Off to Mickey Land

I'm headed to Orlando in the morning to serve as co-leader of the writers track at Synergy. I'm so eager to hear what Lauren Winner (Girl Meets God) has to say about memoir writing!

I'm also up to my ears in my translation work at UTD. I have spent the past week or so looking at about 2,000 inscriptions from ancient Ephesus. I now have pages and pages of references to Artemis. In other cities Artemis was the goddess of the hunt. But the Ephesian Artemis--while she was a huntress--had a little different flavor. She was the goddess of childbearing. In fact Plutarch said the reason her first temple burned down was because she was away officiating at Alexander the Great's birth. (Greek gods/goddesses were not omnipresent, dontcha know.) Women preparing to deliver would take offerings to her temple and ask her to save them, either by killing them quickly with her arrows or by delivering them safely.

Artemis's second-born twin brother, Apollo, caused their mother to labor for nine days, so Artemis--who watched helplessly--asked her daddy Zeus to make her a virgin forever so she'd never have to endure that stuff. She is one of only three females in the ancient pantheon who was untouchable by love.

Many have taught that Artemis was a fertility goddess, but it looks like nothing could be further from the truth. She was more like a tomboy, anti-fertility goddess. I think this could account for why the apostle Paul affirms single-life-with-a-purpose living when writing to people in Corinth, but he encourages young widows to marry and have kids when writing to people in Ephesus.