The Golden Bough (Third Edition, Vol. 7 of 12) - Mirrors

Chapter II. Demeter AndPersephone.Demeter andPersephoneas Greekpersonificationsof the decayand revival ofvegetation.The HomericHymn to Demeter.The rape ofPersephone. Thewrath of Demeter.The return ofPersephone.Dionysus was not the only Greek deity whose tragic story andritual appear to reflect the decay and revival of vegetation.In another form and with a different application the old talereappears in the myth of Demeter and Persephone. Substantiallytheir myth is identical with the Syrian one of Aphrodite (Astarte)and Adonis, the Phrygian one of Cybele and Attis, and theEgyptian one of Isis and Osiris. In the Greek fable, as in itsAsiatic and Egyptian counterparts, a goddess mourns the loss ofa loved one, who personifies the vegetation, more especially thecorn, which dies in winter to revive in spring; only whereas theOriental imagination figured the loved and lost one as a deadlover or a dead husband lamented by his leman or his wife, Greekfancy embodied the same idea in the tenderer and purer form ofa dead daughter bewailed by her sorrowing mother.The oldest literary document which narrates the myth ofDemeter and Persephone is the beautiful Homeric Hymn toDemeter, which critics assign to the seventh century beforeour era. 134 The object of the poem is to explain the originof the Eleusinian mysteries, and the complete silence of thepoet as to Athens and the Athenians, who in after ages tooka conspicuous part in the festival, renders it probable that thehymn was composed in the far off time when Eleusis was stilla petty independent state, and before the stately procession of134 R. Foerster, Der Raub und die Rückkehr der Persephone (Stuttgart, 1874),pp. 37-39; The Homeric Hymns, edited by T. W. Allen and E. E. Sikes (London,1904), pp. 10 sq. A later date—the age of the Pisistratids—is assigned to thehymn by A. Baumeister (Hymni Homerici, Leipsic, 1860, p. 280).