The beautiful Hymn to Demeter, an example of Greek religious faith in its
most pensive and most romantic aspects, was found in the last century
(1780), in Moscow. _Inter pullos et porcos latitabat_: the song of the
rural deity had found its way into the haunts of the humble creatures
whom she protected. A discovery even more fortunate, in 1857, led Sir
Charles Newton to a little _sacellum_, or family chapel, near Cnidos. On
a platform of rock, beneath a cliff, and looking to the Mediterranean,
were the ruins of the ancient shrine: the votive offerings; the lamps
long without oil or flame; the Curses, or Dirae, inscribed on thin sheets
of lead, and directed against thieves or rivals. The head of the statue,
itself already known, was also discovered. Votive offerings, cheap
curses, objects of folk-lore rite and of sympathetic magic,--these are
connected with the popular, the peasant aspect of the religion of
Demeter. She it is to whom pigs are sacrificed: who makes the fields
fertile with scattered fragments of their flesh; and her rustic effigy,
at Theocritus's feast of the harvest home, stands smiling, with corn and
poppies in her hands.
[Mourning Demeter. Marble statue from Knidos. In the British Museum:
lang54.jpg]
But the Cnidian shrine had once another treasure, the beautiful
melancholy statue of the seated Demeter of the uplifted eyes; the
mourning mother: the weary seeker for the lost maiden: her child
Persephone. Far from the ruins above the sea, beneath the scorched
seaward wall of rock: far from the aromatic fragrance of the
rock-nourished flowers, from the bees, and the playful lizards, Demeter
now occupies her place in the great halls of the British Museum. Like
the Hymn, this melancholy and tender work of art is imperfect, but the
sentiment is thereby rather increased than impaired. The ancients buried
things broken with the dead, that the shadows of tool, or weapon, or vase
might be set free, to serve the shadows of their masters in the land of
the souls. Broken as they, too, are, the Hymn and the statue are "free
among the dead," and eloquent of the higher religion that, in Greece,
attached itself to the lost Maiden and the sorrowing Mother. Demeter, in
religion, was more than a fertiliser of the fields: Kore, the Maiden, was
more than the buried pig, or the seed sown to await its resurrection; or
the harvest idol, fashioned of corn-stalks: more even than a symbol of
the winter sleep and vernal awakening of the year and the life of nature.
She became the "dread Persephone" of the Odyssey,
"A Queen over death and the dead."
In her winter retreat below the earth she was the bride of the Lord of
Many Guests, and the ruler "of the souls of men outworn." In this office
Odysseus in Homer knows her, though neither Iliad nor Odyssey recognises
_Kore_ as the maiden Spring, the daughter and companion of Demeter as
Goddess of Grain. Christianity, even, did not quite dethrone Persephone.
She lives in two forms: first, as the harvest effigy made of corn-stalks
bound together, the last gleanings; secondly, as "the Fairy Queen
Proserpina," who carried Thomas the Rhymer from beneath the Eildon Tree
to that land which lies beyond the stream of slain men's blood.
"For a' the bluid that's shed on earth
Flows through the streams of that countrie."
[Silver denarius of C. Vibius Pansa (about 90 B.C.). Obv. Head of
Apollo. Rev. Demeter searching for Persephone: lang56.jpg]
Thus tenacious of life has been the myth of Mother and Maiden, a natural
flower of the human heart, found, unborrowed, by the Spaniards in the
maize-fields of Peru. Clearly the myth is a thing composed of many
elements, glad and sad as the waving fields of yellow grain, or as the
Chthonian darkness under earth where the seed awaits new life in the new
year. The creed is practical as the folk-lore of sympathetic magic,
which half expects to bring good harvest luck by various mummeries; and
the creed is mystical as the hidden things and words unknown which
assured Pindar and Sophocles of secure felicity in this and in the future
life.
The creed is beautiful as the exquisite profile of the corn-tressed head
of Persephone on Syracusan coins: and it is grotesque as the custom which
bade the pilgrims to Eleusis bathe in the sea, each with the pig which he
was about to sacrifice. The highest religious hopes, the meanest magical
mummeries are blended in this religion. That one element is earlier than
the other we cannot say with much certainty. The ritual aspect, as
concerned with the happy future of the soul, does not appear in Iliad or
Odyssey, where the Mysteries are not named. But the silence of Homer is
never a safe argument in favour of his ignorance, any more than the
absence of allusion to tobacco in Shakspeare is a proof that tobacco was,
in his age, unknown.
