Artemis

CHESMAYNE

Artemis

“De Kelderkamer”, Pieter de Hooch

The Princess (PS). Greek mythology: a goddess, sister of Apollo, represented as a virgin huntress and associated with the moon, identified with Diana. Born on the isle of Delos to Zeus and Leto, twin sister of Apollo. The myth of how the hunter Actaeon spied on her as she bathed naked, and was turned into a stag torn apart by his own hounds, amplifies her nature as a virgin huntress. ‘Virgin’ here is parthenos, ‘unmarried’. To sleeping Endymion she bore fifty daughters yet remained virgin. Like Athene, she sometimes wore a Gorgon-mask - turning men to stone by her gaze alone. Bubastis: capital of Lower Egypt (named after Bast), the local cat-headed goddess. She was identified with Artemis by the Greeks. The cat was sacred to her as was the Doe (maternal aspect of womanliness). The doe also appears in many fairy tales (embodying the feminine).

From Goddess web page…….

Katherine Neville’s book, ‘The Magic Circle’: she writes about bees, and explains (thank you very much, wonderful authoress) that the bee was Artemis’s symbol because bees were associated with prophetesses and also identified with virgins because it was believed bees created themselves through parthenogenesis. She also noted that Deborah, one of the few women mentioned in a leading role in the Old Testament, was a prophetess, and her name in Hebrew means “bee”.

Remember our Egyptian goddess friend, Neith - the oldest goddess from before the time Upper and Lower Egypt were united. This is what Schneider has to say:

“We can create volume [to the universe with our ability to construct a square out of the Vesica Piscis] and clothe it with the four elements, or states, of matter. The ancients symbolized this materialization process by ‘weaving’ (emphasis added). The earliest known goddess in prehistoric Egypt was Neith, goddess of weaving, wisdom, and war, later known to the Greeks as Athena (emphasis added). Although Neith is seen as a virgin goddess, her headdress of two crossed arrows symbolized the polar crossings of male and female principles, of warp and weft, needed to make cloth, the ancient symbol of matter. Diagonals represent crossing and fixing. Crossing, like multiplying, represents ‘fertilization’; this is the origin of the use of an “x” to indicate multiplication (emphasis added) [shades of Robert Palmer and “Feel the Heat”, ooohhhh!]. Today, we speak of ‘multiplying our progeny’, ‘cross-pollinating’ plants, and ‘cross-breeding’ animals. The crossed arrows also represent the diagonals of a square. Upon her four-quartered loom Neith weaves the four states of “mater” [Latin word for “mother”, from which the words “matter” and “matrix” arise] with which subsequent mother goddesses clothe newborn forms.

“In the Greek alphabet, whose letters represented numbers [Gematria], the words for ‘goddess’ and ‘Gaia’, or Mother Earth, each add up to fifteen, one unit from 16 [the one unit difference is allowed in Gematria] (= 4 x 4), the square of a square and ultimate symbol of the ‘Archetypal feminine as fertile mother goddess’ (emphasis added)”. We have further emphasis on the square Chessboard as a symbol for the Goddess and for fertility, and notice the diagonals crossing, meaning “multiplication”. The Chessboard is the ultimate symbol of birth = creation.