to his senses to reveal the Goddess' messages. Catullus gives a corroborative account of the Corybantic ecstasy, particularly useful for its description of the music and notable for its depiction of ecstatic self-castration (Cat. 63).
Ecstasy of this sort was more or less common to Near-Eastern religion.
Though attempts have been made to trace its "origin" to Thrace and Asia Minor, it seems to have been a constant and universal phenomenon, particularly as regards Cult prophets.
(62) The Sumerians describe a shaman-like “man who enters heaven” and the Canaanite cult of Baal included ecstatic seers (1 Kings 18:19 ff, 2 Kings 10:19, )
(63) while the transports of the Hebrew prophets require no comment. It would accordingly be rather surprising Hekate, as an agricultural Great Mother from the Near East,
didn't include ecstasy in her rites.
We possess both indirect and direct testimony that Hekate shared with Kybele the power to produce madness: on the one hand Hekate rose to her highest pitch of popularity the fifth century, in the context of the Peloponnesian war which saw the introduction of a number of emotional, orgiastic cults -- Kybele, her Thracian counterpart Bendis, the Thraco-Phrygian Sabazius, and the dying gods Attis and Adonis.
(64) A similar influx of ecstatic divinities was seen during the second Punic war in Rome (Livy, 25.1).
(65)
The time of Hekate's rise to general acceptance is then in itself a clue to her character. There is also explicit testimony from this period to bear out the assumption, as Dodds points out.
(66) Of the two lists of powers believed in the later fifth century to be associated with Madness --in neither of which curiously Dionysus figures -- both include Hekate and Cybele. The one list, by Euripides (Hipp. 141 ff.)t adds Pan and the Corybantes,
(67) while Hippocrates (Hier. Nous. 4: 16-33) attributing the various symptoms of epilepsy to various gods (cramps in the right side due to the Mother of the Gods, horselike whinnying to Poseidon, e.t.c.) makes the onslaught of Hekate and the Heroes responsible for night-terrors, madness, leaping up from bed and rushing out of doors (30-33). The Euripides passage is worth quoting in full: here the chorus describes Phaedra maddened by love:
“Maiden, thou must be possessed (
entheos) by Pan made frantic or by Hecate, or by the Corybantes dread, and Cybele the mountain mother. Or maybe thou have sinned against Dictynna, huntress queen, and art wasting for thy guilt in sacrifice unoffered. For she doth range the lakes' expanse and past the bounds of earth upon the ocean's tossing billows. (Eur. Hipp. 141-150)
(68). The (semi-Jesus) water-walking, like fire-walking or other such paranormal feats, are universal tokens of ecstasy — attainment of a superhuman state.
(69) Finally, Hekate is invoked in the magical papyri as a sender of
paroistresis “painful frenzy” (P.G.M. 2498-90) specifically, and generally asked to harry and madden the various recalcitrant objects of the love spells. A connection between Hekate and ecstatic modes of worship is also reflected in from her nymphlike features -- her physical appearance and her cave, both of which are attested in the Demeter and form the standard depiction on vases. The nymph figure should not be considered as separate from and inimical to Hekate’s great-mother status, but rather an aspect of it -- for the nymphs are, as we have seen above, also
kourotrophoi.
Nymphs were considered capable of inflicting madness on anyone who saw them at midday, the hour of their manifestation, emerging from the waters, e.g., Tiresias who saw Pallas and Charilco, or Actaeon who came upon Artemis and her nymphs. This is at root testimony to the ambivalence of water which on the one hand destroys and dissolves and on the other fertilizes and germinates.
