Artemis the Lesbian

This week we are talking about the Goddess of the hunt Artemis (Diana). 

Her world is a world of women, and none of them are terribly heteronormative.

From her birth, Artemis desired to live a life surrounded by women, shunning city life for the wild lands of the mountains and forests. Ancient sources are generally coy about female homoeroticism, however when we read the texts' silences and contradictions a picture of female intimacy is clear. 

We will discuss the story of Artemis and Kallisto. Though at first the story appears as a male figure invading a female space, this disguises an image of feminine sensual intimacy. 

What emerges is an image of homoeroticism in the divine sphere.

Transcript

Title

Dominica Raven 0:28

Hello, everybody, and welcome to Lambda, the LGBT and Antiquity Podcast, the show for all things LGBT in the ancient world. I'm your host, Dominica Raven, episode 5, Artemis the Lesbian.

Intro

Dominica Raven 0:42

When Artemis, the goddess of the hunt, was an infant, she spent her days playing in the mountains and shooting at rabbits with her toy bow. As she grew up, she asked Zeus to grant her perpetual virginity and to be forever free from childbirth. She requested to dress and act like a young woman forever while she hunted in the forests and mountains with her new special hunting bow. Artemis desired above all else to be unwed, a wild, untamable woman who could do as she pleased. She did not want to be shackled to marriage, or was it that she didn't want to be shackled to heteronormativity? Once Zeus had granted her these things, Artemis asks him for sixty daughters of the sea and twenty daughte rs of the rivers. These are nymphs who were overjoyed at becoming mates for Artemis. They're all wild women of wild spaces, together in the mountains. So here we have a bunch of young unwed women who also did not want to be shackled to marriage and wouldn't even look at an adult man. These women became part of Artemis's retinue, following her through her travels, hunting with her, and tending to all of her needs. Of all the women who accompanied her, Artemis loved Callisto the most. Callisto was an adroit huntress who used a bow or a spear. One day Zeus took note of this beautiful young woman and the way she and Artemis interacted. Zeus disguises himself as Artemis and approaches Callisto. Now Zeus hits on Callisto, who announced that she loves Artemis even more than Zeus. So the two embrace and kiss in the forest. Now the two eventually have intercourse and Callisto gets pregnant. She initially tries to hide this from Artemis, but it becomes visible, and Artemis learns the truth. When the child, named Archas, the eponymous progenitor of the Arcadian people, is born, Callisto is transformed into a wild bear. This bear becomes Ursa Major, the great bear constellation.

