Hestia

Hestia is the demigod of the hearth and home. She is the home-maker goddess. She is responsible for the happy functioning of the individual household and the wider 'homes' of the community , city and nation. Some say she has a maiden daughter Vesta who has the role of tending the home-fire.

Our Hestia derives from the Greek Hestia and other similar hearth-fire goddeses. However our Hestia is regarded as a married woman (married to Mithras) and has a role beyond tending the fire.
Hestia is a home-maker. She has a desire for good order in the home and has a calm and dependable personality that can be relied upon. She takes pride in maintaining everything that is needed to provide a place for people to live.




HESTIA TAPATI - worshipped by the Scythians

Tabiti, equated by Herodotus with the Greek goddess of the Hearth, Hestia, is thought to be a Hellenized version of a Scythian name *Tapatī́ similar to Hindu Tapatī and related verb tapayati ("burns"/"is hot"), as well as Avestan tāpaiieiti, Latin tepeo and several other Indo-European terms for heat.

Tapati was the most venerated of all Scythian deities, her high status being attested when she was called the "Queen of the Scythians" around 450 BCE by the king Idanthyrsus. Tapati was a primordial sovereign deity of fire similar to the Vedic Agni and the Greek Hestia, therefore being connected to the common Iranian cult and concept of fire, although she belonged to an older period in the development of Indo-Iranian religion compared to the other Iranian peoples and the Indo-Aryans, among whom she had been respectively replaced by the male fire-gods Atar and Agni. Due to being a deity representing an abstract notion of fire and divine bliss, Tapati was rarely depicted in Scythian art, but was instead represented by the fireplace, which constituted the sacral centre of any community, from the family to the tribe. As a goddess of the Hearth, Tapati was considered the goddess of the home, ensuring prosperity to a well-functioning household, as well as the patron of society, the state and families who protected the family and the clan.

As a symbol of supreme authority, Tapati was assigned the superior position among the other gods through her role as the guardian of the king, due to which as well as her to link to the common Iranian cult of fire, she was connected to the importance of fire and of royal hearths in Iranian religions. The king's hearth was hence connected with Tapati, and was therefore an inviolable symbol of the prosperity of his people and a token of royal power. As the guardian of the royal hearth, Tapati therefore ensured the well-being of the tribe - an oath by the royal hearths was considered the most sacred and breaking it was believed to cause the king's illness and was punished by death. The hestiai of Tapati were likely the flaming gold objects which fell from the sky in the Scythian genealogical myth and of which the king was the trustee while Tapati herself in turn was the protector of the king and the royal hearth, thus creating a strong bond between Tapati and the Scythian king, who might have been seen as an intermediary between the goddess and the people, and any offense to the royal hestiai was considered as affecting the whole tribe and had to be averted at any cost. Her characterisation as "the Queen of the Scythians" was thus possibly linked to the notion of the Khvarenah, the Iranian divine bliss, or even to that of the fire which protects the king, the vahran.

The hestiai were part of the ceremony of the ritual sleep during which a substitute ritual king would ceremonially sleep in an open air field along with the gold objects for a single night, possibly as a symbolical ritual impregnation of the earth. This substitute king would receive as much land as he could ride around in one day: this land belonged to the real king and was given to the substitute king to complete his symbolic identification with the real king, following which he would be allowed to live for one year until he would be sacrificed when the time for the next ritual sleep festival would arrive. (adapted from wikipedia)