Courtney’s talk is called “Nymphs and Nymphomania: Reclaiming Kallisto as the ‘Bride’ of Artemis and the Sacred Wilderness”
The Greco-Roman pantheon is littered with understudied and oft-forgotten divine figures including its wealth of nymphs: “minor” goddesses associated with the innate faerie-like enchantment of the natural world. Kallisto, daughter of the Arcadian nymph Nonakris, whose name means “most beautiful,” is one of Zeus’s many rape victims. Her story traditionally functions as a cautionary tale against being too alluring for the lustful gods as she is victim-shamed by her own mentor, Artemis, and punished for the rapist’s crime against her.
Although “nymph” originally meant young, nubile bride, by the Victorian era nymphs resurfaced in the concept of nymphomania which pathologized women’s sexuality and their supposedly excessive lust. In this paper, I propose a queer remythologizing of Kallisto’s story by reclaiming her “nymphomania” as a positive expression of the endlessly erotic and creative potential of both women’s bodies and the earth Herself. Drawing inspiration from Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés’s Women Who Run with the Wolves, I depict Kallisto as the “bride” (nymph) of Artemis and by extension of the untamed wilderness overseen by this Hellenic goddess of the hunt. This retelling restores to both Kallisto and the earth Herself agency and sovereignty while celebrating sapphic love and queer women’s desire.
About Courtney
Dr. Courtney Kleftis is a former musicologist, music librarian and the founder of The Goddess Foundation (www.thegoddessfoundation.org) library, archive, and online spiritual center (established September 2021). Courtney is dedicated to rewilding women’s sacred and sexual experiences. In addition to her Artemisian research, she is in the process of developing TGF’s pilot initiative: an oral herstory project dedicated to exploring women’s experiences of the divine feminine within the traditionally patriarchal Abrahamic religions.