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Gypsy Lantern:
I’ve been doing a great deal of research recently on the Isian cult (Egyptian, Hellenistic & Roman), and found some very interesting historical connections that may be of help to you in your search for information.
Witchcraft in Italy & the surrounding islands tends to center around Diana. There are also conceptual links to the Eleusinian Mysteries (Note the mother/daughter axes of Ceres/Proserpine and Diana/Aradia). At some point during the Hellenistic era, the deity concepts of the Graeco-Roman Diana and the Egyptian Isis were combined to form a composite that is quite similar to the deity that many Continental Witches pay homage to.
(All quotes below from RE Witt, Isis in the Ancient World, Cornell University Press 1971)
Artemis was recognized by the Greeks, as was her counterpart Diana by the Romans, as holding sway over the entire universe in its three separate realms: the heavens, the underworld and the world where dwelt all those living things…
The name of Artemis was revered throughout Greek lands from the Pillars of Hercules to the Crimea, in the Peloponnese and Thrace, along the coast of Asia Minor and on the Aegean islands. She was the most popular of all the Greek goddesses. Her epicleses were many and her functions complicated. She presided over birth and growth. Wild nature was her peculiar joy. Sometimes, therefore, her features were theriomorphic. She ruled over the animal and vegetable kingdoms. She merged with Hecate to hold power equally in heaven and under the Earth. Men paid honor to her both in association with her musician brother Apollo at the famous cult centres of Delos and Delphi and in combination with Hecate at crossroads as lunar and infernal divinity. Above all else, however, Artemis was the divine symbol of chastity and its particular guardian. – pg 142
(Note: I tried looking up ‘epicleses’ in the dictionary and couldn’t find it. It’s definitely a specifically religious term; I think it may have to do with consecrations and/or blessings. Will search further.)
How soon Artemis and Isis amalgamated cannot be known with certainty. The Oxyrhyncus Litany shows us that Isis was invoked as Artemis both in Crete at Dicte and in the Cyclades as the goddess ‘of threefold nature’. We may think at first of an apparent stumbling block, the declared resolve of Artemis to remain a virgin. But the virginal aspect is but one of two, for at Ephesus she personifies female fruitfulness. Nor is Isis without another guise in her Egyptian setting. She and her sister Nephthys can be mimed in a piece of religious pageantry by two women, brought onto the scene ‘with pure body’ and each of them virgo intacta. So also a Christian writer alludes to women who are ‘singular in their chastity’ as worshippers of Isis in her homeland. In the Roman calendar she gives her name to ‘days of chastity’, puri dies, with which we may perhaps compare the Ember Days of the Christian Church. The Isiac votary Lucius mentions ‘the abstinence which the ascetic rites entail’. Examples occur in Latin poetry where Isis, like Diana, insists on continence. – pg 143
Besides this there are other fundamental resemblances between Greece’s great goddess of many names and Egypt’s. Their cumulative effect strongly supports the view that when the time was ripe the identification was made easily. Paradoxically, both Artemis and Hellenistic Isis not only led men and women to abstain from sexual intercourse but also presided over birth and growth. Each had a peculiarly close association with the moon. (Note: In Egypt Isis was a stellar deity, not a lunar deity. I’m not sure where the author gets his info here – will also look into this further.) Both were mighty queens in the underworld where they cast light upon the dead in their darkness. Both rejoiced in processions and in festivals of lights. Both delighted in possessing manifold names. Hellenistic Isis, like Artemis, assumed the character of ‘Lady of the Ocean’. Like Artemis Limenitis, Limenoscopos, she had a particular regard for harbours. Like her she could control the winds that blew upon the waters. Like her she was renowned for sudden interventions in human affairs when all other means of salvation had failed. Lastly, Artemis/Diana both in classical and in prehistoric times could acquire a pancosmic significance, which at once united her with Isis Panocrateira, ‘all-ruling’. The identification is historically more important than any other and needs to be more deeply stressed than has been done in the past. – pg 144
Seen in the light of the Christian dispensation that followed the downfall of paganism, the fusion of Isis with Artemis has historical significance, but it marks a departure from a Greek interpretation that seems to have been traditional. Herodotus specifically distinguishes Isis from Artemis by conflating the one with Demeter and the other with Bast…the impossibility of reaching a strict equation between Egyptian and Greek myth is made clear by Herodotus and Pausanias, who quotes Aeschylus on the subject as declaring that "Artemis is Demeter’s daughter, not Leto’s". (Note: Once again the weird mother/daughter conflations between earth deities and lunar deities…as you find out more about Continental Witchcraft it should be interesting to see how these relationships crop up and relate to each other. Unfortunately, I’m not expert enough by any means to know for sure.)
One thing is certain. Greek Artemis, when she ‘fled to Egypt’ along with the rest of the Olympians, assumed the features of the cat-headed Bast. This must be borne carefully in mind when we hear Juvenal exclaiming rhetorically that in Egypt the whole population "worship cats in one city, and the dog in another, but none worships Diana". In a certain sense Artemis was always missing from Egyptian theology. The virgin huntress who haunted the wild mountainside and sea-girt territory of Greece was a foreigner to the banks of the Nile…
Yet as we can see from Herodotus, though the point is not made by Juvenal, it was exactly in the city of Bubastis, where the cat was the sacred animal, that the Greeks could find the Egyptians worshipping ‘Artemis’. – pg 146
The assimilation and subsequent identification of Isis with Artemis could not have taken place without the goddess of Bubastis. Bast was the intermediary when the process of theocrasia began. Bast, like Isis and Artemis, protected maternity and childbirth, presided over growth and nature, and rejoiced to be honoured with outdoor processions. It was through Bast that the mythological discrepancies about the parentage of Artemis were eventually smoothed away. It is one of the ironies of the history of religion that the pagan figure of the Virgin Mother resulting from the fusion of Artemis with Isis should have owed its first beginnings to the mediation of a goddess with the features of a cat. – 146-7
(Note: Cats, of course, hold a great deal of importance in many forms of European Witchcraft and Paganism. I wonder if this is part of the reason why.)
Hope that helps. |
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