Artemis

Artemis (Ἄρτεμις, Roman Diana) is the Olympian goddess of wilderness, of the hunt, of childbirth, of the untamed margins where the polis does not yet reach — and in the archetypal reading the Seba tradition inherits from Hillman and the post-Jungians, she is the figure of the psyche’s virginal integrity: not virginity as sexual abstention but virginity as the in-oneself-ness that belongs to no one.

Her sacred ground is edge territory — the forest, the mountain, the river, the moon’s white silence. She attends births because the moment of birth is a margin crossing, and she is the goddess of margins. In the tragic tradition she is the figure behind Iphigenia at Aulis, behind Hippolytus’s refusal of Aphrodite, behind the transformation of Actaeon. For a depth-psychological reading her archetype names the configuration of the feminine that refuses the collective demand to be for others, that holds itself in relation to its own ground — what the tradition has variously called the psychological virgin or the one-in-herself.

Relationships

• olympian-pantheon
• virgin-as-psychological-type
• archetypal-feminine