She is strikingly described in one of the so-called "Homeric Hymns", from which I quote a few extracts in Jules Cashford's free verse translation (2003)

Artemis I sing with her golden arrows and her hunting cry … In mountains of shadow and peaks of wind she delights in the chase, she arches her bow of solid gold she lets fly arrows that moan   Crests of high mountains tremble, the forest in darkness screams with the terrible howling of wild animals the earth itself shudders,  …

when her heart is elated, then she unstrings her curved bow and goes to the great house of Phoebus Apollo, her dear bother, in the fertile grasslands of Delphi and there she arranges the lovely dances of the Muses and Graces There  she hangs up her unstrung bow and her quiver of arrows, and gracefully clothing her body she takes first place at the dances and begins

The picture here abounds in paradox. The contrast between its two scenes is startling. First we have Artemis the hunter "with her cry", leaping hither and thither in the darkness of a forest, unleashing slaughter on the animals, creating such pain, chaos and terror that the earth herself shudders in anguish. Then "when her heart is elated" we change scene to Artemis the choreographer, calmly dressed in beautiful clothes, mingling with the gods in a scene of elegance and beauty. Not only are heaven and earth extravagantly contrasted, but Artemis is portrayed as equally at home in each. Reading other accounts (Baring and Cashford, 1993, Spretnak) the paradoxes increase: there she is not only the huntress of animals, but the carer and protector of animals, and the goddess of childbirth. How can all the elements hang together in one image? What is going on here is the nature of the mythic realm – it does not adhere to normal logic but to a wider logic in which opposites not only coexist, but call each other into simultaneous being. The hunter and the hunted are, in all the most ancient European poetry, one being. Destruction and creation are inseparable. For reasons that the logical mind cannot grasp, the intellectual realm of heaven is, for Artemis-consciousness, bound up with the opposite realm of chaos. They cannot exist without each other. This ancient Goddess requires all these paradoxes in order to exist.

To relate this to the question of matter we have to turn to the Greek of the poem. Here two words jump out: hule (forest) and gaia (the earth).  While "forest" was the primary meaning of hule, within a century at most of this hymn the word was also the normal term for "matter". It is forest in the sense of the primordial, the ground out of which life springs. So the transition of Artemis between heaven and earth is also a transition between matter and spirit. And "earth" is being represented through the feminine aspect of the goddess gaia. The relationship between spirit and matter, heaven and earth, expressed in Artemis, injects the dynamic of a circle of creation and destruction in which gaia "shudders", as if in awe of the birth of which this speaks. Artemis is seen as a god of life, while death is of course present as an essential part of the cycle of life, and chaos as an essential complement to the elegantly choreographed dances of the muses.

Parallels with the earlier mythology of genesis are still prominent. The forest/matter of hule seems akin to the womb-waters of creation (maim) in genesis; Artemis is classically referred to as "the sounding one" ("with her hunting cry"), reminding us of the root meaning of shamayim in the idea of sound. As compared with the earlier Hebrew picture, however, it would be fanciful to try to discern two separate polarities at play here: heaven/spirit and earth/matter begin to take on a fusion of the two older polarities

Classical Greece

Moving on a little in time, we learn more about the Greek concept of matter from Plato. In his work Timaeus he describes the creation of the world from an ideal form of creation conceived in the mind of God. But halfway through, a disturbing thought strikes him, a thought that is one of the great deep questions of the world. What exactly is it that takes us from the abstract thought in the mind of God, to a specific THIS, a real, solid actual existence, here? It’s no good saying God can do anything – the whole point of the story is to explain the world, and if the story has no link between the idea and the reality it explains nothing. So Plato posits a counterpoise to intellectual form: a sort of unthinkable formlessness waiting for form, a “this” that is not yet a “this something”, a no-thing-ness that he calls “the receptacle or nurse of coming-to-birth”. In the light of Douglas Klotz’s usage, I take the liberty of paraphrasing this as “the womb of becoming”. And arising from the womb (matter) and the intelligible form is the actual world. Once again, the identification with maim is clear, while the other categories are taking on a different shape, as we move into a different classical world. We can note that the Latin word that is the source of our "matter" is materia, which is linked with mater, mother - also emphasising the womb theme.

