Chapter 44. Demeter and Persephone.
DIONYSUS was not the only Greek deity whose tragic story and
ritual appear to reflect the decay and revival of vegetation. In
another form and with a different application the old tale reappears
in the myth of Demeter and Persephone. Substantially their myth is
identical with the Syrian one of Aphrodite (Astarte) and Adonis,
the Phrygian one of Cybele and Attis, and the Egyptian one of Isis
and Osiris. In the Greek fable, as in its Asiatic and Egyptian
counterparts, a goddess mourns the loss of a loved one, who
personifies the vegetation, more especially the corn, which dies in
winter to revive in spring; only whereas the Oriental imagination
figured the loved and lost one as a dead lover or a dead husband
lamented by his leman or his wife, Greek fancy embodied the
same idea in the tenderer and purer form of a dead daughter
bewailed by her sorrowing mother. 1
The oldest literary document which narrates the myth of Demeter
and Persephone is the beautiful Homeric Hymn to Demeter, which
critics assign to the seventh century before our era. The object of
the poem is to explain the origin of the Eleusinian mysteries, and
the complete silence of the poet as to Athens and the Athenians,
who in after ages took conspicuous part in the festival, renders it
probable that the hymn was composed in the far off time when
Eleusis was still a petty independent state, and before the stately
procession of the Mysteries had begun to defile, in bright
September days, over the low chain of barren rocky hills which
divides the flat Eleusinian cornland from the more spacious
olive-clad expanse of the Athenian plain. Be that as it may, the
hymn reveals to us the conception which the writer entertained of
the character and functions of the two goddesses; their natural
shapes stand out sharply enough under the thin veil of poetical
imagery. The youthful Persephone, so runs the tale, was gathering
roses and lilies, crocuses and violets, hyacinths and narcissuses
in a lush meadow, when the earth gaped and Pluto, lord of the
Dead, issuing from the abyss carried her off on his golden car to
be his bride and queen in the gloomy subterranean world. Her
sorrowing mother Demeter, with her yellow tresses veiled in a dark
mourning mantle, sought her over land and sea, and learning from
the Sun her daughter's fate she withdrew in high dudgeon from the
gods and took up her abode at Eleusis, where she presented
herself to the king's daughters in the guise of an old woman, sitting
sadly under the shadow of an olive tree beside the Maiden's Well,
to which the damsels had come to draw water in bronze pitchers
for their father's house. In her wrath at her bereavement the
goddess suffered not the seed to grow in the earth but kept it
hidden under ground, and she vowed that never would she set
foot on Olympus and never would she let the corn sprout till her
lost daughter should be restored to her. Vainly the oxen dragged
the ploughs to and fro in the fields; vainly the sower dropped the
barley seed in the brown furrows; nothing came up from the
parched and crumbling soil. Even the Rarian plain near Eleusis,
which was wont to wave with yellow harvests, lay bare and fallow.
Mankind would have perished of hunger and the gods would have
been robbed of the sacrifices which were their due, if Zeus in
alarm had not commanded Pluto to disgorge his prey, to restore
his bride Persephone to her mother Demeter. The grim lord of the
Dead smiled and obeyed, but before he sent back his queen to
the upper air on a golden car, he gave her the seed of a
pomegranate to eat, which ensured that she would return to him.
But Zeus stipulated that henceforth Persephone should spend two
thirds of every year with her mother and the gods in the upper
world and one third of the year with her husband in the nether
world, from which she was to return year by year when the earth
was gay with spring flowers. Gladly the daughter then returned to
the sunshine, gladly her mother received her and fell upon her
neck; and in her joy at recovering the lost one Demeter made the
corn to sprout from the clods of the ploughed fields and all the
broad earth to be heavy with leaves and blossoms. And
straightway she went and showed this happy sight to the princes
of Eleusis, to Triptolemus, Eumolpus, Diocles, and to the king
Celeus himself, and moreover she revealed to them her sacred
rites and mysteries. Blessed, says the poet, is the mortal man who
has seen these things, but he who has had no share of them in life
will never be happy in death when he has descended into the
darkness of the grave. So the two goddesses departed to dwell in
bliss with the gods on Olympus; and the bard ends the hymn with
a pious prayer to Demeter and Persephone that they would be
pleased to grant him a livelihood in return for his song. 2
It has been generally recognised, and indeed it seems scarcely
open to doubt, that the main theme which the poet set before
himself in composing this hymn was to describe the traditional
foundation of the Eleusinian mysteries by the goddess Demeter.
