Artemis is a goddess of the Greek tradition.
Goddess of the hunt, the moon, and the wilderness, the unmarried mistress of nature. Artemis is the twin sister of Apollo and one of the few Olympian goddesses who preserves her virginity and asserts her independence from men.
With bow and arrows she watches over stags, deer, and all wild animals. She is a protector of women, especially in childbirth and in friendships among women.
Type: Greek principal deity, goddess of the hunt and the moon, patroness of virgins
Pantheon: Greece (one of the twelve Olympians), adopted in Rome as Diana
Function: hunting, wild nature, the course of the moon, protection of women in labour, virginity
Principal attributes: bow with golden arrows, crescent moon, hind, short huntress’s garment
Principal cult sites: Ephesus (the Artemision, a wonder of the world), Brauron (Attica), Sparta (Artemis Orthia), Delos (birthplace)
Roman counterpart: Diana
Artemis has been central to Greek mythology since Homer (8th century BC). Her principal sanctuary, the Artemision in Ephesus, was one of the Seven Wonders of Antiquity (built from the 6th century BC, burned down by Herostratus in 356 BC, rebuilt, and finally destroyed in the 3rd century AD).
In Ephesus, however, Artemis is already a synthesis of the Greek Artemis and the pre-Hellenistic Anatolian mother goddess (Cybele/Kubaba); the famous many-breasted statues belong to this Asia Minor form.
In the Hellenistic period there was further syncretization with Hecate (Artemis-Hecate) and Selene (the moon). The New Testament records the famous episode of the silversmiths in Ephesus in Acts 19.
Principal cult sites: Ephesus (the Artemision, the most famous; with the many-breasted Anatolian-Greek hybrid form), Brauron (Attica, with the initiation of girls, the Arkteia, in which young girls played the part of “she-bears” before marriage), Sparta (Artemis Orthia, with the famous scourging of boys, an initiation rite), Delos (mythical birthplace, where she was venerated together with Apollo), Aulis (the Iphigenia myth).
In Sicily, Syracuse maintained the cult of Artemis at the spring of Arethusa.
Central sources: Hesiod (Theogony), Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, the Homeric Hymn to Artemis (short, the 27th hymn), Callimachus’ Hymn to Artemis (Alexandrian, extensive), Apollodorus’ Library, Pausanias’ Description of Greece.
Plays: Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis and Iphigenia among the Taurians (central to the Artemis myth), Euripides’ Hippolytus. Secondary literature: Burkert, Greek Religion; Vernant, Mortals and Immortals; Cole, Landscapes, Gender, and Ritual Space; LIMC sub voce Artemis.
Artemis is depicted as a muscular, swift huntress, often in hunting dress (a short chiton), with bow and quiver. Her symbols are the stag or the gazelle, the silver crescent moon (which she guides across the sky), the torch, and sometimes dogs (her hunting hounds).
She is frequently shown with her attendant nymphs in woodland scenes. Her beauty is wild and untamed, not courtly as in the case of Aphrodite.
Artemis is invoked as the protecting goddess of the hunt, of the wilderness, and of women, especially during pregnancy and childbirth. She protects women from harassment and violence. Her oath is inviolable; she aids those who invoke her.
Women dedicated offerings to her before their wedding. Paradoxically, Artemis is also the goddess of pestilence among wild animals. Her festival, the Thesmophoria (in part), is celebrated annually in numerous sanctuaries. She is the ideal of independence and of friendship among women.
Appearance and Symbolism
Artemis is portrayed as a young, muscular virgin in a short chiton, armed with bow and a quiver full of arrows, the archetype of the goddess of the hunt.
The stag and the deer were her sacred animals, as was the hound. The moon itself became her sphere, though this was fully established only in later periods; earlier she was more the radiant goddess of the night.
The cypress and the fir were sacred to her. With her crescent moon as a diadem and her silvery radiance, she embodied purity and virginity, and at the same time the ambivalent power of female wildness and independence that refused to be subject to any man.
