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

Chapter II. Demeter And Persephone. 51But if the myth was acted as a part, perhaps as the principal Demeter andpart, of the most famous and solemn religious rites of ancientGreece, we have still to enquire, What was, after all, stripped oflater accretions, the original kernel of the myth which appearsto later ages surrounded and transfigured by an aureole of aweand mystery, lit up by some of the most brilliant rays of Grecianliterature and art? If we follow the indications given by ouroldest literary authority on the subject, the author of the Homerichymn to Demeter, the riddle is not hard to read; the figures of thetwo goddesses, the mother and the daughter, resolve themselvesinto personifications of the corn. 140 At least this appears tobe fairly certain for the daughter Persephone. The goddesswho spends three or, according to another version of the myth,six months of every year with the dead under ground and theremainder of the year with the living above ground; 141 in whoseabsence the barley seed is hidden in the earth and the fields liebare and fallow; on whose return in spring to the upper worldthe corn shoots up from the clods and the earth is heavy withleaves and blossoms—this goddess can surely be nothing elsethan a mythical embodiment of the vegetation, and particularlyof the corn, which is buried under the soil for some monthsof every winter and comes to life again, as from the grave, inthe sprouting cornstalks and the opening flowers and foliage ofPersephonepersonificationsof the corn.Persephone theseed sown inautumn andsprouting in spring.Demeter the oldcorn of last year.The view thatDemeter was theEarth goddess isimplicitly rejectedby the author of theHomeric Hymn toDemeter.[040]Foucart (Recherches sur l'Origine et la Nature des Mystères d'Eleusis, Paris,1895, pp. 43 sqq.; id., Les Grands Mystères d'Eleusis, Paris, 1900, p. 137); E.Rohde (Psyche, 3 i. 289); and L. R. Farnell (The Cults of the Greek States, iii.134, 173 sqq.).140 On Demeter and Proserpine as goddesses of the corn, see L. Preller, Demeterund Persephone (Hamburg, 1837), pp. 315 sqq.; and especially W. Mannhardt,Mythologische Forschungen (Strasburg, 1884), pp. 202 sqq.141 According to the author of the Homeric Hymn to Demeter (verses 398 sqq.,445 sqq.) and Apollodorus (Bibliotheca, i. 5. 3) the time which Persephonehad to spend under ground was one third of the year; according to Ovid (Fasti,iv. 613 sq.; Metamorphoses, v. 564 sqq.) and Hyginus (Fabulae, 146) it wasone half.