No Independent Cult of Asteria

Asteria herself received no independent cult under her own name anywhere in ancient Greece. Walter Burkert's survey of Greek religious practice records no temple, altar or priesthood addressed to Asteria specifically, and what religious attention the myth generated attached instead to two things other than the goddess herself: to Delos, the island she became, which developed into one of the most important panhellenic sanctuaries in the Greek world, and to Hecate, the daughter she bore to the Titan Perses, who received a genuinely widespread and long-lived cult of her own as goddess of crossroads, magic and liminal boundaries. Some ancient sources identify Asteria with Brizo, a comparatively obscure Delian goddess associated with prophetic dreams, but this identification rests on late and uncertain testimony rather than on any clearly attested cult addressed to Asteria by that name. The honest picture is that Asteria's mythological importance, as the aunt of Apollo and Artemis, the mother of Hecate and the origin of one of Greece's most sacred islands, never translated into worship of Asteria as an individual object of prayer or sacrifice. Her story mattered enormously to Greek religion in its consequences, without Asteria's flight there is no Delos and no shelter for Leto, but the devotion those consequences generated was directed everywhere except at Asteria herself.