The Visual Imagery, Artemis & Life

By Mary G. Galvin PhD

The ancestors of western society had a belief system that satisfied both the needs of society and the individual need for spiritual satisfaction.
The 'Life, Death and Artemis' series is an in-depth academic study of one part of that belief system, embodied in the Goddess Artemis, a member of the Greek Pantheon.
This purpose of this series of volumes is to present an analysis of the imagery, cult practices and beliefs in Artemis, in order to extrapolate the intrinsic nature of the goddess, culminating in the view that the forces and the course of mortal life in all their complexity were anthropomorphised in her. These volumes contain the results of the examination of thousands of years of belief and practices; analysis of over seventeen thousand images; three and a half thousand references to Artemis in ancient texts; and much modern academic commentary, in order to piece together a coherent picture of this once important aspect of western society and its beliefs.
The series consists of several volumes; the first addresses the diverse imagery of Artemis; the second addresses the cult practices; and the third addresses the perceived active role of Artemis. Reference material is presented in a separated volume
This first volume, 'The Visual imagery, Artemis & Life' is an examination of the diverse imagery related to Artemis, a discussion of both the diversity of representation and the commonality of the themes expressed in the art and artefacts related to Artemis; demonstrating the correlation in the imagery between Artemis and Life.
Subsequent volumes examine this relationship in greater detail, within the practices and beliefs as documented by those who practiced Artemis worship.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mary G. Galvin PhD
• Release date: Jan 27, 2018
• ISBN: 9781370749201

Mary G. Galvin PhD

Mary has worked in the field of healthcare technology over the last ten years. She has implemented automated anaesthetic record keeping systems across 43 Queensland hospitals to provide a solution that supports improved clinical decision-making and patient outcomes in the perioperative setting. Mary has delivered patient queuing and wait management systems for Gold Coast outpatient clinics and has integrated electronic cardiotocography and intrapartum recording into the maternity section of the Gold Coast University Hospital.Prior to this, she worked for more than 20 years across a range of industries including defence, telecommunications, banking and healthcare in both management and consulting roles. Her project experiences range from the highly-technical (such as developing sonar and radio communications for defence) to those that transform businesses (for example, re-engineering company processes to handle a five times increase in the customer base).This wealth of experience has enabled her to develop advanced skills, not only in project and program management, but also business process re-engineering and organisational change management. Mary has also led, managed and mentored many multi-disciplinary project teams.This flexibility extends to her academic credentials. Mary holds degrees in Mathematics, as well as in Classics and Humanities. Her PhD thesis on human behaviour and belief systems was completed within three years and was described as outstanding by a senior Professor at Oxford University.Mary maintains her academic interests in parallel with her working life and has lectured and tutored part-time. She has authored and presented a paper on the mating rituals of the ancient Greek adolescent at .the Australian Society for Classical Studies (ASCS) 2007 conference.Mary has also authored and presented a paper on the benefits of anaesthetic record keeping at the Health Informatics Conference HIC2009. Her paper has since been published in the electronic Journal of Health Informatics.

Book preview

The Visual imagery, Artemis & Life ~ Volume 1 of the Series

'Life, Death and Artemis'

Copyright 2017 Mary G. Galvin PhD

Published by Mary G. Galvin PhD at Smashwords

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Table of Contents

Start of document

Acknowledgements

Series

Series Abstract

Series Prologue

Series Introduction

Volume 1

The Background

The Artefacts

Ephesian Artemis

Potnia Theron or Artemis with Animals

Winged Artemis

Pergaian Artemis

Classical Artemis & Artemis as Huntress

Visual Imagery Evaluation

Visual Imagery Conclusion

Notes

Author

About the Author

Other books by this Author

Tables

Table Artefacts by Type

Table-Artefacts by Era

Table-Artefacts by Geographic Location

Charts

Chart - Artemis Image Styles by Area and era (excludes Peloponnese)

Chart - Artemis Image Styles by Era in the Peloponnese

Chart - Artemis Ephesia Images by Area and Era

Chart - Potnia Theron Images by Area and Era

Chart - Artemis with Animals Images by Area and Era

Chart - Winged Artemis Images by Area and Era

Chart - Artemis Pergaia Images by Area and Era

Chart - Artemis Huntress by Area and Era (excludes Peloponnese)

Photographs

Picture-Map showing geographic location of Artemis image find sites

Picture-Ephesian Artemis

Picture-Palm fruits

Picture-Bears eating palm fruits

Picture-Çatalhöyük Bear

Picture-Brauron Leopard votive

Picture-Potnia Therôn plaque

Picture-Potnia Therôn Boiotian pithos-amphora

Picture-Classical Artemis with Animals

Picture-Winged Artemis with Lions

Picture-Winged Artemis with a Deer

Picture-Pergaian Artemis in the hand of Tyche

Picture-Pergaian Artemis

Picture-Kybele in her shrine

Picture-Kybele in her shrine with animals

Picture-Artemis Huntress with serpent armband

Picture-Artemis in peplos and himation

Picture-Artemis Huntress in short chiton, quiver strap, hunting boots and with a dog

Picture-Artemis Huntress in short chiton, hunting boots and with a dog and a deer

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the Australian Archaeological Institute at Athens who provided me with a much-appreciated grant to assist with the cost of travel to Greece in order to complete my research on the cult of Artemis. During late 2005 I was able to visit many sites of Artemis and to seek out some of the artefacts discovered at these sites, now in various museums. It was obviously not possible to visit all of the many hundreds of sites as, to quote the Greeks themselves, ‘there were more sites of Artemis in the ancient world, than any other deity, save Apollo’.

