ABSTRACT
Towards the end of the Cocteau's La Belle et la bête one sees a statue of a woman with a bow and arrow - an allusion to the cult of Diana, the ancient Greek goddess of the hunt, protectress of animals, and a virgin in the sense of both sexual chastity and wholeness unto herself. The town of Nemi is still fixated on the goddess Diana: the restaurants even serve wild boar from the surrounding forests, whose oak groves date back to the Bronze and Iron Ages. In Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast, Diana guards the building where the Beast's fortune is kept: when thieves break in, she shoots them with her arrows. Diana is the triple goddess: goddess of nature and wildlife, goddess of the moon, and goddess of the magic arts. In the twentieth century, when women's status was not necessarily defined by the economic class of the man she marries, an updating seemed called for.