(70) And, it should be noted, one of the Greek terms for madness is nvmpholeptos “siezed by a nymph”
(71). When we find then Hekate as a nymph, we should bear in mind not only its signification as a symbol of child-nurturing and fertility, but its relation to frenzy -- which is rooted in its association with water. That destructive and fertilizing qualities are attributed to water on the spiritual plane as well as the physical may be supported with a few examples: water is a universal symbol of the Imagination (the Phereian Spring of Greek poetic inspiration, the similar Norse Well of Imir;) and water as a symbol of the dissolution of personality is found in the Greek Lethe and the Hebrew “waves of Death” the ‘mishbre ha maweth’. The notion that the moon, with its puzzling and profound relation to water, produces madness is probably of a piece with this. The point here is that although an ecstatic mode of worship is common to the agricultural great goddesses
(72) madness and ecstasy will be particularly pronounced in those who are also associated with water (and finally the moon) as is Hekate, who is honored with fish sacrifices and genealogically made the mother of sea monsters.
Proceeding to the Roman record where we first begin to have really circumstantial and satisfying accounts of witchcraft (for now the depiction of witches displaces that of Hekate for reasons to be set forth in Part Two,) we have these depictions of Hekate's minions: in Horace,
“…ergo negatum vincor ut credam miser Sabella pectus et cremare carmina
caputque Mars a dissilire nenia”. (Hor. Epod.17: 27-29)
And so, ill-fated, I am driven to believe what I once denied: that Sabellian
(73) incantations can set the heart ablaze, and that by Narsian spells the head is rent asunder.
(74)
that is, witches can, like Hekate, inflict madness or ecstasy.
So when Tibullus wishes on his girlfriend sufferings comparable to those her bewitching beauty has visited on him, he says:
“sanguineas edat ilia dapes atque ore cruento tristia cum multo pocula felle bibat:
hanc volitent animae circum sua fata querentes semper, et e tectis strix violenta canat:
ipsa fame stimulante furens herbasque sepulcris
quaerat et a saevis ossa relicta lupis; currat et inguinibus nudis ululet per urbes,
post agat e txiviis aspera turba canum”. (Tib. 1: 5: 49-56)
Nay the hag's food be mixed with blood. Hay the cup she puts to her gory lips be bitterly charged with gall. Nay ghosts flit round her always, bemoaning their fate, and the fierce vampire bird shrill from her roof; and she herself, frantic from hunger's goad, hunt for weeds upon the graves and for bones which the wild wolves have left, and with middle bare run and shriek through the towns, and a savage troop of dogs from the crossways chase her from behind.
(75)
I cannot here begin to sort through the passage's kaleidoscopic profusion of images, nor need one to appreciate the poem. Tibullus had very little interest in witchcraft — his references to it are brief and conventional, with the exception of this passage where the heaped confusion testifies to a contempt for the components. In the course of this study every feature will find its treatment — for now we need only note the infliction of madness. Going from the witches1 ability to inflict madness to their capacity to embody it, we find much of the Bacchante about Horace’s witches.
In the fifth Epode we find:
“Canidia, brevibus implicate viperis
crines et incomptum caput...” (Ep. V: 15-16)
Canidia, her locks and dishevelled head entwined with short vipers...
(76)
“suggesting, by her disarrayed coiffure (not to mention the snakes,) the bacchante”.
Likewise - at expedita Sagana, per totam domam
spargens Avernales aquas, horret capillis ut marinus asperis
echinus aut currens aper. (Ep. V: 25-28)
But Sagana, with her skirt tucked up high, sprinkling through all the house water from Lake Avernus, bristles with streaming hair, like some sea-urchin or a racing boar.
(77) Again in the Satires we find Canidia and Sagana in a furious condition: Vidi egomet nigra succinctaxn vadere pal la Canidiam, pedibus nudis passoque capillo, cum Sagana maiore ululantem: pallor utrasque fecerat horrendas aspectu. scalpere terrain unquibus et pull am dive Here mordicus agnam coeperunt;(Hor. Sat. 1: 8: 23-28)
My own eyes have seen Canidia walk with black robe tucked up, her feet bare, her hair dishevelled, shieking with the elder Sagana. Their sallow hue had made the two hideous to behold. Then they began to dig up the earth with their nails, and to tear a black lamb to pieces with their teeth..
