ARTEMIS är’ tə məs (̓Αρτεμις). Artemis was a goddess universally worshiped throughout the Gr. world, but may have had pre-Hellenic origin, as for example at Ephesus, in which city her cult was undoubtedly grafted on to that of an Asiatic fertility goddess. It may be significant that the name yields no clear Gr. meaning, and it is idle to speculate on the form and shape of the original concept of the deity and her functions. In historical times her sphere was the uncultivated earth, the forests, and the hills. Homer gave her the title, “lady of wild things,” the virgin huntress, armed with bow and arrows.

Other functions were acquired. For example, her role as a city goddess was the result of her popularity among women because she was invoked in childbirth. Aetiological myths accounted for this office by stories of Artemis’ horror at her mother’s birth pains, or by the quite contradictory tale that after Leto had borne her painlessly on the island of Ortygia, she fulfilled herself an obstetric function at the subsequent birth of her twin brother Apollo on the island of Delos. In ancient mythology she is not frequently associated with Apollo. The most probable explanation of Artemis’ function as a goddess of birth is that, in spite of her classical virginity, in ultimate origin she was one of the many mother goddesses of the pre-Hellenic world. Some forms of her ritual seem to have involved the simulation of beast shapes. For example, in one part of Attica little girls in saffron dresses, imitating perhaps the pelt of a bear, danced before her image and were said to “play the bear.” Does this suggest that the original form of the deity was animal? At Halae a pretense of human sacrifice was made by drawing a few drops of blood from a man’s throat with a sword, and this may very well represent an original prehistoric practice and a recollection of some horrifying ritual of fertility worship. It was the Artemis cult of a barbarous people of the Tauric Chersonese (the Crimea) which, allegedly introduced by Orestes, the hero of Euripides’ Iphigenia in Tauris, gave rise to the simulated sacrifice at Halae. At Ephesus, where, as above mentioned, the cult of Artemis was merged with that of an Anatolian fertility goddess, a mighty temple, one of the Seven Wonders of the World, was built. Here some cult object, possibly a meteoric stone, was associated with Artemis (Acts 19:35). Amazons, the warrior maids of Asia Minor, are said to have founded the cult of the Ephesian Artemis, and certainly the girls who served the temple were dressed in short skirts with one breast bare, Amazon and huntress fashion. Coins and surviving images seem to depict Ephesian Artemis as many-breasted, but the multiple protuberances may be stylized bunches of grapes or figs, symbols of fertility. The shrine in Ephesus had become a tourist attraction and an economic asset in the days of the city’s commercial decline. The ire of the silversmiths who made little models of the temple for tourists and pilgrims is told in the brilliant narrative of Acts 19. Diana (KJV) is a Romanization of Artemis.

Bibliography W. M. Ramsay, The Letters to the Seven Churches (1904), ch. XVII; C. Seltman, The Twelve Olympians and Their Guests (1960), ch. X.