The most important aspects of Artemis at a glance. The following fields summarize her origin, function, appearance, veneration, symbols, and cultural parallels.
Artemis is the daughter of Zeus and the Titaness Leto, twin sister of Apollo. She was born on the island of Delos (or, according to an old tradition, on Ortygia near Delos), where Leto (pursued by Hera) found refuge.
Artemis is born first and then helps her mother during the birth of Apollo, hence her patronage of childbirth.
A deliberate virgin (parthenos), she swore as a child to her father Zeus never to marry, and asked for a bow, a retinue of huntresses, and the mountains as her realm.
She appears as a figure of vengeance in the cases of Actaeon (transformed into a stag and torn apart by his own hounds because he saw her naked) and Niobe (whose children Artemis and Apollo shot with arrows).
A dual function is characteristic of Artemis: huntress with a merciless bow, but also protector of wild animals and their young (Potnia Theron, “Mistress of the wild animals”). She is the patroness of young girls before marriage; in Brauron, Attic girls honoured the sanctuary as “she-bears” before their wedding.
She is a helper in the pains of childbirth (together with Eileithyia), yet her silver arrows also brought women a sudden death (in contrast to Apollo’s arrows for men). She is the patroness of the course of the moon (later syncretized with Selene).
A young, beautiful, tall woman in a garment reaching above the knees (the chitoniskos, a typical huntress’s costume). Her hair is bound up high or worn as a short crown of curls.
A bow with golden arrows and a quiver hang over her shoulder. A crescent moon sits on her brow (later through syncretism with Selene).
She is captured in mid-stride, often with one leg raised. A hind or the golden deer of Ceryneia appears as her companion animal. She wears a pointed cap (pilos) and sandals.
In Ephesus she takes the unusual form: enthroned, with several rows of projecting breasts or bull’s scrota (a symbol of the fertility of the pre-Greek Anatolian mother).
Sphere of influence: Artemis was especially popular among women and young girls, before marriage, in the pains of childbirth, and during acute illness.
Before their wedding, girls dedicated toys, veils, and locks of hair to her; in Brauron they performed the Arkteia initiation rite as she-bears. In Sparta, boys carried out the Diamastigosis at the altar of Artemis Orthia (a ritual scourging as a test of manhood).
Hunters and travellers invoked her before every departure into the wilderness. In Ephesus, thousands of pilgrims came to her temple festival, which took place every four years.
In the Iphigenia myth she averts the demanded sacrifice of the girl at the last moment by means of a hind, and sends Iphigenia to Tauris as a priestess.
Bow with golden arrows (silver arrows in Homer), quiver, short huntress’s garment, crescent moon (later), hind, golden deer, she-bear (Brauron), spear, torch (Artemis Phosphoros, “Bringer of Light”), sandals.
Sacred plants: laurel (with Apollo), cypress, palm (Delos). Sacred animals: hind, bear, deer, boar (the Calydonian Boar myth), quail (Ortygia), dog. Sacred number: 3 (the triplicity with Hecate and Selene).
Diana (Rome, an almost identical adoption with its own cult of Diana at Aricia near Rome), Selene (Greece, the moon, later syncretized with Artemis), Hecate (Greece, crossroads, often in triplicity with Artemis and Selene), Cybele/Kubaba (Anatolia, the original root of the Ephesian Artemis), Britomartis (Crete, a local huntress), Bastet (Egypt, syncretized in the Hellenistic period as Artemis Bubastia), Freyja (Germanic, goddess of the hunt and of love), Durga (Hinduism, a warrior goddess riding a tiger), Ishtar (Mesopotamia, bow and arrows).
In the broader context: Artemis is the most famous representative of the Potnia Theron tradition (Mistress of the wild animals), which occurs in many archaic cultures.
Veneration in Everyday Life
Rituals and Invocations
Among the best-known rites were the Brauronia, with the “bear dance” (Arkteia) of young girls. Artemis was invoked as a helper in childbirth, and the Ephesian Artemision festival was among the great festivals of Asia Minor.
