So how did you choose your username?

[Hekate]

148. Love your origin story & would love to hear your storytelling...

At the time I joined DU in 2002 I’d recently finished a graduate program in mythological studies.

Before I started that program I’d spent years dealing with an unruly adolescent daughter, which got me to thinking about Demeter and Persephone. Looked at from one point of view — in my case, askance — the daughter had dragged her mother through Hell. I wrote poetry about us.

When I started writing papers it seemed natural to delve deeper into the mythology of Demeter and Persephone, and a very rich mythology it is.

But as with so many goddesses, they are part of a triad, and Hekate is the third one. I asked myself if I wanted to continue with researching the mother-daughter myth and decided to take a different path. Hekate is not a mother, and one of her names is Eldest, because she’s from the Titan brood that predated the Olympians.

So when I came here I took Hekate’s name.

But in deciding to become very politically involved, I also took another road, away from writing about mythology. And that was also Hekatean, for she stands at the road where three ways meet, and as Frost noticed (in talking about only two roads) when you choose a path, you can’t really return from whence you started.