Diana Acephala: Myth, Madness, and the Moon
Tucked away in a little-known park on the outskirts of San Francisco, there once stood a statue of the goddess Diana. Featured as the frontispiece of Arthur Evans’ 1978 Witchcraft and the Gay Counterculture, this statue was a site of worship for decades, receiving frequent offerings of fruit, flowers, wine, candles and more from local devotees. She was revered and honored as a guardian of the wild ones and leader of the local nymphs, presiding over the windswept ruins of a millionaire’s former estate overlooking the ocean. Until, last year, she was dismembered, beheaded, and buried alive.
Now, gods die all the time. Frequent deaths and rebirths are part of the deal when it comes to maintaining one’s divinity in a changing world. But when it happens, it marks time in ways that are worth paying attention to. Diana, the Roman name for the Greek Artemis, is the divine embodiment of wildness itself, the rhythmic waxing and waning of the Moon, the ritual of the hunt through which one creature dies so that another may live, and the mysterious threshold that the child passes through in order to reach adulthood. I believe that the end of Diana’s reign over Land’s End in physical form marks the end of an era in which colonial powers could concretize the concept of wildness into a safe stone icon and hold it at bay. I believe this is, in fact, her liberation.
But first, some background. Home to the Yelamu tribe of the Ohlone nation, the expanse of rolling sand dunes at the north-westernmost corner of the San Francisco peninsula, like much of California, was invaded in the 18th century by Spanish explorers who set up missions there with the intention to convert and displace indigenous people. This paved the way for Adolph Sutro, who made his fortune in a monumental silver mine scam, to come in and develop the land in the late 1800s. He built his estate on the land that is now called Sutro Heights Park and filled it with Roman icons, charging passersby a dime each to walk through and view them. The 20th century brought waves of Russian, then Chinese, immigrants to the neighborhood, which remains an enclave for both of these groups despite also drawing many of the ultra-wealthy families who flocked to San Francisco during the tech boom. Along the beach, just south of Diana’s perch, the city’s catastrophic wealth disparity is laid bare. People sleep on the sidewalk or in busted cars, largely ignored by the well-appointed yuppies who go there to windsurf or play volleyball or walk their potbellied pigs.
The statue in question is a facsimile of Diana of Versailles, housed at the Louvres, which is itself a Roman copy of a Greek statue. Funnily enough, the statue that was on display in the park during the time of the events I’m about to describe is not even the same one placed there by Sutro. That one, apparently, is hidden away somewhere in the fluorescent-lit bowels of San Francisco’s municipal storage system. When Sutro lived there, the park was full of such statues, each of them recreations of classical icons, but according to a National Parks Service brochure printed in the 1970s as well as a follow-up comment from a longtime SF Parks & Rec gardener, the statues were frequently vandalized, and so were buried where they stood in order to reduce the burden of maintenance and cleanup on the department. By the time I arrived in San Francisco, only Diana remained.
I’d come there for mysterious reasons, following a devotional current that had caught me like a gust of wind at a low moment in my life. Or maybe I was following a crush. Same difference. Anyway, I’d somehow gotten connected with a group of people who hosted rituals around the Bay Area, taken a few classes with them and become an initiate of their Bacchic-Orphic tradition, whatever that meant. When I arrived, we met for a picnic at Diana’s feet. I was all ingenue, clueless as to what I’d gotten myself involved in. When someone asked me whether it was the sex or the drugs that had drawn me to their humble cult, I said neither. They accused me of being a tourist and I answered in all seriousness “I don’t know where I came from or how I got here, but everyone’s been really nice so far.” They apologized. They said, “there’s something going on here that I don’t understand but if all these folks are extending a warm welcome, I’m not gonna be the first to contradict that.”
That group taught me how to feed the lions who protect the park, how to pray and give offerings to the land and the ancestors, and how to cultivate reciprocity with the web of life. And I had nowhere else to go, so I stayed.
One night, for no particular reason, I set off to bring Diana some honey. She’d occupied a key position in my personal pantheon since childhood, so after moving to the neighborhood I was excited to have the opportunity to connect with her more directly. The streets were cool and quiet at night, and the rhythmic crashing of the waves made a fitting backdrop to my restlessness. I climbed the hill doggedly, as a feeling of curiosity and import grew in me. I’d made this walk many times already and knew that I’d make it again, but also felt within that field of repetition the specificity of this moment, this iteration, and what was beginning now.
