Section 4. The Double Personification of the Corn as Mother and Daughter.
COMPARED with the Corn-mother of Germany and the
Harvest-maiden of Scotland, the Demeter and Persephone of
Greece are late products of religious growth. Yet as members of
the Aryan family the Greeks must at one time or another have
observed harvest customs like those which are still practised by
Celts, Teutons, and Slavs, and which, far beyond the limits of the
Aryan world, have been practised by the Indians of Peru and
many peoples of the East Indies-a sufficient proof that the ideas
on which these customs rest are not confined to any one race, but
naturally suggest themselves to all untutored peoples engaged in
agriculture. It is probable, therefore, that Demeter and
Persephone, those stately and beautiful figures of Greek
mythology, grew out of the same simple beliefs and practices
which still prevail among our modern peasantry, and that they
were represented by rude dolls made out of the yellow sheaves
on many a harvest-field long before their breathing images were
wrought in bronze and marble by the master hands of Phidias and
Praxiteles. A reminiscence of that olden time-a scent, so to say,
of the harvest-field-lingered to the last in the title of the Maiden
(Kore) by which Persephone was commonly known. Thus if the
prototype of Demeter is the Corn-mother of Germany, the
prototype of Persephone is the Harvest-maiden which, autumn
after autumn, is still made from the last sheaf on the Braes of
Balquhidder. Indeed, if we knew more about the peasant-farmers
of ancient Greece, we should probably find that even in classical
times they continued annually to fashion their Corn-mothers
(Demeters) and Maidens (Persephones) out of the ripe corn on the
harvest-fields. But unfortunately the Demeter and Persephone
whom we know were the denizens of towns, the majestic
inhabitants of lordly temples; it was for such divinities alone that
the refined writers of antiquity had eyes; the uncouth rites
performed by rustics amongst the corn were beneath their notice.
Even if they noticed them, they probably never dreamed of any
connexion between the puppet of corn-stalks on the sunny
stubble-field and the marble divinity in the shady coolness of the
temple. Still the writings even of these town-bred and cultured
persons afford us an occasional glimpse of a Demeter as rude as
the rudest that a remote German village can show. Thus the story
that Iasion begat a child Plutus ( "wealth," "abundance") by
Demeter on a thrice-ploughed field, may be compared with the
West Prussian custom of the mock birth of a child on the
harvest-field. In this Prussian custom the pretended mother
represents the Corn-mother (Žytniamatka); the pretended
child represents the Corn-baby, and the whole ceremony is a
charm to ensure a crop next year. The custom and the legend
alike point to an older practice of performing, among the sprouting
crops in spring or the stubble in autumn, one of those real or
mimic acts of procreation by which, as we have seen, primitive
man often seeks to infuse his own vigorous life into the languid or
decaying energies of nature. Another glimpse of the savage under
the civilised Demeter will be afforded farther on, when we come to
deal with another aspect of those agricultural divinities. 1
The reader may have observed that in modern folk-customs the
corn-spirit is generally represented either by a Corn-mother (Old
Woman, etc.) or by a Maiden (Harvest-child, etc.), not both by a
Corn-mother and by a Maiden. Why then did the Greeks
represent the corn both as a mother and a daughter? 2
In the Breton custom the mother-sheaf-a large figure made out
of the last sheaf with a small corn-doll inside of it-clearly
represents both the Corn-mother and the Corn-daughter, the
latter still unborn. Again, in the Prussian custom just referred to,
the woman who plays the part of Corn-mother represents the ripe
grain; the child appears to represent next year's corn, which may
be regarded, naturally enough, as the child of this year's corn,
since it is from the seed of this year's harvest that next year's crop
will spring. Further, we have seen that among the Malays of the
Peninsula and sometimes among the Highlanders of Scotland the
spirit of the grain is represented in double female form, both as old
and young, by means of ears taken alike from the ripe crop: in
Scotland the old spirit of the corn appears as the Carline or
Cailleach, the young spirit as the Maiden; while among the
Malays of the Peninsula the two spirits of the rice are definitely
related to each other as mother and child. Judged by these
analogies Demeter would be the ripe crop of this year;
Persephone would be the seed-corn taken from it and sown in
autumn, to reappear in spring. The descent of Persephone into the
lower world would thus be a mythical expression for the sowing of
the seed; her reappearance in spring would signify the sprouting
of the young corn. In this way the Persephone of one year
becomes the Demeter of the next, and this may very well have
been the original form of the myth. But when with the advance of
religious thought the corn came to be personified no longer as a
being that went through the whole cycle of birth, growth,
reproduction, and death within a year, but as an immortal
goddess, consistency required that one of the two
personifications, the mother or the daughter, should be sacrificed.