Conjurations and Invocations
Textual Transmission and Formulas
The Homeric hymn to Artemis and the hymn of Callimachus depict the virgin huntress and mistress of the animals. Cult inscriptions from Ephesus and from the sanctuary of Brauron transmit the local rites.
Amulets and Protective Symbols
Material apotropaia and archaeological evidence
Women dedicated clothing and votive offerings to Artemis in order to ask for protection during childbirth. The many-breasted statue type of the Artemis of Ephesus and depictions of bears from Brauron are widely attested archaeologically.
Goddesses of the hunt and of the moon are found everywhere: Diana (Rome), Atalanta (heroic legend), Skadi (Scandinavia), Chang’e (China). The emphasis of Artemis on femininity without sexuality or subjection to men is distinctive for her time.
She shares the lunar aspect with Selene and Hecate, but her focus on the hunt sets her apart. Her role as protector of women and children connects her with Eileithyia and other protective deities.
One of the most idiosyncratic figures in the history of ancient religion is the Artemis of Ephesus. Her temple, the Artemision, was counted among the Seven Wonders of the World.
The cult image of this goddess differs fundamentally from the youthful huntress of Greek art. It shows a rigid, column-like figure whose upper body is covered with numerous rounded protrusions and whose lower body is enclosed in a tight garment adorned with reliefs of animals.
What these protrusions represent has been disputed since antiquity. Ancient authors spoke of many breasts, from which earlier scholarship made a many-breasted fertility goddess. Other interpretations see in them eggs, bull’s testicles attached as offerings, or pieces of amber jewellery.
There is no certain answer; scholarship continues to debate the question. What is clear is that the Ephesian Artemis was deeply rooted in Asia Minor traditions and merged with a local mother goddess.
This goddess was famous in antiquity, and her cult extended far beyond Ephesus. Copies of the cult image spread throughout the Mediterranean world.
The Acts of the Apostles in the New Testament reports an uproar of the Ephesian silversmiths, who sold models of the sanctuary and saw their business threatened by Christian preaching, with the cry that great was the Artemis of the Ephesians.
From the standpoint of religious studies, the Ephesian Artemis is an important example of how a Greek divine name could encompass very different local deities. The huntress and the enthroned mistress of Ephesus share little more than the name.
An old epithet of Artemis is potnia thērōn, Mistress of the wild animals. She is already called this in the Homeric Iliad.
In early Greek art there is a widespread pictorial type showing a winged or standing goddess who grasps two animals, often lions, stags, or birds, by the neck or the legs. Whether each of these depictions refers to Artemis is an open question, but the type accords with her nature.
Artemis is the goddess of untamed nature, of mountains, forests, and marshes, of wild animals and of young creatures not yet integrated into the order of the city. She is a huntress and at the same time a protector of the animals; for ancient thought these two roles are not mutually exclusive.
The hunter respects the order of the wild, and the goddess punishes offences against it. The myth of Actaeon, whom she turns into a stag because he saw her bathing, and who is torn apart by his own hounds, belongs to this context.
The etymology of the name Artemis remains unresolved despite many attempts. The name already appears on Mycenaean Linear B tablets in a form read as a-te-mi-to, which attests its great age.
Connections have been proposed to words for unharmed, for bear, or for sharp, but none of these derivations has prevailed. Scholarship reckons that the name may be pre-Greek. This uncertainty is typical of very ancient deities and an indication that Artemis belongs to the oldest strata of the Greek pantheon.
One of the most illuminating cults of Artemis took place at Brauron on the east coast of Attica. There Artemis Brauronia was venerated, and the sanctuary was closely connected with the transition of young girls into adulthood.
Athenian girls spent a period in the service of the goddess and in this function were called arktoi, she-bears. They took part in rites that evidently included dances and a race.
The mythical background relates to a slain sacred she-bear of Artemis, for which the girls had, as it were, to make amends.
Scholarship understands the Brauron cult as a rite of initiation: the girls passed through a temporally limited phase, set apart from the customary order, within the wild domain of the goddess, before returning to the community of the city as women of marriageable age.
