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~ ARTEMIS ~

Amazon Moon-Goddess, Mother of Creatures, she was also known in Latin as Diana or "Goddess Anna". Her image at Ephesus had depicts her torso covered with breasts, to show she nurtured all living things. However, She was also the Huntress, who brought down the very creatures she brought forth. Her name in Sparta was given at Artamis, meaning "Cutter" or "Butcher".

The myth of Artemis extends as far back as Neolithic sacrificial customs. At Taurus her holy women, under the guidance of their high priestess Iphigeneia, sacrificed all men who landed on their shores, nailing the head of each victim to a cross. At Hierapolis, the Goddess's victims were hung on artificial trees in her temple. In Attica, Artemis was ritually propitiated with drops of blood drawn from a man's neck by a sword, a symbolic remnant of former beheadings. Later, human victims were replaced by bulls, hence earning her the title of Tauropolos, "bull-slayer".

As the Huntress, she also represented the destroying Crone or the waning moon. Like Hecate, she led the nocturnal hunt while her priestesses wore the masks of hunting dogs. Alani, or "hunting dogs," was the Greek name for Scythians who revered Artemis. The mythological hunting dogs that tore the Horned God to pieces were really Her sacred bitches.

Mythographers of the classics pretended that the Horned God Actaeon committed the sin of seeing the chaste virgin Goddess in her bath, and she condemned him out of her offended modesty. In Germany, however, the Goddess's ritual bath could be witnessed only by "men doomed to die." Actaeaon's antlers and deerskin reveal him to the pre-Hellenic stag king, reigning over the sacred hunt for half the year before he's torn apart and replaced by his co-king. In the 1st Century A.D., Artemis's priestesses still enacted the pursuit and slaying of a man dressed as a stag on the Goddess's mountain. Thus Her groves became the "deer-gardens", the scene of many a venison feast. In German this was known as "Tiergarten", in Swedish "Djurgarden".

One of Artemis's most popular animal incarnations was the Great She-Bear, Ursa Major, ruler of the stars and protectress of the axis mundi, Pole of the World. The Helvetian tribes in the area known as Berne, worshipped her as the She-Bear, which is still their heraldic symbol. Berne means "She-Bear." Sometimes the Helvetians called her Artio, shortened to Art by the Celtic tribes who coupled her with the bear-king, Arthur. As Artio's Lord of the Hunt, the medieval god of witches came to be called, "Robin son of Art."

According to the Irish, Art meant "God," but its earlier meaning was "Goddess", more specifically the Bear-Goddess. She was also canonized as a Christian saint, Ursula, a derivation from her Saxon name of Ursel, She-Bear.

"Many-breasted" Artemis was always a patroness of fertility and birth. When male gods turned against these attributes by opposing the cult of the Goddess, Apollo, her own twin brother, and sometimes consort, made birth illegal on his sacred isle of Delos. Pregnant women then had to vacate the island lest they offend the god by giving birth there. Christians continued to vilify Artemis. The Gospels demanded the destruction of Artemis's Ephesian temple (Acts 19:27) St. John Chrysostom preached against this temple in 406 A.D. Afterward, it was soon looted and burned. The Patriarch of Constantinople praised Chrysostom's zeal: "In Ephesus he stripped the treasury of Artemis; in Phrygia, he left without sons her whom they called Mother of the Gods."

We know her maternal flame still burns on.