The Three Faces of Hekate

Hekate's three faces look at past, present, and future — but not the way most retellings explain. A patient walk through what each face actually sees, and the small practice for the practitioner who has narrowed a decision too far.

The triple-faced depictions of Hekate are old enough that the archaeological record carries them across centuries. The faces are not interchangeable. They look in three directions, and the three directions are not, exactly, past-present-future in the linear sense. They are three different orientations the practitioner can take toward the same question, in the same room, on the same evening.

The triple gaze is the practice.

The first face: what was

The first face looks at what the practitioner has already lived through that bears on the current question. Not the autobiography. The specific. I have been in this situation before, with a different name on it. I made a choice last time. The choice produced this outcome.

The first face is honest about the practitioner's own track record. It does not flatter. It does not catastrophize. It simply notes: here is what I have already done, and here is what already came of it.

The second face: what is

The second face looks at the present situation as it actually is. Not as the practitioner has been narrating it. Not as the practitioner wishes it were. The actual conditions on the ground.

This face is the hardest. Most practitioners spend most of their days looking at a slightly retouched version of the present. The retouching is mostly defensive — it filters out the parts of the present that are inconvenient. The second face of Hekate is the practice of, briefly, taking the filter off. The conditions are what they are. The relationships are what they are. The money situation is what it is. The body is what it is.

The first face is honest about what was. The second face is honest about what is. The third face is honest about what is being avoided.

The third face: what is being avoided

The third face is the one that surprises practitioners. It is not, strictly, the face of the future. It is the face of the option the practitioner has already noticed and has been refusing to look at directly.

Every narrowed decision — stay or leave, take it or do not, say it or do not — has, behind it, a third option the practitioner has been mostly aware of but has not been allowing into the conversation. The third face of Hekate is the one that looks at it. What is the option you have not been letting yourself consider, because considering it would mean changing more than you were prepared to change.

The third face is not promising the practitioner will take that option. It is only insisting that the option be looked at. The looking is the practice.

The small triple-gaze working

For the practitioner with a stuck decision: take fifteen minutes. Light a candle. Sit with one piece of paper folded into three columns.

Column one: what I have done before that resembles this, and what came of it.

Column two: what the actual present conditions are, with the filter off.

Column three: what option I have been refusing to look at directly.

Write briefly in each column. Do not solve. Do not decide. Just see all three at once.

Blow out the candle. Put the paper somewhere private. Come back to it tomorrow morning. The decision will, very often, have changed shape overnight — not because the situation changed, but because the practitioner now has three faces' worth of information about it, and was previously working with only one.