As I passed through the twin lions at the entrance to the park, I noticed a small fire in the distance, which I’d never seen there before. I assumed that someone was camping out, or that perhaps it was a gathering, and thought either way I’d give them some space. But when I arrived at Diana’s statue, there was someone standing just beside her, leaning casually against the plinth, anxiously flipping through something on their phone. I decided to make a loop around the park in hopes that when I returned they’d be gone and I could make my offering in peace.
As I rounded the mountain in the center of the park I sensed movement in the shadows of the trees. I remember the eerie feeling of a spirit reaching toward me and beckoning me over the cliff, down toward the beach, but I affirmed for myself and for them that I was only there to visit Diana and that I would just be passing through, with a firm “no, thank you.” I passed the final curve of the trail and found the fire, which I had somehow forgotten about, directly in front of me. A figure stood behind the flame in shadow, hooded perhaps. I couldn’t see their face. In front of them, across the fire, was an altar with several red candles set atop a wide, flat stump beside the crossroads. I realized uneasily that I was walking straight into the middle of their circle.
I changed my path to skirt around the edge of this strange scene, walking instead behind the altar and back toward Diana, not wanting to intrude upon their space. I preferred to stay my intended course. However, when I returned to Diana’s statue, the first person was still there, still waiting. The whole thing felt off and, shaken, I walked back out the way I’d come in without making my intended offering. I immediately feared this was a mistake, but found myself unable to turn around.
A few days later, I returned to find that Diana had been attacked. It struck me first as I approached that her shape was different, jagged. Thick wire armature showed where previously stone flesh had covered her metal bones. The arm that reached behind her to pull an arrow from her quiver was reduced to a bent dash and one leg was now stripped below the knee. The stag that ran alongside her was missing its head, and her own nose had been broken off.
I told a friend and fellow devotee what had happened and we brainstormed ways to care for her. We brought her roses and apples, drummed and sang for her, and dressed her wounds in honey and cloth. Bandaged, she looked better. But we wondered about who would have done such a thing, and why? Climbing her nearly six-foot pedestal to smash through solid concrete is no casual feat, and especially after what I’d experienced during my previous visit, we were left with a host of uneasy questions.
Conversations with neighbors and onlookers in the park over the next few weeks proved disheartening. Most agreed that it was an awful thing to have happened, but the conversation slid all too easily into people venting their fear and distrust of our houseless neighbors, or comparing the attack to the toppling of statues of colonizers and slavers, which we saw as very different phenomena. We understand Diana as a guardian of the wild space that lies beyond what is annexed by civilization, which would, in our view, include all those who exist on the margins of the social order. If this was an act of symbolic vengeance, in the context of a spiritual war manifest in gentrification and the commodification of survival, why would she be a sensible target? And if it was, instead, an act of madness -- well, to us that is not as simple as it might seem.
The fact is that spirits are everywhere. This is not a non-normative view in the context of human history. The period of time in which it’s been considered unusual or even insane to believe in or interact with spirits of the dead, of nature, of place and time and things sometimes called gods, angels, daemons, nymphs or faeries has been only the slightest blip. The period of time in which what we call madness has been considered an individualized glitch in the brain rather than a symptom of interference in the spiritual ecosystem has, too. My friend and I agreed that if someone out there went mad in a way that led them to smash a statue of the goddess Diana that had remained there for over a century, something was most certainly up. And who was that figure keeping fire at the crossroads? Why had I been almost compelled into their circle? What the hell is going on here?
Time went on, unanswered. About two months after discovering Diana’s injuries, I was walking through the park with another friend, telling her the story. It was satisfyingly clean the way it came out. We’d bandaged her wounds and solved the problem. Good for us. But as we approached the statue, I noticed again that something was wrong. When we got close enough to make out her shape, I stopped short and put my hand on my heart. Frozen in shock and anger, I found words: they took her fucking head.
Decapitation is a whole other thing. With this, something had shifted, opening the way for the mysteries of the Acéphale, of Orpheus, Algol, and the monthly disappearance and reappearance of the Moon. The loss of Diana’s head signified the creation of a new opening through which a new story could pour through, as though her very throat lay open to the sky, unobstructed by analysis and old meaning. Well, it wasn’t exactly lost, either. At least half of her head remained in one piece in the grass at the base of her pedestal, and I cradled it softly in my arms on the way home, to lay at the center of our hearth.
