By Dianna Rhyan
Having watched the moon set with the sun’s rising, the ancient lunar goddess Hekate is on my mind. And near the Huron river path this morning, a pokeweed plant reaches upward offering a message and posing a hieroglyphic sign as she raises her arms in slender scarlet sleeves. Fresh green pendants nestle beside fully ripe ink-purple fruit on her supple limbs where she drapes luxurious flowing tresses, trailing glossy clusters from slender stems. Wildly flowering, the goddess and plant step from forest edge as one to emerge into the waking world. Hekate dances within her chosen ally pokeweed, just as ancient Greeks thought nymphs ensouled their trees in mutual lifelong union.
In Nichols Arboretum in Ann Arbor, I stop and sit on the ground, to journal beside her—trusting that her epiphany will grow ever clearer as we breathe together in silence.
Triple-faced Hekate, and her soulmate the pokeweed plant, are sovereign in many realms, yet prefer to dwell in no-one’s-land where trails and paths convene and where crossroads intersect only to diverge and wander away. Enter almost any Midwestern place and look aside—away from the center to the margins, away from the ascendant and out toward the lost, to where shredded outcasts of mulch, mounds of dung, pulled-up fence posts, tumbledown bricks, or crumbling cinderblocks pierced with saplings lie sleeping, hunching their backs and taking their chances. Where brambles and poison ivy recline on rough bedding, curled around their secrets. There you will find her. Willowy in stature, she sees far down the turning traces of wild things in many directions at once to reveal, or conceal, what she perceives.
Flourishing among her companions, like a long-ago princess distinguished in a chorus of nymphs, pokeweed is dancing. Far across a burgeoning meadow, her rangy form is easy to pick out, thriving amid her lofty chorus as they wave and circle together on the riverbank.
Pokeweed’s plant chorus includes distinct personalities, each nymph bearing gifts in her hands: angelica, wild carrot, bergamot and mint, snakeroot, water hemlock, sow thistle, and motherwort. To savor each name is to invite each plant’s texture, fragrance, and shape to linger in the heart. Burgeoning amid the leggy troupe, some stalks are familiar from kitchen sill, pasture edge, or gone-to-seed garden, and they range from piquant to caustic, from nutrient to touch-me-not. This tangle of plant-folk, this be-wild-ering bouquet, edges us toward the wild where all true stories begin.
Like Hekate and all her retinue, pokeweed epiphanies require reverence and caution. Goddess and plant are beneficial, yet also dreadful, and they embrace contradictory ways: inviting or repellent, enticing or repulsive, protective, or deadly. As the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus intimated about reality itself, truth is paradoxical. Harmonies of nature and divine power dwell within the transforming, dynamic unity of opposites.
The Ancient Greek word pharmakon encompassed divine opposites signifying both medicine and poison; pokeweed declares the pharmaceutical, paradoxical truth that perilous toxins and beneficial remedies spiral upward from a single potent root. Pokeweed-Hekate transmutes toxins in the soil, grips terrain to prevent eroding earth from wasting away, and aerates underworld fungal webs for the healing of all. For all these reasons and more, I have no plan to touch or use her in any way; I celebrate without going too near and respect her person, as I do her creative wisdom. Cloaked in unknowns, she remains as mysterious as any triple-faced goddess, any queen of fertility and decomposition, any mistress of rising and falling vegetation.
Veiled in mystery, remote, fierce, and distant dwelling, when need arose Hekate made mythic epiphanies as the embodiment of compassion. She did so in the springtime of archaic Greek myth (as told in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter), when the god of death Hades leapt out of a chasm to abduct the seedling plant-goddess Persephone.
Persephone was born a sweet flower, a blossom-cheeked maiden,
a soft petal, gentle sapling, tender branch.
when she was gathering blossoms among her chosen nymph companions,
Hades seized her and rapt her away from summer,
down beneath the rich soil of searching roots,
down to the dread dark of the underworld.
The Hekate who responded to Persephone’s plight was a paradoxical goddess of many faces and manifestations for Hekate was by far the most feral and enigmatic of Greek goddesses. Still today, lonesome and deserted crossroads are dear to her just as they are to wild pokeweed.
In Persephone’s enchanted myth, Hekate dwells in a cave underground, rooted in the living depths of Gaia, among the intertwined, questing roots of the blooms Persephone was touching. Down in the fertile soil, deep inside her cavern, Hekate hears the cries of Persephone more sensitively than any other creature in the cosmos.
Hekate alone responded, light-bearing goddess,
cave-dwelling spirit of the delicate veil,
she who has empathy for tender new growth.
Hekate’s cave, like a wise-woman’s enclosure or a sacred glade, is not a blank emptiness but a rich emptiness: a vibrantly hollow place for resonant perception. Underground, the tender young plants told her through their roots about the kidnap of the young goddess. Hekate swiftly shares their herbal insight and revelation, leading to Persephone’s seasonal return.
When will Hekate-Pokeweed speak wisdom? The myth suggests this:
when no one else comprehends, or
when no one else is willing to tell the truth.
