Click here to listen to Artemis and Your Place in the Family of Things in the Season 1 archives on buzzsprout
“When the moon shone, Artemis was present, and beasts and plants would dance.” Karl Kerenyi
An exploration of Artemis, Greek goddess of the moon, the hunt, and wilderness, and the myth of her fateful encounter with Acteaon, that may help you find your place in the family of things.
Here is a transcript of this program:
Artemis and Your Place in the Family of Things 053019
Hello everyone and welcome to Myth Matters, a biweekly podcast of storytelling and conversation about mythology, and why it’s important to our lives today. I’m your host and personal mythologist, Catherine Svehla. Thank you so much for joining me. Wherever you may be in this wide, beautiful, crazy, world of ours, you are part of this story circle.
In the last podcast I told you about Selene and Hecate, two Greek goddesses associated with the moon, and I invited you to engage with the moon in the summer months when it’s easy to be outside, to reflect on the significance of the moon cycle and how that influences your rhythms, to refresh your night vision. The new and the full moons are very potent times and the other world that exists under the moonlight calls to something deep in our hearts and souls. In our imagination and the genetic memory, we still carry awareness of a time when the comforts and dangers of the natural world were more familiar, a constant presence and not merely a backdrop or a pocket park inside the sprawl of what we call civilization.
Hecate is the goddess of magic and the new moon. The Greeks imagined Selene as the full moon incarnate, the moisture and dew of the moonlight and dawn, the refreshment and fulfillment that brings, and there was a third goddess in this moon trio, Artemis, the hunter who is recognized by the horns of the crescent moon. I want to talk to you about Artemis today. Now I’ve mentioned in the other podcasts involving Greek deities that we’re following the ideas of James Hillman here, James Hillman and others who advocate the power of particular images and personifications, as ways to think and relate more creatively to the forces that comprise our lives today.
These are commonly expressed in big words, abstractions like “love,” for example, which as a big abstract principle is empty and flat and sterile. It needs imagination. It needs heart. Love as an idea doesn’t mean very much does it, without the particulars, without reference to our lived experience of love for someone or something specific? Personifications like the deities in the Greek pantheon can give our imagination something to latch onto and to work with, to make these abstractions, these ideas, forces that we can really contend with and understand. And I want to say that understanding and using this power of the personified, of the specific, of devoted attention to the relatively small things in our relatively small lives—well this is an important tool in these times, when the grand abstractions like “Truth” and “Justice” and “Democracy,” for example, are empty rhetoric, cynically employed hot air without substance. And the unique power of the particular, the specific, the personal to illuminate the grand, the universal, the all encompassing is the power of myth too. This is a way that we can combat the tyranny of these abstractions, to ground them once again, to make them real.
Once again, this is the power of myth and story, this is the action of the “archetypal” in the language of depth psychology, the power of metaphor to generate multiple meanings. You start with something small and specific and through meditating on its meaning, boom, you end up in the mythic dimension, that is the universal, the cosmic realm of meaning. Now I mentioned love as one of the grand abstractions because we talked about Aphrodite and Eros, the Greek deities who personified this notion in a recent podcast. Artemis, the goddess I want to talk about today, is the face of big words also. I want to use this goddess to reflect a little bit on our notions of “the wild” and “wilderness.”
The Greeks had other related deities. Pan was the nature God for example, and there was Dionysus, god of the irrational, the ecstatic, which is another image of the wild. Dionysian rites took place in the woods and the mountains outside of civilization, outside of the city. I’ll probably talk about Dionysus in an upcoming podcast. He’s a pretty important figure and I could give us an interesting way to think about our current cultural conversations. So you see, Artemis is not the only deity that you could meet when you are out roaming the mountains and the forests far from city life and conventions. And yet she is singular, and her attachment to what we now call “wilderness” and the experiences one can have, and the lessons one can learn, by venturing into the wilderness, especially if you are willing to go alone.
Artemis energy protects the wilderness. I’ve had a number of conversations with people, women in particular, over the last couple of years about the archetypes and the figures in indigenous cultures, water protectors, grandmothers, champions of the land. And part of the backdrop of those conversations is this sense of poverty in Western culture because we don’t have anyone in particular, a female figure who represents the understanding that wilderness and the natural world are sacred and exist, and deserve to exist, for themselves alone. And yet we do. Artemis. Artemis is the one and she is the source of our familiar Western metaphors about the natural world in its pristine or essential state. Artemis is the source of our sense of value for pure water and air, of the phrase virgin forest and our sense of the sanctity of wilderness.
