Hecate is the goddess of crossroads and boundaries, of the night and the ghosts that move in it, and of magic. What is striking is her standing in the oldest source: Hesiod's Theogony devotes an unusually long and warm passage to her, presenting her as a goddess whom Zeus honoured above others, with a share of power over the sky, the earth and the sea, and the ability to grant or withhold success to those she favours. This is not the marginal witch-goddess of later imagination but a broadly benevolent power. Her descent is from the Titans, daughter of Perses and Asteria, which places her outside the Olympian family while leaving her honours intact.
Though thoroughly Greek by the Classical period, Hecate's deepest roots may lie outside Greece altogether: her grandest sanctuary stood not in old Greece but at Lagina in Caria, in southwestern Asia Minor, where a well-preserved Hellenistic temple precinct, excavated from the nineteenth century onward, was linked to the nearby city of Stratonicea by a sacred processional way used for the annual Key-Bearing festival, the Kleidos Agoge, in which a young priestess carried a ceremonial key in Hecate's honour. Some scholars read this Carian prominence as evidence that Hecate originated as an Anatolian goddess absorbed into Greek religion, though the question of her ultimate origin remains debated rather than settled.