The Devil at the Crossroads is a case study in how modern mythologies take the elements mankind has always known and revisit them with a different angle. There is no real origin to the idea of meeting a dark spirit at the borderlands between two places, or the not-space past the walls, to make a deal with a steep cost that seems acceptable—maybe even sensible—at the time, but proves to be too much. That this being becomes the Christian Devil probably has more to do with Faust than any specifically Christian belief about that Devil. Perhaps it is taken from his attempts to tempt Jesus, where on his final try he offered the whole world in exchange for a moment of worship; but there is little else he does, at least as my Russian Orthodox parents described him, that sound much like bargaining.

The Devil at the Crossroads has all the makings of an old world myth being draped in Christian imagery in the new world. This is incredibly pronounced in African-American folktales, where slaves brought their stories with them and then clothed those stories in elements from the Christianity they began to accept over later generations. He is the wandering spirit of the land just out of reach, offering his wares for a great price. I do not know much mythology from Africa, but I have trouble imagining they did not have such concepts in the stories they brought, and calling him The Devil some centuries later follows a known pattern.

Whatever true name the Queen (or King) of the Crossroads originally had, they have acquired numerous titles and names and faces ever since. Hecate is almost certainly not her original name; her basic function—guardian of the edges, great magician, the cycle of life and death tainted by the fearsome undeath—would almost certainly have become a necessary spirit the moment people began to have edges and recognize death and seek power. This would have happened well before humans reached Asia Minor. Petitioning that being is older than history, magic predates writing. Maybe it had something to do with wandering traders, people from ‘outside’ meeting a community at the edges and bringing them exotic things. Maybe it’s just because some early people felt there was something powerful in the dark and wanted to reach out to it rather than run from it. We will likely never know; the point remains, when people first went to the limits of their known pocket of the world and called out for an audience, something was there to receive them. And century after century, when people from some new land went out to the forest, or the crossroads, or the sunset, or the graveyard, they were received anew, and gave the thing that welcomed them a name they understood.

​The Devil at the Crossroads is just this, again. Robert Johnson walks away from the community that knows him, and when he returns he brings with him a gift of music no one could explain. His community seeks an answer, and they look to the edges. And the thing they see lurking there, the eyes in the darkness, has acquired a name. A name associated with the first musician, even. Satan, the one whose voice once echoed through heaven with the tones of instruments mortal and divine, cast into the darkness where he now draws people to their doom. This Devil, Johnson’s community decides, must have welcomed a wayward soul and given him some of that music. Oddly enough, it is not the one who seeks the Thing at the Edges that names it, but those who stay behind and seek to warn others not to follow that path. We don’t know if Johnson even did make such a deal—I suspect he did not—but if he had, I wonder what name he called his patron. Would we know the Devil at the Crossroads as a devil at all, if we had learned of it from someone who cried out to it, and was embraced by it, rather than those who feared to seek it?

I excitedly explained to Sergei and Nan what had happened over dinner, how I had managed to peer backwards in time which had never happened properly before. They were excited to hear about it, and Nan took it as evidence that distance from Matteson was a good thing for my magic. It was hard to argue with her on that, but I tried to make sure she didn’t let her concern become any actual dislike of Matteson. It wasn’t exactly his fault if that was the case, and I was the one who chose to keep living with him. I could have just as easily stayed in the house on West Hill and let his influence on the space fade. Well, not just as easily; splitting the property tax with him was a smaller bill than rent would have been.
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Either way, Nan felt she could improve my results with the right application of material components. So she started working out some ideas while I helped Sergei close up shop, and when I came down to the shop the next day she had a couple crystals set out and a few herbs in her mortar and pestle. We talked through my experience again, how I was connecting with time and what everything felt and smelled like, and she added a few more things from behind the counter and ground them up into a fine powder which she mixed with a little bit of water. She asked me to add a drop of my blood, which I did by picking at the scab from the day before, and she turned it into a fine paste which was gathered into a small bowl. She instructed me to try again, and use the paste to make my wave marking before I began, and gave me a different incense she thought would be slightly better. I thanked her, went to the meditation space, and tried again.

While Sergei and Nan worked in the front of the store, I spent some time in their meditation corner working on some of what I had learned from The Fates. After returning to the physical world, I had been unable to duplicate the results I’d had in the cave. This was to be expected; The Fates had warned me that it would be much harder to do as it was, and the impact of Matteson’s nature on my magic, even when he was away, was probably a factor I hadn’t adequately considered. But I had a new theory to work with that I couldn’t access time the way The Fates did, anyway, at least not outside of their help. The thread they gave me was a focus, but the means they used relied on their nature as spirits, which I didn’t have. After my conversation with Sergei this morning, Nan suggested that spirits have their own paths to magic, distinct from humans. And, since I relied on a type of elemental energy, I may need to reframe my attempts at time magic to something that could connect to my element.

“This,” she said, “would be very difficult for some elements, like earth, which is too rigid. But water? I think you’ll figure it out.” If that was the case, then maybe I shouldn’t be thinking of time as a tapestry the way they did. Maybe I shouldn’t be thinking about time as a thing at all. Maybe I should be thinking of it as a flow.

So I sat down in the meditative space, the thread woven into my hair, trying to commune with water and feel the flow of things not just through space, but through time. Nan had set an incense burning to help me, and I had a stone from the Ohio River in one hand and one from Lake Michigan in the other. I quieted my mind, and began seeking the flow.