Another significant role of Plato's "receptacle" is that of providing space. In the intellectual realm there is no separation, everything, like our own thoughts, mingles without boundaries. But the created world is a thing with separation: different things are in different places, and it is the receptacle, the womb of becoming, that defines a space in which that is possible. Matter is to do with places.

With Aristotle, matter and spirit are both brought "down to earth" as the two inseparable aspects to be found in any being: substance and form. But for him the creative process is not seen in an interaction between the two (as suggested by Artemis); instead it is potentiality (dunamis, from which we get "dynamic") that plays the role of hule/maim.  In the course of moving from Genesis to Aristotle we have shifted through the emotional gears. In Genesis all the terms of the polarities were powerful archetypes, charged with power and mystery. In Aristotle rationality is dominant, the here-and-now. His mastery of the power of the rational intellect that had been progressively emerging over the preceding years is indeed in itself awesome; but it is achieved at the cost of loosing the lightness, passion and feeling for the sacred that we find in Plato. Both matter and spirit have lost their divinity. The "disenchantment of the world" is under way.       

The Christian Era and the deprecation of matter

As we move into the Christian phase of the West, the polarisaton of heaven and earth into different places continues. Originally, when the enchantment of the world still cast its spell over all peoples, both heaven and earth carried the numinosity, the otherness, in the heart of all things. There were represented particularly through those inaccessible places where this numinosity was most prominent: shamayim in the peaks of mountains such as Olympus or Sinai, aretz in the rocks of the wilderness, maim in the waters or, in the form of hule, in the darkness of the forests. But also the divine was interwoven into the fabric of everyday life. Now, however, the numinosity, the abode of the God(s), became restricted to the remote and inaccessible as heaven and earth became exclusively places and no longer principles. In the case of Christianity this move was particularly ironic since, as Neil Douglas-Klotz has shown, the core message of Jesus, who taught using the language of Aramaic that is close to Hebrew, concerns malkutah d'bashmaya - the Kingdom of Heaven (shmaya) - which is "among/within you".

Not only did the developing Christian church separate heaven and earth, but it progressively down-graded the status of earth and with it the status of matter. A passage from St Paul's letter to the church in Corinth sets the tone:
"Dust" (choikos) is derived from the word for a rubbish heap - matter has changed from the divine waters of fecund creativity to the left-over rubbish thrown out from a perfectly swept heaven.  

The 16th and 17th centuries

We now come to the move by Descartes that was to establish the modern concept of matter, a move that brought the dichotomy between heaven and earth into the nature of the human being. At the time the teachings of Aristotle stressing an inseparable polarity of form and matter were still very influential and, since form could be held to be of divine origin, acted to mitigate theology's condemnation of matter. Descartes, however, argued that, when it came to the human being, matter and soul were two quite separate entities. He defined them by the terms res extensa (extended stuff) and res cogitans (thinking stuff). Matter was made up of separate corpuscles, packed together, whose intrinsic bulk constituted space. Mind, on the other hand, was independent of space, belonging to a self-contained realm of pure thought. We see how the connection of matter with space has been retained from Plato, but now the corpuscular nature of matter deprives it of any creative potential, and it becomes Paul's "dust". The only source of true creativity is soul (res cogitans), which is a conception of the human mind in its purely rational form, stripped of the emotions which, according to Descartes (following in the steps of Augustine) belong to the body, not the soul. Rationality is divine, feeling is base. Indeed even the soul is incapable, on the earth, of any true creativity, for all change on the earth consists only of the rearrangement of the corpuscles of matter which are themselves unchangeable. Hule is capable of transformation, Cartesian matter only of rearrangement.

