Asteria, goddess of nocturnal oracles, sister of Leto and mother of Hekate. Here we see her taking l
Asteria, goddess of nocturnal oracles, sister of Leto and mother of Hekate. Here we see her taking little Hekate out in the night, probably to teach her daughter about her powers.Not much is known about Asteria. She threw herself into the sea in the form of a quail to avoid getting raped by Zeus (other sources say that it was Zeus who threw her into the sea when she refused to sleep with him), and she was later transformed into the island of Ortygia. This island was the only piece of land that gave refuge to Leto when she was pregnant with Zeus’s children and pursued by the wrath of Hera. Leto gave birth to Apollon and Artemis on Ortygia and the island was later renamed Delos. Leto’s arrival on the island also rooted it in its place. Earlier it had floated to and fro on the waves.I’ve always had some difficulty to combine this myth with Hesiod’s hymn to Hekate. According to Hesiod, Zeus had the greatest respect for Hekate and he honored her like no other after the Titan War. Why first honor someone and then try to rape that person’s mother? It doesn’t make sense (unless that thing with Asteria happened first and Zeus actually felt bad about what he had done, and all those honors to Hekate was a way to make up for it). Well, it probably wasn’t meant to make sense. Hesiod doesn’t mention the myth of Asteria at all, so in his version that story probably never happened. I still haven’t decided exactly how it happened in my version. I use to imagine Asteria as a little mentally unstable. Maybe she became more and more detached from reality and when Zeus tried to force himself on her, she really went crazy and threw herself into the sea, never to return in human-form again. At that point Hekate was of course a grown up and able to take care of herself (I imagine her as a bit older than the Olympians). In a way she had already lost her mother, since Asteria was becoming more and more introverted and mentally deranged, but she still missed her and continued to carry her mother’s torch. And that is why, in my version, Hekate always carry two torches. -- source link
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