Hekate's Honey Cakes and a Poxy Saint
Or, Hekate's many faces
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Every year on the eve of 4th December, the scent of cinnamon and honey wafts through Greek neighbourhoods. The next morning, neighbours visit each other, exchanging bowls of varvāra; a pudding of sweet boiled wheat, mixed legumes, raisins, pomegranate seeds, various other dried fruits, nuts, and spices. The pudding is laced with sugar, cinnamon, and honey. The traditional recipe often contains 7, 9, or rarely 10 ingredients; numbers with a symbolic significance.
When it is ready, the children of the household eat first, then the adults, and the next morning neighbours share their batches with each other, ensuring all families with children receive enough portions for all.
The sharing of this ritual meal is accompanied by entreaties and offerings for the protection of the children’s health from all manner of disease, but particularly those causing lesions to the skin, from measles (today) to smallpox (until a few decades ago).
On the day itself, the faithful flock to the churches dedicated to St. Varvara (Barbara), whose feast day this is, bringing with them canisters filled with the pudding as festive offerings to the saint. These are laid out on tables in the church, and once blessed, everyone will share in the offering once again.
They save a few of the grains from the dish, thread them onto cords, and hang them from St. Barbara’s icon in their homes as an aide-memoire for the saint and apotropaic talisman, until the following year. Such talismans are usually disposed of by fire or water; never simply thrown away.
Many Greek communities originating from Asia Minor and Northern Greece make cakes instead of the varvāra pudding. When baked, they soak them in honey, and then place them on a table at a crossroads. There, the local priest performs a blessing and petitions the saint; then the women share the cake out to the attending faithful.
In decades past, especially among Greeks from Asia Minor, any suggestion of an outbreak of disease (smallpox or measles especially) would lead to an emergency ceremony. A priest would be called to the affected neighbourhood. At the crossroads, he would sanctify the area, and give holy water to the women to bless and purify their homes.
Once the priest had left, householders with small children would set up large, low tables at the crossroads. On them they placed large basins with milk and honey, and baskets with freshly baked slices of bread. Three mothers from the community would stand behind the table. The first would cut the slices of bread, the second would dip each slice into the milk-honey mixture, and the third sprinkled this honey-bread with cinnamon, giving a piece to each child present.
On receiving the slice of honey-bread, each child had to say: “Milk and honey on her path!”, which is to say, on the path of the personification of smallpox, who is none other than St. Barbara.
Honey-Milk and the Sweet Blessing
The “blessing,” the “sweetness,” and the “honey-milk” are all vernacular euphemisms for smallpox, a dreaded disease in Greece as everywhere else until the development of the smallpox vaccine in the 1960s and 1970s. There are still people alive in Greece with the pockmarks of smallpox visible on their faces; still others with stories to tell of losing family members to it.
Such euphemisms are commonly used in Greece to speak of things that are feared; it is a form of placation used to avoid the ‘evil’ hearing its name and visiting the speaker. This is an ancient phenomenon; Hades was also called Ploutos (riches) in order to highlight the generosity of the earth and deflect the terror of death; so too, the pox and similar diseases are given sweet names.
The use of seeds and grains is a further example of sympathetic magic, as the seeds resemble the smallpox lesions that the ritual seeks to exorcise; their apotropaic power found in the practice of making them enticingly tasty, very nutritious, and consuming them.
The three windows
Its association with St. Barbara begins with her official synaxarium (lives of the saints), according to which, she lived in Nicomedeia, in Greek Asia Minor in c. 300CE during the reign of Diocletian (the various Christian denominations have slightly different origin stories; according to the Catholic Church she was born in Tuscany; other sources say Lebanon. Here I always focus on the most widely told Greek version).
The beautiful daughter of a pagan satrap, she clashed with her father Dioskoros over religion as she followed the burgeoning movement towards Christianity of the time. For a time he locked her in a tower, with handmaidens and every luxury, hoping this would keep her from ‘dangerous’ ideas. He ordered that a private bath house be built for her, so she would not come into contact with anyone. These traditionally had two small windows for circulation of the air; in her father’s absence Barbara ordered the stonemasons to build in a third window to signify the Trinity. The troparion for her feast day notes that with the three windows, she secretly incorporated the mystery of baptism to initiate herself into the light of the Trinity.
Seeing the alteration to the building, her father confronted her, and she confessed. He handed her over to Marcian, the Roman governor, who initially ordered that she be whipped. She endured various tortures alongside another young Christian woman, Iouliani (Julia). Eventually, her father demanded to execute her himself. As she attempted to escape a cave magically opened up before her and closed behind her as she ran inside. Her hair was caught in the entrance, so her father was able to pull her out, and he immediately beheaded her with a sword. He was struck down instantly by lightning; interpreted as divine justice for her martyrdom.
