Hekate Soteira: A Study of Hekate's Roles in the Chaldean Oracles and Related Literature (Society for Classical Studies American Classical Studies)

The author is highly educated and I’ve read a couple of her other books, she references everything and it is all very scholarly and knowledgeable information. If you’re looking for real knowledge on Hekate, this book is IT. Anyone interested in the studies, or who plans on working with/worshipping this goddess should definitely get this book. It’s also nice having a female author for these scholarly texts who does not have any bias towards female deities and theological studies as we see so often with a lot of male authors and historians. Thank you so much!

Great profound book in the study of Hekate’s Role in the Chaldean Oracles will revisit this once I’ve become more well read in Chaldean Magic and Plato’s Timaeus.

While this is certainly written from the scholarly vantage point with plenty of footnotes and a healthy bibliography - it's exactly the place I wanted to start. Exactly what I was hoping for and more. Covers the Chaldean Oracle and Platonic World Soul ideas with absolute splendor. Well written, with all the right references. There's no shortage of books on Hekate - most focus on the least interesting aspects. This is an enigmatic deity, one of the most important of antiquity. Do yourself the favor of learning the how and why. Read it three times for good measure. But don't look back after you put the book down!

An indispensable survey of Hekate's role in the "Chaldean Oracles" & as a sublunar mediating figure in platonic/neoplatonic cosmologies. The extensive footnotes and bibliography point the way to deeper study through classical sources & modern anthropological studies. In particular, Johnston provides disambiguation of Hekate's classical role as celestial sublunar mediator and her function/hypostasis as Physis, whose associations with wandering dead and "daemon dogs" would attribute Hekate with "witchcraft" and maleficent magic in later periods (including the present). The discussion of iynx wheels as theurgical tools was another critical success of this study. Johnston did a great survey of classical thought to consider the application of the device along w "symbola" (ie sympathetic natural materials a la Agrippa) to evoke the epiphany of Hekate. Essential.

Very please with the book overall condition

Fantastic book! Some of it can be hard to interpret for a beginner like me, but great insight!

If you are looking for a resource on Hekate as viewed in the ancient text, this is an excellent one. It is definitely a scholarly work, not a "religious" view so you have to be prepared for that flavor of the writing. I found it well sourced and extremely informative. What with all the claptrap being passed around the internet through copy and paste these days, it is refreshing to find someone who has SOURCED her interpretations. I would say this is a good jumping off point for anyone who wants to study Hekate starting from the bare bones of things. I gave this one less star simply because there are a lot of words written in Greek that are not immediately translated for the reader. I understand this being a scholarly work it is written for a specific audience, one that probably knows those words without translation into English. But I am not such a person so for me, I took off the star simply because I would have liked those words translated (Perhaps in parenthesis next to the word or in footnotes) for my own ease of reading. Other than that, I'd say this is a five start work. Definitely worth the money and a great resource for anyone studying Hekate.

Fantastic book and it came within a week of purchase

impeccable

*****

great

Conheço sobre o livro indiretamente, através da leitura de artigos. Lerei, com certeza, em breve, para um melhor entendimento dos vários aspectos da deusa.

This is an impressive book written by a scholar, with many scholarly references and notes (thankfully, footnotes, which are much easier to access than endnotes). I learnt a lot about Hekate, and the book is a nice alternative to the more popular books on this remarkable goddess which tend to emphasise devotional practices. Unfortunately, as another reviewer has commented, the author sometimes emphasises the importance of a term but neglects to translate that term from Greek! I assume the meaning in Greek is obvious to her but not to this reader.