This so-called chapter of Ancyra is so interesting an exhibition of the blending of classical and mediæval diablerie that I shall make no apology for interposing a detailed examination of its mythology. It will subserve my argument against Janus, by bringing out the idolatrous, and so far unreal, element of magic as that which naturally presented itself to the early church as the object of its denunciations.
Diana (Dia Jana) was one of the deities of ancient Latium; although a Latin federal temple was erected to her by Servius Tullius on the Aventine Hill, she never took any very high rank amongst the divinities of Rome, but remained the special patron of slaves and rustics—that is to say, the immediate cultivators of the soil.[101] Livy and Strabo tell us that this goddess was identical with the Ephesian Artemis—an acquaintance with whose cult the Latins might have obtained through the Phocean colony at Marseilles. Dr. Döllinger describes the Ephesian goddess as "a kind of pantheistic deity, with more of an Asiatic than an Hellenic character. She was most analogous to Cybele as physical mother and parent of all." S. Jerome (Proœm. ad Ephes.) says that the Ephesians worshipped Diana, "not the huntress who carries the bow and is high-girt, but that many-breasted one, which the Greeks call πολυμαστης."
The cultus of Diana in Italy, though substantially of a benignant character, seems to have been early qualified by the sterner rites of Thrace, where bloody flagellations had been accepted as a compromise for human sacrifice. Aricia, one of the oldest towns in Latium, boasted that its image of the goddess had been brought from Tauris.
Originally, Dr. Döllinger reminds us, neither the Roman Diana nor the Grecian Artemis were connected in any way with the moon. As the ancient Latin sun-god Janus' sister, Diana was the female divinity of the sun. Æschylus is generally said to be the first author who speaks of Artemis as the moon-goddess; whereas Hecate was an original goddess of the moon and of the night. Hence, when she came to be identified with Artemis, and through her with Diana, by an amalgamation of rites, Diana became undisputed goddess of the moon and of the mysterious realms of the night, the resort of ghosts and fays. Hecate was a Titan, the only one who retained power under the Zeus dynasty; hence her name, Titanis, or Titania, with which Shakespeare has familiarized us. Statius (Thebaid, lib. i.) applies this epithet to the moon:
"Titanis late mundo subvecta silenti
Rorifera gelidum tenuaverat aëra biga."
Virgil doubtless gives this title to the stars as to the moon's supposed satellites (Æneid, lib. vi.):
"Lucentemque globum lunæ Titaniaque astra."
In Lucian we have frequent mention of Hecate and her dogs; in a fragment of S. Maximus of Turin the same "aerial dogs" are referred to, and S. Hippolytus speaks of Diana and her dogs appearing in the magician's cauldron.
The amalgamated worship of Hecate and Diana, the queen of ghosts and the goddess of fertility, presents precisely those apparently incongruous elements which strike us in fairy mythology, where fairies, and ghosts, and witches combine so oddly in the web of mediæval folk-lore.