“Dining with Hekate: Embodied Knowledge as a Source of Nourishment”
Panel: “Revitalizing Sacred Ceremony”
2026 Online Symposium, May 3 2026
Reimagining Goddess Scholarship: At the Edges of Sacred Knowledge
Dr. Kay Turner is an artist and scholar working across disciplines including performance, writing, music, and folklore. Since 2012 Turner’s performance works and writing have revolved around an exploration of the witch figure in folklore and history. She has worked with artist Elizabeth Insogna on several projects exploring the Greek goddess Hekate, including “Healing Persephone Wounds” (National Art Gallery, NYC, 2021) and “A Hekate Supper”, Parts 1 and 2 (Five Myles Gallery, Brooklyn, NY, 2022). She is the founding editor and publisher of Lady-Unique-Inclination-of-the-Night, a journal of art and the goddess (1976-1983). Her books include What a Witch: Before and After, with Zini Lardieri (2021); Transgressive Tales: Queering the Grimms, with Pauline Greenhill (2012) and Beautiful Necessity: The Art and Meaning of Women’s Altars (1999). She holds a PhD in Folklore and Anthropology (UT Austin) and taught for 20 years in the Performance Studies Department at NYU. Turner is a past president of the American Folklore Society. She lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
Presentation Description: Hekate has often been called the Goddess of Witches. She was and is that, but also so much more. In ancient Greece her worship took place in temples and also at house-post altars and crossroad shrines. At these shrines devotees gathered to feast—their meal was called “a Hekate supper—and make petitions for Hekate’s intercession.
My presentation proposes a feast with Hekate getting to know her many facets including her lineage, her epithets, her invocations, her rites, her symbols, her realms, and her alliances. I have done a number of ritual performances that attempt to deconstruct aspects of Hekate through ritual means. This lecture is largely based on a performance called “A Hekate Supper, Parts 1 and 2” that I did in 2022 at Five Myles Gallery in Brooklyn. This, as well as other performances I have done in my “What A Witch” series begun in 2012, is framed by my practice of embodied knowledge: sealing the history and folklore of various witch figures in ritual experience. Each “What A Witch” begins with a performative lecture followed by a ritual that invites participation from the audience.
This symposium presentation must of course forego full-on ritual but I will discuss Hekate in light of embodied knowledge and queer pedagogy. I highlight Hekate’s recognition and repair of brokenness as seen in her role in the myth of Demeter’s separation from Persephone. Hekate heard the cries of Persephone and lighted the way to her recovery.To repair brokenness is her moral charge. She urges commingling, links worlds together, threads connections. A goddess sought after to repair brokenness, her work was made most potent through her union of the living and the dead.
I also share some research and thinking that came out of a recent ritual performance at the School of Visual Arts *NYC) called “Aphrodite’s Mirror/Hekate’s Reflection.” The performance explores beauty and hag-ery in an exchange of gifts between Aphrodite and Hekate. A critique of ageism but also a solution, Aphrodite and Hekate, both known as transgressors of boundaries, are viewed as equals and allies in dismantling false hierarchies.