Commentary on the Charge of the Goddess 6: Artemis

Sources and Influences

Ye Bok of Ye Arte Magical: Artemis:

Thealogy

Artemis is a Greek Olympian Goddess, the daughter of Zeus and Leto, and Apollo’s elder twin sister. It is unclear whether her origin was as a great Mother Goddess in the Near East who then acquired Maiden Goddess characteristics in Greece (Miriam Robbins Dexter: Whence the Goddesses: A Sourcebook. Pergamon Press, New York, 1990.).  She appears extensively in Greek mythology and history, her imagery and cult changing from place to place. In her earliest appearances she is a virgin and huntress, who presides over transitional times of women’s lives, and in men’s lives as patroness of hunting and of war (Simon Price and Emily Kearns (editors): The Oxford Dictionary of Classical Myth and Religion. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2003.).  She has a somewhat contradictory mythology, being associated with both childbirth, loss of virginity, and sudden death: it is not for nothing that she is portrayed with a bow, and Greek tragedy associates her with human sacrifice, or which there is no evidence in her later cult, but could be a memory of an earlier cult. The more violent element in her mythology appears in these lines from the Iliad:

‘The truth is, Artemis of the Golden Chair
Had brought the scourge of war on the Aitolians;
She had been angered because Oineus made
No harvest offering from his vineyard slope.
While other gods enjoyed his hecatombs
He made her none, either forgetful of it
Or careless – a great error, either way.
In her anger, the Mistress of Long Arrows
Roused against him a boar with gleaming tusks
Out of his wild grass bed, a monstrous thing
That ravaged the man’s vineyard many times ...
So huge the boar was, no small band could master him,
And he brought many to the dolorous pyre.
Around the dead beast Artemis set on
 A clash with battlecries...’
(Homer (translated by Robert Fitzgerald): The Iliad. Everyman’s Library, London, 1992, p. 220.)

Unlike some of the other Goddesses named here, she was seen as chaste, associated with virginity, and became enraged when her favourites lost their virginity. It seems that there was a development in her mythology from being a patroness of wild places and hunting, to later being a city Goddess of women (Herbert Rose: Artemis. In M. Cary et al (editors): Oxford Classical Dictionary. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1949.).  Later she became associated with the moon, and by acquiring the title Trivia, became assimilated with Hecate, gaining in the process some of Hecate’s magical and underworld qualities. Robbins Dexter creates concord among some of these apparent contradictions by pointing out that all the Goddesses of the Olympian pantheon were either married or celibate, and feels that Artemis’s maiden status allowed her to retain her power for herself, whereas if she were married she would have had to become a consort to a God. At the time of entering the Greek pantheon she was probably Mistress of Animals, and a Mother Goddess, responsible for birth and death, and only acquired her virgin status as a Greek Goddess. So the contradictions of her mythology may be accounted for by her non-Greek origins, having started off life as a Goddess of fertility, fulfilling the functions of both a Mother Goddess, and a Goddess of death and regeneration.
Artemis’s worship differed in different places. Her cult at Lacedaemon in Sparta connects two aspects of this cult with the line of the Charge about the youths making sacrifice, and with the religious practice of scourging. The first practice was the Artemis decreed that her altar should be stained with human blood to propitiate her, which would make her take away from the Spartans the disease she had inflicted on them for defiling her altar. After some years of human sacrifice on her altar, this was replaced with the practice of scourging prepubescent boys enough that their blood would spatter on the altar.
The other practice relating Artemis to scourging at Sparta was a ritual in which groups of young men would compete to take some cheese placed on the altar of Artemis. The first group would defend the cheese with their whips, and the second group would try to take it, although in this ritual the connection made between sacrifice, blood, and the altar of Artemis is more tenuous (Sorita d’Este and David Rankine: Wicca: Magical Beginnings. Avalonia, London, 2008.). 
Artemis was particularly associated with the bear, particularly in her cult at Brauron, where young girls dressed in saffron robes in imitation of bears, in a dance in Artemis’s honour. The connection with bears may come from a tale in Hesiod (Robbins Dexter, op. cit.), where Callisto, a nymph who lived with Artemis among wild animals in the mountains, caught the eye of Zeus. He seduced her, and after some time of not noticing it, eventually Artemis saw her bathing and realised that Callisto was pregnant. Because the nymph had not retained her virginity, Artemis in her rage turned her into a bear. Zeus took pity on Callisto the bear when she was in danger of death after wandering into Zeus’s precincts, and he set her among the stars as Ursa Major.
The bear can hardly be described as a gentle animal with which to be associated, and indeed Artemis had the title ‘Deer-Shooter’ and in the Homeric Hymns is pictured as ravaging all wild animals. The contradictions of her mythology also continue in the Homeric Hymns, where she is pictured hanging up her bow and arrow, and leading the dance of the Muses and Graces. In some places she was also associated with the orgiastic rites of the Bacchantes, her temples containing their cymbals, and Artemis carrying titles of Maenad, Thuiad, Phoibad, and Lussad, all titles associated with women possessed by Gods such as Bacchus (Robbins Dexter, op. cit.).
Artemis is mentioned in the New Testament: the cult of many-breasted Artemis at Ephesus (where she was later venerated under her Latin name of Diana) was targeted by the early Christians for destruction. They highlighted that a roaring trade was done in images of Diana or Artemis at Ephesus – and stressed the monetary aspect of her cult – but the people were adamant in their support of the Goddess. Ultimately the temple at Ephesus was razed in the fifth century (Barbara G Walker: The Women’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets. Harper and Row, San Francisco, 1983.),  but the episode places Artemis amongst the Goddesses in the Charge who are to be found in a context of conflict between monotheism and the older religions.
Gardner tells the story, in The Meaning of Witchcraft, of how the temple of Artemis at Iolcus in Thessaly had fifty priestesses. One was chosen by lot every seven years to be Queen, who could take whom she wished as her spouse, who was sacrificed at the end of the seven years, when a new queen was chosen. He equates the power of this priestess to that of the High Priestess in witchcraft, who is seen as encompassing the divine power in herself, and so may choose whom she will as High Priest. Gardner comments on the difference that in Wicca the High Priest is not sacrificed (Gerald Gardner: The Meaning of Witchcraft. Weiser Books, York Beach, 2004.).  This may be seen as an attempt to find an ancient precedent for the pattern of priesthood in Wicca, but it does more in connecting Wicca with a Goddess with a mythology of two halves, reflecting the polarity principle of Wicca. Another significance of Artemis’s mythology to the Wiccan milieu is the changeability of her cult at different times and places, and the different understandings of this aspect of the ‘Great Mother’ which mark her mythology.
In modern witchcraft Artemis is often seen as one of a trinity of Goddesses: either Artemis, Hecate and Selene to represent waxing, full and waning aspects of the moon, or Artemis, Persephone and Hecate, to represent the three realms of the living, the dead, and spirits (Judika Iles: The Element Encyclopedia of Witchcraft. Harper Element, London, 2005.).  Gardner himself wrote of this trinity of Goddesses as related to three of the phases of the moon, preferring the Artemis (waxing), Selene (full), and Hecate (dark moon) formula. He comments that in ancient art each of them carries a large knife, which he equates to the witch’s athame, a torch, and a scourge. He believed that the greatest magical power was with Hecate (Gardner, op. cit.).