The Acéphale is a creature mythologized by Georges Bataille, Pierre Klossowski, Andre Masson and others in their eponymous secret society, founded in Paris in the late 1930’s as an anti-fascist religious cult. According to the introduction if a recent facsimile reproduction of the society’s journal, the Acéphale is a “headless figure who had come to [Bataille] in dream and trance as much as in his study of ancient art, who is starry-breasted, labyrinthine of belly and has the face of death for its reproductive organs, who clutches the knife of sacrifice in its left hand and the sacred heart in its right, and whose appearance signals a dramatic break with even the most revolutionary forms of political struggle.”
Nigerian philosopher Bayo Akomolafe reminds us frequently to honor the spirits emerging from the cracks in the breaking and broken world. In an essay that reconsiders Acéphale through the legacy of Feminist Performance Art, Anne Lesley Selcer writes “in the obscure corner of history where Acéphale dwells, we see a stark opposition: the bodiless head versus the two-headed body, the ecstasy of the body through its death versus the ecstasy of the body through its ongoingness, the body relieved of having a head at the top by also having a head at the bottom, the body as more than one, the body in its resolute openness.”
When Diana lost her head, something new became possible. We just didn’t know what.
In this work one thing we learn is that if you take, you must give. After everything that had happened, it seemed that what we all needed was a story. In times of loss and uncertainty, it is instinctive to grope for an answer to the simple question, why? And where no answer is provided, we will tend to invent one. To make meaning is the work of the head and while our goddess may have lost hers, ours were still firmly in place. So, what did we do? We gave her a new one. Like bandaging the wounds, like clicking undo. Surely that will end the war.
At least it was the kind that rots. Woven out of wild pokeweed and fire-thorn, antlered and red-masked, we raised it at the ancient festival of Nemoralia, when Roman devotees would process with torches to Lake Nemi, known as Diana’s Mirror, to wash their hair and dress it with flowers. Women and slaves rested on this day, and the hounds would be honored and dressed in flowers, too. No beast could be killed. We gathered at the foot of the statue then and sang, and blessed the new head and raised it up, and I held back the sort of cry that would tear through the well-planned proceedings, the sort that one might cry if one’s throat was bare, exposed to the heavens. I held my grief.
Unsurprisingly, the San Francisco Parks & Recreation Department didn’t appreciate our gesture. They built a fence around Diana and covered her body with tarps. Things seemed to accelerate after that. Someone cut the ropes and freed her from her plastic veil. Someone else painted strange words of praise on her pedestal. Days later, they were power washed away by confused-looking workers in neon vests. Passersby lamented; it seemed the wild was winning. None of it made any sense at all.
Throughout this time, I found myself reflecting on a story that I’d heard shortly before Diana’s first wounding, which bears some interesting resonance with this mystery. This story is not part of Diana’s primary mythology; it originates in a 16th century catalogue of gemstones and their properties written by the French poet Rémy Belleau, and it goes like this:
Amethyst was a youth beloved in her community for her cool demeanor, ability to soothe conflict and overall willingness to support others. Upon coming of age, she decided to embark on a journey into Diana’s wood to spend some time in devotion to her. While Amethyst was preparing for this journey, a drunken Dionysos roamed the wood, among his merry friends. A passing mortal offended the god, sending him into a rage, but somehow escaping his vengeance. Dionysos arranged that the next mortal to enter the forest would be attacked by tigers, and torn apart in his place.
The next mortal to enter the wood was, of course, the young Amethyst, laden with gifts for the Virgin Queen. When the tigers sprang from the shadows, Amethyst said a prayer to Diana, who intervened by turning her into a statue of gleaming white crystal, which could not be broken by the tiger’s claws.
Dionysos, realizing what had happened, arrived on the spot where Diana was attending this statue. As it was told to me, Dionysos, sobered by now, pours out his cup of wine onto the statue, joining Diana in lament. This rare act of a god pouring libation for a mortal is offered as explanation for the purple color of the Amethyst stone, and the grief and regret felt by Dionysos for the fate of this young devotee resonates with the gem’s ability to soothe the pain of ragefulness and addiction.
I wonder about this gesture, now.
There’s another, much older, story involving Artemis (as Diana was known in Greece) and Dionysos which seems to illustrate a reverse dynamic to the one present above. Apparently at one time in Achaea a maiden and a youth were sacrificed to Artemis Triclaria each year as an act of appeasement for her temple having been defiled. Meanwhile, upon his return from the Trojan War, a Thessalian prince named Eurypylus was given a chest made by Hephaestus, blacksmith and god of fire, containing a statue of Dionysos. Opening the chest and gazing on the statue drove Eurypylus mad and set him wandering until he reached the place where these annual sacrifices occurred. Here, he introduced the cult of Dionysos, ended the practice of human sacrifice and subsequently regained his sanity. At the new festival that was established, youths exchanged the crowns of grain, which the sacrifices had previously worn, for crowns of ivy, a vine that is holy to Dionysos.