(78)
The disheveled hair and particularly the digging and tearing with bare nails and teeth similarly suggest bacchante-like condition. Likewise Ovid's Medea:
nine procul Aesoniden, procul nine iubet ire ministros»
et monet arcanis oculos removere profanos.
diffugiunt iussi, passis Medea capillis
bacchantum ritu flagrantis circuit aras... (Ov. Met. 7: 255-58)
Far hence she bade Jason go, far hence all the attendants, and warned them not to look with profane eyes upon her secret rites. They retired as she had bidden. Medea, with streaming hair after the fashion of the Bacchantes, moved round the blazing altars..
(79) -- the parallel with Bacchic frenzy is underlined by the insistence that all uninitiated keep away.
Similarly Dido invoking Hekate and Chaos is ‘crinis effusa sacerdos’, “priestess with streaming hair” (Vir. Aen. 4: 509.) Seneca's Medea shows a yet more pronouncedly Near-Eastern character, reminiscent of the priests of Baal who slashed themselves to heighten their frenzy in their prayer-contest with Elijah, or the self-flagellating Cybele-priests described by Apuleius: her children's nanny declares vidi furentem saepe. "I've often seen her raving," (SEN. Med. 673,) attonito gradu (Sen. Med. 675,) “staggering, stunned” with reference to Medea's stalking off to invoke Hekate's aid, and in the course of that evocation she behaves like a priest of Cybele: she declares
“...tibi nudato pectore maenas sacro feriam bracchia cultro. manet noster sanguis ad aras: assuesce, manus, stringere ferrum carosque pati posse cruores — sacrum laticem percussa dedi”. (Sen. Med. 805-11)
“.. .to thee with bared breast will I as a maenad smite my arms with the sacrificial knife. Let my blood flow upon the altars; accustom thyself, my hand, to draw the sword and endure the sight of beloved blood. Self-smitten have I poured forth the sacred stream”.
(80)
Special Note: Genita Mana.
We have record of dog sacrifice to Genita Mana, “the good birth-goddess”, whom Tabeling identifies with Mania, the Mater Larum. He shows that manus is an archaic Latin word for good, also used as a euphemism for ‘dead’. Parallels such as Zeus Meilichios (gentle, mild), Eukoline (content, friendly) for Hekate (Et. M.. s.v.). and of course the Eumenides, come immediately to mind. Dogs were sacrificed to Genita Mana so that no harm should come to household members. (Plut. Quaes. Rom. 52; Plut. N.H. 29: 58.)
Tabeling as usual uses Hekate as the outside parallel to establish Genita as a manifestation of Mania, citing further the association of dogs with the
Lares Praestites, whose altar they adorned (Ov. Fast. 5: 139 ff.)
(81) Again, little light is cast on the meaning of the hound-sacrifice, but we at least find that it is not unique to Greece as an apotropaic propitiation of a chthonic goddess, particularly in relation to birth and children.
Tabeling, Mater Larum, pp. 90-92
Special Excursus: Legba.
Here we’ll examine a certain African fertility and sacred-pole god who, after being transferred to the new world, becomes associated with the crossroad, and develops a lunar and supernatural side analogous to that of Hekate when fused with Enodia. The parallel is offered to lend plausibility to our model of Hekate's development, and particularly valuable since we know almost nothing of Enodia or the reasons why she was fused with Hekate. Seeing a similar syncretism in another context may show the logic of process in Hekate's case, even if it cannot provide the precise details.
In Dahomean theogony the original androgynous creator god Nana-Buluk gives birth to the twin regnant sky-gods, Mawu, the moon (who is female), and Lisa, the sun (who is male)
(82).
The first six offsprings of Mawu and Lisa inherited the various realms (earth, sky, sea, animal realm, air etc.;) Legba, the last-born, arrived in a world where all the realms had been already apportioned: accordingly Mawu made him her representative in all of them.
