Images:

Artemis attacking a fawn
Artemis with a fawn
Apollo and Artemis kill Tityos, who tried to rape Leto
Punishment of Actaeon       Description
Sacrifice of Iphigenia         Description
Artemis of Ephesus

Artemis not only enjoys one of the most widespread cults, but is also one of the most individual and manifestly one of the oldest deities. Her name is etymologically obscure; whether or not it is to be found in Linear B, the Mycenean script, is still a matter of dispute. Immediately apparent are her close connections with Asia Minor. Her name appears among the gods of the Lydians and of the Lycians, and though a borrowing from the Greek is probable in the case of the Lycians, and not impossible in the case of the Lydians, the personal names with their non-Greek formation indicate how fully this goddess is assimilated.

In the famous Artemis of Ephesus, Asia Minor elements seem to have been taken over wholesale by Greek cities, in the cult image and also in the organization of beggar priests or even eunuch priests within the framework of a temple state. Identifications with the Great Goddess of Asia Minor, with Kybele or Anahita, were later made without hesitation. Like Apollo, Artemis also has eastern lions in her train.

In the Iliad Artemis is called Mistress of the Animals,  #1    #2 obviously a well established formula, and this has justly been seen as a key to her nature. The eastern motif so beloved by archaic art, which shows a goddess - often with wings - standing between symmetrically arranged wild animals, is generally associated with Artemis.  This Misstres of the Animals is a Mistress of the whole of wild nature, of the fish of the water, the birds of the air, lions and stags, goats and hares; she herself is wild and uncanny and is even shown with a Gorgon head.

Though she is "gracious to the playful cubs of fierce lions and delights in the suckling young of every wild creature that roves in the field," she is also the huntress who triumphantly slays her prey with bow and arrow. Always and everywhere Artemis is the goddess of hunting and of hunters; she is honoured in a very ancient way where the hunter hangs the horns and skin of his prey on a tree or else on special, club-shaped pillars.  Without doubt, customs of this kind, as well as the very idea of a Mistress of the Animals, go back to the Palaeolithic.    In the Homeric poems, this sphere of activity, still betrayed in the title Mistress of the Animals and very much alive in the cult, is decidedly suppressed, and Artemis is made a girl. In the battle of the gods Artemis cuts a sorry figure: one impudent speech, and Hera grabs her by the wrists and boxes her about the ears with her quiver; the arrows falls scattered on the ground and Artemis rushes off in tears to be comforted by her father Zeus, leaving Leto, her mother, to pick up the arrows  (III 1.6) The goddess is forced into the role of an awkward adolescent girl beside a severe step-mother - among warriors she is doubly out of place.     The positive counterpart to this is presented in the Odyssey: the most attractive of maidens, Nausikaa, is painted in the colours of Artemis:

Iliad 6.93.109

 "Now when they had washed the garments, and had cleansed them of all the stains, they spread them out in rows on the shore of the sea where [95] the waves dashing against the land washed the pebbles cleanest; and they, after they had bathed and anointed themselves richly with oil, took their meal on the river's banks, and waited for the clothing to dry in the bright sunshine. Then when they had had their joy of food, she and her handmaids, [100] they threw off their head-gear and fell to playing at ball, and white-armed Nausicaa was leader in the song. And even as Artemis, the archer, roves over the mountains, along the ridges of lofty Taygetus or Erymanthus, joying in the pursuit of boars and swift deer, [105] and with her sport the wood-nymphs, the daughters of Zeus who bears the aegis, and Leto is glad at heart ó high above them all Artemis holds her head and brows, and easily may she be known, though all are fair ó so amid her handmaidens shone the maid unwed."

This became the definitive picture of the goddess: Artemis with her swarms  of nymphs, hunting, dancing, and playing on mountains and meadows.  Artemis loves the bow and to kill wild beasts in mountains and the lyre and dancing and piercing, triumphal  cries and shady groves - and also the city of upright men - so runs the  Homeric Hymn.  This is reflected in the classical iconography: she is a  youthful, lithe figure with a short chiton and a girl's hairstyle and carries a  bow and a quiver of arrows; like her brother Apollo, she is often accompanied  by an animal, usually a stag or doe. The goddess among her nymphs is "holy" in a very special sense as an  inviolate and inviolable virgin. A feeling for virgin nature with meadows,   groves, and mountains, which is as yet barely articulated elsewhere, begins to find form here; Artemis is the goddess of the open countryside beyond the  towns and villages and beyond the fields tilled in the works of men.