However, the double conception of the corn as mother and
daughter may have been too old and too deeply rooted in the
popular mind to be eradicated by logic, and so room had to be
found in the reformed myth both for mother and daughter. This was
done by assigning to Persephone the character of the corn sown
in autumn and sprouting in spring, while Demeter was left to play
the somewhat vague part of the heavy mother of the corn, who
laments its annual disappearance underground, and rejoices over
its reappearance in spring. Thus instead of a regular succession
of divine beings, each living a year and then giving birth to her
successor, the reformed myth exhibits the conception of two divine
and immortal beings, one of whom annually disappears into and
reappears from the ground, while the other has little to do but to
weep and rejoice at the appropriate seasons. 3
This theory of the double personification of the corn in Greek
myth assumes that both personifications (Demeter and
Persephone) are original. But if we suppose that the Greek myth
started with a single personification, the aftergrowth of a second
personification may perhaps be explained as follows. On looking
over the harvest customs which have been passed under review,
it may be noticed that they involve two distinct conceptions of the
corn-spirit. For whereas in some of the customs the corn-spirit is
treated as immanent in the corn, in others it is regarded as
external to it. Thus when a particular sheaf is called by the name
of the corn-spirit, and is dressed in clothes and handled with
reverence, the spirit is clearly regarded as immanent in the corn.
But when the spirit is said to make the crops grow by passing
through them, or to blight the grain of those against whom she has
a grudge, she is apparently conceived as distinct from, though
exercising power over, the corn. Conceived in the latter mode the
corn-spirit is in a fair way to become a deity of the corn, if she
has not become so already. Of these two conceptions, that of the
cornspirit as immanent in the corn is doubtless the older, since the
view of nature as animated by indwelling spirits appears to have
generally preceded the view of it as controlled by external deities;
to put it shortly, animism precedes deism. In the harvest customs
of our European peasantry the corn-spirit seems to be conceived
now as immanent in the corn and now as external to it. In Greek
mythology, on the other hand, Demeter is viewed rather as the
deity of the corn than as the spirit immanent in it. The process of
thought which leads to the change from the one mode of
conception to the other is anthropomorphism, or the gradual
investment of the immanent spirits with more and more of the
attributes of humanity. As men emerge from savagery the tendency
to humanise their divinities gains strength; and the more human
these become the wider is the breach which severs them from the
natural objects of which they were at first merely the animating
spirits or souls. But in the progress upwards from savagery men of
the same generation do not march abreast; and though the new
anthropomorphic gods may satisfy the religious wants of the more
developed intelligences, the backward members of the community
will cling by preference to the old animistic notions. Now when the
spirit of any natural object such as the corn has been invested
with human qualities, detached from the object, and converted into
a deity controlling it, the object itself is, by the withdrawal of its
spirit, left inanimate; it becomes, so to say, a spiritual vacuum. But
the popular fancy, intolerant of such a vacuum, in other words,
unable to conceive anything as inanimate, immediately creates a
fresh mythical being, with which it peoples the vacant object. Thus
the same natural object comes to be represented in mythology by
two distinct beings: first by the old spirit now separated from it and
raised to the rank of a deity; second, by the new spirit, freshly
created by the popular fancy to supply the place vacated by the
old spirit on its elevation to a higher sphere. In such cases the
problem for mythology is, having got two distinct personifications
of the same object, what to do with them? How are their relations
to each other to be adjusted, and room found for both in the
mythological system? When the old spirit or new deity is
conceived as creating or producing the object in question, the
problem is easily solved. Since the object is believed to be
produced by the old spirit, and animated by the new one, the
latter, as the soul of the object, must also owe its existence to the
former; thus the old spirit will stand to the new one as producer to
produced, that is, in mythology, as parent to child, and if both
spirits are conceived as female, their relation will be that of mother
and daughter. In this way, starting from a single personification of
the corn as female, mythic fancy might in time reach a double
personification of it as mother and daughter. It would be very rash
to affirm that this was the way in which the myth of Demeter and
Persephone actually took shape; but it seems a legitimate
conjecture that the reduplication of deities, of which Demeter and
Persephone furnish an example, may sometimes have arisen in
the way indicated. For example, among the pairs of deities dealt
with in a former part of this work, it has been shown that there are
grounds for regarding both Isis and her companion god Osiris as
personifications of the corn. On the hypothesis just suggested, Isis
would be the old corn-spirit, and Osiris would be the newer one,
whose relationship to the old spirit was variously explained as that
of brother, husband, and son; for of course mythology would
always be free to account for the coexistence of the two divinities
in more ways than one. It must not, however, be forgotten that this
proposed explanation of such pairs of deities as Demeter and
Persephone or Isis and Osiris is purely conjectural, and is only
given for what it is worth. 4