Since that time I have extended my research through museum visits across the globe and would also like to thank these institutions that do so much to preserve our heritage and our collective memories.

Series Abstract

ΒΙΟΣ

as written by the classical Greeks

an ambiguous word when read alone

is it βíος the way of life ?

or is it βιóς the instrument of death ?

unaccentuated it embodies both

– a pair of opposites?

ARTEMIS

a goddess of ambiguous and liminal zones

nurturer of life, of birth and the young

bringer of death in the hunt and the home

- a contradiction ?

Yet life has no meaning unless death exists and

death is only meaningful if once there was life

- co-dependent concepts.

ΒΙΟΣ one word symbolic of two interdependent concepts

ARTEMIS one goddess powerful in two inter-related realms.

NOTE: Karl Kerényi gives a comprehensive explanation of the Greek understanding of βίος where he makes the distinction between the finite property of βίος which exists between birth and death compared to the infinite properties of ζωή which means the opposite of death.¹ This distinction is then used by him to characterise Dionysos as ζωή, the indestructible thread of continuous life. His dissertation on the meaning and use of these words is equally applicable to this assessment of Artemis, where her role is that of βίος, each discrete and individual life, a finite entity bounded by the milestones of birth and death. These two concepts of life co-existed in the Greek world. It is this concept of βίος, the finite span of life² with which both Artemis and this series are concerned.

Series Prologue

The Greek habit of renaming foreign deities as Artemis was not an attempt to convert barbarian peoples to their way of thinking; it was an acknowledgement that they perceived in these foreign deities characteristics they knew to be those of Artemis; rites they perceived to be those of Artemis; or a rationale behind the worship they associated with Artemis. Much modern scholarship has focussed on the differences in her worship between places and over time. In contrast this series attempts to explore the ancient Greek ethos, searching for any unchanging similarities that underlay her worship and which enabled the Greeks to definitively and conclusively identify a deity as Artemis.

Despite her rituals being rooted in myths and oral traditions, evidence for the cult of the Greek goddess Artemis³ is abundant; much of this evidence is available in the form of ancient texts dating from the eighth century BC through to medieval times, and inscriptions dating from bronze-age linear B tablets through to late Roman imperial times. The textual evidence is supported by the archaeological, in the widespread proliferation of her sanctuaries and temples spanning large tracts of three continents, from Spain across to the Arabian Gulf and around the Mediterranean to the northern countries of Africa. Archaeological evidence also exists in the form of artefacts, representations of both the goddess herself and the varied dedications made to her. All of this is supported by the vast quantity of inscriptional evidence, which is so extensive that nearly every book on ancient Greek inscriptions has a paragraph of references to Artemis under the ‘Res Sacrae’ section.

Despite the breadth of evidence available, assessments of Artemis and her rites have tended to focus on isolated fragments of cult practice, small groups of artefacts or individual sites rather than taking the wider view. Subsequent attempts to build a coherent picture from these assessments inevitably results in contradictions. Is she a goddess of childbirth or of death, of women or of warriors, of the wilderness or of civilization, of individuals or of the polis, or a composite of all of these? The apparent contradictions have not been resolved. Similarly if one were to take three separate assessments, one of a leaf, one of a piece of bark and one of a piece of root, it is not possible to understand the tree by trying to resolve the differences between the three sets of information. One is obliged to study the tree as a single integrated unit - a dynamic entity - for it is only by taking into account all aspects of the tree that it can be truly understood. A correspondingly integrated approach can be applied to the study of the cult of Artemis but in this case the quantity of evidence is so vast that it is more akin to studying the forest.⁴ This is not an impossible task despite the quantity of evidence noted previously because firstly, given the conservative nature of Greek religion, procedures and rites were passed down from generation to generation without change⁵ and any study of this information quickly highlights the commonality present and the unchanging features that were maintained throughout the eras⁶ of Artemis worship. Secondly, the nature of the topic lends itself to extensive use of modern technology in the assessment and analysis process. Combined, these two components form an integral part of the methodological process used in the analysis underlying this series of volumes.

Established theories from disciplines beyond those of ancient history and classics have been incorporated for further elucidation providing new avenues for analysis. These theories draw from the areas of anthropology and religious studies via the works of religious anthropologist Roy Rappaport, and social anthropologists Arnold Van Gennep, Victor Turner and Mircea Eliade.⁷

The net result of this research is a comprehensive and coherent view of Artemis and her worship, which demonstrates that the perceived contradictions of my colleagues are not contradictions but different facets of a broader picture.⁸ Some of the information presented has been well discussed previously but, of necessity, that information must be reiterated in order to provide a fully inclusive and consistent view.

Through this extensive process of analysis and assessment it can