The Enchanted Tarot

Astrology

Enchantments

Alchemy

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ARTEMIS was the very independent Goddess of the Moon and the woods, born of Zeus, the Greek God, and Leto, an earlier Goddess of Fertility. Her twin brother was Apollo, God of the Sun. ARTEMIS wished for the freedom Apollo enjoyed. She asked Zeus for a bow and arrow, and a short, masculine tunic so that she might pursue a life of hunting in the forest. In her Huntress aspect, she represented The Goddess as the Destroyer of Life.

However, she was quite protective of her Mother, even helping her later in childbirth. This tenderness also extended to animal mothers and their offspring.

Full of freshness and newness, unbound by the conventional subservient role played by the women of Greece, she roamed the woods with her band of Nymphs. Though she possessed a seductive innocence, she would strike out mercilessly if anything threatened her feelings of integrity and self-worth. Once caught bathing in a mountain stream, she turned the man who had spied upon her into a stag and had him torn apart by his own dogs.

ARTEMIS ruled a primeval, natural world of perfection unknown in the cities. She followed her own path and felt perfectly complete without a man. When she chose one she would always be on equal footing with him.

Her joy was to fall asleep without any worries under the stars, to excel physically, and to seek her own destiny with all the ardor and the almost obsessively narrow focus of youth.