I don’t know how long it took me, as I started to lose sense of nearly everything before it happened, but I finally felt something click. I opened my eyes and looked around. At first, nothing seemed different, until I turned my attention to the incense and saw the smoke frozen in place. I felt pressure building up on me, and I suspected that this was because I was trying to stand still. Here I was, meditating on flow, and when I finally slipped into it I was looking at a single moment instead of going with that flow. I tried to push backward, but the pressure was stronger that way. Going against the flow would be even harder. But I knew I could do it, if I just gave it a little more energy. I bit my thumb, hard, hard enough to draw blood, and used that bit of blood to paint waves on my forehead as I chanted. Slowly, I felt the pressure begin to ease, and I turned my attention to the smoke again. I stared at it, pushing, until the smoke started to curl downward toward the fire. It was slow going, but I was getting there. I was watching time in reverse!

I stood and continued pushing, and when I glanced back I saw myself sitting in place, eyes closed. I left myself behind and walked out of the meditative space into the shop at large, and watched Sergei walking backward toward the office while Nan pulled a crystal out of a paper bag, folded the bag, and put it under the counter under the warm gaze of a customer, who had coins floating up into her hand from a change purse. I watched, in absolute glee at the fact that it was working, before I suddenly felt the pressure hit me again and throw me forward.
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I gasped as my eyes flew open and I dropped the stones. I checked my hand, and my thumb had a small droplet of fresh blood on it. But I was out of the trance, and it had proven that I could do this. Now I just needed to get better at it.

The big picture for Sergei’s theory begins some time before the rise of Greek culture. He tried to describe what time frame he was talking about, but didn’t know the English name for it and for all I know he never knew the Russian one either, so it was only after I searched online and asked if he was talking about the Minoan civilization, and he vaguely agreed, that I decided to just go with that and move on. But the broad sweep of his theory had a few major sections.

First, that Hecate predates the Greeks. He believes basically all the Greek gods predate the Greeks as a culture, in fact, but that’s not the point here. Sergei pointed to an idea that Hecate is originally from modern-day Turkey, near the coast on the southwest, though he seemed somewhat unconvinced of the specifics. I have no idea how they came to that specific location, but Sergei said it was a specific temple and I decided to look it up later. By this theory, the people who originally worshiped Hecate would have been monotheistic, serving their dread goddess with no rival or distraction. I asked how a society could function if their sole moral ideal was a goddess of undeath and magic, and he noted that monotheistic faiths don’t have gods of anything. They have a single god of everything, and what we pagans see as foci are just personality. For instance, there are these claims that the Jewish god was just a Babylonian sky god who got his own spin-off series, but Sergei believes it would be more accurate to say that the Jewish people had this one god, and the Babylonians may have adopted him into their pantheon and relegated him to the role of sky god because there was an opening there he seemed to fit. I asked if he thought all polytheistic beliefs started this way, as a collection of monotheisms merging together, and he said it was probably at least similar to that. At any rate, this would have put a tribe of people in southwestern Asia Minor as a monotheistic cult serving their goddess, Hecate. He believes everything worth knowing about her begins here, which is a shame because we know almost nothing about what this period of her life would have looked like.

The next phase would be the one we already know pretty well. The tribe worshiping Hecate gets conquered and/or Hellenized, Hecate is absorbed into the Greek pantheon and relegated to a position suiting her personality and available job openings, and the stories we know of her come to be either created, or altered into their known form. But the thing is, my studies of the Matteson family library suggest that the metaphysical realm and the physical realm do not have an equal exchange of influence. Henry clearly believed that the physical realm is nudged to a certain degree by things that happen in the metaphysical, but that the metaphysical is fundamentally defined by things that happen in the physical. If he’s right, any changes made to her character by introduction into the Greek pantheon would have changed who she actually was on a basic level. Sergei noted that was a significant ‘if,’ but if it was true, it wouldn’t change the importance of her first existence as a solo deity. Everything the Greeks used to define her would have already been there; they only changed her role in the universe relative to other gods, but not who she was. This, he felt, was not a difference important enough to straighten out for now. I’m not convinced it’s that minor, but I’ll have to consider that on my own.

This bleeds into the next phase, when the Romans absorbed the stories of Greek mythology and associated their own gods with the Greek gods. Here, Hecate becomes Trivia, a strange goddess who held sway over her own mystery cult (like Hecate would have before becoming part of a pantheon) and was occasionally described with traits that seemed to blend her with other gods, especially Diana. But while much of what defines her here is identical to things that defined Hecate, it is in the Trivia stage that she comes to be associated with crossroads. I noted that her function as Queen of The Crossroads seemed a pretty integral part of Hecate’s nature, so why would it only pop up here? Sergei stated that maybe it became part of her nature as Trivia, or maybe it was always a part of her nature and the Romans were just the first of her worshipers to find roads important enough to list them.

After this, things get murky. Most of the Roman gods fade into cultural obscurity or are overshadowed again by their Greek counterparts in the public mind as time goes on, but the spirits who received that praise almost certainly continued on in some form. Sergei notes a rise of she-devil queens in European Christianity, sometimes borrowing from Jewish sources (such as Lilith), sometimes from pagan ones. He believes Hecate spent some time as one or many of this latter sort, but there are not enough surviving records to his knowledge for us to piece together who or when. And, he said, that relies on assuming she remained a woman. It’s not like spirits are generally bound to a gender, and Sergei believes he knows at least one instance where Hecate was, in fact, a man.

​Sometime in the 1900s, the idea arose in the southern American states that people could go to the crossroads and make a deal with the devil. This apparently really took off with a blues singer. But while there is little information to tie the Christian Devil to such behavior, Sergei claims the descriptions of this Devil at the Crossroads suits Hecate well. And, he notes, the stories of this devil only begin to fade once neopagans begin to arise with the advent of Wicca, once the name of Hecate becomes relevant again to a group of people seeking power. This, he claims, is where she is now; having stepped away from the position of Devil at the Crossroads and leaving no one to continue making those deals, the stories of that being would slow to a halt while the stories of Hecate appearing in her mythic form to young witches would rise.