Both Dionysos and Artemis/Diana have associations with liberation, wildness, transgression and escape. In his form as Eleutherios, the Liberator, Dionysos frees his followers from self-consciousness and social restraint through the intoxicating effects of wine, music and ecstatic dance. Similarly, and particularly for young women in Greek & Roman societies, the path of Diana represented a liberation from the conventional life of marriage and childrearing. The names of both gods share a common root: Proto-Indo-European *dyeu-, meaning “bright, resplendent, shining (in a godlike fashion).” So why is it that they seem to find themselves on the opposite ends of these conflicts around whether, and when, violent sacrifice is warranted?
It’s important to remember, for those of us relating to the gods of antiquity from a perspective influenced by monotheism, that these deities are not really cohesive, singular entities, but vast rhizomatic networks of signification with various expressions that emerge in specific times and places. There was a time before Artemis was even known as Apollo’s sister, when she presided over orgiastic rites akin to those usually associated with Dionysos, rites that included choral dance and singing as well as bloodletting and human or animal sacrifice. At least one author traces the word virgin to a compound root meaning “man-killer.” Like Dionysos, Artemis is depicted as bull-headed, the crescent moon comprising her horns. She is also connected with vegetation and trees, particularly medicinal plants associated with supporting childbirth and the prevention or abortion of pregnancy. She is both a huntress and protector of wild animals; it is she who decides who gives their life and who eats. She presides over rites of passage, the wild, liminal space between childhood and adulthood.
Another important point of comparison between Artemis and Dionysos is their relationship to sparagmos, or the experience of being physically rent or torn apart. Dionysos undergoes sparagmos shortly after his birth at the hands of the Titans, regenerating from his own rescued heart, which was buried in Zeus’s thigh. One of the most popular myths of Artemis concerns Actaeon, a hunter (and Dionysos’s cousin) who either was heard boasting that he surpassed Artemis herself in ability, or was caught trespassing in her woods, spying disrespectfully upon her bath. Either way, by the wrath of the goddess he is transformed into a deer and torn apart by his own hunting dogs.
Now, it seems that our Diana has experienced the same.
To those of us who understand sparagmos as an opportunity for spiritual regeneration and rebirth, it might seem that rather than (or perhaps in addition to) being protected from a gruesome fate, the young devotee Amethyst is actually denied something quite valuable. If her options at that moment in life, as they were for many who chose to devote themselves to the Virgin, were either to marry a man chosen by her parents, live in his house and bear his children; or to live a life of freedom in the forest with Diana and the nymphs, well, I’d have made the same choice. But in the story, it’s by the wrath of Dionysos and the protective interference of Diana that her freedom is denied her, twice. The whole thing is out of character, for both gods.
Which brings me to the elephant in the room where all conversations about Diana take place: virginity. There’s been much popular speculation about the exact nature of Diana’s virginity and the vow of chastity expected of her devotees; unsurprisingly, the word “virgin” appears to be used differently in different times and places, sometimes referring simply to a young unmarried woman, and other times carrying a specific (a)sexual connotation. Some theorize that Diana’s virginity was related to ritual taboos around sexual abstinence before a hunt. What’s worth noting is that as time goes on, the element of physical chastity is increasingly emphasized in the literature, despite the obvious and persistent homoeroticism present in descriptions of Artemis’s relationships with the nymphs and her followers’ relationships with each other. What remains constant is the refusal of marriage as the primary condition of virginity.
Unfortunately, Diana’s role in the Amethyst story maps disturbingly well onto the ideology of people who appropriate feminism to attempt to justify their hatred of trans people, some of whom uplift Diana/Artemis as a protector of women and women’s spaces against what they consider “male intrusion and violence.” Let’s be clear: this association and the historical-mythological reading it’s based upon is patently false. The gender landscapes of ancient Greece and Rome were vastly different from the one(s) we live inside of today, featuring particular categories of gender outside of the heterosexual matrix that were entwined with the worship of particular deities, and which were intentionally erased through Christianization. At her famous temple in Asia Minor, the goddess known to the Greeks as Artemis of Ephesus was served by clergy known as megabyzoi, reminiscent of the galli/gallae of Kybele, who are often considered by historians to comprise a “third gender” that, in today's context, might be called trans feminine.
