Hestia is the force of aspiration and rectitude. It calls for the refusal of compromise, purity (everything being in its right place), and sincerity.
Hestia is the firstborn of the six children of the Titan Cronos, but the last one whom he regurgitates. Her function is to watch over the sacred fire. She is also the goddess of hearth and home or more precisely of the fireplace, always situated at the centre of the house in ancient Greece. She is the goddess honoured and invoked by every family at the beginning of each ritual.
See Family Tree 17
To fully understand this web page, it is recommended to follow the progression given in the tab Greek myths interpretation. This progression follows the spiritual journey. The method to navigate the site is given in the Home tab.
Hestia Giustiniani, Roman copy, second century CE, Rome, Museo Torlonia, CC BY 3.0 Sailko
Hestia never changes place, which is why she does not appear in any of the heroic adventures. Amongst the gods she holds a privileged place that even Zeus, usually possessive about his supremacy, respects. She was courted by Apollo and Poseidon but rejected both of them and remained an eternal virgin.
As the house is a representation of the inner space, Hestia resides at the centre of our being. She is not the fire itself, but the presence that watches over it.
Fire, or light, originates from another plane, that of the Titan Koios, and manifests itself through his grandson Apollo, the expression of the psychic being on the plane of mental consciousness. Hestia herself is therefore not a manifestation of the psychic being, which is the soul, the divine spark within each individual, but a force of aspiration that keeps alive the inner fire, the first tangible manifestation of the psychic being. If there is a lag in striving or lack of aspiration, the fire dies down or is covered by ashes and slag.
As a sister of Zeus, Hestia belongs to the highest plane of human consciousness. This aspiration is present throughout the planes, is born in the deepest part of oneself often in an almost imperceptible way, and does not impose itself. It stimulates growth and surpassing of oneself. Paradoxically, it is most often the situations of suffocation or oppression that favour its emergence. This is not a ‘desire’, which is a movement of the ego aiming to satisfy a lack through the urge to possess, but rather a call, an essential need.
At the beginning of the path, this aspiration seems to be expressed by a slight feeling of unease, often even a rejection of the world, because the seeker knows what he does not want but does not yet know where he is going. This lack of knowledge about the true nature of the unease can lead to taking the wrong paths. Even if the seeker has understood that the first goal towards which this growing fire pulls him is the discovery of the inner reality, it will be very difficult for him to orient himself as long as he has not established contact at least once.
There is therefore a long work of ordering and cleaning to prepare the groundwork in which Hestia participates, as can be seen in the structuring characters of her name, ΣΤ (the combination of English letters ST that forms for instance the verb “to stand”), which denote the current of consciousness tending upwards as well as a certain kind of rectitude.
The first manifestation of Hestia is probably the call of the ideal. For a long time, this highest idea we can hold is the guide of the inner journey. It occurs until the seeker is sufficiently conscious of his inner being and until the latter becomes the captain of the ship, taking control over the lesser personality in all its movements, feelings, and thoughts. The inner being is the ‘psychic being’ which the ancient Greeks knew as the ‘psyche’.
It is not a matter of escaping into the dream realm to avoid facing what is real, but rather an aspiration for something more noble, beautiful, and true, or whatever is specific to each seeker which will enable him to confront his thoughts, words and feelings and each of his acts.