Artemis

Callimachus tells how Artemis, at the age of three, sat on her father Zeus’s knee and asked for gifts: eternal virginity, a bow and arrows, a short tunic for running, sixty ocean nymphs as attendants, twenty river nymphs to care for her hounds, and all the mountains in the world. Zeus laughed and gave her everything.

The Hunter

Artemis ruled the wild places. She hunted deer and boar with her pack of hounds and her company of nymphs. The boundaries she maintained were absolute. When the hunter Actaeon stumbled upon her bathing, she turned him into a stag. His own hounds, failing to recognize their master, tore him apart. The story was a warning about what happens when the wrong person crosses into sacred space.

Ephesus

The Temple of Artemis at Ephesus was one of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world. It was built, burned by Herostratus in 356 BCE (the night Alexander the Great was born, according to Plutarch), rebuilt, and finally destroyed by a Gothic raid in 262 CE. The Artemis of Ephesus looked nothing like the lithe huntress of Greek art. She was depicted covered in bulbous protrusions, long interpreted as breasts, now also read as bull testicles, eggs, or dewdrops. The Ephesian Artemis was a Near Eastern mother goddess wearing a Greek name.

The Paradox

Artemis was the virgin goddess of childbirth. The contradiction is only apparent. She presided over the threshold: the passage from the wild into the human, from the animal into the social, from pregnancy into motherhood. She was not domestic. She was the power that made the domestic possible by guarding its boundary.