Diana at the Crossroads: Threefold Goddess

There is a lake in the Alban Hills, thirteen miles south of Rome.

It fills the caldera of an extinct volcano — a circular lake, perfectly round, set so deep in the forested hillside that it seems to be looking at the sky rather than connected to the earth. The ancient Romans called it Speculum Dianae — the Mirror of Diana. The still water reflects the moon so perfectly that the full moon over Nemi appears to swim, double, the real moon above and the moon in the lake below.

Diana lives in both.

She is the huntress in the forest at the lake’s edge. She is the moon in the sky and in the water. She is Hecate at the crossroads below — the goddess of the liminal space where roads meet and choices are irrevocable. The Romans developed her triple nature explicitly, calling her by all three names in the same prayer, acknowledging that the goddess they approached was the same goddess under three aspects, three locations, three functions.

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The priesthood at Nemi is unlike any other in the ancient world.

The priest of Diana at the Nemi grove holds the title Rex Nemorensis — King of the Wood. He earns the position by killing his predecessor. A runaway slave who reaches the sacred grove and breaks a branch from the sacred tree earns the right to challenge the current priest to single combat. If he wins, he becomes the new Rex Nemorensis. If he loses, the current priest keeps his position — until the next challenger comes.

The priest lives in the grove armed, constantly vigilant, waiting for the slave or the criminal or the ambitious man who will come to challenge him. He sleeps with a sword. He walks the grove paths watching the shadows. He knows that his priesthood was purchased with violence and will be ended by violence, and that the moment he relaxes, the moment he forgets to watch the tree line, is the moment he dies.

This is the priesthood Frazer opens his Golden Bough with — the image that launched twelve volumes of comparative mythology. The priest in the sacred grove, sword drawn, waiting for the challenger who represents the cycle of life, death, and renewal. Diana demands this of her priests: the constant vigilance of the hunted animal, the constant readiness of the hunter.

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Catullus’s hymn to Diana is the fullest poetic statement of her triple nature.

He addresses her as great Diana — huntress of the mountains, goddess of the crossroads, Moon under the name Juno Lucina (she who brings children into the light), Hecate below. He addresses each aspect separately and then draws them together: You it is who, by going through your twelve monthly courses, fill the year of the farmer with good things.

She is the moon who measures time, which is the moon’s ancient function in agricultural religion everywhere. She is the divine patroness of the sacred groves where the oldest Italian religion practiced its rites. She is the huntress because the grove requires a hunter, because wild things require a divine overseer, because the edge between the cultivated and the wild needs a goddess who moves freely in both.

At the Aventine Hill in Rome, her principal urban temple served a political function: it was established by Servius Tullius as the common sanctuary of the Latin League, the alliance of Italian cities that Rome led. Diana in Rome was not merely a religious presence but a civic one — the goddess under whose protection the Italian alliance assembled, the divine warrant for Rome’s leadership of its Latin neighbors.

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Hippolytus comes to Nemi in the Roman version of the myth.

In the Greek story, Hippolytus — the young man who dedicated himself to Artemis and died because Aphrodite punished him — is brought back to life by Asclepius. Diana takes the resurrected young man to her grove at Nemi and hides him there under the name Virbius, twice-man, the man who lived twice. He becomes her companion in the grove.

The story does the same work as the Amazon myths associated with Diana: the young men who dedicate themselves absolutely to the virgin huntress, who choose the wild world of the hunt over the domestic world of marriage and reproduction. Hippolytus/Virbius at Nemi is the masculine counterpart to Diana’s virginal Vestals — the man who passes out of the social world into the sacred grove and never comes back to ordinary life.

The lake still catches the moon. The forest around it is a nature reserve now. The priests are gone. But on a clear night in August, when the moon is full and the lake is calm, you can see what the Romans saw: the Mirror of Diana, the goddess looking at herself from both sky and water simultaneously, three-in-one and alone in the grove.