When Artemis was a little girl, she climbed onto the lap of her father, Zeus. She was the daughter of Zeus and the Titan goddess Leto and Zeus was so delighted with her. He asked his little daughter, Artemis what she wanted. Well, she knew exactly what she wanted. Artemis told her father that she wanted to have a bow and arrow and hounds for the hunt. She said that she wanted to always wear a short tunic, to live in the wilderness on the mountains, with the companions of her own choosing, to never marry, and to not have to come to Mount Olympus–the so called civilization of the gods—unless it was absolutely necessary. Zeus granted her all of these things.
That tells you a lot about Artemis, that she knew what she wanted and that what she wanted was to be away from conventions and from the traditional roles that women had to play. And also just away from others in general.
Artemis was one of the Virgin goddesses. She was chaste and she insisted on chastity in her followers. One of the meanings of this in connection with wilderness is its sanctity. It’s a word I used a few minutes ago, I guess. And by that I mean that it doesn’t need to be put to use to have value, that its existence, its very being, is its purpose, is its value. The wilderness doesn’t exist to fulfill the particular needs of anybody or anything. It just is. And Artemis conveys the need and the value of that, the state of that in wilderness, outside, in our experience of it, and also the need to have such a place, a place of self-determination, within our own beings.
Now, there is a definite tension between Artemis and Aphrodite. Aphrodite is about relationship and relatedness. Both of these goddesses retain their selfhood, their autonomy. You might recall that although Aphrodite expresses herself and gives her gifts through relationship, love, sexuality, she’s not a wife, she’s not necessarily cut out for marriage or even for motherhood, just like Artemis. She belongs to herself. But in the case of Artemis, Artemis defines herself, she defines her self. She is not defined by roles that are put on her by other people. She sets her own goals. This is part of the significance of her being a hunter, and she has the focus and the discipline to achieve them—another meaning we can draw from the fact that she is a hunter.
It’s very essential to possess this sense of self, of self-definition, of the essential purity or untouchability of some aspect of your psyche, especially for women because we are conditioned to not to have that at all. But regardless of your gender it is important to have this because that is the source of your sovereignty and it’s part of your connection to the wild. There is something radical about a person, again, especially a woman, but any person who doesn’t relinquish essential control or power in their own lives. I think a lot of us, a lot of us relinquish too much of this essential control or power that is personified in the goddess Artemis. If this were not true, we would not have so much literature and conversation about codependency for example.
Now there are gifts or costs. How you look at it depends on the individual and also depends on one’s stage of life, because you can live within or through more than one archetype. You know, we are not only reflecting the energies of one, we pass through many, we have relationships with many of them. So although I say you’re not going to combine Artemis and Aphrodite very successfully, you certainly may move back and forth between the two in a serial, intense engagement with one or then the other. In any event, gifts or costs during the time you spend with Artemis, that depends on you. She’s in the wilderness. She’s outside human community for the most part. She’s on the margin and those of us who choose to live literally on the margin, in the desert like I do, know that is both a blessing and a challenge.
Artemis is without romantic partner or children, but she has her work and she is about her work, her own issues and sense of mission and goals. And although she is outside the human community, for the most part, she is in the company of women. So in addition to being the Western archetype of the protector of the sanctity of the purity of the natural world, she is also what we would now call a feminist, absolute feminist. No wonder she’s fierce, right? Artemis energy often surges when I am in groups of women, it’s part of our need to reclaim the sanctity of our own selves, our own sovereignty, and often times is connected to our shared sense of the value of the things that Artemis protects: children, the young generally, animals, and the natural world.
But despite genders, once again, Artemis is the source of passion for wilderness and is part of our deeply felt sense that there is something healing in it, that it’s a sanctuary at the same time that it can be very foreign and frightening. Regardless of gender, you will find Artemis when you go outdoors, especially if you go out there alone. Being in the Artemis energy outdoors brings us back into the body, back into that enlivening and satisfying awareness of our own physicality. If you like to garden or do anything outside, build something, move through space, climb rocks, then you know that to move as an animal moves is a particular joy.
Often, in that state of moving without the usual self-consciousness, alone through natural spaces, especially wild spaces, ultimately there is a release and relief from the ego. The ego, our socially conditioned self, the one that carries our preoccupations with all that we have manufactured as a species and community, and as individuals. I know that when I first started going backpacking, it took me a number of days to get to the point where all of that inner chatter would stop. But it did happen. And over time cultivating that experience, I got to the point where as soon as I put my backpack on and I started walking down the trail, boom, that was turned off. And what a blessing it was. It was one of the reasons to go outside, when all of that ego chattering stops, when you spend enough time outside for it to basically, you know, just give up looking for stimulation, you find a place to rest in a deeper and different sense of self. That is Artemis.
