The torch

Persephone was picking flowers in a meadow when she disappeared. Her mother, Demeter, heard one cry, and then nothing.

For nine days Demeter walked the earth with a burning torch in each hand, looking for her. She didn't eat, and she didn't wash. She asked everyone, god and mortal alike, and no one would tell her what had happened.

Far away, in a cave, Hecate had heard the girl cry out too. She hadn't seen who took her, and she had no answer to give.

The oldest full telling of this story is the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, a Greek poem more than 2,500 years old, and it calls Hecate tender-hearted. The Greek means something close to “thinking tender thoughts.” Nobody had asked her for anything. She had only heard someone in pain, and for her that was reason enough to go.

On the tenth morning, as dawn came up, she went to find the mother, a torch in her hands.

“I heard her voice,” she told Demeter, “yet saw not with my eyes who it was.”

So the two of them went on together, torches lit, to Helios, the sun, who looks down on everything under the sky. There, at last, Demeter heard the truth.

It was a long road from there before her daughter came home. When she did, Hecate came to embrace her, and the hymn says that from then on, Hecate was Persephone's companion.