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Re-Imagining Hekate: Muse for Memoir

This article reimagines the archetype of Hekate, ancient Greek deity, through the framework of memoir writing. Situated at the threshold, crossroads, and her cave, Hekate's triune form presides over the liminal, holding the tension between past, present, and future, visually suggesting the polycentric perspective needed when entering the underworld. So, too, the memoir writer approaches the underworld as participant and witness, seeking truth through variant perspectives. Although it is traditionally Mnemosyne and her daughters, the Muses, who are invoked for inspiration, I propose Hekate as muse of darkness, mediator between a writer and terror, between words and the abyss of silence. As Hekate disassembles and assembles, so, too, the memoir writer must take apart a piece of a life, exposing raw and sometimes ragged edges before tending and reassembling them. As “Queen of the Ghosts,” Hekate is followed by a retinue of phantoms, the untimely dead. Family secrets, lies, experiences of trauma or unacknowledged passions are the untold stories, or hauntings, often holding sway over a psychological history. Into such gaps and places of “between” the memoir writer excavates, discovering imprisoned stories, making meaning of events, thus transmuting and transforming personal and mythological lineage. By writing into the vulnerability, the silence, losses, gains, fears and wounds, the writer discovers stories linking them to a wider narrative, illuminating the internal landscape or inscape. This article explores and encounters mythological parallels between the art of writing memoir and the richness of Hekate's symbols.