Apollo's freedom is freedom from the body — from weight, from the press of matter, from what constricts. Artemis's freedom is freedom within nature, which means freedom that never stops touching things. The distinction Otto draws here is cleaner than it first appears: not male versus female, but two entirely different relationships to the material world, one that releases upward and one that moves laterally through forest, shore, and the quick living thing.

Notice what gets dignified by the language of "higher." Apollo carries the spiritual ambition Otto can't quite resist endorsing — clarity, form, the will organized toward the immaterial. Artemis is magnificent in Otto's telling, but she remains elemental, physical, the virginal condition of wild nature untransformed. The asymmetry is the argument: one figure points toward the transcendent, the other circles back to the ground. What the passage does not ask is whether "higher" means better or only means further from the body. Artemis's virginity is not a failure of development; it is a refusal of the logic that what develops, ascends. She stays close to the animal, the wet, the quick-moving thing — not because she cannot rise, but because rising was never the point.