Prayers to Hekate (On Old Foolishness)

Goddess-Nurse of the young, give ear to my prayer, and grant that this woman may reject the love-embrace of youth and dote on grey-haired old men whose powers are dulled, but whose hearts still desire.

-- Prayer to Hekate from Homeric Epigrams
(translation by H.G. Evelyn-White]

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Maybe that old fool's prayer is the augment behind our Dumb and Dumber culture ... as if reason has apexed and ebbed into the dotage of desire, for the puer's spring, the puella's virginal smile ...

Hekate is closely related to other feminine night-deities; daughter of Leto (a moon-goddess who gave birth to Apollo) or Lux, Goddess of Night; guide of Persephone in the realms of the dead; virginaL in her relation to Aretemis, wise in woman's arts (many of the black, though other simply feminine, like childbirth), all exclusive of men.

It's obvious why a horny old coot would invoke any means possible to get up under a young hottie's tunic -- including a fistful of Hekatean invective. Is there another level, too? Do rational people age past the height of their powers, and, ebbing, find themselves prone to superstition, or, at best, charmmed by ennuis's bittersweet gold?

And is there a third level? Do rational eras themselves age past their prime? After the Hellenic, do superstitious & sacchyrine Hellenistic ones follow? When cultural innovation becomes endless repitition? Is Catullus Ovid without the storytelling? Is he the faintest remains of Homer, reduced to cackling & drooling at the scent of pretty girls walking by? Don't get me wrong, I love Catullus; and the sexual certainly is the pschompomp of the spiritual, our animal rudder, our ground and figure ... Is the dirty old man a gatekeeper of sorts whose message we don't yet understand?

Certainly we're awash today in time's fools; lordy what an obsecene amount of cash & energy gets squandered on the addlements of youth's aura. How many angels d'ya think dance on the tip of Hilton's nipple? Enquiring minds gotta to know!

To me there's nothing uglier than old & older people trying to look young and younger; perhaps Hekate's charm works us in reverse, a physic which returns to scotch its maker. We don't so much charm the maid as become enthralled with her spell, like Merlin in Nimue's bower of thorns. All of this Botoxing and boob-heaving and fatsuction and face and/or penis transplanting is like that maimed ugly artisan Hephaistos trying to create Pandora, first woman on earth. And like the old tale, the Pandora we create with our immortalized flesh ushers in a godlikeness which further asks us just what the hell humans -- and human faith -- is for.

The intensity of the density of such a mind to me shows its extreme age; and whether it augurs impending annihilation or simply a gentler mediation from one age to the next, the geezer who by day defends the city walls and by nights babbles his appeal to a remote dark feminine maruader is a strange hexagram for modernity. Maybe Hekate gets her husband at last in the old man's desire, unrepentant, world-burning, defiant of every turret in consciousness for one dig in the dale of filly's dilly's demsene, jowls to the howls, burying Descartes in a casket with sea sand. I sink, therefore I clam.

Dumb and dumber, someone call the plumber ...