Give my beauty to the laurels
Many folk narratives quickly sprang up around this bare-bones sketch of this saint’s life, with minor regional differences. The most widespread version has it that when her father insisted she should marry, Barbara prayed to Jesus for her beauty to be taken from her so she would no longer be desirable, and in response to her prayer, she was struck with the pockmarks of the pox.
Even her words in prayer were added to the story (song from Naxos):
Mountains, take my allure,
and forests, take my hair
and you, bitter laurel [the oleander bush]
take my beauty.
It is thought that this is how the oleander tree got its beautiful flowers, and that St. Barbara’s sacrifice conferred on her supernatural power to cure the smallpox, in a commonly found form of reverse sympathetic magic. (See the section on the rooster sacrifice and pharmakos in my article here for more on this). Its nature as a shared communion of protection is typical of the collective nature of Greek society, still strongly visible on many levels (see here for more on this).
Saint of lightning
Apart from a powerful protector against smallpox, St. Barbara is also the official patron of the artillery, her feast day celebrated with full military honours. This association derives from the avenging thunderbolt of Divine Justice that struck down her father when he executed her; the lightning being associated with firearms.
There is nothing in St Barbara’s synaxarion or troparion about smallpox, honey, cakes, or indeed projectile missiles. Yet folklorists and even official Church sources freely acknowledge that the customs described are a syncretic reflection of folk magical practice added to elements of Hekatean worship.
From Hekate to Poxy Barbara
The Hekataea or Hekate’s Deipnon was a ritual offering held during the dark of the moon. Oral tradition has it that the deipnon as midwinter approached was especially important, as prayers to Hekate included pleas for protection for the family, but also for the crops from the harsh winter conditions. The panspermia [pudding containing an abundant variety of grains and seeds], is made for many different religious rituals, is very widely attested in ancient and medieval sources, and despite regional variations, is likely to be the very same recipe(s) used in antiquity since it depends on locally grown harvests.
It is well established (and freely acknowledged by the Orthodox Church) that in the early Christian period, deliberate efforts were made to replace Pagan deities with figures from the new religion that resembled them, while retaining elements of the previous ritual. Their integration into folk religion and fusion with folk practice was acceptable as long as it served to foreground the new religion. This was commonly done by the Greeks; Hesiod’s Theogony is a masterclass in fusing the older chthonic beliefs and deities with the ‘new’ Olympian ones (Athanassakis 2022); it is seen again in Roman times where similarities served as a bridge for Roman hellenisation, in Hellenistic Alexandria, and across the Greek colonies.
Image source
Barbara is not the saint’s real name; indeed it is not a name at all, but a descriptor.
It derives from Varvaros (barbarian), meaning she came from a distant place, from among the varvaroi, which refers to those with other customs, or who do not speak Greek.
An alternate interpretation is that it refers to her barbaric martyrdom, and it is likely that both are partly true. Inversions are very common in the attribution of qualities of this nature, so her name may possess the nature of an epithet: subjected to barbarism, she became resilient, with the power to overcome it, and thus confer that protection on others. This is reflected in the other epithets attached to her in her hymnal: 'courageous,’ ‘brave,’ ‘victorious,’ ‘champion,’ ‘valiant.’ In folk tradition she is also called ‘terrible,’ and ‘black-clad’.
The root of her name is associated with wintry ‘barbaric conditions, whereby St. Barbara and the two other saints whose feast days fall near to hers: St. Savvas, the saint of death (5th December; replaces Charon), and St. Nicholas, 6th December; replaces Poseidon).
They are named together in a dark, but well-known and widespread onomatopoeic folk saying: Ἁγία Βαρβάρα βαρβαρώνει, Ἃι Σάββας σαβανώνει, Ἁϊ Νικόλας παραχώνει = St Barbara barbarises [brings barbaric winter]; St Savvas shrouds [wraps one in a shroud]; St. Nicholas buries [in snow or brings death from the cold]. Equally, a common saying and belief is that “St Barbara eliminates enemies; St Savvas cures cancer; St Nicholas calms storms.”
The element of the folk myth in which Barbara voluntarily sacrifices her beauty and is pockmarked to save her from forced marriage contributes further to her qualities of decisiveness, bravery, and power through the pharmakos of sacrifice. The motif of her being swallowed up by a magical cave and returned to daylight before her execution, can be interpreted as a descent and return from the underworld - albeit brief.
