Commentary on the Charge of the Goddess 12: Diana

Goddess Diana fountain in Villa d'Este near Tivoli, Italy

Sources and Influences

BAM: - [not present in BAM version]

Thealogy

Diana is often considered to be the same Goddess as Artemis, but in a Roman form, but Price and Kearns (Simon Price and Emily Kearns (editors): The Oxford Dictionary of Classical Myth and Religion. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2003.)  write that she was originally a moon Goddess, to whom the characteristics of Artemis were syncretised. They describe her identification with Artemis as ancient, and from Artemis she gained the patronage of wild animals, and luminal places, although it is not clear how this syncretisation took place.
She was virgin Goddess of the hunt, protectress of wild animals, and later a Goddess of women. After her identification with Artemis, she also assumed the title of Trivia, and assumed some of the chthonic roles of Hecate, in addition to her existing liminal associations. Her presence in the Charge is very easily explained, in addition to the motif of a Goddess who appears in the midst of Christian-Pagan conflict, by her folkloric connections with witches, flying by night, and La Vecchia Religione, and it provides the perfect illustration both of how the popular folkloric milieu of the romantic period through into the twentieth century nourished the creation of the new Paganisms, and also how whole histories (don’t forget that anciently ‘historia’ meant investigation rather than how we would understand it now) can be built on relatively little evidence. I am aware that in this section I will be treading on some people’s dearly-loved beliefs, but I am also conscious of another layer to this tale: the whole nature of magic is of changing and creating things. If a whole history of an ancient religion which never existed has been created, and people still firmly belief this spurious history, that is a glamour of the most excellent sort. If we can create a past, just imagine what we can do to the future!
Perhaps the most unusual aspect of Diana’s cult is the one best known amongst Pagans today: her grove near Aricia in the centre of Italy was served by a priest, Rex Nemorensis, king of the grove, who was always an escaped slave who gained this office by killing his predecessor. This combat, which is unique to religion in the ancient world  (ibid.), was initiated by picking a branch from a certain branch in the grove. This is how Ovid describes the grove, a description also highlighting her role in protecting women, and the torches which were part of her worship:

‘In Aricia’s valley, circled by a shady wood,
Is a lake, hallowed by an ancient cult.
Here Hippolytus hides, unfleshed by horses’ reins;
Hence no horses may enter the grove.
The long hedgerows are covered with hanging threads;
Many placards give thanks to the goddess.
Often a woman is granted her prayer, wreathes her brow
And bears shimmering torches from the city.
The grove is ruled by runaways with strong hands and feet,
Who later perish by their own example. ...
Barbarism is peeled off, justice surpasses arms,
And civil violence becomes shameful.
An altar’s sight induces recent brutes to offer
Wine and salted spelt on glowing hearths.’
(Ovid (translated by A.J. Boyle and R.D. Woodward): Fasti. Penguin Books, London, 2000, Book 3, lines 263-272; 281-284, p. 62.)

Ovid places this tradition in a context of justice, an overturning of the existing social order, so that justice rules, and yet the savage loses his savageness, but the reason the history of this unique shrine has been so powerful, is that it is the starting-point for Frazer’s influential study of magic, The Golden Bough, the basic argument of which, summoned in one of Frazer’s letters, will sound familiar to Wiccans:

‘By an application of the comparative method I believe that I can make it probable that the priest represented in his person the god of the grove – Virbius – and that his slaughter was regarded as the death of the god. This raises the question of the meaning of a widespread custom of killing men and animals regarded as divine. ... The Golden Bough, I believe I can show, was the mistletoe, and the whole legend can, I think, be brought into connexion, on the one hand, with the Druidical reverence for the mistletoe and the human sacrifices which accompanied their worship, and, on the other hand, with the Norse legend of the death of Balder. ... The resemblance of many of the savage customs and ideas to the fundamental doctrines of Christianity is striking. But I make no reference to this parallelism, leaving my readers to draw their own conclusions...’  (Robert Ackerman: J.G. Frazer: His Life and Work. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1987, p. 95.)

