TO ARTEMIS

Chaste goddess, bathing in silver light
These ancient, sacred trees,
Turn your beautiful face toward us
Without your veil of clouds.
Calm, O goddess, calm,
All burning hearts, and
Over-zealous emotion,
Spread on earth the sweet peace
Which you make reign in heaven.

—A Year of Pagan Prayer, compiled by Barbara Nolan

Artemis shoots down from the heavens

Artemis, goddess of the hunt

"Her virginity represents a defiant claim that her sexuality is her own, not possessable by any man. When Actaeon comes upon her bathing, she turns him into a stag which his own hounds then hunt and kill. Artemis can be decisive and cruel; she is as goal-directed as the arrows she shoots from her bow. Artemis is not willing to hide her sexuality as Athene does nor to yield it. She will not let herself be raped (as her mother Leto was by Zeus) nor will she be co-opted into denying her sexuality so as to make things easier for the men who might feel desire for her. She is neither seductive toward men nor protective of them. Her passion is not repressed like Hera's nor sublimated like Athene's nor lived out in relationships like Aphrodite's. Artemis is the Lady of the Wild Things, including the wildness within herself. She is goddess of the instinctual not the rational or the civilized. To know one's body, one's instincts, one's emotions as one's own-that is Artemis."

Downing, C. (1994). Lesbian Mythology. Historical Reflections / Réflexions Historiques, 20(2), 169–199.

Artus Quellinus, 1609-1668

Statue of Artemis, Greek goddess of hunting (Diana in the Roman pantheon), ca.1650/54

Amsterdam Royal Palace 

and in the distance, I saw / proud, solemn/fern-wild

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a painting sponsored by my patrons

Artemis and Apollo slaying the Niobids. 

In Greek Mythology, Niobe was a queen of Thebes and mother to anywhere between 12-14 children (sources vary). She boasted that she was superior in motherhood to the goddess Leto, who only had two children... The Olympians Artemis and Apollo. 

The divine twins could not abide by such insult to their mother and struck down the children of Niobe one by one from on high with their arrows. 

Niobe is depicted in the Archaic style in the border of the illustration, across from Leto, mourning the loss of her children as they are felled by the arrows of Artemis and Apollo. 

“There is so much incest among the gods, this is so wrong!”

Okay, I don’t know if people understand that the gods are actually cosmic forces far beyond our comprehension, not mere human beings who relate to one another through blood ties. In fact, they only take on human form so that our minds can comprehend them. It is a personification, not the god in their true essence. The human mind is not capable of fully grasping what a god truly is, and the myth of Semele exists precisely to illustrate this.