How I Pray to Hekate: Ancient Greek Names vs. the Words I Say When It's Bad

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Most of us speak more than one language to the people we love: the careful voice we save for occasions, and the plain one that shows up at two in the morning. At the top of every ritual I write a line of ancient Greek, one of Hekate's (Hecate's) epithets, and I'm not confident I pronounce any of it right. So what is that line doing on the page?

This episode follows that question through the old Egyptian spell books and her many names (Triodītis, Enodia, Phosphoros, Chthonia, Polyōnymos, the "many-named"), the strange "words that aren't words" in those prayers, and an ancient argument that the power was never in the meaning but in the sound. Then three honest answers about what ritual words are for, the one I don't like, and what I call the emergency voice: the one that shows up when there's no time to be heard properly at all.

Chapters

0:00 Cold open

0:33 Two voices for the people we love

3:25 Talking to her like an old friend

5:17 One woman, two languages

6:09 What the oldest books say

9:07 Words that aren't words

11:31 Three answers

14:52 How do you tell which one you've been doing?