Now, Joseph Campbell thought that Artemis was the primary goddess of the Greeks. And there are a lot of historical connections that take her back to Cybele who was one of the goddesses that expressed/personified the all-encompassing life energy and the cyclical nature of life. And some of these connections between Cybele and these sort of all-encompassing Goddess figures, and Artemis, are found in Ephesus, which is where Artemis’s main –and one of her oldest– temples is found. I want to share one of the best-known myths about Artemis, to convey some of her mystery in this connection to all-encompassing life and the mystery of the wild and of wilderness. That is the story of Artemis and Actaeon.
Actaeon was the grandson of Cadmus, who was the founder and so once king, of Thebes. He was born of a royal family and raised by the wise centaur Chiron, who was mentor to many of the noble heroes and talented young Greek men. Chiron taught Actaeon how to hunt and this was a major preoccupation of his. So one morning he got up very early, met his friends and went to Mt. Citharion to hunt. He had an exceptional pack of dogs and he was a very good hunter, accurate and brave. The group had very good luck. They caught a lot of game of various types and when they stopped to rest, the sun was high over their heads.
The day was quite hot and Actaeon suggested that maybe they should stop, that they had shed enough blood for one day and it might be time to find some cool shade and rest. All of his friends were in agreement about the wisdom of this plan. And the party slowly dispersed as each of the young man went in search of shade and cool grass and a drink… and Actaeon wandered the mountainside and ultimately found himself alone.
Well, this young man and his friends were not the only ones who had been out hunting that morning. The Goddess Artemis had also been out on Mount Citharion with her bow in hand, and she was traveling with a retinue of young women, what we would now call tomboys. They also had decided that the day was warm and it was time to rest. Artemis and these young women retired to this secret grotto on the mountain where a graceful stone arch opened onto a small meadow, with a clear stream of pure water. There was a pool that was perfect for bathing. This was one of the refuges of this goddess and Artemis and her young women attendants went to the pool to bathe. The young woman helped her get into the water. They took her bow from her shoulders, they helped her undress, bound up her hair.
And it so turned out, that Actaeon in his quest for a cool place and perhaps a drink of water, came upon the stream. And he followed its babbling course to the meadow where he saw this stone arch. He quietly stepped inside the cool grotto and hearing the voices of the women, crept silently to the edge of the pool. And there he found Artemis and her attendants. He was completely struck with amazement. He just stood there, dumbfounded and staring. When his presence was registered by all of the others, the young women cried out and rushed around Artemis to shield the goddess from his view. But she was much taller than the rest of them and she looked over their heads at the hunter who was still staring at her.
Furious, Artemis said, “I bet you can’t wait to go back to your friends and to tell them that you have seen the goddess unveiled,” and then she glanced around looking for her bow and arrows. But they were lying on the bank just out of reach and then Actaeon heard his companions off in the distance, calling his name, and without thinking he opened his mouth to call out and reply to them. Artemis, who wielded the only tool she had at hand, splashed the young man with water. “Now go and tell the others which you’ve seen,” she said, “if you can.”
Those drops of water from her wet hands turned Actaeon into a stag. A pair of antlers emerged from his head. His arms and legs lengthened, his hands and feet became hooves, and his skin turned to rough hide. This transformation of Actaeon was not only physical. He became a dear in mind and spirit too, and he suddenly looked up at Artemis and started, you know, as a deer can do. And he turned and ran. He turned and ran away across the meadow and he ran with grace and speed and there was something left in there of that young man who noticed this. And he thought to himself, I am faster than the wind and just as tireless.
He stopped to take a drink at the stream and lowered his head. And when he did, he saw his reflection and –oh my God!– it was really more than his mind could quite put together and a strangled cry, not really human and not really animal, rose from his throat. While he stood there gazing into the stream, trying to understand what was, what had happened, his hunting dogs who were traveling with his companions, who were now looking for him, caught his scent. This was a large pack of dogs. Some say he had 50 and they were very well trained, and as soon as they caught the scent of the deer, they began tracking it.
Well, Actaeon saw them coming. He ran away but they gave chase and he could not get away from them. A dog jumped onto his back, another gripped his hind leg. Several others leapt for his throat and he tried to moan and cry out and plead for mercy with his eyes, to make contact, to try and assert himself as master to the dogs, but they brought him down. His friends, hearing the commotion, gathered to watch the show and they called out to Actaeon, imagining that he was fast asleep in the shade someplace or too lazy to answer their call. Little did they know that poor Actaeon was all too present.
Later, the story of his fate is told and retold until it finally reached the ears of mortals. Some people think that the goddess was too harsh. Others say that Artemis simply acted according to her nature and that the young hunter had bad luck. What do you think? Should we expect life or the gods to be fair or is there perhaps a larger pattern that we need to look a little bit more closely to see?
