Snakes are harmless unless you step on them, and Diana is like a snake, beautiful but repellent - and dangerous. And in fact Actaeon does not actually do anything, he merely observes and and unwittingly too, by doing so he is condemned to a hideous death, ignorantia juris non excusat , taken to the extreme. Diana turned him into a stag to be torn to pieces by his own hounds.
It set me thinking of John Wayne Bobbitt, his behaviour was less excusable than Acteon’s but then he only lost one limb - and that to be sewn on again.

Cybele, the Anatolian Goddess of nature, animals and wild places. Her followers and priests were given to orgiastic practises. Like Lilith her supreme position was usurped by another, not in her case by another woman but by an aggressive male God - Zeus.
In these terrible days of global pollution, spreading oil slicks and nuclear sabre rattling it would be encouraging to see signs of Cybele clawing back some of her lost power.

Lilith’s origins are Babylonian, she re-appears in the Bible as Adam’s first wife, but is banished childless after claiming equality with him. She is portrayed as a snake and as such returns as the temptress. A demon, a stealer of husbands and children, an evil beguiling witch. Depending on the age and culture, fear of Lilith waxes and wanes. Generally the more sexually repressed the society, the more she is seen as demon and servant of Satan. The less mankind is at harmony with his female nature the more demonic Lilith becomes, conversely a man at peace with his ‘feminine’ subconscious sees Lilith as his muse. Residing in shadows she is the unconscious, the female nature within man - his muse but also his fears and on occasion nightmares. The unconscious mind is unaware of time, feels rather than reasons, and perhaps has roots extending so far into the past that it is pre-human, pre-sexual, androgynous, eternal. Down, down into the depths where everything and everything lies beneath the surface, the unconscious is not aware of good and evil, God is not necessarily good and Satan is not necessarily bad.
Associated with the moon’s dark phase, Lilith drifts in and out of men’s affairs under various guises, Hecate, Diana, Persephone, the white goddess; she is the moon that is there but cannot be seen, her moonlight shadow stretches over all the women in this series. 

Leo

My daughter Allegra climbing an apple tree

Civita di Bagnoregio

The roof of the British Museum’s Great Court

28 minute documentary for Swiss TV chanel RTSI on the shooting of five photos in the Belle series in and around Orvieto, Umbria. In Italian with English subtitles. Director Leo Colla. It may take a little while to load.

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Behind-the-scenes documentary video of the shooting of this image. Featuring Katia and Daniella, two young Australians.

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William Turner painted Orvieto from this hill in 1828 - the view has changed very little from his day to ours.

A faded Madonna on a street in Bagnoregio