The whole poem leads up to the transformation scene in which the
bare leafless expanse of the Eleusinian plain is suddenly turned,
at the will of the goddess, into a vast sheet of ruddy corn; the
beneficent deity takes the princes of Eleusis, shows them what
she has done, teaches them her mystic rites, and vanishes with
her daughter to heaven. The revelation of the mysteries is the
triumphal close of the piece. This conclusion is confirmed by a
more minute examination of the poem, which proves that the poet
has given, not merely a general account of the foundation of the
mysteries, but also in more or less veiled language mythical
explanations of the origin of particular rites which we have good
reason to believe formed essential features of the festival. Amongst
the rites as to which the poet thus drops significant hints are the
preliminary fast of the candidates for initiation, the torchlight
procession, the all-night vigil, the sitting of the candidates, veiled
and in silence, on stools covered with sheepskins, the use of
scurrilous language, the breaking of ribald jests, and the solemn
communion with the divinity by participation in a draught of
barley-water from a holy chalice. 3
But there is yet another and a deeper secret of the mysteries
which the author of the poem appears to have divulged under
cover of his narrative. He tells us how, as soon as she had
transformed the barren brown expanse of the Eleusinian plain into
a field of golden grain, she gladdened the eyes of Triptolemus and
the other Eleusinian princes by showing them the growing or
standing corn. When we compare this part of the story with the
statement of a Christian writer of the second century, Hippolytus,
that the very heart of the mysteries consisted in showing to the
initiated a reaped ear of corn, we can hardly doubt that the poet
of the hymn was well acquainted with this solemn rite, and that he
deliberately intended to explain its origin in precisely the same
way as he explained other rites of the mysteries, namely by
representing Demeter as having set the example of performing the
ceremony in her own person. Thus myth and ritual mutually
explain and confirm each other. The poet of the seventh century
before our era gives us the myth-he could not without sacrilege
have revealed the ritual: the Christian father reveals the ritual, and
his revelation accords perfectly with the veiled hint of the old poet.
On the whole, then, we may, with many modern scholars,
confidently accept the statement of the learned Christian father
Clement of Alexandria, that the myth of Demeter and Persephone
was acted as a sacred drama in the mysteries of Eleusis. 4
But if the myth was acted as a part, perhaps as the principal
part, of the most famous and solemn religious rites of ancient
Greece, we have still to enquire, What was, after all, stripped of
later accretions, the original kernel of the myth which appears to
later ages surrounded and transfigured by an aureole of awe and
mystery, lit up by some of the most brilliant rays of Grecian
literature and art? If we follow the indications given by our oldest
literary authority on the subject, the author of the Homeric hymn to
Demeter, the riddle is not hard to read; the figures of the two
goddesses, the mother and the daughter, resolve themselves into
personifications of the corn. At least this appears to be fairly
certain for the daughter Persephone. The goddess who spends
three or, according to another version of the myth, six months of
every year with the dead under ground and the remainder of the
year with the living above ground; in whose absence the barley
seed is hidden in the earth and the fields lie bare and fallow; on
whose return in spring to the upper world the corn shoots up from
the clods and the earth is heavy with leaves and blossoms-this
goddess can surely be nothing else than a mythical embodiment
of the vegetation, and particularly of the corn, which is buried
under the soil for some months of every winter and comes to life
again, as from the grave, in the sprouting cornstalks and the
opening flowers and foliage of every spring. No other reasonable
and probable explanation of Persephone seems possible. And if
the daughter goddess was a personification of the young corn of
the present year, may not the mother goddess be a personification
of the old corn of last year, which has given birth to the new
