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

Chapter II. Demeter And Persephone. 53Pluto, lured Persephone to her doom by causing the narcissusesto grow which tempted the young goddess to stray far beyondthe reach of help in the lush meadow. 144 Thus Demeter of thehymn, far from being identical with the Earth-goddess, musthave regarded that divinity as her worst enemy, since it was toher insidious wiles that she owed the loss of her daughter. But ifthe Demeter of the hymn cannot have been a personification ofthe earth, the only alternative apparently is to conclude that shewas a personification of the corn.With this conclusion all the indications of the hymn-writer The YellowDemeter, theseem to harmonise. He certainly represents Demeter as thegoddess by whose power and at whose pleasure the corn eithergrows or remains hidden in the ground; and to what deity cansuch powers be so fittingly ascribed as to the goddess of thecorn? He calls Demeter yellow and tells how her yellow tressesflowed down on her shoulders; 145 could any colour be moreappropriate with which to paint the divinity of the yellow grain?The same identification of Demeter with the ripe, the yellowcorn is made even more clearly by a still older poet, Homerhimself, or at all events the author of the fifth book of the Iliad.There we read: “And even as the wind carries the chaff about thesacred threshing-floors, when men are winnowing, what time [042]yellow Demeter sifts the corn from the chaff on the hurryingblast, so that the heaps of chaff grow white below, so were theAchaeans whitened above by the cloud of dust which the hoofsgoddess who siftsthe ripe grain fromthe chaff at thethreshing-floor.The Green Demeterthe goddess of thegreen corn.δηαί “barley”: see Etymologicum Magnum, s.v. ∆ηώ, pp. 263 sq.). Theformer etymology has been the most popular; the latter is maintained by W.Mannhardt. See L. Preller, Demeter und Persephone, pp. 317, 366 sqq.; F.G. Welcker, Griechische Götterlehre, i. 385 sqq.; Preller-Robert, GriechischeMythologie, i. 747 note 6; Kern, in Pauly-Wissowa's Real-Encyclopädie derclassischen Altertumswissenschaft, iv. 2713; W. Mannhardt, MythologischeForschungen, pp. 281 sqq. But my learned friend the Rev. Professor J. H.144 Hymn to Demeter, 8 sqq.145 Hymn to Demeter, 279, 302.