From the roof of our hotel in the hill towns just south of Rome, we gaze into the deep cobalt waters of a little crater lake nestled in the woods. To the east, a Full Moon rises, catching Her reflection in the smooth dark oval that is known as Diana's Mirror. This is Lake Nemi. deep and mysterious as the Goddess who claims this area as Her own. Lord Byron, in his poem Childe Harold, likens it to a sleeping snake: "Lo, Nemi! navell'd in the woody hills...The oval mirror of thy glassy lake...All coil'd into itself and round, as sleeps the snake." A palpable kundalini power lies among these coils, for Nemi is numinous, even eerie, in the twilight. The lake seems to have a heartbeat.

In the morning a dragons breath mist lays over the water and the surrounding forest, making the town of Genzano, high on the hill to the west, look like a city in the sky. The Castelli Romani hill towns loom high above the lake, and there is no easy way for the townspeople to access it. We saw no swimming (other than ducks), no boating, not a sign of human life on the lake, only the strawberry fields and chestnut forest bordering it. The streets of Nemi wind narrowly up and down, and at the foot of the quaint strawberry hill town is a charming fountain topped with a statue of the maiden huntress, Artemide-Diana, the town's guardian Goddess.

In the old days, devotees would trek from Rome and the surrounding villages to Her temple sanctuary here, braving deep forests, wolves and outlaws along the way. Such remote shrines generally inspire only the most sincere to make the trip, and those who did were rewarded with a sight so hauntingly beautiful that surely, as Virgil said, "Some God...Lives in this grove...this hilltop thick with leaves..." In Nemi, that God is Diana.

Who is Diana of Nemi? Is she the same as the Diana of Rome? No official cult statue was ever found on site (although there are statues from the site in the British Museum, these are thought to be of priestesses). She's identified with Rome's nature goddess and maiden huntress primarily, but also with Vesta and Hecate of the flaming torches, Lucifera the Light Bringer, Egeria the nymph of Nemi's fountain waters, Nemesis/Nemorensis (lit. "of Nemi"), and all the moon goddesses of the Mediterranean. Romano-British tradition linked Her to Nimue, who's father worshiped Diana and named her after a sanctuary of the Lady of the Lake, and to the Celtic goddess Nemetona, from whence comes the Druidic word Nemeton, sacred site.

The Roman emperor Caligula held boat parties and cruises on this lake, dedicating the festivities to Isis. The names of the Lady of the Lake Nemi
may have changed through time, but She still lives on. She continues to be invoked in the hill towns as the Queen of Heaven, Splendid Morning Star, Blessed Mother of God, and Stella Maris, Star of the Sea. Shrines of the Virgin Madonna with these captions can be found throughout Nemi and Genzano. We stood for hours waiting for a bus near one such image, right in the middle of a triple crossroads!

It was on the banks of Lake Nemi that the musician Gounod composed his most celebrated work, the "Ave Maria". He even commemorated the occasion by inscribing "Nemi 24 April 1862" on his guitar. This place held many artists and writers spellbound. Byron, Virgil and Goethe have drawn inspiration from it in their work; JWW Turner painted multiple views of the lake. James George Frazer was also charmed by this sacred spot. His classic work, The Golden Bough, makes several references to the site. Frazer commented in the book's introduction, "No one who has seen that
calm water, lapped in a green hollow in the Alban Hills, can ever forget it."

Nemi has a shady past, as vividly described by Frazer: over and over again, Rex Nemorensis, the King of the Wood, was cut down by a contender for the mystical Golden Bough. The triumphant king, a runaway slave, found himself in a new bondage as keeper of the Golden Bough that would one day in turn cost him his life. The first Rex Nemorensis was Hippolytus, son of Theseus and Hippolyta, and priest of Artemis-Diana (aka Titania). Upon his death, the Goddess spirited her priest to Nemi, where she renamed him Virbius, the Twice Born.

Other legends surrounding Nemi include statues that weep blood, the Roman emperor Tiberius' ghost haunting the crater, a specter of a young maiden wandering around the house of a noble family in Genzano, objects rolling uphill, esoteric night ceremonies in the woods, and a pervading odor of burning wax, with no candles in sight.

Descending along a rocky path along one of Nemi's banks, we were greeted not with the smell of burning wax, but the melodious trickling of a tiered waterfall. I wondered if this was the original fountainhead of Egeria, a nature spirit exclusive to Nemi. Fairy mistress and counselor to Numa, the Roman king who succeeded Romulus, Egeria advised the peace loving king and helped him to reform Rome's calendar. When Numa died, Egeria's copius tears brought a metamorphosis; she was transformed into a waterfall plunging down the side of the lake. The song of the waterfall we found was not lamenting, but merry, skipping playfully over the stones. I like to think of it as housing Egeria's numen, and that the spirit of her beloved Numa is with her, and together they laugh and dance and make love in the Ariccian wood.

(A somewhat more lengthy edition of this article was published as "Diana's Mirror" in Circle Network News, Spring 2003)