object:1.44 - Demeter and Persephone
book class:The Golden Bough
author class:James George Frazer
subject class:Occultism
class:chapter
XLIV. 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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."
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.
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.
questions, comments, suggestions/feedback, take-down requests, contribute, etc
contact me @ integralyogin@gmail.com or via the comments below
or join the integral discord server (chatrooms)
if the page you visited was empty, it may be noted and I will try to fill it out. cheers