An ABC of Witchcraft Past and Present - Doreen Valiente 2018

Diana

Diana is the Roman name of the goddess of the moon, whom the Greeks called Artemis. (See ARTEMIS.) Her temple at Ephesus was one of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world.

The name Diana comes from the Indo-European root Di, meaning ’bright, shining’, as befits the lady of the bright lamp of heaven. Under this name, she would have been equally acceptable to the people of the Celtic provinces of Rome, as the Celtic words dianna and diona also mean ’divine’ or ’brilliant’.

Perhaps this is one reason why the worship of Diana was so widespread and long-enduring. We have seen how the very early Canon Law of the Christian Church denounced women who continued to worship Diana by night. (See CANON EPISCOPI.) Charles Godfrey Leland tells us how in nineteenth-century Italy he found people who had insufficient education to know anything about the classical goddess Diana, who were yet perfectly well aware of her as queen of the witches. (See LELAND, CHARLES GODFREY.)

The beautiful invocations to Diana, which Leland collected from Italian witches and published in Aradia: the Gospel of the Witches of Italy (London, David Nutt, 1899), are proof of the surviving cult of Diana and its importance to the understanding of what witchcraft really is. (See ARADIA.)

Jerome Cardan, who wrote of witches in his books De Rerum Varietate, published in Basle in 1557, says: “They [witches] adore the ludi Dominam [the Lady of the Games] and sacrifice to her as a god.” This ’Lady’ was Diana, and the “games” were the full-moon Esbats, which take their name from the Old French s’esbattre, meaning to frolic. In Italy, these witch frolics were sometimes called ’the game of Benevento’, after a district notorious as a witches’ meeting-place.

Other names which the goddess acquired during the Middle Ages were Dame Habonde, Abundia, Satia, Bensozia, Zobiana and Herodiana. In Scotland she was called Nicneven, who rode through the night with her followers “at the hinder end of harvest, on old Halloween”, as an old Scots poet describes it.

Some of these names are evidently descriptions of her attributes. Abundia, for example, is connected with ’abundance’, and Satia with ’satisfaction’. Herodiana is a combination of the names of Diana and her witch-daughter Herodias. Bensozia could mean ’the good neighbour’ an expression which was a name for the fairies. Many of the Old Gods became associated with the fairies in the popular mind, after the coming of Christianity. Shakespeare’s Queen of the Fairies, Titania, bears what is actually an old name of the Moon Goddess. In Ireland, the Sluagh Sidhe, or Fairy Host, was led by the beautiful and shining figures of the old Celtic gods and goddesses.

Fairyland, in fact, was simply the pagan Other World, to which the souls of pagans went when they died; and Diana was its queen. This was quite in accordance with classical myth, which gave to the triple goddess of the moon rulership over three realms; that of Heaven, Earth and the Other World, the dwelling-place of the dead. As the divinity of the moon, she was Selene; as the goddess of the woodlands and the wild things, she was Artemis; as the queen of the mysterious Beyond, she was Hecate.

The poet John Skelton describes her three-fold divinity:

Diana in the leaves green,

Luna that so bright doth sheen,

Persephone in Hell.

As a universal goddess, Diana had many forms and many names. In fact, it would be more correct to say that there was a universal goddess, of whose myriad names Diana was one. Naturally, the cult of a goddess so widely worshipped was carried on all over the ancient Roman Empire, where it mingled with those of native goddesses like Dana, Briginda and Cerridwen.

The cult of Diana was particularly important to Ancient Britain, because, according to legend, it was she who had directed the Trojan Prince Brutus, the founder of the royal line of Britain, to take refuge here after the Fall of Troy. The descent of British royalty from the Trojans was accepted without question in olden times and was a matter of pride. Britons called themselves Y Lin Troia, ’The Race of Troy’.

The place where Brutus landed, at Totnes in Devon, is still shown; and London was called Troy Novaunt, or New Troy, because Brutus had founded it.

The sacred relic of London, London Stone, which is still preserved, is said to have been the original altar which Brutus raised to Diana, in gratitude for his kingdom. On its safety the fate of London is supposed to depend.

The temple of Diana founded by Brutus is said to have occupied the site of the present St. Paul’s Cathedral. This may be the real origin of a strange medieval custom which was formerly kept up at the cathedral on St. Paul’s Day, 25th January. In 1375 a certain Sir William Baud had been permitted to enclose 20 acres of land belonging to the cathedral, on condition that he presented annually to the clergy of the cathedral a fat buck and a doe. These animals were brought into the cathedral, when the procession was taking place, and were offered at the high altar.

The buck being brought to the steps of the altar, the Dean and Chapter, apparelled in copes and proper vestments, with garlands of roses on their heads, sent the body of the buck to be baked, and had the head and horns fixed on a pole before the cross, in their procession round about the church, till they issued at the west door, where the keeper that brought it blowed the death of the buck, and then the horns that were about the city answered him in like manner.

So says Robert Chambers in his Book of Days (2 vols, W. & R. Chambers, London and Edinburgh, 1869; also Gale Detroit, 1886), quoting from an old author. In fact, this ceremony is in keeping with a pagan rite associated with a pagan site, upon which the original cathedral was built. Then the old rite continued in a Christianised form; and in 1375 a man was given some land on condition that he supplied the annual sacrifice of the horned beasts of Diana.

The alchemists sometimes used figures of Diana as a symbol of silver, the moon’s metal. The old belief in turning your money over for luck, when you first see the new moon, is a relic of the worship of Diana. It should, of course, be silver money which you are asking her to increase.

Diana’s crescent moon and blue robe of stars were directly taken over by artists, and bestowed as attributes of the Madonna, when she is represented as Queen of Heaven. The beauty of medieval Madonnas is the loveliness of a goddess, who was anciently Diana, and before that Isis, and before that the Divine Woman of the dark and secret sanctuaries of the cave men.