We shall find that a barbaric people, the Pawnees, hold a mystery
precisely parallel to the Demeter legend: a Mystery necessarily
unborrowed from Greece. The Greeks, therefore, may have evolved the
legend long before Homer's day, and he may have known the story which he
does not find occasion to tell. As to what was said, shown, and done in
the Eleusinia, we only gather that there was a kind of Mystery Play on
the sacred legend; that there were fastings, vigils, sacrifices, secret
objects displayed, sacred words uttered; and that thence such men as
Pindar and Sophocles received the impression that for them, in this and
the future life, all was well, was well for those of pure hearts and
hands. The "purity" may partly have been ritual, but was certainly
understood, also, as relating to excellence of life. Than such a faith
(for faith it is) religion has nothing better to give. But the extreme
diligence of scholars and archaeologists can tell us nothing more
definite. The impressions on the souls of the initiated may have been
caused merely by that dim or splendid religious light of the vigils, and
by association with sacred things usually kept in solemn sanctuaries.
Again, mere buffoonery (as is common in savage Mysteries) brought the
pilgrims back to common life when they crossed the bridge on their return
to Athens; just as the buffooneries of Baubo brought a smile to the sad
lips of Demeter. Beyond this all is conjecture, and the secret may have
been so well kept just because, in fact, there was no secret to keep.
{59}
Till the end of the present century, mythologists did not usually employ
the method of comparing Greek rites and legends with, first, the
sympathetic magic and the fables of peasant folk-lore; second, with the
Mysteries and myths of contemporary savage races, of which European folk-
lore is mainly a survival. For a study of Demeter from these sides (a
study still too much neglected in Germany) readers may consult
Mannhardt's works, Mr. Frazer's "Golden Bough," and the present
translator's "Custom and Myth," and "Myth, Ritual, and Religion." Mr.
Frazer, especially, has enabled the English reader to understand the
savage and rural element of sympathetic magic as a factor in the Demeter
myth. Meanwhile Mr. Pater has dealt with the higher sentiment, the more
religious aspect, of the myth and the rites. I am not inclined to go all
lengths with Mr. Frazer's ingenious and learned system, as will be seen,
while regretting that the new edition of his "Golden Bough" is not yet
accessible.
If we accept (which I do not entirely) Mr. Frazer's theory of the origin
of the Demeter myth, there is no finer example of the Greek power of
transforming into beauty the superstitions of Barbarism. The explanation
to which I refer is contained in Mr. J. G. Frazer's learned and ingenious
work, "The Golden Bough." While mythologists of the schools of Mr. Max
Muller and Kuhn have usually resolved most Gods and heroes into Sun, Sky,
Dawn, Twilight; or, again, into elemental powers of Thunder, Tempest,
Lightning, and Night, Mr. Frazer is apt to see in them the Spirit of
Vegetation. Osiris is a Tree Spirit or a Corn Spirit (Mannhardt, the
founder of the system, however, took Osiris to be the Sun). Balder is
the Spirit of the Oak. The oak, "we may certainly conclude, was one of
the chief, if not the very chief divinity of the Aryans before the
dispersion." {61} If so, the Aryans before the dispersion were on an
infinitely lower religious level than those Australian tribes, whose
chief divinity is not a gum-tree, but a being named "Our Father,"
dwelling beyond the visible heavens. When we remember the vast numbers
of gods of sky or heaven among many scattered races, and the obvious
connection of Zeus with the sky (_sub Jove frigido_), and the usually
assigned sense of the name of Zeus, it is not easy to suppose that he was
originally an oak. But Mr. Frazer considers the etymological connection
of Zeus with the Sanscrit word for sky, an insufficient reason for
regarding Zeus as, in origin, a sky-god. He prefers, it seems, to
believe that, as being the wood out of which fire was kindled by some
Aryan-speaking peoples, the oak may have come to be called "The Bright or
Shining One" (Zeus, Jove), by the ancient Greeks and Italians. {62} The
Greeks, in fact, used the laurel (_daphne_) for making fire, not, as far
as I am aware, the oak. Though the oak was the tree of Zeus, the heavens
were certainly his province, and, despite the oak of Dodona, and the oak
on the Capitol, he is much more generally connected with the sky than
with the tree. In fact this reduction of Zeus, in origin, to an oak,
rather suggests that the spirit of system is too powerful with Mr.
