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Today I am standing up for Artemis.

Now, Artemis is an incredibly difficult goddess to pin down, right? And I think this is because she's a predator.

She's a hunter, so she should be hard to spot.

But specifically, the kind of hunter that she is is the archer.

In the Homeric hymn to Artemis, it's only 10 lines long,

and it mentions her loving arrows twice. So it's a big part of her character. She is the daughter

of Zeus and of Leto. She is the sister to Apollo, the moon to his son. She is also queen of wild creatures, Potnyatheron in Greek.

In addition to that, she is a protector of young girls, sometimes a sort of demander of the

lives of young girls, but mainly with the protecting. Let's stick with that for now.

And when I say young girls,

I'm not euphemizing. I mean actual children, her priestesses at Browron, which is modern-day Vavrona,

not too far from Athens, were probably about 10 years old, at least if we can believe the chorus in Aristophanes play Lysistrita, who say they served as bears at Browron when they were 10. If you look at the statues

of her priestesses or worshippers that have been found at Vavrona, they don't look even 10. They look

seven, maybe eight years old, top end. And yes, you heard me right. I did say bears, because her

priestesses were known as bears. And we don't know why. It's always really hard to know why anything happens

in women's religious practices in antiquity

because our writing is by men

and they're not always invited.

So maybe these girls were known as bears

because they wore yellow dresses,

which was a sort of priestly colour,

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