Diana

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On the wooded northern shore of Lake Nemi, in the crater of an extinct volcano in the Alban Hills south of Rome, a man walked the grove of Diana with a drawn sword. He was a runaway slave, and he was a king. By the law of the place he had won his title — rex Nemorensis, the King of the Wood — by breaking a bough from a certain tree no one else might touch and then killing the priest who held the office before him. He kept it the only way it could be kept: by killing the next man who came to take it from him. Day and night he watched the trees, because the next runaway was already somewhere on the roads to Aricia. This was the most famous priesthood of Diana, the virgin goddess of the hunt, of woodland and wild beasts, of the moon, and of women in childbirth — and it was the image with which James Frazer chose to open The Golden Bough in 1890, reading the strange succession at Nemi as a relic of a worldwide rite in which the sacred king must periodically die.

The goddess of the threshold

Diana’s domain was everything that lay beyond the cultivated field. She belonged to the forest and the mountain, to the boundary between the tilled land and the untamed, to the crossroads and the night. She was a huntress and the protectress of the things she hunted — wild animals were hers, and she ranged among them with her bow and her pack of hounds. She was a virgin, and she guarded that chastity ferociously; the same goddess who roamed the wilds was called upon by women in labor, for the threshold of birth was a wild and dangerous place too. Her name was bound up with the bright sky and the moon: the Romans read Diana as kin to dius, the daylight and the open heaven, and she came to stand for the moon as her brother Apollo stood for the sun.

In the documentary record Diana is among the oldest goddesses of Latium, very likely an indigenous Italic woodland power before she was a Roman one. Her most politically charged shrine stood in Rome itself, on the Aventine — the temple ascribed to the early king Servius Tullius in the sixth century BC, which held the foundation charter of the Latin League. Set on the plebeian hill outside the old sacred boundary, the Aventine Diana was a goddess held in common by all the Latin peoples, not the Romans alone; her cult there carried the weight of a whole confederation. The slave’s freedom granted at her festival, and the gathering of the Latins under her name, mark her from the start as a goddess of the outsider and the in-between.

Diana and Artemis

Early and thoroughly the Romans laid Diana over the Greek Artemis, and the two flowed together so completely that the Latin goddess took on the whole Greek mythology as her own. Diana Nemorensis was Hellenized in the fourth century BC, and by the classical period the attributes were a single inheritance: the bow and the quiver, the hunting hounds, the short tunic of one who runs, the crescent set above the brow. With Artemis came the twin birth on Delos — Diana and Apollo borne by Leto — and the fierce chastity, and the swift vengeance on those who trespassed against it. Artemis’s role as Eileithyia, easer of childbirth, passed to Diana under the title Lucina, the one who brings the newborn into the light. The Greek goddess’s old function as mistress of animals, potnia theron, settled on the Roman one without a seam.

The grove at Nemi gathered other figures into this circle. The nymph Egeria, a spirit of its springs, was Diana’s companion and counsellor. Virbius — read by the Romans as the resurrected Hippolytus, the chaste hunter killed and restored by Asclepius with Artemis’s help, the twice-living man — shared the wood with her. The lake the poets called speculum Dianae, Diana’s mirror, and on the Ides of August, the thirteenth, the festival of the Nemoralia carried torches in procession around its water, the flames doubled on its still surface.

One goddess in three

Diana was never only the goddess on the earth. She was joined to Luna in the sky and to Hecate below it, and the three were read as a single power wearing three faces — Diana triformis, the threefold goddess. The formula the poets and the late commentators repeated set her in the three levels of the cosmos: above the earth she is the Moon; on the earth she is Diana, the huntress of the woods; beneath the earth she is Hecate, or Proserpina, queen of the crossroads and the dead. Her title Trivia — from the trivium, the place where three roads meet — names the same triplicity from below, the goddess who stands at the forked night-road where the living leave offerings for what moves in the dark.

This was the architecture that would carry her furthest. A goddess of the hunt might have stayed in the forest; a goddess who also rules the moon, the crossroads, and the dead is already a goddess of magic — of the lunar timing of operations, of the offerings left where roads divide, of the divination that questions the dead. The threefold Diana held together three things that the later imagination would never quite let go of again — the lunar light, the nocturnal road, and the company of the dead. When her name reappears a thousand years on, it is this Diana, the one of the moon and the night and the crossroads, who returns, and not the maiden with the bow.

The night ride: the canon Episcopi

The strangest stretch of her afterlife opens in the early Middle Ages, in a document that meant to bury her and preserved her instead. Around the year 906, Regino of Prüm, abbot of a Rhineland monastery, set down in a handbook for bishops a passage on a folk belief he wished to stamp out. Certain wicked women, it ran — quaedam sceleratae mulieres — turned back toward Satan and deceived by demonic illusion, believed that in the hours of the night they rode out upon beasts in the train of Diana, goddess of the pagans, together with a countless multitude of women, crossing vast distances and obeying her as their mistress. This is the passage that came to be called, from its opening word, the canon Episcopi.