Body

Dominica Raven 2:57

Though Artemis is a goddess of wild spaces, she is consistently shown as a very feminine goddess. Artemis is a huntress, a wild woman from the mountains. From the very beginning, Artemis does not desire married life, but instead chooses to live a powerful, liberated female figure. However, being liberated from the marriage bed does not mean that she's unaccompanied. Artemis is almost always shown with accompanying nymphs and dryads and other goddesses and even human women in tow. Artemis' world is a world of women. When human hunters successfully bagged their quarry, they thanked Artemis. When they failed to produce anything at all, they assume Artemis has some grudge against them. Hunting is an inherently treacherous pursuit in the ancient world. You never know when you might find a fierce lion or a wild boar out in the woods. Finding game is difficult enough, but even when you do find game, it's no guarantee of Artemis' favor. There are many stories of people who claim a large or impressive animal, only to learn that this was a special favorite of Artemis. One example of this is Agamemnon, the tragic king of Mycenae, who once killed one of Artemis' favorite deer. Later, when he was trying to set sail with his army bound for Troy, Artemis held the whole fleet up with rough seas and winds. The huntress eventually demanded Agamemnon sacrifice his own daughter, Iphigenia, as recompense for his sin. But at the last moment, Artemis whisked Iphigenia away to safety, where she eventually became one of the goddess's priestesses, or in some versions, an immortal companion. The point is, Artemis is routinely shown as implacable towards any mortal who has sinned against her. She deals out wildly unpredictable and often ironically cruel punishments. Though Artemis is shown as a wild goddess, Artemis' wildness actually helps her to better serve human women during the wild portions of their lives. Artemis is often shown being attended by young women priestesses. She features heavily in festivals and rituals involving young women transitioning from one phase of their lives to another. So a girl becoming a teenager raging with pubescent hormones, or a teenager becoming an adult, are both transitions. Artemis oversees. Artemis is present at rituals of marriage. As we've mentioned before, marriage is basically a business deal made between two families. As such, there is a lot of pressure on the young woman for this arrangement to succeed, both for the benefit of the household they were born into and the household they're about to join. Additionally, they may be moving to a new city they had never been to before and joining a family they had never met. So marriage is a wild, unpredictable period where maidens have high anxiety and emotion. Artemis also oversees significant portions of the birthing process, particularly the birthing pains themselves. Women all over the ancient world would literally cry out to Artemis to help lessen the pain of childbirth. And finally, Artemis is a patron of nurses and other carers for youth. Her role is to protect and nurture young life in any form. Human nurses are in need of her help, just like animal nurses too. There's even a story where Artemis personally nurses wild animals abandoned in the mountains. There is a final, more triggering and uncomfortable pattern of appearances in myth. After heroines or nymphs are sexually assaulted, there's a tremendously emotional and vulnerable period that follows. People seem to be wild during this period of post-trauma processing, and Artemis is there watching, and sometimes helping women through this phase. So there's a pattern with respect to Artemis' roles. They generally center around women who are at major life changes and painful moments. There are times when women are perceived to be wild, unpredictable, and emotionally volatile, and these are the moments when Artemis helps women. Though she's not always able to help cure the pain, she is there when women are at their most wild and vulnerable. Now, there are two things I'd like to point out here. First, Artemis is a goddess who shows special favor for her women, and yet Artemis is also shown interacting with the world of men. However, where someone like Athena is welcome and advantageous towards men she admires, such as Odysseus, Artemis is often presented as a barrier to men. Men leave their towns and go up into the woods or into the mountains and invade this female world. The reason men are allowed to hunt is because they entered Artemis' world and obey Artemis' rules. Any man who doesn't obey Artemis while hunting risks being turned into a stag and ripped apart. Secondly, Artemis is conventionally feminine in a few crucial ways. Her religion is fundamentally a female space. Where Athena is often called mannish and takes male pursuits like conflict and warfare to their absolute zenith, Artemis embodies a very particular type of the feminine. So the question is, to what extent can any of these episodes actually be considered homoerotic? If you define the homoerotic as a narrative voice describing two women having sex, then the answer is practically none. We can interpret queer-coated attributes of the stories all we want, but there really isn't a specific sex scene to be found between Artemis and any man or woman. However, when we return to the narrative of Callisto before the introduction of the male element in Zeus, we do find a world of these wild women. There are nymphs and dryads, Amazons, and human women all in the troupe. Now not one of these women represents a heteronormative ideal. They live apart from society in the wild spaces of the mountains and woods and fields. None of them are married and thus tamed by marriage or shackled to domestic life in the oikos. I always think it's telling that many ancient authors use a livestock metaphor. Young women are fillies who must be tamed by their families and brought beneath the yoke of marriage. This is the expected trajectory for young women, a trajectory which is roundly and absolutely rejected by Artemis and her band. Remember, Artemis represents a wild femininity which we all experience at one point or another in our lives. So the women of Artemis represent a break from heteronormativity from the very beginning. A consistent issue with studying the lesbian experience is that we often have images of homoeroticism masquerading as images of chastity, and we can rarely tell the difference. The majority of records come from the heteronormative voice of the Paterfamilias. What happens when the doors to the women's quarters close is not really something they could adequately police. Of course, they have their proxy agents or slaves, but ultimately it's not a space they can control as easily as they can the rest of the household. So there's a clear possibility of women engaging in intimate activities, and the whole thing is completely invisible to the powers that be. Additionally, since sexual activity in the ancient world is defined largely, if not exclusively, through penetration, there are a lot of homoerotic options open to a woman without sacrificing chastity defined this way. So, in this way, the sexual act between Zeus and Callisto really is something different from whatever Artemis and Callisto have already done. Now the myth represents this visually. Artemis partakes in the sensual foreplay, and then she swapped out for Zeus at the last minute for the real sexual acts. While some scholars have used the fact that Zeus is in disguise as Artemis to discredit the whole story as a statement of homosexuality, they overtly miss that it is in fact presented as an advancement of a goddess onto Callisto from the start. These scholars tend to spend so much time on the punishment doled out at the end of the story, they miss the fundamental reason Zeus approached Callisto as Artemis in the first place. When Zeus, disguised as Artemis, flirts and makes advances on Callisto, Callisto is not alarmed in any way, but embraces her with affection. It would seem that Artemis making amorous advances does not set off any warning for Callisto. Not one of the versions of the story makes the claim that Artemis and Callisto had a relationship before the episode. However, the sensual advances are neither refused nor resisted. In fact, everything about Artemis' activities are received as if they were expected. This makes sense because Artemis is a trusted member of the group. She has already established a strong emotional connection to Callisto at the very beginning of the story. But on the other hand, Zeus could have changed into anything a swan, a bull, rain, a cloud, and he chooses to become Artemis for the seduction scene. So the problem with these types of interpretations is that the seduction was done by Artemis, even if the sexual act was done by Zeus. This is most clearly visible in the best known version of the story from Ovid's Metamorphosis. Artemis and Callisto swap hunting stories and share a kiss. It is important for the narrative to proceed that Artemis and Callisto already have this bond and that Zeus is abusing the bond to seduce Callisto. Thus the story centers around a scene where a goddess seduces a female, and even if there is a heterosexual assault to follow, that seduction remains homoerotic. One way to interpret this story is that Callisto, just like Artemis, is fundamentally a female who's not overtly womanly. Everything in the narrative shows her as this wild youth transformed into a mother by the end. Viewed in this light, the narrative is actually about Callisto coming of age and becoming more socially acceptable as a woman. By the end, she is a mother, albeit a bear, with a son named Arcas. This is a narrative which strongly indicates homoeroticism as the path to heteronormativity. Thus, the story can be read as an initiation of a youth into the proper adult world. Though there are so many examples of this dynamic in male homoerocism, there are so few initiatory homoerotic stories related to young women. I think that this is a compelling way to look at the narrative. The main issue I see is the disconnect between the initiation and the ending. Callisto may be expressing femininity more within the acceptable range, but not for very long. Within a few months of becoming pregnant, she loses her humanity altogether and becomes a bear. So if it is simply initiation, it is not an initiation into human womanhood, but divinity. At the end of the story, Callisto is not killed, but apotheosed to the heavens where she looks down on us to this day from the great bear constellation. If we consider it this way, Artemis is not punishing Callisto, but saving her beloved companion from a life of shame, and delivering her from death itself.