(83) Legba is then, like Hekate, a “World-Tree” Iggdrasil character, bridging the planes of being. This leads to his having, like Hekate, the particular role of intermediary, which is mythologically explained by Mawu-Lisa
(84) having assigned to each god a different and mutually incomprehensible language appropriate to their respective realms.
Legba alone is given knowledge of all, hence his role as interpreter.
“Therefore if any of the children of Mawu-Lisa, on earth or elsewhere, wish to address their parents or each other, they must transmit their messages through Legba, for they can no longer communicate directly. Thus Legba is everywhere; he is found even before the houses of the
vodu (spirit, deity) themselves, and this is because all living creatures must address themselves to him before they can be understood by the gods”.
(85)
In an extension of his interpreter's function, Legba interprets Efl (Destiny), the “writing” of Mawu, through, the patterns of the thrown palm-nuts or cowrie shells. He performs this service both for mankind
(86) and the other gods.
(87) The role of divine go-between may lead to the mediator's being held responsible for the success of prayers and petitions — and this may be in part behind the ambivalence which Hesiod ascribes to Hekate, stating that whom she wishes to she either helps or hinders in any of the enumerated spheres of activity. Such is certainly the case with Legba:
“They (messengers from the sky, prophets of Mawu) also said that every man has a god whom he must worship, but that without Efl he can never know his god, and that it is therefore necessary that all inhabitants of the earth worship Legba, for if they fail to do so, Legba will refuse to reveal to a man the writing that is his destiny; that if they do not address Legba first, he will not give to man the good things that are destined for him. Each day, they continued, Mawu gives the day's writing to Legba, thus telling him who is to die, who is to be born, what dangers this one is to encounter, what good fortune that one is to meet. And when Legba has this information, then, if he wishes, it is possible for him to change the fate in store for any man”.
(88)
We must then be chary of assigning the ambivalence of Hekate exclusively to the changeable mature of a Mother goddess -- such may be intrinsic to a deity who acts as go-between in prayers, as a result of his being blamed for their unsuccessful reception. This very point is made somewhat cynically in the tale “Why Trickster has a Bad Name”
Now it is said that in those days Legba did nothing without instructions from Mawu. But when there was evil, and the people cried out and went directly to Mawu, Mawu said to them, “It was Legba who did that”. All the people began to hate Legba. One night Legba went to see Mawu to ask her why, when there was evil, she called his name? Mawu said to him that in a country it was necessary that the roaster should be known as good, and that his servants be known as evil.
(89)
Though not directly suggested by Hesiod's narrative, such a disposition would fit in with his program of Zeus aggrandizement and his assertions of Zeus' absolute justice.
In Dahomey Legba is the first addressed in prayers; so he continues in Haiti, where he was brought by the slaves. Legba is the first god saluted in all ceremonies as the god who makes communication with the god-realm possible: his assistance is implored in the following terms:
(song of greeting to Legba):
Lo m'a tune, m'salie loa-vo Vodu Legba. l'uvri have pu nwe Pu mwe ga r&tre Lo m'a tune m'a remesve loa-vo. Abobo.
Atibon-Legba, remove the barrier for me, agoel
Papa Legba remove the barrier
So I may pass through
When I come back I will salute the lfia.
Vodoo Legba, remove the barrier for me
So that I may come back;
When I come back, I will thank the loa, Abobo.
(90)
One can imagine something rather similar being used for Hekate, who is always, as Hesiod tells us, called upon when prayers and sacrifices are made (Theog. 416-18).
Legba, because of his crucial role in communication between humans and gods, and even among the gods themselves, is identified in Haiti with St. Peter
(91) — a well-known catholically oriented person who holds the keys of heaven and earth. This calls to mind Hekate, whose priestess is called “Keybearer” in a temple inscription, and who is herself given a key as attribute in the Magical papyri.
Legba is also in Dahomey an apotropaic fertility god, represented in front of every house by a small earth-mound in which is planted a wooden or iron phallus.
