Artemis on Artemis
In the myths and cuits of Archaie and Classieal Greece Artemis displays two ubiquitous characteristics which go to the core of her nature as crystallized in the pious minds of her worshippers: virginity implying not only chatity but also independence, and wildness indieating unlimited sovereignty. These two features meet in the notion of dynamism. The image that may help us clarify the association of ideas that went under the presence of the goddess is that of a river the natural flow of whose current is arrested by a dam. What the dam performs is enhancing, not diminishing, the potential
energy, that is to say the natural dynamism, of the river. Such then is the function of Artemis. Unlike the virginity of Hestia whieh is a sign of the purity of fire, the Artemisian virginity is not asexual. The power of the goddess is emphatieally manifested in childbirth and adolescence (and, occasionally, in copulation) where the sexual element is partieularly pronounced.