Gardner did not explicitly reference Frazer in either of his published non-fiction books on witchcraft, but in a sense at the time it was not necessary for him to do so, since Frazer’s ideas form part of one of the major ‘ingredients’ in the creation of modern paganisms: how ancient religion was understood in the first half of the twentieth century, at least by the laity rather than academic historians. These understandings are often built on some theories which were either respectable when they were new and since discredited (like Frazer’s: the multi-volume edition of The Golden Bough is still valuable for its source references, but the ubiquitous single-volume abridgement is not because it cuts out Frazer’s sources and leaves his now-discredited interpretations of them), or else were never academically accepted when new (such as Murray’s Witch Cult) but were unfortunately ideas that the public picked up and ran with. Then, as now, The Golden Bough is to be found in the magical/anthropology sections of libraries and bookshops and so formed and still forms a part of the milieu in which magical people’s ideas are formed.
Diana’s connection to witchcraft may be found in the tenth-century Canon Episcopi, often taken to be evidence of Pagan survivals:

‘...certain abandoned women perverted by Satan, seduced by illusions and phantasms of demons, believe and openly profess that, in the dead of night, they ride upon certain beasts with the pagan Goddess Diana, with a countless horde of women, and in the silence of the dead of night fly over vast tracts of country, and obey her commands as their mistress, while they are summoned to her service on other nights.’  (Rossell Hope Robbins: The Encyclopedia of Witchcraft and Demonology. Spring Books, London, 1970, p. 76.)

The Canon does not mention witchcraft, and the perceived connection to witchcraft may come from the flying motif, found in the trials, while the Devil motif of the trials is replaced by the Goddess Diana, a figure more fitting for modern Paganism. Norman Cohn writes that there was a popular belief of women flying through the night; sometimes their leader was Herodias. He believes that these women were experiencing this then common cultural assumption in their dreams, believed it was actually happening, and the church latched onto this belief as a delusion to be corrected.  (Norman Cohn: Europe’s Inner Demons. Chatto Heinemann, London, 1975.)
    A further connection with witchcraft is found in her presence in Leland’s Aradia as the Goddess of the witches. Gardner wrote that she was the wife of Janus, worshipped in Britain by refugees from the Fall of Troy, and also quoted them with the fairies, quoting A. E. Waite to the effect that fairies were the consorts of Diana, and that the original fairies were merely women who had been initiated into the mysteries of magic.  (Gerald Gardner: The Meaning of Witchcraft. Weiser Books, York Beach, 2004.) Once again Gardner draws on sources which to him as a non-academic may have appeared impeachable, but in fact Aradia has always been considered doubtful historically. Yes, it undoubtedly draws on the folklore of the region, but that folklore also takes place within a Catholic context, and the most damning fact is that there is no other evidence prior to the publication of Aradia, for the survival of an ancient religion in that area of Italy. I discount certain modern witchcraft writers, because the important evidence would have to appear independently of Aradia to be credible.
Hutton identifies three possible extremes in the interpretation of Aradia: first that it was actually the scripture of a vanished religion, second that Maddalena made it up to please Leland, and third that Leland made it up. He does not ultimately come down on any one of these, but asserts that there is still research to be done in Leland’s unpublished papers, and the solution as to the actual source of Aradia may be a combination of all three, or none of them (Ronald Hutton: The Triumph of the Moon. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1999).
This essentially leaves us exactly where we were at the beginning of this: leaving questions of history aside, the stories around Diana and her postulated cult are a potent force within our community today. For feminists she is the epitome of female power, for example. Witches of all traditions have this potent myth of a Goddess who sends her semi-divine and semi-human daughter to the enslaved to teach them how to free themselves from all that enslaves them. If this mythology so much as makes one person get up and do something to make the world a better place, then it has done its job.