The following elements strengthen the associations between Hekate and St Barbara. These are not my conclusions; they are aggregated from both historical and Church sources:
association with a distant land/foreign language other than Greek (Hekate was widely worshipped in Asia Minor and the Aegean islands, her name deriving from ἑκάς, meaning distant).
association with darkness and overcoming hardship (Hekate as goddess of witchcraft and hauntings; both a source of, and a protector from supernatural dangers).
ability to freely move between the three planes: celestial; earthly; underworld.
association with figures reflecting the Olympian deities with whom Hekate is on an equal footing in the Theogony: Hades/Charon, Poseidon, and Zeus (replaced by Jesus). This is strongly reflected in the companion feast days and folk saying noted earlier, via which she is associated with St. Nicholas (Poseidon) and St. Savvas (Hades) - more on these two in future offerings.
association with rituals performed at a crossroads to Hekate Enodia / Trioditis (there is no other reason for Barbara to be associated with crossroads). Also note the three mothers in the Anatolian crossroads ritual against the pox.
the epithet ‘black-clad’ is directly associated with witchcraft.
Barbara is called on to protect children specifically from disease and supernatural dangers; this is also the role of Hekate Kourotrophos. The specificity of smallpox is related to other parts of her story.
St. Barbara is associated with lightning, thunder, and projectile weapons due to the lightning bolt that struck her father instantly when she was executed. This reflects Hekate Brimo in her vengeful, ‘terrible’ aspect associated with her descent to the underworld (also seen in Barbara’s story) and storms (Hesiod). Also in Hesiod, Hekate is ‘good to stand by horsemen, if she will,’ as is St. Barbara.
Through the cave motif, St. Barbara is also considered a protector of miners, quarriers, and all who work underground, as well as firemen through the thunderbolt motif.
Hesiod tells us of Hekate’s power over water; St. Barbara is also closely associated with water. Legend has it that in 1384, when the Ottomans conquered the city of Drama, they were planning to pull down the church consecrated to St. Barbara to build a mosque. But the rivers (Springs of St. Barbara) flooded and submerged the church, creating a lake to protect it. Today a new church (built 1920) stands at the lakeside, and the ruins of the old church still stand at the bottom of the lake.
The ruined church in the lake is visible during some of the aerial shots in this video. These springs feed the Aggitis and Strymonas rivers, and they begin in one of the largest river caves in Europe.
On the eve of her festival (3rd December), children make small wooden or cardboard boats or rafts and float votive candles on the lake towards the submerged church. These are left to sink as offerings to the saint.
St Barbara is seen to be a protector of girls and women especially; it is thought that the tradition of the boats on the lake began as a divination ritual. After the evening liturgy on the eve of St. Barbara’s feast, unmarried girls would light votive candles and float them towards the submerged church on scraps of wood, making a wish. If the candle stayed lit, the wish would be granted. This tradition is continued to this day by thousands of local children.
The next morning, all the girls go to the lake to bathe in the water consecrated by the saint, both as ritual purification, and to protect them from gossip and bring them luck in finding a match. They take some water home to purify and protect the household. Some sources say that during the Ottoman occupation, Turkish women would join in the ritual, making offerings to the saint, participating in the varvāra meal, and joining the Christian girls for the purifying bathing in the morning.
Sources for the list above: D. S. Loukatos, Folklore-Tradition 5: Addenda to Winter and Spring, Filippotis, 1985; M.P. Nilsson - I.Th. Kakridis, Greek Popular Religion, Harper 1961; G. Megas, Greek festivals and customs of folk religion, Athens 1956; https://www.vimaorthodoxias.gr/nea/τα-καραβάκια-της-αγίας-βαρβάρας-στη-δρ/
Syncretic pathways
Folk beliefs and the troparia (hymns) of saints are known to be mutually influential; that is, folk beliefs enter the troparia when seen as beneficial to the faithful (and not contradictory to dogma). Likewise, literary historians have traced the cross-fertilizations between scholarly learning in the Byzantine period (which did propagate and disseminate ancient myth), and rural oral traditions.
Since these beliefs and practices would have been deeply rooted especially among the populations of northern Greece and Greek Anatolia, these syncretic fusions of attributes of Hekate - including the offerings - are a realistic - and well studied - explanation of the connections between the ancient goddess and saint.
It is also well-established that in the case of deeply rooted folk beliefs and even magical practices, the standard strategy of Orthodox clerics has been to overlay an Orthodox Christian veneer, while allowing the practice itself to carry on, and even participating in it themselves (Passalis 2004). The Orthodox Church is fairly open about this in our time.
