Artemis
ARTEMIS (Gr. Artemis, Lat. Diana). Diana was the Roman goddess of the moon. A daughter of Jupiter, she was a twin sister of Apollo, who was associated with the sun, as she was with the moon. She was represented as a virgin huntress and was widely worshiped. When the Greek worship penetrated Italy about 400 b.c., the Italians identified Diana with their Artemis, her Greek counterpart. Her worship was pure compared with the sensual worship of eastern gods and goddesses.
“Artemis of the Ephesians” is mentioned only in
ARTEMIS är’ tə məs (̓Αρτεμις). Artemis was a goddess universally worshiped throughout the Gr. world, but may have had pre-Hellenic origin, as for example at Ephesus, in which city her cult was undoubtedly grafted on to that of an Asiatic fertility goddess. It may be significant that the name yields no clear Gr. meaning, and it is idle to speculate on the form and shape of the original concept of the deity and her functions. In historical times her sphere was the uncultivated earth, the forests, and the hills. Homer gave her the title, “lady of wild things,” the virgin huntress, armed with bow and arrows.
Other functions were acquired. For example, her role as a city goddess was the result of her popularity among women because she was invoked in childbirth. Aetiological myths accounted for this office by stories of Artemis’ horror at her mother’s birth pains, or by the quite contradictory tale that after Leto had borne her painlessly on the island of Ortygia, she fulfilled herself an obstetric function at the subsequent birth of her twin brother Apollo on the island of Delos. In ancient mythology she is not frequently associated with Apollo. The most probable explanation of Artemis’ function as a goddess of birth is that, in spite of her classical virginity, in ultimate origin she was one of the many mother goddesses of the pre-Hellenic world. Some forms of her ritual seem to have involved the simulation of beast shapes. For example, in one part of Attica little girls in saffron dresses, imitating perhaps the pelt of a bear, danced before her image and were said to “play the bear.” Does this suggest that the original form of the deity was animal? At Halae a pretense of human sacrifice was made by drawing a few drops of blood from a man’s throat with a sword, and this may very well represent an original prehistoric practice and a recollection of some horrifying ritual of fertility worship. It was the Artemis cult of a barbarous people of the Tauric Chersonese (the Crimea) which, allegedly introduced by Orestes, the hero of Euripides’ Iphigenia in Tauris, gave rise to the simulated sacrifice at Halae. At Ephesus, where, as above mentioned, the cult of Artemis was merged with that of an Anatolian fertility goddess, a mighty temple, one of the Seven Wonders of the World, was built. Here some cult object, possibly a meteoric stone, was associated with Artemis (
Bibliography
W. M. Ramsay, The Letters to the Seven Churches (1904), ch. XVII; C. Seltman, The Twelve Olympians and Their Guests (1960), ch. X.
International Standard Bible Encyclopedia (1915)
A deity of Asiatic origin, the mother goddess of the earth, whose seat of worship was the temple in Ephesus, the capital of the Roman province of Asia. Diana is but the Latinized form of the Greek word Artemis, yet the Artemis of Ephesus should not be confused with the Greek goddess of that name.
She may, however, be identified with the Cybele of the Phrygians whose name she also bore, and with several other deities who were worshipped under different names in various parts of the Orient. In Cappadocia she was known as Ma; to the Syrians as Atargatis or Mylitta; among the Phoenicians as Astarte, a name which appears among the Assyrians as Ishtar; the modern name Esther is derived from it. The same goddess seems to have been worshipped by the Hittites, for a female deity is sculptured on the rocks at Yazili Kaya, near the Hittite city of Boghazkeui. It may be shown ultimately that the various goddesses of Syria and Asia Minor all owe their origin to the earlier Assyrian or Babylonian Ishtar, the goddess of love, whose chief attributes they possessed. The several forms and names under which she appears axe due to the varying developments in different regions.
Tradition says that Diana was born in the woods near Ephesus, where her temple was built, when her image of wood (possibly ebony; Pliny, NH, xvi. 40;
At the head of her cult was a chief priest, originally a eunuch who bore the name and later the title Megabyzos. Under him were priests known as Essenes, appointed. perhaps from the city officials, for but a single year; it was their duty to offer the sacrifices to the goddess in behalf of the city. Other subordinate classes of priests known as Kouretes, Krobatai and Hilroi performed duties which are now obscure. The priestesses were even more numerous, and, probably from their great numbers, they were called Melissai or bees; the Ephesian symbol therefore which appears commonly upon the coins struck in the city, is a bee. The Melissai, which in the early times were all virgins, were of three classes; it is no longer known just what the special duties of each class were. The ritual of the temple services consisted of sacrifices and of ceremonial prostitution, a practice which was common to many of the religions of the ancient Orient, and which still exists among some of the obscure tribes of Asia Minor.
The temple of Diana was not properly the home of the goddess; it was but a shrine, the chief one, devoted to her service. She lived in Nature; she was everywhere wherever there was life, the mother of all living things; all offerings of every possible nature were therefore acceptable to her; hence, the vast wealth which poured into her temple. Not only was she worshipped in her temple, but in the minute shrines or naoi which were sometimes modeled after the temple. More frequently the shrines were exceedingly crude objects, either of silver or stone or wood or clay. They were made at Ephesus by dependents of the temple, and carried by the pilgrims throughout the world. Before them Diana might also be worshipped anywhere, just as now from the soil of the sacred Mesopotamian city of Kerbela, where the sons of Ali were martyred, little blocks are formed and are carried away by the Shiah Moslems that they may pray upon sacred ground wherever they may be. The makers of the shrines of Diana formed an exceedingly large class among whom, in Paul’s time, was Demetrius (