(92) When represented in human form, it is "...as a torso and head or full length, and modeled in clay. If the Legba is one of a person of consequence, a fantastically large and erect penis is in evidence, and a jar, molded into the base of the figure at the front where offerings are placed, completes the statue.
About the central figure carved wooden statuettes representing the wives of Legba are placed, and the whole complex is sheltered by a conical thatched roof, the peak of which is perhaps no more than three feet above the ground.
(93) This fertility god acquires his perpetual
priapism when his wife Gbadu (i.e.. Fa) so cursed him for having slept with their daughter Minona.
(94)
Almost a similar narrative story is told of Persephone and Hermes (Cic. de Nat. Deor. 3: 22: 56), which we mentioned above in our discussion of the Great Mother's consort -- we shall frequently be making the point of Legba's similarity to Hermes. This will not vitiate the parallel we are drawing between Hekate and Legba: the Hermes analogies are only drawn in where Hekate is prevented by her sex from manifesting her nature in the same way.
To return to the message of the sky-prophets,
“...they taught...how necessary it is that Legba have a shrine outside each compound, facing the entrance to the dwelling-place, because in the sky he is always so with Mawu, and because, since the writing that controls human destiny is in the house of Mawu, it is necessary that Legba, who is always before the door of this house, be placed before the doors of the houses of men.
They said that before a man may eat, Legba must eat; that when a person goes away from his home he must tell Legba, that he may be led by a good road; that when one is troubled, the trouble should be confided to Legba that he may bring aid; in short, that when a man wishes to do anything at all in life, Legba must first be informed.
(95)
This calls to mind the Hekataia before the Athenian houses, which it was customary to consult before going on a journey. Whether this consultation was a matter of conferring or of consulting an oracle is uncertain.
Legba keeps this character in Haiti where he is given the epithet “Mait’-bitasyon” - “Master of the Dwelling”.
(96) In fact, his Priapus-like figure is set up everywhere, and especially in the market place, at the gateways, and at the crossroads.
(97) Later we shall return to the fateful character of this last placement.
In Dahomey Legba is the god above all others sacrificed to in childbirth,
(98) and also receives signal honor in marriage rites.
(99) So in Haiti, Legba is addressed in prayers at childbirth with the words that emphasize his combination of fertility and gate-opening associations, “Open the road for me...do not let any evil spirit bar my path”.
(100)
Similarly the Near eastern sacred-pole goddess Asherah was invoked in childbirth, as Patai conjectures,(
(101) where he interprets the cry of Leah when her maid Zilpha gives birth,
b’ashri. (Gen. 30: 12) as “with Asherah’s help”.
Hekate's role in birth has been adequately discussed above.
Inevitably Legba, as a god with birth and realm-crossing characteristics is also associated with initiation. But though Netraux mentions Legba many times in this context, it is always in his peripheral character of initial facilitator. One thinks of Hekate at the entry to the mysteries, and her similar station only in an introductory poem in the book of Orphic Hymns.
As one would expect after these copious instances of sacred pole symbolism, the most vital of all, that of world-tree, is not lacking. Though in Dahomey this appears principally in Legba's multi-realm range and role of intermediary, the symbolism is explicit in Haiti in the poteau mitain, the pole set up in the center of the Voodoo temple by which the gods (Loa) descend, which is also called the poteau Legba — that is, Legba is explicitly identified with the sacred pole that symbolises his activity, precisely as Hekate, who accesses the three worlds, is with the hekataion.
In Haiti Legba came to be especially posted at the crossroads, just as Hekate occupied Enodia's station. Thence he comes to have, under the epithet
Mait'-carrefour (102)— a connection with sorcery.
In fact
Mait'-carrefour would be a very adequate translation, adjusting for gender, into Creole, of Enodia. Thus many Haitian-magic formulae begin “By thy power, Master of the Crossroads”.