Some of the traditions discussed above are attested throughout the late antique, Byzantine, and modern periods, across the Helladic region and neighbouring regions. Multiple churches and chapels to St. Barbara exist, and the traditions are well attended; it is one of the larger feast days. Also well-loved and revered in Catholic and Protestant contexts, the stories surrounding St. Barbara are many; again, here I focus only on those relating to Greek living traditions.
This is by no means the only example of syncretic survival of elements and rituals specific to Hekate; as noted in another article on this site, some of her attributes are also represented by an aspect of Panagia in whom all the ancient goddesses find expression in one region or another.
In terms of practices and rituals, there are still others that bear more than simply echoes of Hekate, and these will be explored in future instalments.
What about modern Hekate worship?
Part of the core mission of Thyrathen is to demonstrate that the Greek deities never died, nor did the magicoreligious rituals associated with them. Rather, they became syncretised within Greek Orthodoxy, their expression especially visible within folk practice, where practices have survived largely intact even if their mythos has been altered. This is not wishful thinking, but it does require qualification.
Among anglophone scholarly communities in particular there is a strong bias towards an idealised and isolated Classical Greece, whereby the language, religion, and people after the Roman conquest (in some cases), the adoption of Christianity and establishment of the Eastern Empire (Byzantium) in others, are seen as being altogether cut off from their classical roots to the extent that they are not even Greek.
This has led to distortions and misperceptions being perpetuated in the literature, severe misrepresentations of both historical and living Greek culture thenceforth, cultural appropriation, and disparaging dismissal on the part of non-specialists as well as some specialists.
By Greek, I mean Greek-language, and cosmologically Greek, that is, a culture that retained a worldview and cosmology with clear reflections of that of antiquity: animistic, with a blurring between sacred and material spheres, cyclical perception of time, personification of natural and celestial powers, and the potential for deification of mortals. The evidence for this is overwhelming, as indeed, is the scholarship from niche fields and those in languages other than English. As I write these essays, I am gathering this bibliography and will provide it in the more formal write-ups of some of these trajectories.
On language
The question of language should by now be a non-issue, but unfortunately many scholars as well as those adopting Hellenic Pagan worship frequently argue that Modern Greek - which they do not speak - is a debased or corrupted shadow of its former self - which they largely do not speak either, apart from some mispronounced phrases.
This is no more true than arguing that Modern English is a debased or corrupted shadow of Chaucer’s or Shakespeare’s English, or that modern Celts do not know how to speak Gaelic. There are historical reasons why these misunderstandings have occurred, but the key point is to realise that language, worldview, and people are products of an organic evolution of a living Protean culture that has adapted according to historical and sociocultural developments. It was never entirely cut off from place, language, or worldview, though as with all civilisations, it has been marked by ebbs and flows over time.
More abrupt severance from earlier traditions did occur in Catholic countries and in African, American, and Asian communities where Christianity was imposed by force. This did not happen across the whole of Greece, even during the iconoclasm, nor despite localised Islamicisation during the Ottoman occupation and expulsion of Greek populations, both topics I shall explore in due course.
Lines of transmission
Classical mythology, beliefs, and religion were known, preserved, and disseminated in Byzantium, as evidenced by these samples (also see below) from 11th century Byzantine codices, all of which depict Hekate in relation to spectres, visions, and dragons. These are copied from 9th century prototypes, themselves originating in late antique prototypes, thus providing definitive material proof of cultural continuity already impacted by late antique syncretism, but certainly not cut off from it (Panofsky & Saxl, 1933; Weitzmann, 1949).
Religious and magicoreligious practices and beliefs evolve to serve the people to whom they mean something. If the Greek-speaking peoples of this geographical region needed Hekate, they kept her attributes and powers, and they never forgot how to worship her. Similarly in neighbouring regions which possess their own variants of such practices.
If they changed her name, and shared her attributes across different regions and deities, that does not mean that the essence of the entity once called Hekate has changed, as should by now be evident by the practices surrounding St. Barbara, Panagia, and elsewhere.
Aspects not appropriate within the ecclesiastic environment found fertile ground in folklore, as seen in the wondertales and folk divinatory practices. The name of Hekate may not have been fit for purpose within an Orthodox Christian environment, but its nature and meaning persisted through its translation - from one name meaning “far away/distant” to another with the same meaning, whose use made more sense in the new historical context.
If the name Hekate itself serves a different community, not rooted in the wider Helladic region, and not speaking Greek, that has revived her worship through a new interpretation of the ancient version in a very different context (see my free course on Hesiod’s Theogony for this; there will be a sequence of episodes devoted to Hekate eventually), that is their prerogative. We have always been philoxenoi - hospitable - and there is room for infinite interpretation.