Conclusion

Dominica Raven 15:50

So, the goddess Artemis spends her time in the wild country surrounded by wild women. This world is a strange other world beyond conventional human notions of heteronormativity. Already at the beginning of the story, these wild women are acting outside of societal expectations. Then Zeus, disguised as Artemis, arrives and woos one of the wild women. Though Greek and Roman mythology are notoriously coy with female sensuality, the narrative itself provides a pre-existing homoerotic relationship of which Zeus knew and abused to his advantage. This approach is important when we study the LGBT experience in antiquity. Sources rarely explicitly state what we are trying to study, so we have to dig into the details and explore the social dynamics at work in the story creatively. We cannot afford to let ancient heteronormativity stand uncritically. Within our critical discussions, we gain a bit of knowledge on the experience which would otherwise have been invisible to our gaze.

Dominica Raven 16:59

This approach was developed by J.J. Winkler, who was one of our pioneering queer scholars in the classics. His major book was The Constraints of Desire, The Anthropology of Sex and Gender in Ancient Greece, which covers a wide variety of sources from which we can gain a bit of knowledge on ancient sexuality. Critically he lays out a research methodology he labels reading against the grain, which is essentially what we did here. Winkler's candle burned bright and he influenced the majority of queer scholars in the classics to this day. Yet, like many of the best queer minds of his generation, his life was cut short by AIDS in 1990. I remember when I first read his work and thinking that what he was describing was perhaps the best way I had been exposed to at getting at what we're actually trying to study. Even if an ancient author is not necessarily saying it, they are talking about it. I read against the grain all the time.

