La consécration des jeunes filles à Artémis. Le retour d’Iphigénie de la Tauride à Brauron

The worship of Artemis Brauronia in Attic is connected to the initiatory ritual of arkteûsai celebrated for the goddess at Brauron, at Mounychia, and at Athens. At the end of the religious teleté, the protéleia is celebrated : the young she-bear, covered with a ritual dress, perform their “passage” from the adolescent pre-puberal sphere to that of sexual and “political” ripeness. At that time, the passage is also sanctioned by the sacrifice of a goat to the goddess. The significant passages of aetiological myth of the arkteûsai at Brauron concern with the being of a she-bear in the temple consecrated to Artemis and with the death of the animal killed by men; the pestilential plague infesting the community; the oracle revealing the necessary remedy for the removal of the míasma. In the lógos of Mounychia the requested remedy provides the sacrifice of a maiden, more precisely of a daughter. So the ritual action isfocused on the moment of mise à mort rituelle and in the workings of sacrificial substitution realized by a man called Embaros, who will substitute his daughter with a goat. This story seems to refer to the Artemis of Taurians or tauropólos, mainly worshipped in the Tauric Chersonese by the offerings of human sacrifices, and to the aulidean tradition of the sacrifice of Iphigeneia, whose presence at Brauron is justified with the local variant of the myth. The example of the father daughter’s slayer make us understand the confrontation with the death experience in sacrificial means (giving death for giving life), and in ‘initiatory’ and symbolic means (the youth put under the experience of a temporary exile from the ‘normality’ trough the expedient of a ritual death).