Diana

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Diana was the Roman goddess of the hunt, of woodland and wild animals, of the moon, and of childbirth — a virgin huntress who ranged the forests and was worshipped above all at her sanctuary by Lake Nemi in the Alban Hills, south of Rome. Early and thoroughly the Romans identified her with the Greek Artemis, and the two goddesses’ attributes merged: the bow and the hunting hounds, the crescent moon, the protection of women in labour, the fierce guarding of her own chastity. At Nemi her priest was the rex Nemorensis, a runaway slave who held the office until another killed him for it — a grim succession that later furnished James Frazer the opening image of The Golden Bough.

In her own cult Diana belonged to the world of the threshold and the wild: the boundary of the cultivated and the untamed, the crossroads, the night. She was sometimes joined to Luna in the sky and to Hecate in the underworld, the three read as one goddess in three aspects — a triplicity that gave her an enduring association with magic, the moon, and the dead.

The strangest part of her afterlife begins in the early Middle Ages. A church text known as the canon Episcopi, circulating by the tenth century, condemned the belief held by “certain wicked women” that they rode out at night in the company of Diana, goddess of the pagans, over great distances. The canon’s purpose was to deny that any such flight occurred — to call it a delusion sent by the devil — but in naming Diana it preserved her, against its own intention, as the patroness of a nocturnal female society. Across the later witch trials the name recurred, sometimes as Diana, sometimes as Herodias or local equivalents.

This thread was taken up in the modern period. In 1899 the American folklorist Charles Leland published Aradia, or the Gospel of the Witches, presenting it as the scripture of a surviving Tuscan witch-cult that worshipped Diana and her daughter Aradia; scholarship has never confirmed his source and treats the work with caution. Margaret Murray’s early-twentieth-century thesis of a continuous underground pagan religion built partly on the same materials and is now generally rejected by historians. When Gerald Gardner assembled modern Wicca in the 1950s, Diana — by way of Leland and the broader figure of the Moon Goddess — entered the new religion’s pantheon, and one of its currents took her name directly.

What survives, then, is two Dianas held loosely together: the precisely attested goddess of Roman cult, and the composite night-mistress assembled from a hostile church canon, a contested folklore text, and a twentieth-century revival. The historical distance between them is real; the name carried across it anyway.

→ Related: Durga · Freyja · Rhea · Divination