Next Week

Dominica Raven 18:04

Next week we're going to explore the relationship of Zeus and Ganymedes. Zeus may well be the deity of order and creation who is a pansexual. However, I'm really not sure about Ganymedes. Ganymede is never shown to have any relationship with a woman, or really anybody except Zeus himself. Ganymedes is one of a few figures only ever shown as a homosexual lover. See you next Monday.

Notes and Comments

Dominica Raven 18:51

While we interpreted the story of Artemis and Callisto as a manifestation of a divine figure associated with female homoeraticism, this is not the only way to interpret these pieces. I actually started by making two separate arguments, one with Artemis as an asexual, gender non-conforming figure, and once with Artemis as a lesbian. In the end I went with homoeraticism because I feel she is the best candidate for a lesbian in the whole Olympian pantheon. But this is only one way to assemble the stories into a queer synthesis. I never want to make my interpretation seem like I am repressing or ignoring other aspects or identities. It's just the argument I happen to be making right just now. Artemis certainly represents gender non-conformity, which would be an excellent topic for another time. Today, it is lesbian Artemis.

Dominica Raven 19:51

The part of the story where Artemis makes a request of Zeus is drawn from Callimachus' hymn to Artemis, verse 1 through 40. Callimachus was a Greek scholar working at the Library of Alexandria who lived from around 310 to 240 BC. He worked principally in literary scholarship, with his main work being the Pinakes, which is a lost 120-volume bibliographical index to the extensive holdings in the Library of Alexandria. His hymns survived and were extremely influential for later Greek and Roman authors. In Callimachus' hymn to Artemis, 62 through 72, Artemis' attendants cover their eyes when they meet a male cyclops. This is a common cultural expectation when young girls interact with adult men. The story of Callisto's metamorphosis into a bear is found in Ovid's Metamorphosis, book 2, verses 401 through 530. Ovid lived between about 43 BC to around 18 AD. He was one of those later poets whose work draws influence from Callimachus. Eratosthenes' Catasterismi, section 1, includes the story where Callisto, as a bear, is apotheosed to the heavens. Eratosthenes was a Greek scholar from the Library of Alexandria who lived during the 3rd century BC. He was the very first scholar ever to calculate the Earth's circumference and axial tilt. This book is a guide to the mythology of the stars, connecting the variations of the mythical episodes to the observable night sky.

Dominica Raven 21:33

The rapid-fire list of different transformations Zeus had engaged in so that he could mate with different mortals is drawn from many different mythical episodes. Zeus became a swan to mate with Leda, the mother of Helen, Clytemnestra, Castor, and Pollux. Zeus became a bull to mate with Europa, the mother of King Minos and King Radamanthus from Crete, as well as Sarpedon, the Trojan war hero whose death kicks off. The death cycle in the Iliad. Zeus became golden rain to mate with Danae, the mother of the hero Perseus, and in some versions of the story, Zeus became a cloud to mate with Semele, mother of Dionysus. I would also like to note that each of these is not necessarily promiscuity or violence, but different forms of immaculate conception. Each one of these types of stories reflects an overtly unusual type of conception in an effort to underscore the miracle of the resulting pregnancy and the blessed heroic children.

Dominica Raven 22:37

The idea that the story of Callisto represents initiatory female homosexuality is drawn from Sarah Boringer, Female Homosexuality in Ancient Greece and Rome, first published in French in 2007 and translated by Anna Prager in 2021. Page 55 through 74.

Dominica Raven 22:56

Reading Against the Grain is drawn from J.J. Winkler, The Constraints of Desire, The Anthropology of Sex and Gender in Ancient Greece, 1990, page 99 through 126. That's all for this episode. We'll see you next Monday.