Artemis, the huntress who became mistress of the Moon

In the modern imagination Artemis with a crescent moon in her hair seems an obvious image. Yet the oldest form of the goddess was not lunar. She was the virgin huntress of woods and mountains, protector of wild animals and of the thresholds of women's lives. The bond with the Moon was built slowly, through centuries of religious and philosophical reflection, and its story helps us understand how the Greek gods changed their faces over time.

The twin of Apollo

According to myth Artemis was the daughter of Zeus and Leto and the twin sister of Apollo. Leto, persecuted by Hera's jealousy, found refuge on the island of Delos, which became one of the great Panhellenic sanctuaries. In the Iliad Artemis is called potnia theron, «mistress of animals», a title that points to much older divine figures, attested in Aegean art as a goddess standing between two beasts.

Her world was the world of margins: woods, marshes, mountains, but also the passages in girls' lives towards marriage and childbirth. At Brauron, in Attica, Athenian girls served the goddess in a rite called the arkteia, during which they were called «bears». The rite took place in a sanctuary near the east coast of Attica, where excavations have yielded small vases showing girls running or dancing. Nothing in these archaic cults refers explicitly to the Moon.

How the lunar goddess was born

The shift came when, between the classical and Hellenistic periods, Apollo was increasingly identified with Helios, the Sun. By symmetry his twin sister was associated with Selene. The process was encouraged by philosophers and learned poets, who liked to read the gods as images of natural forces, and by the spread of epithets such as Phoebe, «the bright one», and Phosphoros, «light-bringer».

A concrete clue comes from Athens. The festival of Artemis Mounichia, at Piraeus, was celebrated in the month of Mounichion, and according to ancient sources she was offered cakes surrounded by small lit torches, called amphiphontes, «shining all around». Several authors linked those lights to the full Moon. It is an example of how an older cult could, over time, take on astral meanings.

Ephesus and the hymn of Callimachus

The goddess's grandest sanctuary was the Artemision at Ephesus, counted among the seven wonders of the world. According to Plutarch it was set on fire in 356 BC by a man named Herostratus, who wished to make his own name immortal, on the same night that Alexander the Great was born. The Ephesian Artemis, with her unusual iconography, was however a goddess of Anatolian origin, different in many respects from the Greek huntress.

In the third century BC Callimachus composed a Hymn to Artemis in which the child goddess asks Zeus for a bow, arrows and perpetual virginity. From here the image of Artemis passed to Rome, where it merged with Diana. When we see her today with the lunar crescent, we are looking at the result of a long layering: an archaic huntress to whom Greek culture, little by little, entrusted the night sky as well. The two images, the huntress and the Moon, do not exclude each other: both speak of a distant, pure and luminous goddess who watches over what lies outside the city.