Diana
Diana is the Roman assimilation of the Greek Moon Goddess Artemis. Diana was often portrayed riding the moon, with a bow in her hands. She was frequently worshipped out in the open, so she could look down at her faithful. Roman Moon Goddess and Goddess of the Hunt. Diana is many faceted. She is a seductress as well as a mother figure for Witches.
Diana is, of course, an appropriate iconographic figure to symbolize both an abbess and a chaste wife such as Shakespeare’s Imogen. Indeed Panofsky characterizes the goddess as “a divinity priest-like and virginal, yet motherly in relation to her nymphs and to animals that seek her protection, prepared to be charitable where charitableness is due, but equally prepared to punish foes and detractors.”But since Diana is a huntress, as well as a protector of chastity, she can be exceedingly dangerous to those who oppose her in any way, as the enemies of the abbess Gioanna da Piacenza discovered in Renaissance Parma and the enemies of the most famous royal Diana, Queen Elizabeth, often learned to their sorrow in sixteenth-century England.
--Peggy Muñoz Simonds
Diana was depicted
in the 16th century as the wandering moon, but also as a nymph, with
bow ready bent in her hand, a quiver at one side, and in the other hand
a most swift-footed greyhound.