The Amethyst story and its positioning of Diana as a benevolent protector against the senseless violence of drunken Dionysos (who was raised in the mysteries of Kybele and whose allegiance eternally belongs to those who journey across constructed borders) has no basis in history and plays into a false belief about the meaning of purity which has had disastrous consequences in our world. This idea of purity, which is inextricably bound to white supremacy and the hatred of queers within the white hetero family structure, has been a driving force behind millenia of institutionalized bigotry and structural violence against women, queers, trans people and people of color.
Furthermore, the reduction of this wild, multiplicitous deity into a single and static form, the erasure of her diverse and localized expressions, is directly a function of colonization. Rome consolidated power throughout the Mediterranean by incorporating aspects of numerous local, land-based cults into one state religion. That is how Artemis and her sixty-four known epithets became the singular Diana. Our local Diana’s decapitation is a severing of that rotten fruit from the rhizome that the goddess is, that sexless, ciswashed expression that has become primary in our modern imagination but which has now outlived its time. This is not who Diana is, was, or ever will be. It is, in fact, a total contradiction of her character.
The stories we tell about the gods matter; as long as they remain alive in memory, they continue to grow and evolve. In a thesis entitled “Artemis and Virginity in Ancient Greece,” Rebecka Lindau writes:
“Virginity signaled independence, autonomy, self-reliance, an untamed status, and closeness to the deity as a result of a perception of purity and innocence. The virgin existed in a state between female and male, daughter and mother, son and father, child and adult, mortal and immortal which gave her or him extra-ordinary capabilities, such as the abilities to prophesize and heal.” (167-8)
Rather than physical chastity, the basis of this type of virginity is the refusal of institutionalized reproductive sexuality and the social roles it inscribes on people in favor of a life devoted to wildness itself, in its full range of splendor and brutality. The wild is not a safe or protected place. Its vitality lies beyond the meanings that humans project onto it. It is headless. In a world that fears neither death nor life, this is what is meant by purity.
There is a poetic resonance between Diana’s statue breaking and the tale of a youth turned into a statue by Diana as protection from being broken. It seems that, despite the best efforts of her fearful followers, the tiger’s claws have finally found their way through stone. I say blessings on Diana’s liberation from her old form. Blessings on her headlessness. Blessings on the unfolding of new forms of wildness, wild overtaking all. Blessings on the Virgins, our unfolding expansion of joy and pleasure, sovereignty and love. May that which would seek to tame us be rent by teeth as sharp and bright as the bull-horned moon, the very stars themselves.
Addendum
The day before the Autumnal Equinox of the year following the events recounted above, as the Sun was completing its transit through the sign of the Virgin, I went to pay a visit to our wounded Diana at Land’s End. Laden with wine, flowers and fruit for the goddess, I was accompanied by a fellow virgin who had yet to see the statue in person. I love bringing people here, telling them Diana’s story and letting them see her beautifully wounded form. I hope that doing so encourages them to embrace the wild of their own woundedness, and to locate a more expansive possibility for themselves through that opening.
As we neared the park I spotted her plinth through the trees. What I saw concerned me, but I did not interrupt my customary path. We rounded the corner toward the lions and I opened the bottle of wine for them. I poured some into their mouths as I’d been taught, hugged and kissed them as I always do, and we exchanged the following words.
“She’s gone.”
“It’s okay.”
Indeed, she was gone, and her plinth stood empty, unfenced, still freckled with paint from the devotional hymns that had been written there by the faithful and then power-washed away. I climbed up and stood in her place, and my friend snapped a picture, recreating one that had been taken of me on a family trip to Ephesus when I was seven, when I’d innocently posed on another empty plinth that had once belonged to this goddess who I knew as my namesake, and the ever-dying Moon.
In a moment in history defined by collapse, we must not be afraid of ruins, nor to take our place among them. It’s us, the worshippers, who create the gods and keep them alive in our imaginings. We who make the statues, write the hymns, plan the rituals, tell the stories. The power of the gods is not located anywhere outside of us, our own bodies and the webs we weave in life. And like any spider, when our web is destroyed, whether in carelessness or malice or fear, collapsing under its own weight or the heartless machinations of industrial capitalism, we may fall to the ground and grieve but in the end we will simply build another, and our hunt will go on.
It is the Virgins who comprise Her body now. Hail to Us, the Fire in our Hearths, and to our Sacred Web. May this Wound serve as the opening through which Wildness reclaims All.