Months before Superstorm Sandy raged on the Atlantic Coast of the Americas, Artemis spoke to me in June 2012 of a coming storm when the year drew to an end:

The test is upon you yet silent in its shadows, but it will be rapt in sudden announcement of its presence. Do not be alarmed. We are with you as the trunk is to its roots but can protect the younger trees in a storm only by sustaining presence. It cannot suspend the winds and lashing rains but can sustain by enduring presence. When the storm has run its course, the sun shines and the winds sing softly again, all are stronger through the enduring. This is our first message to you. We ask you to share it as a ray of hope. This is what will really happen as 2012 draws to an end. All who have gone before you and returned have weathered the storm you now encounter.

In his epic poem the Iliad, Homer remembered Artemis as the mistress of wild land and life. She is sometimes identified as the daughter of Demeter, who left Mount Olympus to live among humanity and teach the mysteries of immortality at Eleusis. Strangely, Artemis had no birth story among the Greeks, who gloriously commemorated their deities' births.

It was as if Artemis had already existed and the Greeks adopted her from an early progenitor of Greek civilization. The advanced pre-Greeks possessed written scripts long before the Greeks, but this was discovered late in the twentieth century. One of the scripts, Linear A, had yet to be deciphered when the twenty-first century dawned.