The Arcadian myth of Artemis and the she-bear is variously narrated. According to Pausanias, Lycaon, king of Arcadia, had a daughter, Callisto, who was loved by Zeus. Hera, in jealous wrath, changed Callisto into a she-bear; and Artemis, to please Hera, shot the beast. At this time the she-bear was pregnant with a child by Zeus, who sent Hermes to save the babe, Areas, just as Dionysus was saved at the burning of Semele and Asclepius at the death of his mother, whom Apollo slew. Zeus then transformed Callisto into a constellation, the bear.* No more straightforward myth of descent from a beast (for the Arcadians claimed descent from Areas, the she-bear's son) and of starry or bestial metamorphosis was ever told by Cahrocs or Kamilaroi. Another story ran that Artemis herself, in anger at the unchastity of Callisto, caused her to become a bear. So the legend ran in a Hesiodic poem, according to the extract in Eratosthenes.**
* Paus., viii. 3, 5.
** O. Müller, Engl. transl., p. 15; Catast., i.; Apollodor.,
iii. 82; Hyginus, 176, 177. A number of less important
references are given in Bachofen's Der Bar in den Religionen
des Alterthums.
Such is the ancient myth, which Otfried Müller endeavours to explain by the light of his lucid common sense, without the assistance which we can now derive from anthropological research. The nymph Callisto, in his opinion, is a mere refraction from Artemis herself, under her Arcadian and poetic name of Calliste, "the most beautiful". Hard by the tumulus known as the grave of Callisto was a shrine, Pausanias tells us, of Artemis Calliste.* Pamphos, he adds, was the first poet known to him who praised Artemis by this title, and he learned it from the Arcadians. Müller next remarks on the attributes of Artemis in Athens, the Artemis known as Brauronia. "Now," says he, "we set out from this, that the circumstance of the goddess who is served at Brauron by she-bears having a friend and companion changed into a bear, cannot possibly be a freak of chance, but that this metamorphosis has its foundation in the fact that the animal was sacred to the goddess."
It will become probable that the animal actually was mythically identified with the goddess at an extremely remote period, or, at all events, that the goddess succeeded to, and threw her protection over, an ancient worship of the animal.
Passing then from Arcadia, where the friend of the goddess becomes a she-bear, to Brauron and Munychia in Attica, we find that the local Artemis there, an Artemis connected by legend with the fierce Taurian goddess, is served by young girls, who imitate, in dances, the gait of bears, who are called little bears, apktoi, and whose ministry is named aptcreia, that is, "a playing the bear". Some have held that the girls once wore bear-skins.**
* Paus., viii. 3.
** Claus, op. cit., p. 76. [Suchier, De Dian Brauron, p.
33.] The bearskin seems later to have been exchanged for a
saffron raiment. Compare Harpokration, Aristophanes,
Lysistrata, 646. The Scholiast on that passage collects
legendary explanations, setting forth that the rites were
meant to appease the goddess for the slaying of a tame bear
[cf. Apostolius, vii. 10]. Mr. Parnell has collected all the
lore in his work on the Cults of the Greek States.
Familiar examples in ancient and classical times of this religious service by men in bestial guise are the wolf-dances of the Hirpi or "wolves," and the use of the ram-skin in Egypt and Greece.* These Brauronian rites point to a period when the goddess was herself a bear, or when a bear-myth accrued to her legend, and this inference is confirmed by the singular tradition that she was not only a bear, but a bear who craved for human blood.**
* Servius. Jen. i. xi. 785. For a singular parallel in modern
French folk-lore to the dance of the Hirpi, see Mannhardt,
Wald und Feld Qultus, ii 824, 825. For the ram, see
Herodotus, ii. 42. In Thebes the ram's skin was in the
yearly festival flayed, and placed on the statue of the god.
Compare, in the case of the buzzard, Bancroft, iii. 168.
Great care is taken in preserving the skin of the sacrificed
totem, the buzzard, as it makes part of a sacred dress.
** Apostolius, viii. 19, vii. 10, quoted by O. Müller (cf.
Welcker, i. 573).
The connection between the Arcadian Artemis, the Artemis of Brauron, and the common rituals and creeds of totemistic worship is now, perhaps, undeniably apparent. Perhaps in all the legend and all the cult of the goddess there is no more archaic element than this. The speech of the women in the Lysistrata, recalling the days of their childhood when they "were bears," takes us back to a remote past when the tribes settled at Brauron were bear-worshippers, and, in all probability, claimed to be of the bear stock or kindred. Their distant descendants still imitated the creature's movements in a sacred dance; and the girls of Periclean Athens acted at that moment like the young men of the Mandans or Nootkas in their wolf-dance or buffalo-dance. Two questions remain unanswered: how did a goddess of the name of Artemis, and with her wide and beneficent functions, succeed to a cult so barbarous? or how, on the other hand, did the cult of a ravening she-bear develop into the humane and pure religion of Artemis?
Here is a moment in mythical and religious evolution which almost escapes our inquiry. We find, in actual historical processes, nothing more akin to it than the relation borne by the Samoan gods to the various animals in which they are supposed to be manifest. How did the complex theory of the nature of Artemis arise? what was its growth? at what precise hour did it emancipate itself on the whole from the lower savage creeds? or how was it developed out of their unpromising materials? The science of mythology may perhaps never find a key to these obscure problems.*