Both-and, not either/or
Our veiled Hekate is not the same as the ancient one, yet nor is theirs, in both cases, because of the difference in context. Among non-Greek communities too, she is evolving into what those communities need, and that is as it should be. Their rediscovered Hekate is as real as our St. Barbara; both can be said to be evolved expressions of the ancient goddess. To be clear, I am referring to largely English-speaking neopagan communities, not neighbouring ones who have their own versions of these continued living traditions, probably deriving from common origins.
Evolution does not mean superior, nor inferior either. Perhaps it is more useful to think of it as a metamorphosis serving the needs of each community, which is how these figures always appear in their various cultic contexts.
Within the Helladic region, we have an evolution in situ, among the same people whose grandmothers went to the crossroads in the Greek countryside, and who have passed down their honey cake recipes and rituals through the generations. The worldview remains animist and the perception of time cyclical; in the agrarian communities the needs served are still governed by the seasons.
We speak in the same language and are imbued with the same cosmology where the sacred is seen all around us, even by the most hardened logicians (citations and further discussion here). The value systems rest on those of previous generations, with all the attendant - and shifting - tensions. In non-Greek revivalist contexts, they have revived names and epithets, reimagined practices in a new context, embedded in a different worldview, value system, and relationship to time.
Neither of these will ever be the ancient Hekate, for time and place have shaped each. And there is nothing wrong with that. It is how cultures evolve, it is how historical memory is expressed.
What is deeply problematic, is the phenomenon in which scholars, non-Greek practitioners, or enthusiasts, dictate to the people whose continuously living traditions these are, that we are somehow inauthentic, insignificant, or accuse us of political extremism when we point this out. It is deeply unethical and disingenuous to adopt our ethnonyms and markers of cultural identity, all while erasing us from history. I refer readers wishing to understand this further to the excellent posts by Angelo Nasios over at Hearth of Hellenism:
Greek Orthodox Christianity has subsumed the older religion in startling ways, retaining the nature of personification of cosmic powers, ritual, both ‘high’ and ‘low’ theurgic practices widespread in the ancient world. As pointed out in an early, but valuable study:
One of the essential characteristics of the western [sic] European mind seems to be the way in which it destroys things and then reintegrates them on a new basis - breaking with tradition only to return to it from an entirely new point of view - and thus produces “revivals” in the true sense of the word. Byzantine art, on the contrary, never having lost its connection with antiquity, was incapable of finding its way to what we may call a modern style.
Panofsky & Saxl, 229.
Arguments can be made for and against this clearly essentialist statement; however the main point regarding how Western and Byzantine cultures engage with classical material is historically documented, despite this simplistic interpretation.
Despite the adaptations and transformations that have occurred, it is the Byzantine Orthodox tradition that has been the vehicle for maintaining these connections. To discover and explore this, one must engage with it respectfully and in a spirit of curiosity, and I will do my best to transmit this in future work. This form of engagement certainly does not mean that one must embrace it as a belief system.
But before dismissing it as a “break” with an idealised, imagined form of Ancient Greece, one must first understand it, and that requires engagement with the ethnographic and anthropological perspectives at the very least (if you’re not going to learn Greek and read Greek scholarship). One can certainly not erase a whole people on the basis of ignorance, petulance, or arrogance. In recent years Byzantine scholars have begun to focus in earnest on these issues, and their perspectives are valuable to many disciplines where lacunae remain (Averil Cameron, The Byzantines, Blackwell 2006, 1-19).
Cyclical time
I selected St Barbara because her feast day was yesterday (relative to the date this was originally posted), and I have decided to follow the Greek cyclical calendar in my feature articles as I think it will provide a lively illustration of the actual cycle of the year.
Not all posts will be about Orthodox saints - I am selecting those topics that I feel provide the most immersive exploration of Greek ritual and magic as expressed in living traditions.
As Christmas is coming up, we have goblins, fire rituals, and plenty more mischief to enjoy before the purification of the waters at Epiphany and discovery of magical water needed for every ritual (hint: not just holy water!)
Until next time…
This is the first article of yours that I've read and it's highlighted just how much I don't know, coming from an Anglophone context. I'm struck deeply by the myriad connections between Hekate and St. Barbara, for whom my late aunt was named. I'll be subscribing to read more!
Thank you Sasha. Not coming originally from Greece (although a medium once told me I was Greek in an earlier lifetime!) I relish all this history in its widest sense that you are opening our hearts and minds to. 🙏