The picture, from Descartes' Essai sur l'homme, illustrates his conception of the human as a machine presided over by an immaterial soul. One needs to appreciate that each generation imagines humans in the image its latest technology, so that just as we imagine the human brain to be a computer, so Descartes imagined the human body to be a pneumatic automaton, inspired by the inventive designs in of  Salomon de Caus whose Les Raisons des Forces Mouvantes, published in 1615, was studied intensely by Descartes. He thought that the nerves were pipes that conducted control fluids to the various muscles, and that the ventricles of the brain were the reservoirs for these fluids. It was thus natural to see the pineal gland (the almond-shaped object in the picture), which hangs down into the the third ventricle, as the control valve of the whole system, and hence the place where the action of the soul could have most effect. This mechanisation of the body represents the final loss of any sacredness of matter.
The introduction by Descartes of corpuscles was part of a general movement in Europe towards atomism, stemming from a revival of interest in the second century philosopher Lucretius. Whereas Descartes corpuscles are packed together so as to constitute space, atoms as imagined by Lucretius can move freely through the void of empty space; atomism, in other words, is a philosophical position in which all things are made up of certain basic indivisible particles (originally called atoms, though now we use the word differently) and an independent pre-existing void or space. Interestingly, this introduction of space recovers a shadow of Plato's receptacle, which is strengthened in the work of Newton who once, in an unguarded moment, likened space to "the sensorium [sense-organ] of God". In this philosophy it is the combination of space and atoms that stands for the oldest ideas of matter.

Once the Spirit had been completely separated from matter, and matter had lost its divine quality, the world of the Spirit and God was destined to become increasingly irrelevant. Religion became personal piety and Matter began to turn into materialism. 

The modern era and beyond

In the twentieth century the first steps were taken towards recovering the interplay between matter and spirit, and with it a reflection of the earlier polarities. The period leading to the present day was one of a reconstruction of the fullness of the world, but along different lines from those of Genesis.  One can trace at least four strands in this process:

• Within physics, what was at first a desacralised "matter" began to differentiate to recover a physical representation of all the previous polarities. First, the dimension of shamayim/aretz emerged in the discovery of wave-particle duality. Then, in a process that is still in the course of development and unclear, the ruach/maim polarity started to emerge as the distinction between principles (usually expressed as quantum fields) and manifestation (which may be linked with space).
• Within Christian theology, God started to be rehabilitated on the earth. The movement for social reform which at first had been dominated by the reformed churches spread into mainstream Protestantism and, particularly with the birth of liberation theology, Catholicism - where it was followed by a backlash under pope John-Paul II. Feminist theology played a significant role here, emphasising the relational character of God and of God's creation (Grey, 1991). Principles and practical manifestation (ruach/maim) came into inter-relationship, as they were doing in physics. What seems harder is to re-establish an interplay between structure and fluidity.
• "Nature" was progressively reinvented and reenchanted, Aldo Leopold being a seminal influence (Cronon, 1995). It started to become once again the domain of Artemis, but now in both of her roles, as the huntress and the choreographer, no longer separated into two places. Thinkers such as Berry (1990) and Sahtouris (2000) emphasised the cyclic interplay of individuation, competition and destruction (aretz) intertwining cooperation, communion and creativity (shamayim)
• In the human sciences and spirituality huge strides have been made in reconnecting what Descartes divided, with a flowering of body-based spiritualities and mentally based therapies. In a great many places ruach and maim are again in an interplay, a process in which the re-empowerment of women has led to an integration (an embracing of diversity) and co-celebration of the masculine and the feminine. Noteworthy has been the discovery through experimental psychology of the way in which this ruach/maim polarity is deeply embedded in our cognitive processes and shapes the whole of our experienced world  Barnard and Teasdale (1995 ) have established the existence of two well differentiated meaning-making subsystems of the mind (probably hard-wired into the brain, though the anatomy of this has yet to be explored), one dealing with the rational, propositional and the verbal, and the other dealing with the significance to the self, the emotions and connectivity with the sensory world.
  

Based on my own experience I will end by briefly unpacking just the physics strand of this process, in which what was in the eighteenth century simply "matter" became unpacked into the fourfold polarity of Genesis, only one part of which was "matter" in the sense of hule.

Wave-particle duality

I shall begin with this most well-known aspect, as it is expressed in the two-slit experiment of Davison and Germer. Atoms are projected towards a screen with two slits in it onto a photographic plate where each atom turns a grain of the emulsion black.

The resulting pattern of black dots is seen not to be uniform, or having two bands, but two be made up of a large number of dark and light bands, a phenomenon most obviously explained as the result of the interference of waves