The Orphic Hymn to Hekate stands first in the collection of eighty-seven short Orphic Hymns, brief invocations each addressed to a deity, naming the god, heaping up epithets and attributes, and specifying the incense to be burned in offering. The collection, ascribed pseudonymously to the mythic singer Orpheus, was most likely composed in the early centuries CE for use by a religious association in Asia Minor that performed the hymns in ritual. Its placement of Hekate at the head, before even the primordial deities, reflects the goddess's importance in this milieu: a deity of crossroads, boundaries, the night and the passage between worlds, invoked as a guardian and guide. Each hymn functions as a compact act of worship, calling the deity to be present and favourable, and the set as a whole offers a rare window onto the practice of a particular late-antique cult that framed its devotion in the ancient authority of Orpheus.
The collection as a whole is thought to have served a specific initiatory community, and each hymn was likely paired with the burning of its named incense as part of a private ceremony rather than a public civic cult, distinguishing Orphic practice from the animal sacrifice that dominated mainstream Greek religion. Hekate's position at the very head of the sequence, ahead of Zeus and the other Olympians, is unusual among surviving Greek religious texts and reflects a distinctly late-antique reordering of the divine hierarchy around a goddess associated with thresholds and hidden knowledge.