(103) This association leads to Legba's possession of a double nature in Haiti: just as in his primary identity of Legba he permits the entry of the divine, he facilitates, as Carrefour, incursions of the demonic, the powers which magicians employ, in an inversion of Legba's primary role, to cause infertility and impotenceJfo/1 Legba also protects against these demons, just as Hekate is supposed by the Greeks to have done at her crossroads shrines. Finally, Legba is identified with the Sun and Carrefour with the Noon, and Carrefour is considered to be at the zenith of his powers at midnight
(104). Legba's ambivalence is the twin of Hekate’s -- and represented by similar solar/lunar referents. It also worth here recalling that Dahomean Legba is the son of the Sun (Lisa) and the Moon (Mawu). Perhaps the best overall explanation of this recurring pattern of solar/lunar genealogy for sacred pole deities, is that an intermediary or world-tree deity tends to be associated with all liminal conditions — of time as well as space. Thus we may read the genealogies of Hekate and Legba as placing their world-spanning family trees “at the crossroads of day and night”.
Legba was not, in Dahomey, particularly associated with the physical crossroads. Aiza is the spirit that possesses that station: its earth-mound is placed beside every compound, principal crossroads, city-gates, and the entrances to the country's districts, as well as the marketplace, where it is usually placed beside a sacred tree
(105). The exact functions of Aiza seems to be analogous to the Roman
Lar, a combination of ancestor-spirit and boundary-marking roles. Aiza is the impersonal power that holds the sib (patrilineal clan), district or community together as a self-conscious group;
(106) variant traditions describe Aiza mound as the abode of the spirit of a sib's
tohwivo (founder), and indeed the resting place of his bones, and, conversely, as the non-mortuary shrine of a protective
vodu (spirit)
(107). The more extended powers of Aiza seem similar to those of Hermes: it is given offerings on the basis of its help in commerce,
(108) and has an important if ancillary role in religious ceremonies, particularly initiation
(109).
The crossroads themselves have some association with sorcery in Dahomey: for example, during a smallpox epidemic, which is viewed as a punishment by the earth-god Sagbata (the pox is seen as an illness which makes “the grain men have eaten come out on their skin”) for general wickedness: to allay it, men and women must confess their wrongdoings and all sorcerers must throw away their paraphernalia at the crossroads.
(110) Similarly, on a person's death, his magical protective charms (
gbo) are either buried with him, or thrown away at the crossroads or near the family Aiza mound.
This excursus on the Lar-Mercurius-like Aiza is to show that in Dahomey Legba was not associated with the highly developed crossroads deity: once in Haiti, Legba, the sacred-pole fertility god is somehow associated with the crossroads and immediately becomes the god of sorcerers. It cannot be known whether Legba met in Haiti an Enodia-like deity whom he fused with, or whether (and I think likelier) a number of related concepts from Africa were telescoped into the Haitian Legba.
In either case the parallel with Hekate is instructive, for she presents the similar complication of a sacred-pole and fertility deity by fusion with a crossroads spirit.
The alteration in Legba after his arrival at the Haitian crossroads is made even clearer when we consider that in Dahomey he does not possess a funereal aspect: a man's relation to his Legba ends with his funeral, at which the Legba statue that stood guard before his compound is desacralized and shattered.
(111)
Curiously the dog is associated with Dahomean Legba, and indeed is his creation. The association is that he is, like Legba, a leader of men along roads, and this creature's reverent nature is signalized by his habit of burying things — interpreted as making offerings for the ancestors.
(112) Also, should dogs eat the offerings left at the always outdoor Legba shrines, they are considered to be accepted by the deity.
(113) Both the path-leading and offering-eating capacities of Legba's dogs provide an interesting commentary on Hekate's hounds.
Dahomean Legba is associated with magic, which he invented, but his relation to it is more like Hermes than Hekate. He created it as a prank (magic snakes to bite people so he could sell them cures), and thereafter gave the magical arts to a man named Awe, who is the culture-hero for magic. Awe is a of type human audacity, similar to Sisyphus or Spiel Hansel — he makes a charm that incapacitates death, climbs to heaven on a thread as long as a day and a night to challenge Mawu to a knowledge contest, etc. Though
Legba is technically the origin of magic, Awe is the great magician.