I wonder about the sanctity of Artemis and her existence, and her choices and the cost of violating those. I wonder about our reaction to her rage and sense that this punishment is too harsh in that context. I think about Ovid’s version of the story, which is the best-known version. I think it’s easy to read Ovid and then imagine this kind of callow young man inadvertently catching sight of a naked woman and oh my God, you know, she freaks out—and should she? There’s a trivializing aspect to that that I think is part of the decadence of Ovid and the Romans, a trajectory with these deities. So Artemis has already been reduced from a face of a goddess like Cybele, to a naked woman taking a bath.
But there’s something else that may set us up to shrink back from the rage and feed this sense of a harsh, harsh goddess overreacting, and that is the tendency that those of us who do value wilderness and the natural world have, and have had for centuries in the West, to romanticize the “feminine” images of the Goddess and nature. The problem is that romanticizing can also lead to a trivializing. It’s difficult to accept the enormity of the realities embodied in Artemis, her mysteries and the wilderness. In order to do that, I suspect that we must relinquish a position that’s been cultivated and elaborated for millennia in the West, the position that as humans we are the center. We’re the center of the universe, uniquely special, at the top of that hierarchy of being. During the Renaissance, it was said that “man is the measure above things.” I think we have to give that up to become, once again a member of the beautifully complex community of beings.
In the title of this podcast, I borrow a phrase from Mary Oliver and her poem, “Wild Geese.” The phrase “the family of things” is in this poem. Oliver talks about despair and how the world goes on despite it, and what a relief that is in truth, that the world does not stop for our despair and sorrow and that what we receive instead, if we have the imagination to accept it, is a place in the family of things, a meaning that we can bring to Actaeon. Transformation in this myth is an affirmation of that place in the family of things. The hunter becomes the hunted. Remember, Artemis herself is both the deer and the hunter, the boar and the hound. He or she, who eats today, is eaten tomorrow. And how can this be tragic when everyone gets fed in turn?
Let me go back quickly to Artemis’s association with the Moon. Karl Kerenyi writes, “When the moon shone, Artemis was present, and the beasts and plants would dance.” This goddess Artemis is cool, detached, fierce, fierce with the ferocity of the ascetic, of the defender of principles. She’s detached, she’s pitiless in our human view, and yet this is all part of the beauty of the shadowy nighttime side of life, and the joy in the great round, in simply being alive. This cycle of the moon, from Selene’s full moon through the crescents of Artemis, to the dark/new moon of Hecate and back to the crescent moons of Artemis, and so on and so forth can be seen as a metaphor for dismemberment, perhaps parallel to the dismemberment of the conventional, conditioned ego self when we escape into the wilderness, and the release that offers into your place in the greater scheme, the community of life.
I want to close with a final stanzas from rather long poem by Edith Wharton titled “Artemis to Actaeon,” in which the goddess addresses the young man and so explains (in a way) her actions to us. It goes like this:
“For immortality is not to range
Unlimited through vast Olympian days,
Or sit in dull dominion over time;
But this — to drink fate’s utmost at a draught,
Nor feel the wine grow stale upon the lip,
To scale the summit of some soaring moment,
Nor know the dullness of the long descent,
To snatch the crown of life and seal it up
Secure forever in the vaults of death!
And this was thine: to lose thyself in me,
Relive in my renewal, and become
The light of other lives, a quenchless torch
Passed on from hand to hand, till men are dust
And the last garland withers from my shrine.”
I want to remind you that Monday, June 3rd is the new moon here in the United States, so starting this weekend and through next Wednesday or so, we’ll be in the energy of the dark moon, the new moon, Hecate, the magician, the worker from afar. It’s a good time to consider what you want to begin in this next cycle. Perhaps your consideration will include some sense of dissolution and what that offers to you and to others.
If you listened to the last podcast, “Moonstruck,” you can get some details of the ritual that I suggested. In brief, you can mark the four directions to create a crossroads and place yourself there, and speak to Hecate and the moon. Whatever you do, if it’s words offered up on your breath or written down, don’t hold onto it. Burn it, bury it, release it. Let the real magic that takes place happen.
And that’s it for me, Catherine Svehla and Myth Matters. Feel free to contact me if you have questions or comments about today’s program. We’re still making the transition from the old name Myth in the Mojave and updating various platforms. So I’m not going to go into the bit about “if your new” and subscribing and all of that stuff. I do want to say that I am very grateful to all of you who support the program by sharing it with others and spreading the word. And I am deeply doubly grateful to those of you who are able to provide some financial support to this podcast as members of the community on band camp, or as people who mail a check in like Donna Santoro. Thank you so much, Donna, for your recent check. Hopefully by the end of next month, you will also be able to support Myth Matters on Patreon.
Thank you so, so much for listening. Please tune in next time and until then, happy myth-making and keep the mystery in your life.
