Faces of the Goddess Magazine SGC 21

the ruling paradigm, and those which reject
it. In the twentieth century, the population of
the second group was a sliver of the first. In
the twenty-first century, that ratio may well
reverse.
With every day that passes, we have less
privacy than we had before, less political
agency, less opportunity for independent
action. The powers that infringe on our rights
are legion, but primarily consist of corporate
and national interests whose invasive reach
extends deeper into our lives than at any
time within recent memory. All of us know
this, but few of us choose lifestyles which
actively oppose the endless encroachment of
these implacable powers. Those who do so
politically are deemed outsiders, anarchists
and dissidents. Those who do so spiritually are
deemed adversarialists.
The notes that follow suggest two things:
first, that there exists in our Western culture
a legitimate adversarialist spiritual tradition,
and second, that the goddess Hekate has
been – and can be again – a fixture of that
tradition, and one whose presence can provide
access to a current of untapped personal
power and potential to rebel against (and even
reverse) our fates.
Adversarialism
What is an adversarialist spirituality?
I suggest that it is one whose defining
characteristic is that is opposes the central
tenets of the predominant spiritual paradigm
of the time. In other words, it must explicitly
reject – and not merely amend or ignore – the
dominant tradition.
Thus, for example, the rise of the Cult
of the Emperor in ancient Rome was not
adversarialist: though the concept of deifying
political leaders was new to post-Republic
Roman citizens, in some ways it was simply an
extreme form of the ancestor worship which
had always been common in Latin
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funeral traditions since time immemorial.
And more importantly, it ultimately did not
contradict the existing state cult of the twelve
Olympians; it only expanded it to include
an ever-growing pantheon of divine rulers
(along with the emperors’ now-divine parents,
children, wives, and lovers).ii
By contrast, Zoroastrianism was partially
adversarialist, since it upended the both the
existing pantheon of Persian gods and the
tradition of animal sacrifice that supported
it. Zoroaster provided a new overgod (Ahura