Prothyraia

Prothyraia, 'she who stands before the door', is the goddess invoked at the threshold of birth — the divine midwife who eases women in their labour. The name is a title of the birth-goddess Eileithyia, and is closely bound to Artemis as the helper of women in childbed.

Standing at the doorway through which each new life enters the world, she presides over the perilous passage from the unborn to the born — and so the hymn to her opens the whole Orphic collection, for birth is the first of mortal thresholds, the soul's own descent into the realm of becoming.