crops? The only alternative to this view of Demeter would seem to
be to suppose that she is a personification of the earth, from
whose broad bosom the corn and all other plants spring up, and
of which accordingly they may appropriately enough be regarded
as the daughters. This view of the original nature of Demeter has
indeed been taken by some writers, both ancient and modern, and
it is one which can be reasonably maintained. But it appears to
have been rejected by the author of the Homeric hymn to
Demeter, for he not only distinguishes Demeter from the
personified Earth but places the two in the sharpest opposition to
each other. He tells us that it was Earth who, in accordance with
the will of Zeus and to please Pluto, lured Persephone to her
doom by causing the narcissuses to grow which tempted the
young goddess to stray far beyond the reach of help in the lush
meadow. Thus Demeter of the hymn, far from being identical with
the Earth-goddess, must have regarded that divinity as her worst
enemy, since it was to her insidious wiles that she owed the loss
of her daughter. But if the Demeter of the hymn cannot have been
a personification of the earth, the only alternative apparently is to
conclude that she was a personification of the corn. 5
The conclusion is confirmed by the monuments; for in ancient art
Demeter and Persephone are alike characterised as goddesses of
the corn by the crowns of corn which they wear on their heads
and by the stalks of corn which they hold in their hands. Again, it
was Demeter who first revealed to the Athenians the secret of the
corn and diffused the beneficent discovery far and wide through
the agency of Triptolemus, whom she sent forth as an itinerant
missionary to communicate the boon to all mankind. On
monuments of art, especially in vase-paintings, he is constantly
represented along with Demeter in this capacity, holding
corn-stalks in his hand and sitting in his car, which is sometimes
winged and sometimes drawn by dragons, and from which he is
said to have sowed the seed down on the whole world as he sped
through the air. In gratitude for the priceless boon many Greek
cities long continued to send the first-fruits of their barley and
wheat harvests as thank-offerings to the Two Goddesses, Demeter
and Persephone, at Eleusis, where subterranean granaries were
built to store the overflowing contributions. Theocritus tells how in
the island of Cos, in the sweet-scented summer time, the farmer
brought the first-fruits of the harvest to Demeter who had filled his
threshingfloor with barley, and whose rustic image held sheaves
and poppies in her hands. Many of the epithets bestowed by the
ancients on Demeter mark her intimate association with the corn in
the clearest manner. 6
How deeply implanted in the mind of the ancient Greeks was this
faith in Demeter as goddess of the corn may be judged by the
circumstance that the faith actually persisted among their Christian
descendants at her old sanctuary of Eleusis down to the
beginning of the nineteenth century. For when the English
traveller Dodwell revisited Eleusis, the inhabitants lamented to him
the loss of a colossal image of Demeter, which was carried off by
Clarke in 1802 and presented to the University of Cambridge,
where it still remains. "In my first journey to Greece," says
Dodwell, "this protecting deity was in its full glory, situated in the
centre of a threshing-floor, amongst the ruins of her temple. The
villagers were impressed with a persuasion that their rich harvests
were the effect of her bounty, and since her removal, their
abundance, as they assured me, has disappeared." Thus we see
the Corn Goddess Demeter standing on the threshing-floor of
Eleusis and dispensing corn to her worshippers in the nineteenth
century of the Christian era, precisely as her image stood and
dispensed corn to her worshippers on the threshing-floor of Cos
in the days of Theocritus. And just as the people of Eleusis in the
nineteenth century attributed the diminution of their harvests to the
loss of the image of Demeter, so in antiquity the Sicilians, a
corn-growing people devoted to the worship of the two Corn
Goddesses, lamented that the crops of many towns had perished
because the unscrupulous Roman governor Verres had impiously
carried off the image of Demeter from her famous temple at Henna.
