Demystifying the Nine Sorceresses at the Center of Time
Myths, folklore ancient songs and poems present the number ‘nine’ as being connected with the underworld, and this has been extended into modern pop culture. There were ‘nine circles of Hell’ in Dante's Divine Comedy; in J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle-earth men were given ‘nine rings of power’ and in Roman Polanski’s 1999 mystery thriller The Ninth Gate, the protagonist played by Johnny Depp, embarks on a dark esoteric quest through nine levels of Biblical mystery.
Hesiod and the Muse by Gustave Moreau (1891) - Musée d'Orsay, Paris. (Public Domain)
While the literary devices of nine gates, nine circles and nine rings dominate modern fictional writings, in ancient times, religions, myths, legends, songs, poems and stories featured groups of nine goddesses, mothers, maidens, daughters, sisters and sorceresses and to understand what these nine females originally represented, one must look to ancient Greece.