But  behind this there also stands a ritual aspect, the ancient hunting taboo: the hunter too must be continent, he must be pure and chaste; thus he can win Artemis' favour. The most moving expression of the Artemisian ideal is  found in Euripides' Hippolytos. Hippolytos the hunter brings Artemis a  garland of flowers plucked from a meadow never mown by man, in which only the pure may set foot; he alone is permitted to enter, and here in the solitude he is even granted the favour of hearing Artemis' voice.  But his    exclusive devotion to this goddess is in violation of the rules which govern  human life, and so he falls victim to Aphrodite.  For the virginity of Artemis is not asexuality as is Athena's practical and  organizational intelligence, but a peculiarly erotic and challenging ideal.   In  the Iliad the chorus of Artemis is mentioned only once, in order to tell how    Hermes burned with love for one of the dancers and thereupon made her a mother. In other cases also, the chorus of Artemis appears as a predestined  occasion for rape, whether it is the Dioscuri (Castor and Polydeuces) seizing the daughters of Leukippos or  Theseus taking Helen. Callisto, the 'Most Beautiful', was hunting in Artemis' train when Zeus assumed the shape of the goddess and  ravished her, so turning the figure of the pure Virgin into its extreme opposite; in this way Zeus became the father of Arcas, the eponymous ancestor of the  Arcadians.

Here and elsewhere, the picturesque portrayal of Artemis and her retinue fastens on to elements present in ritual. The very word nymph itself refers equally to the divinities present in brooks and flowers, to human brides, and  to young women in their first encounter with love.    Everywhere girls approaching marriageable age come together to form dancing groups,  especially at festivals in honour of the goddess; this is in fact one of the most  important opportunities for young men to become acquainted with girls.

The ritual at Brauron

Occasionally girls are placed for a longer period in the exclusive service of  Artemis as part of an initiation ritual; the most famous example is Brauron near Athens.  In another cult the girls make sport wearing phalluses or else they wear grotesque masks such as those discovered in the Ortheia sanctuary at Sparta.  The girls, like  their goddess, may assume the aspect of a Gorgon: in this way their exceptional status in the wilds is played out even more drastically.

At the same time, the serene and not entirely innocent picture of the Artemisian swarms of maidens is not without its darker obverse. The inviolable goddess is terrible and even cruel - her arrow threatens every girl who fulfils her womanly destiny. Hera reviles Artemis with the words, "a lion  to women Zeus has made you - to kill any at your pleasure."   Service in the  temple at Brauron and also the simpler offerings to Artemis were regarded as an advance purchase of freedom from the power of the virgin  goddess; women who died in childbed were direct victims of Artemis; their  garments were dedicated at Brauron.   But just as the plague god is also the healing god, so the virgin is also the birth goddess; the piercing cry of fear  from the women summons her to hand, and she comes and brings release:  in this she merges with Eileithyia.

There is no wedding without Artemis: hers  is the power to send and ward off dangers before and after this decisive turning-point in a girl's life.  As goddess of the wilds,  Artemis presides over hunting and over the initiation of girls. The aetiological myth points to an even more intimate connection; the dedication of young girls at Brauron is said to be in  atonement for a bear sacred to Artemis which was killed by Attic youths.     For this reason the girls themselves are called "she-bears.". The maiden as a substitute victim for the animal to be killed - presented in mythology as the  bride of the bear or of the buffalo - is a very widespread motif in hunting cultures.

This same motif can also be discerned in the most famous Greek myth of human sacrifice, the myth of Iphigeneia: in propitiation for a stag which Agamemnon has killed in Artemis' sacred grove, the goddess demands the sacrifice of his daughter, for whom a doe is then miraculously substituted in turn. In the context of the epic this sacrifice has the function of opening war; in reality, goat sacrifices to Artemis are made before battle is engaged.

Hunting and war are shown as equivalent. Behind maiden initiation, maiden sacrifice appears as a still deeper level. And just as Apollo is mirrored in Achilles, so Artemis is mirrored in Iphigeneia; Iphigeneia herself becomes a goddess, a second Artemis.  In this way the very figure of the Virgin grows out of the sacrifice.  In point of fact, Artemis is and remains a Mistress of sacrifices, especially of cruel and bloody sacrifices. The image of Artemis which Orestes took together with Iphigeneia from the land of the Tauroi demands human blood.  The image was therefore said to have been brought to Sparta, where the blood of the ephebes was made to flow at the Ortheia festival. The flogging in the theatre as an endurance contest before a tourist audience is, in this form at least, obviously an innovation of Imperial times. The earlier sources point to a cult game in which one group or age-group had to steal the 'cheese' from the Artemis altar while others armed with whips, defended the altar.  For Greeks this is far from being an epitome of pure piety. The ritual cruelty brings something; of the harshness of pre-civilized life into the civilization of the polis. The Greeks like to connect this custom with the barbaric Tauroi in the distant north, but without disputing the identity of this goddess with the blithe leader of the nymphs.