Myth, Ritual And Religion, Vol. 2 (of 2)

by Andrew Lang

* The symbolic explanation of Bachofen, Claus and others is
to the effect that the she-bear (to take that case) is a
beast in which the maternal instinct is very strong, and
apparently that the she-bear, deprived of her whelps, is a
fit symbol of a goddess notoriously virginal, and without
offspring.

The goddess of Brauron, succeeding probably to the cult of a she-bear, called for human blood. With human blood the Artemis Orthia of Sparta was propitiated. Of this goddess and her rights Pausanias tells a very remarkable story. The image of the goddess, he declares, is barbarous; which probably means that even among the archaic wooden idols of Greece it seemed peculiarly savage in style. Astrabacus and Alopecus (the ass and the fox), sons of Agis, are said to have found the idol in a bush, and to have been struck mad at the sight of it. Those who sacrificed to the goddess fell to blows and slew each other; a pestilence followed, and it became clear that the goddess demanded human victims. "Her altar must be drenched in the blood of men," the victim being chosen by lot. Lycurgus got the credit of substituting the rite in which boys were flogged before the goddess to the effusion of blood for the older human sacrifices.* The Taurian Artemis, adored with human sacrifice, and her priestess, Iphigenia, perhaps a form of the goddess, are familiar examples of this sanguinary ritual.** Suchier is probably correct in denying that these sacrifices are of foreign origin. They are closely interwoven with the oldest idols and oldest myths of the districts least open to foreign influence. An Achaean example is given by Pausanias.*** Artemis was adored with the offering of a beautiful girl and boy. Not far from Brauron, at Halae, was a very ancient temple of Artemis Tauropolos, in which blood was drawn from a man's throat by the edge of the sword, clearly a modified survival of human sacrifice. The whole connection of Artemis with Taurian rites has been examined by Müller,**** in his Orchomenos(v) Horns grow from the shoulders of Artemis Tauropolos, on the coins of Amphipolis, and on Macedonian coins she rides on a bull. According to Decharme,(v)* the Taurian Artemis, with her hideous rites, was confused, by an accidental resemblance of names, with this Artemis Tauropolos, whose "symbol" was a bull, and who (whatever we may think of the symbolic hypothesis) used bulls as her "vehicle" and wore bull's horns.

* Paus., iii. 8,16. Cf. Müller, Dorians, book ii. chap. 9,
6. Pausanias, viii. 23, 1, mentions a similar custom,
ordained by the Delphian oracle, the flogging of women at
the feast of Dionysus in Alea of Arcadia.
** Cf. Müller, Dorians, it 9, 6, and Claus, op. cit., cap.
v.
*** Paus., vii. 19.
****Op. cit., ii. 9, 6.
(v) Ibid., p. 311. Qf. Euripides, Iph. Taur., 1424, and
Roscher, Lexikon, p. 568.
(v)* Mythol. de la Grece, p. 137.

Müller, on the other hand,* believes the Greeks found in Tauria (i.e., Lemnos) a goddess with bloody "rites, whom they identified by reason of those very human sacrifices, with their own Artemis Iphigenia". Their own worship of that deity bore so many marks of ancient barbarism that they were willing to consider the northern barbarians as its authors. Yet it is possible that the Tauric Artemis was no more derived from the Taurians than Artemis Æthiopia from the Æthiopians.

The nature of the famous Diana of the Ephesians, or Artemis of Ephesus, is probably quite distinct in origin from either the Artemis of Arcadia and Attica or the deity of literary creeds. As late as the time of Tacitus** the Ephesians maintained that Leto's twins had been born in their territory. "The first which showed themselves in the senate were the Ephesians, declaring that Diana and Apollo were not born in the island Delos, as the common people did believe; and there was in their country a river called Cenchrius, and a wood called Ortegia, where Latona, being great with child, and leaning against an olive tree which is yet in that place, brought forth these two gods, and that by the commandment of the gods the wood was made sacred."***

* Mythol. de la Grece, ii. 9, 7.
** Annals, iii. 61.
*** Greenwey's Tacitus, 1622.

This was a mere adaptation of the Delian legend, the olive (in Athens sacred to Athene) taking the place of the Delian palm-tree. The real Artemis of Ephesus, "the image that fell from heaven," was an Oriental survival. Nothing can be less Greek in taste than her many-breasted idol, which may be compared with the many-breasted goddess of the beer-producing maguey plant in Mexico.*

The wilder elements in the local rites and myths of Diana are little if
at all concerned with the goddess in her Olympian aspect as the daughter
of Leto and sister of Apollo. It is from this lofty rank that she
descends in the national epic to combat on the Ilian
plain among warring gods and men. Claus has attempted, from a comparison
of the epithets applied to Artemis, to show that the poets of the Iliad
and the Odyssey take different views of her character. In the Iliad she
is a goddess of tumult and passion; in the Odyssey, a holy maiden with
the "gentle darts" that deal sudden and painless death. But in both
poems she is a huntress, and the death-dealing shafts are hers both in
Iliad and Odyssey. Perhaps the apparent difference is due to nothing but
the necessity for allotting her a part in that battle of the Olympians
which rages in the Iliad. Thus Hera in the Iliad addresses her thus:**
"How now! art thou mad, bold vixen, to match thyself against me? Hard
were it for thee to match my might, bow-bearer though thou art, since
against women Zeus made thee a lion, and giveth thee to slay whomso of
them thou wilt. Truly it is better on the mountains to slay wild beasts
and deer than to fight with one that is mightier than thou."
* For an alabaster statuette of the goddess, see Roscher's
Lexikon, p. 588
** Iliad, xxi. 481.

These taunts of Hera, who always detests the illegitimate children of Zeus, doubtless refer to the character of Artemis as the goddess of childbirth. Here she becomes confused with Ilithyia and with Hecate; but it is unnecessary to pursue the inquiry into these details.*

Like most of the Olympians, Artemis was connected not only with beast-worship, but with plant-worship. She was known by the names Daphnæa and Cedreatis; at Ephesus not only the olive but the oak was sacred to her; at Delos she had her palm tree. Her idol was placed in or hung from the branches of these trees, and it is not improbable that she succeeded to the honours either of a tree worshipped in itself and for itself, or of the spirit or genius which was presumed to dwell in and inform it. Similar examples of one creed inheriting the holy things of its predecessor are common enough where either missionaries, as in Mexico and China, or the early preachers of the gospel in Brittany or Scandinavia, appropriated to Christ the holy days of pagan deities and consecrated fetish stones with the mark of the cross. Unluckily, we have no historical evidence as to the moment in which the ancient tribal totems and fetishes and sacrifices were placed under the protection of the various Olympians, in whose cult they survive, like flies in amber. But that this process did take place is the most obvious explanation of the rude factors in the religion of Artemis, as of Apollo, Zeus or Dionysus.