When the kouros was made, Apollo was well established as the patron deity of Kalymnos. Even today his symbol, the seven-stringed lyre, appears on the island’s flag and as a popular design motif seen everywhere from buildings to boats.

In Archaic and Classical myth, Apollo and Artemis were born to their mother Leto on the holy island of Delos, the illegitimate twin children of Zeus, god-king of heaven and earth.

Apollo was skilled in music and warfare, leader of the nine muses, athlete, archer and portrayed as a mischievous, lascivious youth. When fully grown, he seized the Oracle at Delphi from the serpent Python and retained the Pythoness, its priestess, in his service. The oracle gave humans exquisitely enigmatic answers to questions about the fates and their future.

For part of the year, Apollo went away to lands beyond the north wind. This, and his association with the number seven, suggests that his roots may lie in more ancient and distant shamanic traditions. He and Artemis were not originally linked. Later he was thought of as a healer through light and as father of Asklepios, founder of medicine. Repenting his wild youth, his mottos became 'Nothing in excess' and 'Know thyself'.

His sister Artemis was a moon goddess, hunter and companion of wild animals, referring to ancient respect for the spirit of hunted animals. She protected women in childbirth and the high, wild places of the female spirit. Artemis myths originate in Crete and Asia Minor. At Ephesus, an Ionian temple to her became a wonder of the ancient world. Her statue there was a huge mother figure covered with the heads of animals and egg-like breasts. Her cult was possibly founded by Amazonian women, involving orgiastic rituals. At the temple stood many kore statues. When Christianity came, Ephesus became a centre for the cult of the Virgin Mary.

The myths of Artemis and Apollo symbolise a shift of belief from the sacred feminine linked with divine nature and regeneration by the Minoans – and perhaps the Ionians – towards the male-dominated, warring culture of Archaic and Classical Greece. The Olympic Pantheon ‘family’ of Apollo and Artemis had some balance of masculine and feminine and a pragmatic, no-blame approach to human relationship with spirit and the divine. It was only Christianity and Judaism that later transformed the deity into a single father god, introducing the ideas of original sin and impurity of human desire and nature.

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