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Artemis—Diana

Artemis—Diana

Homer, in the Odyssey, adds Artemis as a fourth of the Graces, the Gift Givers, and the daughters of Pandareus receive gifts from all four. The activities of Artemis live more among plants, animals and wild things than among people, but, in her aspect of the moon, she watches over women in childbirth.

Artemis, like her brother Apollo, is a Northerner. She was worshipped as Queen in Thrace and in Pæonia, where her aspect as moon goddess is clearest. There, too, she has the title of Hekate, the Far Darter, whose arrows take people in death—the feminine of Apollo Hekatos. As Hekate, as moon goddess, she has her dark and spectral side of magic and spells. The moon being frightening even though she lights up the night, because she stares down in a cold, pitiless way, pale and ghastly, charged with death and magic. As the earth mother, she collects the dead, and in this she shows her gentler and fairer side. When she comes to take people in death, she kills them mercifully, and “with shafts that hurt not, strikes and lays them low”.

Artemis is, of all the divine maidens, austerely virginal. While Athena refuses marriage, she is foster mother, guardian, and friend to many a hero. The relation of these early and husbandless matriarchal goddesses to the male figures who attend them is noble and womanly. It is a relation somewhere between mother and lover, but much like a patron saint. The goddesses do not ask the men they inspire and protect to love and adore them, but that they should do great deeds. It is the relationship of Hera to Jason and of Athena to Perseus, to Herakles, to Theseus. They are to be heroes! The patriarch force the goddesses into a servile amorous and abject domesticity. Artemis alone among the maidens in effect renounced this high companionship with heroes. She dwells apart in lonely mountains and wild, untouched forests. She is most of all the Lady of the Wild Things.

For this reason, the local cults of Artemis retain some of their primitive savagery. The earth mother is like Kali, as we have already noted, and took life as well as gave it. To us, it is no reason why we should do the Goddess's work, but primitive people did not think like us. Pausanias was witness, at Messene, of a horrid ritual in honour of Artemis Laphria. He tells us of…

…a hall of the Kuretes, where they sacrifice without distinction all animals, beginning with oxen and goats and ending with birds. They throw them all into the fire.

The Kuretes were ministrants of the Great Mother, the original Artemis. Pausanias also relates the ritual of the Great Mother at Hierapolis:

In the court of the sanctuary were kept all manner of beasts and birds, consecrated oxen, horses, eagles, bears, and lions who never hurt anybody, but are holy and tame to handle.

But these tame, holy beasts were kept for a holocaust, which Lucian thus describes:

Of all the festivals the greatest that I know of they hold at the beginning of the spring. At this festival they do as follows. They cut down great trees and set them up in the courtyard. Then they bring sheep and goats and other live beasts and hang them upon the trees. They also bring birds and clothes and vessels of gold and silver. When they have made all ready, they carry the victims round the trees and set fire to them, and straightway they are all burned.

Such an holocaust was held in honour of Artemis at Patræ. After describing the altar, surrounded by a circle of green logs of wood and approached by an inclined plane made of earth, he tells of the procession of the virgin priestess in a car drawn by deer. Of the sacrifice itself, he says it was not merely a state affair, but popular among private persons:

For they bring and cast upon the altar living things of all sorts, both edible birds and all manner of victims, also wild boars and deer and fawns, and some even bring the cubs of wolves and bears, and others full grown beasts. I saw, indeed, a bear and other beasts struggling to get out of the first force of the flames and escaping by sheer strength. But those who threw them in dragged them up again on to the fire. I never heard of anyone being wounded by the wild beasts.

The Tauri made human sacrifices to their Artemis. In later days, the conscience of Greece revolted, and Euripides makes Iphigeneia, doomed to sacrifice her brother, cry out against Artemis who “herself doth drink the blood of slaughtered men”. About this same time, the Persians stopped the Western Semites in Syria and the Levant from sacrificing children to the flames of Melekh, an incident symbolized in the bible by the substitution of a lamb for Abraham.