Composed to honor the paired mother-daughter goddesses of fertile vegetation and budding new growth, this is a plant myth for pondering the plant-human-divine continuum. Inviting us, as we kiss the sacred soil of the Arb with our feet, to reflect on the natural rhythms that connect us with mystery and divinity. Many myths celebrate the understandings between goddesses and plants (and goddesses as plants) with humans coming into the mix to benefit from the resulting arrangements. When Demeter and Persephone—the goddesses of ripe harvest and sprouting germination—are finally reunited, their new cycle of life and death is as variegated as a stand of pokeweed, dappled by oak’s shadow and sun’s light, interwoven like a tapestry of sorrow and joy. As this myth tells us, from that time forward,
Hekate accompanied them, and
blessed on earth is any human they graciously favor with love.
Still, a word of prudence—which makes a fine seasoning for love—Hekate , a traditional protectress of witches, works against the god of death in this ancient story, and yet she appears as a force for death, and decomposer of the dead, in other myths. Likewise, pokeweed is wholesome for robins, bluebirds, possums, and raccoons, yet is a potentially lethal force for the unwise human creature who would seek casually to overlook her poisonous aspects and consume her, without careful attunement to time-honored traditional practices or Indigenous wisdom. In truth, and in keeping with divine opposites, the gracious goddess is dangerous.
Portraits of Hekate are sometimes frightening or hideous, but other ancient renderings are lovely. Is the pokeweed goddess frightening, hideous, or beautiful? “Weed” hearkens back to the olden word weod, a plant defined by being not-beautiful, not-useful, or not-valued. Such discourteous definitions—yet how wily and protective! As a supposed weod, the striking, colorful spirit of pokeweed in the borderland escapes notice due to being overlooked, and she is left undomesticated and running wild, under the effective disguise and cunning alias of weod. Witch does not define multilayered Hekate, any more than poison summarizes pokeweed, or weed captures the essence of any plant. As we honor slanting stalks, shaggy riverbanks, and tangled briars, let’s stay mindful that Pokeweed-Hekate’s freedoms rely on rejection, on being forgotten and overlooked.
With ease, if that is her wish, she vanishes,
and emerges in another season, another year,
in another unexpected place.
Deep of taproot, she is ever and always a protector of borderlands, and ever and always a savage corpse-eater—which is to say, she is a transmuter of matter and a creator of fertility. She is a gentle spirit of light who can show us how to be at home in darkness, when she is respected and beloved. When she is reverently evoked and courteously cherished, we are joined to her kind and to her kindness, as we are to all plants, by our mutual inbreathing and outbreathing of spirit. Yet make no mistake; she may not be tamed. Like all plants and plant goddesses, Pokeweed-Hekate offers relationship freely given or not at all.
I have seen her tall and stately, basking in a glorious sunset, gracefully settling onto a crimson throne of autumn hedge maple; I have witnessed her rising refreshed and vibrant from tattered waste bags of slick, manure-coated straw. In winter her stalk-skeletons stand as bleached bones against the shadowy evergreens. This morning she glows, vibrant and bejeweled. The Huron slides silently behind her leafy silhouette, calmly reflecting her dark-gleaming dusky curls and multilayered green gown. In this plant goddess resides the ravishingly beautiful and grotesque, the charm of blossom and fright of decay.
She gestures to show you the way: into the borderland:
wild landscape of the heart, wilderness of dreams.
If we have a lifeblood question flowing, a pilgrimage to walk an arboretum trail beckons. Trace soft and silent footsteps on the soil. Listen for wisdom not your own; find out what the plant chorus is singing. Wait for the face of the goddess who will hint you your answer and prompt you to glance in a healing direction. Rest, journal, or dance beside pokeweed of gracious spirit. Perhaps her faithful attendant nettle, or holy maiden jewelweed will beckon. Come to where sprouting goddesses place slender root ankles, curve green wrists, nod tousled heads, and unexpectedly edge near sedately trimmed lawn. Sit quietly near the border. Nine days going on ten may be quick enough; a fallen-down wall is seat enough; a trickle of moon is light enough. Still, where trails meet in the leafy margins, one tender, green, gently swaying plant is guide enough. Hekate-Pokeweed is flourishing there, as an empathic messenger, statuesque beauty, transformative force, spirit of wild borders, and Mistress of Crossroads. By her side, unforeseen answers, newfound questions, and mystical invitations, await.
Dianna Rhyan, PhD, LPCC, is the author of Staff of Laurel, Staff of Ash: Sacred Landscapes in Ancient Nature Myth from Moon Books. Dianna Rhyan is a mythologist who studies nature goddesses, tree worship, and the spirituality of sacred landscapes. She has a PhD in Ancient Greek and Latin, taught college for thirty years, and worked on archaeological excavations in Greece and Cyprus. She lives in Wooster, OH with her husband and assorted foster dogs. Visit her online at staffoflaurel.com or email her at staffoflaurel@gmail.com.
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