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developed. The conception is that of a beautiful youth furtively kissed in his slumber by Dian of reputed
chastity. The ancient myth is, to begin with, one of darkness and light, or day and night, from which are born
the fifty-one (now fifty-two) weeks of the year. This is Diana, the night, and Apollo, the sun, or light in
another form. It is expressed as love-making during sleep, which, when it occurs in real life, generally has
for active agent some one who, without being absolutely modest, wishes to preserve appearances. The
established character of Diana among the Initiated (for which she was bitterly reviled by the Fathers of the
Church) was that of a beautiful hypocrite who pursued amours in silent secrecy.
"Thus as the moon Endynnon lay with her,
So did Hippolytus and Verbio."
[1. The reader will find them described in my Etrusco-Roman Remains.]
(On which the reader may consult Tertullian, De Falsa Religione , lib. ii. cap. 17, and Pico de
Mirandula, La Strega.)
But there is an exquisitely subtle, delicately strange idea or ideal in the conception of the apparently chaste
"clear cold moon" casting her living light by stealth into the hidden recesses of darkness and acting in the
occult mysteries of love or dreams. So it struck Byron[1] as an original thought that the sun does not shine on
half the forbidden deeds which the moon witnesses, and this is emphasised in the Italian witch-poem. In it
the moon is distinctly invoked as the protectress of a strange and secret amour, and as the deity to be
especially invoked for such love-making. The one invoking says that the window is opened, that the moon
may shine splendidly on the bed, even as our love is bright and beautiful... and I pray her to give great rapture
-sfogo -to us.
The quivering, mysteriously beautiful light of the moon, which seems to cast a spirit of intelligence or
emotion over silent Nature, and dimly
[1. "The sun set and uprose the yellow moon:
The devil's in the moon for mischief; they
Who called her chaste, methinks, began too soon
Their nomenclature; there is not a day
The longest, not the twenty-first of June,
Sees half the business in a wicked way
On which three single hours of moonshine smile."
-Don Juan, cxiii.]
half awaken it-raising shadows into thoughts and causing every tree and rock to assume the semblance of a
living form, but one which, while shimmering and breathing, still sleeps in a dream-could not escape the
Greeks, and they expressed it as Diana embracing Endymion. But as night is the time sacred to secrecy, and
as the true Diana of the Mysteries was the Queen of Night, who wore the crescent moon, and mistress of all
hidden things, including "sweet secret sins and loved iniquities," there was attached to this myth far more
than meets the eye. And Just in the degree to which Diana was believed to be Queen of the emancipated
witches and of Night, or the nocturnal Venus-Astarte herself, so far would the love for the sleeping
Endymion be understood as sensual, yet sacred and allegorical. and it is entirely in this sense that the witches
in Italy, who, may claim with some right to be its true inheritors, have preserved and understood the myth. It
CHAPTER IX. Tana and Endamone, or Diana and Endyinion 32
ARADIA, or the Gospel of the Witches
is a realisation of forbidden or secret love, with attraction to the dimly seen beautiful-by moonlight, with the
fairy or witch-like charm of the supernatural-a romance all combined in a single strange form-the spell of
Night!
"There is a dangerous silence in that hour,
A stillness which leaves rooni for the full soul
To open all itself, without the power
Of calling wholly back its self-control;
The silver light which, hallowing tree and tower,
Sheds beauty and deep softness o'er the whole,
Breathes also to the heart, and o'er it throws
A loving languor which is not repose."
This is what is meant by the myth of Diana and Endymion. It is the making divine or æsthetic (which to the
Greeks was one and the same) that which is impassioned, secret, and forbidden. It was the charm of the stolen
waters which are sweet, intensified to poetry. And it is remarkable that it has been so strangely preserved in
Italian witch traditions.
CHAPTER X. Madonna Diana
"The Madonna is essentially the goddess of the moon.
_"Naples in the Nineties," by E. N. Rolfe.
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