On the Acropolis at Athens was a precinct sacred to Artemis of Brauron. In it was enacted the arkteia or bear service. In one of the comedies of Aristophanes the chorus of women tell how they were reared at the expense of the state. The state wisely took them in hand early:

As soon as I was seven years old I became an Errephoros, when I was ten I was grinder to our Sovereign Lady, then, wearing the saffron robe, I was a bear in the Brauronian festival.

So, in Arcadia, Artemis was a bear, and Pausanias tells us that one of her worshippers was turned into a bear. No doubt in wild Arcadia the bear was a much dreaded creature, whom it was wise to propitiate, but to find at civilized Athens, in the Christian era, a bear-cult is surprising, and shows how tenacious ancient tradition is. The details of the ritual are lost, though no well-born Athenian man dare marry a maiden unless she had been consecrated as a bear to Artemis, for it stood for her virginity. One can imagine little Athenian girls, wrapped in yellow bearskins, dancing and crouching like bears before the goddess Artemis, who would preserve their virginity once more.

The Athenians eventually tamed the bear ritual. A saffron robe was substituted for the bearskin, and from the time of Aristophanes we hear more of the dedication of raiment than of the dancing of bears. An inscription in the British Museum has a long list of offerings. One maiden offers a cloak of carded wool, another her saffron robe, a third her mirror with an ivory handle. On it goes, the goddess disdaining nothing. She must have been well provided for, but sometimes a cloak or shawl is noted down as a “rag”. A young girl, Timaretê, dedicated to her local Artemis, as Lady of the Lake, her clothes and her childish toys and doll before her marriage. Korê is Greek for both maiden and doll.

Though the name Artemis is plainly connected with bears, it is not so clear as that of Hera or Athena. Some think the goddess took her name from a healing herb much in use in antiquity, the artemisia, wormwood or mugwort, known also as the Mother of Herbs and as Tutsan (tout saint) or All Heal. It seems to be an idea that puts thinks on their head. The healing herb was closely associated with the cult of Artemis, and will have been named after the goddess.

In Parkinson’s Herbal, the mugwort or wormwood had the power of dispelling demons. It was called S John’s herb because in midsummer on S John’s Eve girdles were made of it. The herb doctor, Culpepper, says that a hot decoction of the herb was used to promote delivery and to remove tumours. Another herbalist, Gerarde, notes from Pliny that the mugwort “doth properly cure women’s diseases”. It was a woman’s medicine, and was sometimes called parthenium. The mugwort grew in great profusion on Mount Taygetos in Arcadia, the base of Artemis. A manuscript of the eleventh century shows Artemis in the act of giving the mugwort to the centaur Cheiron, the ancient physician who dwelt on Mount Pelion in Thessaly. The reputation of the mugwort has lasted.

So, Artemis, like her twin brother Apollo, was a healer. Apollo, Sophocles tells us, had in the North an “ancient garden”, and this garden, no doubt, was not of flowers, but of healing herbs. Hekate, who was, as we have seen, but the magical moon aspect of Artemis, had a similar garden, which Medea the sorceress visited, and of which we have an account in the Orphic Argonautica. It was shady with leaf-bearing trees, and in it grew many a magic herb, black poppy, smilax, mandragora, aconite, and other “baneful plants”. In the Hippolytus of Euripides, Artemis, all huntress, is worshipped by the huntsman Hippolytus. An ancient treatise on hunting says hunters must pay homage to Artemis Agrotera, She of the Wild. They must pour a libation, sing hymns, and offer first fruits of the game taken, and they must crown the goddess. The hunters must also crown their dogs, and that dogs and huntsmen must feast together. But when Hippolytus comes to pay this service to Artemis, she is not Agrotera on the mountain or in the wilds of the forest, but in a garden, enclosed—a holy magical place. This holy place, this garden enclosed, was the herb garden of Artemis the Healer.

Last uploaded: 19 April, 2008.

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