Finds from the sanctuary, including votive offerings and inscriptions, as well as vase paintings with running girls, support this interpretation.
Beyond Brauron, Artemis was the goddess who accompanied girls and young women, from childhood through childbirth to the dangers of the lying-in period. As Lochia she assisted at the delivery.
At the same time she was the one whose arrows could bring women a sudden, gentle death, just as those of her brother Apollo brought it to men.
This responsibility for the critical thresholds of female life, being born, growing up, giving birth, dying, makes Artemis, despite her status as an eternal virgin, a central deity precisely for the lifeworld of women.
Scholars of religion such as Walter Burkert have seen in this no contradiction, but rather the expression of a goddess who governs all transitions at the boundary of wilderness and culture.
Artemis is the twin sister of Apollo. Both are children of Zeus and Leto, born on the island of Delos, because the pregnant Leto was driven across the earth by the jealous Hera and could find nowhere a place to give birth.
According to a widespread version of the story, Artemis came into the world first and at once helped her mother with the birth of her brother, which is why she is also regarded as a helper in childbirth.
The siblings act together in several myths, often as executors of punishment for offences against their mother or against the order of the gods. The best known of these myths is that of Niobe, the queen of Thebes.
Niobe boasted that she had more children than Leto, who possessed only two, and claimed divine veneration for herself. As a punishment, Apollo and Artemis killed her children, Apollo the sons, Artemis the daughters. Niobe was turned to stone in her grief, a rock from which water continued to flow like ceaseless tears.
The Niobe myth served in antiquity as an example of hubris, the self-exaltation of a human being above the gods, and of its inevitable punishment.
It is also important in the history of religion because it shows the close bond of the siblings to their mother Leto; several of their joint deeds can be read as a defence of their mother’s honour.
In the visual arts, the group of the dying Niobids was a frequent subject.
The pairing of Artemis and Apollo as a punishing brother and sister makes clear that, despite their different domains, hers being hunting and the wilderness, his being the oracle, music, and healing, both had a shared function as guardians of the divine order.
Further standard works in the literature index.
Artemis is one of the twelve Olympian gods, daughter of Zeus and Leto, twin sister of Apollo. She is the goddess of the hunt, of the wilderness, of untouched nature, and the protector of young women before the age of marriage.
Unlike most other goddesses, she is a virgin goddess (Parthenos) who has sworn never to marry. She roams the forests and mountains with her nymphs, armed with bow and arrows. Her Roman counterpart is Diana. In the Hellenistic period she merged with the Ephesian Artemis, a quite different, many-breasted mother goddess of Asia Minor.
Actaeon was a hunter and grandson of Apollo who happened to see Artemis bathing in a woodland spring. Because of this unintentional breach of the forbidden zone, Artemis turned him into a stag, whereupon he was torn apart by his own hunting hounds.
The story is one of the most famous myths of transformation; Ovid devotes a central book of the Metamorphoses to it. It illustrates the relentless severity of Artemis: no intention, no fault, whoever crosses the boundary is destroyed.
Against its influence, cross-cultural tradition names these protective means:
Compare in the Protection Compass →Recommended protective means
The simplest protective means in this collection: 41 layers of fine gold 999, platinum, silver and silicon, manufactured in Ruhla, Thuringia. It requires no activation, is bound to no person, and is effective within a radius of around 50 meters, even without being worn.
Cacus, the fire-breathing giant of Roman legend and adversary of Hercules. Origin, the cattle the...
Yamabiko, the mountain echo spirit of Japanese folk belief. Origin, the explanation of the echo, ...
Azazel, desert demon of the scapegoat and fallen angel of the Enoch tradition. Leviticus rite, ap...
Apam Napat, the Indo-Iranian god, child of the waters, with fire within the water. Origin in the ...
El Sombrerón, the man with the big hat from Guatemala. Origin, the wooing of young women, braid-p...
Enji (Zjarri, I Verbti), the reconstructed fire god of Albanian tradition. Origin, the hearth cul...
