ARTÉMIS

It’s not exactly the goddess of the hunt who gave the work its title. Twin sister of Apollo, and herself an occasional zither player under the name of Artemis Hymnia, the goddess is also a musician. What interested me in her symbolism was the close alliance between wild nature and music. Lèto (the Obscure) united with Zeus (the Day) to give birth first to Artemis (the Moon) and then to Apollo (the Sun) on the island of Delos (clarity). This divine couple have power over health: their bows launch epidemics, but Apollo also allows his son Asklepios to heal them. Artemis hunts game, but also protects it, and lives in the company of a doe. A virgin goddess, she nevertheless protects the fertility of creatures, and it is she who assists women in childbirth, just as she helped Lèto give birth to her twin Apollo from birth. This episode simultaneously reveals the anteriority of wild nature in relation to the god of harmony, and its extreme proximity to the spiritual enlightenment he adds to it. A single cosmic day separates their twin appearances. Music has not softened their morals: they cruelly punish anyone who tries to encroach on their power: Niobe, Actaeon, Marsyas…
Personally convinced that nature and culture cannot be radically separated, and that music belongs to both domains, embodying their necessary union, I found in this ancient figure a permanent and more general symbol of the profound ambivalence of apparent opposites. These are sometimes illusory constructs of reason, when it has succeeded too well in eliminating myth.
As for the organ, as capable of sounding silence as the flow of perpetual motion, it remains a possible vehicle for the sacred, even when freed from its traditional religious attachments.