(114)
Also, magic is not distinct from religion in Dahomey:
Gbo (a term sometimes translated as ‘charm’ or ‘fetish’) is a general power which all the gods possess: there is no cultic practice without it: there are a vast range of
gbo for every aspect of life, and indeed it constitutes the least organized but most pervasive Dahomean religious activity.
(115)
Sorcerers or
azondato do exist in Dahomey: they are those who have traffic with unquiet ghosts, and create zombies.
(116) Among their reputed powers are the ability to change into bats or other animals. These are not however entirely mythical persons — unpopular or ill disposed persons may acquire the reputation of an
azondato(117)— not surprising in a society where everyone makes use of
gbo. Their patron is Minona, Legba's mother or sister, but this may not be taken as evidence that Legba is particularly involved in sorcery. The guilds of
gbo manufacturers, who are a legitimate and integral part of Dahomean society, are as a whole vowed to the fa. deities, to which Legba and Minona belong,
(118) and so the
azondato may be expected to have a particular relation to one of these ?a. related gods without compromising them. Minona does not suffer a loss of esteem or trust from this aspect of her nature: ordinarily an altar to Minona, who is the goddess of Woman, would stand in house of a man's first wife.
(119)
Haitian parallels in popular worship for these kindred spirits, Hekate and Dahomean Legba, are not lacking: in Haiti we find the manger-mort feast ritual offered the dead, of which, in contrast to the tradition of Greek chthonic sacrifices, the living partake after it has been symbolically presented — thereupon a calabash full of the food is placed at the crossroads for Legba,
(120) precisely like Hekate’s “nocturnal banquets”.
Further, Legba is non-syncretically represented as a feeble old man dressed in rags, pipe in mouth, haversack over his shoulder, leaning on a crutch whence his nickname Legba-pied casse, “Legba Lame-foot”. In this guise he is identified with St. Lazarus and St. Anthony the Hermit.
(121) Generally imagined as a ragged old man who wanders the highways, he is associated, like Hekate, with the poor and the marginal, thieves and prostitutes, all who frequent the crossroads at nightfall.
(122)
The Legba-Hekate comparison is of course not exact. Hekate, as she appears in the Greek record is above all an Agricultural Great Goddess (though no doubt she was far more complex in ancient Turkey): we possess only a simplified outline of Hekate. It is above all her personality that eludes us in the absence of her myths. Legba however comes to us as a highly developed trickster, much like Hermes. We will give one example.
The Dahomeans think of the cosmos as ruled by the pantheons, or better families, of sky, thunder (including rain and sea) and earth deities, a threefold mirror of Dahomean society run by the king and his officialdom. The role of Legba and Eft is not only in making known the wishes and intentions of the gods, but for cleverly circumventing them, much as one bribes, cajoles or best of all outwits the bureaucracy -- a pastime which the Dahomeans greatly relish.
(123) Now Legba is especially noted for keeping the celestial government at bay: finding that Mawu is keeping too close an eye on his activities, for in those days heaven was only a few feet above the earth, he persuades an old woman to throw her dishwater up rather than simply away, drenching daily the intrusive Mawu — a practice which finally brought about the present elevation of sky from earth.
(124)
What is important to show here is that Legba is very much like the Greek Hermes, from his roguish persona down to his association with roads and (later) magic, and that like Hermes, Legba is not particularly infernal. It is only on his removal to Haiti and his placement at the crossroads that he becomes decidedly a god of sorcerers.
Similarly Hekate, who shares the fertility and sacred-pole characteristics, whence the world-tree character, with Legba, is as an agricultural goddess only partially associated with the dead, as a moment of her becoming. On her removal to Greece, she is placed at the crossroads and she becomes decidedly the goddess of sorcerers. This parallel should add general plausibility to our model of Hekate's basic nature and eventual demonization.