Could we ask for a clearer proof that Demeter was indeed the
goddess of the corn than this belief, held by the Greeks down to
modern times, that the corn-crops depended on her presence and
bounty and perished when her image was removed? 7
On the whole, then, if, ignoring theories, we adhere to the
evidence of the ancients themselves in regard to the rites of
Eleusis, we shall probably incline to agree with the most learned
of ancient antiquaries, the Roman Varro, who, to quote
Augustine's report of his opinion, "interpreted the whole of the
Eleusinian mysteries as relating to the corn which Ceres (Demeter)
had discovered, and to Proserpine (Persephone), whom Pluto had
carried off from her. And Proserpine herself he said, signifies the
fecundity of the seeds, the failure of which at a certain time had
caused the earth to mourn for barrenness, and therefore had given
rise to the opinion that the daughter of Ceres, that is, fecundity
itself, had been ravished by Pluto and detained in the nether
world; and when the dearth had been publicly mourned and
fecundity had returned once more, there was gladness at the
return of Proserpine and solemn rites were instituted accordingly.
After that he says," continues Augustine, reporting Varro, "that
many things were taught in her mysteries which had no reference
but to the discovery of the corn." 8
Thus far I have for the most part assumed an identity of nature
between Demeter and Persephone, the divine mother and
daughter personifying the corn in its double aspect of the
seed-corn of last year and the ripe ears of this, and this view of
the substantial unity of mother and daughter is borne out by their
portraits in Greek art, which are often so alike as to be
indistinguishable. Such a close resemblance between the artistic
types of Demeter and Persephone militates decidedly against the
view that the two goddesses are mythical embodiments of two
things so different and so easily distinguishable from each other as
the earth and the vegetation which springs from it. Had Greek
artists accepted that view of Demeter and Persephone, they could
surely have devised types of them which would have brought out
the deep distinction between the goddesses. And if Demeter did
not personify the earth, can there be any reasonable doubt that,
like her daughter, she personified the corn which was so
commonly called by her name from the time of Homer downwards?
The essential identity of mother and daughter is suggested, not
only by the close resemblance of their artistic types, but also by
the official title of "the Two Goddesses" which was regularly
applied to them in the great sanctuary at Eleusis without any
specification of their individual attributes and titles, as if their
separate individualities had almost merged in a single divine
substance. 9
Surveying the evidence as a whole, we are fairly entitled to
conclude that in the mind of the ordinary Greek the two goddesses
were essentially personifications of the corn, and that in this germ
the whole efflorescence of their religion finds implicitly its
explanation. But to maintain this is not to deny that in the long
course of religious evolution high moral and spiritual conceptions
were grafted on this simple original stock and blossomed out into
fairer flowers than the bloom of the barley and the wheat. Above
all, the thought of the seed buried in the earth in order to spring up
to new and higher life readily suggested a comparison with human
destiny, and strengthened the hope that for man too the grave may
be but the beginning of a better and happier existence in some
brighter world unknown. This simple and natural reflection seems
perfectly sufficient to explain the association of the Corn Goddess
at Eleusis with the mystery of death and the hope of a blissful
immortality. For that the ancients regarded initiation in the
Eleusinian mysteries as a key to unlock the gates of Paradise
appears to be proved by the allusions which well-informed writers
among them drop to the happiness in store for the initiated
hereafter. No doubt it is easy for us to discern the flimsiness of the
logical foundation on which such high hopes were built. But
drowning men clutch at straws, and we need not wonder that the
Greeks, like ourselves, with death before them and a great love of
life in their hearts, should not have stopped to weigh with too nice
a hand the arguments that told for and against the prospect of
human immortality. The reasoning that satisfied Saint Paul and has
brought comfort to untold thousands of sorrowing Christians,
standing by the deathbed or the open grave of their loved ones,
was good enough to pass muster with ancient pagans, when they
too bowed their heads under the burden of grief, and, with the
taper of life burning low in the socket, looked forward into the
darkness of the unknown. Therefore we do no indignity to the myth
of Demeter and Persephone-one of the few myths in which the
sunshine and clarity of the Greek genius are crossed by the
shadow and mystery of death-when we trace its origin to some of
the most familiar, yet eternally affecting aspects of nature, to the
melancholy gloom and decay of autumn and to the freshness, the
brightness, and the verdure of spring. 10