Its purpose was flatly skeptical. The ride did not happen. No woman flew anywhere; only God commands the powers of nature, and to imagine otherwise was to be seduced by the devil — whose whole part in the affair was the deception itself, the dream laid over a sleeping mind. A bishop’s duty was to preach this belief out of his people as a lie. And yet, in setting out to deny the flight, the canon gave it a name and a patroness. It fixed in the record the picture of a nocturnal society of women crossing the night sky under a goddess’s command — Diana, named explicitly, the pagan deity who would not die. Burchard of Worms, copying the canon into his great collection of church law around 1010, deepened the strangeness: in one place he set beside Diana the New Testament figure Herodias, and in another the Germanic Holda, as though the leader of the night ride could wear any of three names. From Burchard the text passed into the Decretum of Ivo of Chartres and then, around 1140, into Gratian’s Decretum, the authoritative body of canon law for the rest of the medieval centuries.

So the church’s own statute carried Diana forward across the Christian Middle Ages as the mistress of a phantom procession. The skepticism cut both ways. When the witch-hunting demonologists of the fifteenth century wanted to argue that the gatherings of witches were real flesh-and-blood crimes — that the witches’ sabbath truly convened — they had first to argue around the canon Episcopi, which the church itself had made law and which insisted the night ride was a delusion. Across the trial records the leader of the imagined ride keeps her old names: Diana, or Herodias, or whatever local form the inquisitor reached for. A Roman goddess of the woodland had become, against every intention, the standing name for the patroness of a witchcraft that the people who wrote her down did not believe existed.

Aradia and the modern revival

The thread the canon left dangling was picked up at the close of the nineteenth century. In 1899 the American folklorist Charles Leland published Aradia, or the Gospel of the Witches, presenting it as the scripture of a surviving witch-cult in Tuscany that still worshipped Diana — here the Queen of the Witches — and her daughter Aradia, born of Diana and Lucifer the light-bearer and sent down to earth to teach magic to the oppressed. Leland said he had the text from a Tuscan informant he called Maddalena, who he claimed sent him the manuscript, the Vangelo, by post on the first day of 1897. Scholarship has never been able to confirm that any such cult or manuscript existed; the work is read with caution, as possibly Leland’s own composition or his informant’s, and at best as a window onto nineteenth-century Italian folk belief rather than an unbroken survival. What is not in doubt is its consequence. Aradia placed Diana at the head of a self-described witch religion, and it became one of the founding texts that the twentieth century would build on.

In the early decades of that century, the Egyptologist Margaret Murray argued that the early-modern witch trials had documented a real, organized, pre-Christian fertility religion — a surviving pagan cult she traced back, in part, to the Diana of the canon Episcopi. The thesis was widely read, carried into the Encyclopædia Britannica, and is now rejected by historians: the specialists of the witch trials, above all Norman Cohn, showed that no such continuous cult ever existed, that the sabbath was a fantasy assembled from much older slanders, and that the trial confessions Murray treated as reportage were extracted under torture. The Old Religion she described was a modern reconstruction, not a discovery.

But the reconstruction took on a life of its own. When Gerald Gardner assembled the new religion of Wicca in mid-twentieth-century Britain — drawing on Murray’s discredited pedigree, on Aradia, on ceremonial magic and Freemasonry, and on the literary Goddess of Robert Graves — Diana entered its pantheon by way of Leland and the broad figure of the Moon Goddess. This was no antique survival but a genuinely modern faith, made in the 1950s and after; its own historian, Ronald Hutton, has called it the only fully formed religion England has given the world. And within the broader current of modern Paganism that grew from it, one branch took Diana’s name directly and made her, once again and now in earnest, the goddess at the center of a women’s nocturnal cult — the thing the canon Episcopi had described in order to deny it, finally willed into being.

Texts and scholarship

The Nemi priesthood survives in scattered ancient notices — Strabo and Pausanias describe the armed priest who must kill to hold his office; Ovid sets the rite in the Fasti; Suetonius records that the emperor Caligula, finding one rex too long-lived, sent a stronger man to end his reign. The image entered modern thought through the opening pages of James Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1890), where the King of the Wood becomes the doorway to a vast comparative theory of the dying god; the relevant chapter is freely readable in Frazer’s own words. Charles Leland’s Aradia, or the Gospel of the Witches (1899) is in the public domain and remains the single most influential modern text to place Diana at the head of a witch religion; the full text is available online, and Robert Mathiesen and Robert Chartowich’s later critical edition reopened the old question of its sources. For the medieval afterlife the foundational study is Norman Cohn’s Europe’s Inner Demons (1975), which traces how the canon Episcopi’s skeptical Diana fed into and then collided with the developing fantasy of the sabbath; the canon itself, transmitted through Regino of Prüm, Burchard of Worms, and Gratian, is the documentary hinge between the Roman goddess and the witch-lore. For the construction of modern Wicca and Diana’s place in it, Ronald Hutton’s The Triumph of the Moon (1999, revised 2019) is the standard account, and Sabina Magliocco’s study of the Aradia legend sets Leland’s book within the larger story of how a contested folklore figure, with roots in medieval Italian belief, became modern scripture.

The sharpest irony is the canon Episcopi’s own. It named Diana in order to deny her — ruling that the women who believed they rode out in her train at night were deluded, carried by a phantom the devil had set in their minds. But to name her was to make her citable, and the inquisitors who later assembled the sabbath out of that same text read its denial as a description. The goddess the church wrote down to dispel became, in the writing, the standing name under which a witchcraft no one had practiced was prosecuted.

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