The Horse, the Snake and the Dog: The Three Heads of the Real Queen of the Night

At the dark of the moon, an ancient goddess walked through the roads of ancient Greece, accompanied by sacred dogs and bearing a blazing torch. Occasionally she stopped to gather offerings left by her devotees where three roads crossed, because she was honored in places where one could look three ways at once. The goddess herself could look three ways because she herself had three heads: head of a snake, a horse and a dog. The dog, according to the Greeks, was the Trojan Queen Hecuba who leapt into the sea after the fall of Troy and was transformed by the goddess. 

The mysterious goddess, Hecate, is closely connected to the lunar phases. Although she is not mentioned in the Homeric poems, Hecate is featured in the writings of Hesiod as an august figure, daughter of titans Perses and Asteria, the star-lighted splendour of space, honoured above all by Zeus and the other gods although she was born a titan and was not a part of the Olympian pantheon.

Hecate’s worship traveled south from her original Thracian homeland and continued into classical times, both in the private form of Hecate suppers and in public sacrifices, celebrated by Caberioi (“great ones”) with honey, lambs, dogs and sometimes human slaves. In the Argonautica, Jason placates Hecate in a ritual prescribed by Medea, her priestess: bathed at midnight in a stream of flowing water, and dressed in dark robes, Jason is to dig a round pit and over it cut the throat of an ewe, sacrificing it and then burning it whole on a pyre next to the pit. He is told to sweeten the offering with a libation of honey, then to retreat from the site without looking back, even if he hears the sound of footsteps or barking dogs. 

As queen of the night, Hecate was sometimes said to be the moon-Goddess in her dark form, as Artemis was the waxing moon and Selene the full moon. However, she may as well have been also  the goddess of the underworld as she ruled the spirits of the dead. As the queen of dead, she ruled the powers of regeneration. Endowed with a triple dominion in earth, sea, and heaven, she sits in the seat of judgment beside kings, crowns whom she will with victory in war and in the games, grants wealth and honour, is patron of riders and mariners, and is generally Kourotrophos (“a Nursing-mother”). This remarkable goddess, whose character seems more complicated than that of an ordinary divinity, and who receives the utmost respect from the Olympian gods, gives us a striking analogy with Sin, the august Moon-god of the Euphrates Valley who was also born from the stars. wise and ancient ruler of the sea, connected with growth.

Sin is represented by the three tens from the natural circumstance that his course was completed in about thirty days. But this is only one aspect of his triplicity as he was also regarded by the Babylonians as having a threefold movement, one in longitude, one in latitude, and one in an orbit. As people considered the real or supposed different movements movements, they see the orb itself and noticed its three phases: Crescent-moon, Half-moon, and Full-moon. In the Argonautica, Hecate Triformis appears as Horse, Dog, and Snake. Sir G. W. Cox (1827 – 1902) connects the Horse with the Full-moon, the Snake with the Waxing-moon, and the Dog with the Waning-moon.

The earliest known monument of Hecate is a small terracotta in Athens, found with a dedication to Hecate, in 6th century style of writing. The goddess is seated on a throne with a chaplet bound round her head, without recognizable attributes and character, and the main historical value of this work is that it proves the single shape to be her earlier form, and her recognition at Athens to be earlier than the Persian invasion in 492 BC.

The 2nd century writer Pausanias says that Hecate was first depicted in triplicate by the sculptor Alcamenes in the Greek Classical period of the late 5th century BCE which was placed before the temple of the Wingless Nike in Athens. Greek anthropomorphic conventions of art resisted representing her with three faces: a votive sculpture from Attica of the 3rd century BCE, shows three single images against a column; round the column of Hecate dance the Charites. Some classical portrayals show her as a triple goddess holding a torch, a key, serpents, daggers and other items. 

The three animals also appeared on one of the most venerable relics in England, which is the ivory horn of Ulf now in the vestry of York Minster. A Latin inscription on the horn states that Ulphus, prince of the Western parts of Deira, originally gave it to the church of St. Peter, together with all his lands and revenues. By this horn, the church holds several estates of great value, not far east from the city of York, and which are still called Terrae Ulphi. On this famous horn we find Hecate Triformis and her animas. The horse appears to represent the crescent-moon, the Snake is the emblem of the rays of light from the full-moon, and the dog, which we can only make out its head and neck, represents the half-moon. It is evident that the symbols of  this triple moon phase, the horse, snake and the dog would have been familiar to the artist of the horn and to the writer of the Argonautica due to their existence in the antiquity.