Frazer.
He makes, perhaps, a more plausible case for his reduction of dread
Persephone to a Pig. The process is curious. Early agricultural man
believed in a Corn Spirit, a spiritual essence animating the grain (in
itself no very unworthy conception). But because, as the field is mown,
animals in the corn are driven into the last unshorn nook, and then into
the open, the beast which rushed out of the last patch was identified
with the Corn Spirit in some animal shape, perhaps that of a pig; many
other animals occur. The pig has a great part in the ritual of Demeter.
Pigs of pottery were found by Sir Charles Newton on her sacred ground.
The initiate in the Mysteries brought pigs to Eleusis, and bathed with
them in the sea. The pig was sacrificed to her; in fact (though not in
our Hymn) she was closely associated with pigs. "We may now ask . . .
may not the pig be nothing but the Goddess herself in animal form?" {64a}
She would later become anthropomorphic: a lovely Goddess, whose hair, as
in the Hymn, is "yellow as ripe corn." But the prior pig could not be
shaken off. At the Attic Thesmophoria the women celebrated the Descent
and Ascent of Persephone,--a "double" of Demeter. In this rite pigs and
other things were thrown into certain caverns. Later, the cold remains
of pig were recovered and placed on the altar. Fragments were scattered
for luck on the fields with the seed-corn. A myth explained that a flock
of pigs were swallowed by Earth when Persephone was ravished by Hades to
the lower world, of which matter the Hymn says nothing. "In short, the
pigs were Proserpine." {64b} The eating of pigs at the Thesmophoria was
"a partaking of the body of the God," though the partakers, one thinks,
must have been totally unconscious of the circumstance. We must presume
that (if this theory be correct) a very considerable time was needed for
the evolution of a pig into the Demeter of the Hymn, and the change is
quite successfully complete; a testimony to the transfiguring power of
the Greek genius.
We may be inclined to doubt, however, whether the task before the genius
of Greece, the task of making Proserpine out of a porker, was really so
colossal. The primitive mind is notoriously capable of entertaining,
simultaneously, the most contradictory notions. Thus, in the Australian
"Legend of Eerin," the mourners implore Byamee to accept the soul of the
faithful Eerin into his Paradise, Bullimah. No doubt Byamee heard, yet
Eerin is now a little owl of plaintive voice, which ratters warning cries
in time of peril. {65} No incongruity of this kind is felt to be a
difficulty by the childlike narrators. Now I conceive that, starting
with the relatively high idea of a Spirit of the Grain, early man was
quite capable of envisaging it both spiritually and in zoomorphic form
(accidentally conditioned here into horse, there into goat, pig, or what
not). But these views of his need not exclude his simultaneous belief in
the Corn Spirit as a being anthropomorphic, "Mother Earth," or "Mother
Grain," as we follow the common etymology; or that of Mannhardt ([Greek
text]) [Greek text]="barley-mother"). If I am right, poetry and the
higher religion moved from the first on the line of the anthropomorphic
Lady of the Harvest and the Corn, Mother Barley: while the popular folk-
lore of the Corn Spirit (which found utterance in the mirth of
harvesting, and in the magic ritual for ensuring fertility), followed on
the line of the pig. At some seasons, and in some ceremonies, the pig
represented the genius of the corn: in general, the Lady of the Corn
was--Demeter. We really need not believe that the two forms of the
genius of the corn were ever _consciously_ identified. Demeter never was
a Pig! {66}
"The Peruvians, we are told, believed all useful plants to be animated by
a divine being who causes their growth," says Mr. Frazer. {67} The
genealogical table, then, in my opinion, is:--
Divine Being of the Grain.
|
+---------+--------------------------+
| |
(_Anthropomorphized_). (_Zoomorphised_).
Mother of Corn. Pig, Horse,
Demeter. and so on.
Thus the Greek genius had other and better materials to work on, in
evolving Demeter, than the rather lowly animal which is associated with
her rites. If any one objects that animal gods always precede
anthropomorphic gods in evolution, we reply that, in the most archaic of
known races, the deities are represented in human guise at the Mysteries,
though there are animal Totems, and though, in myth, the deity may, and
often does, assume shapes of bird or beast. {68}
Among rites of the backward races, none, perhaps, so closely resembles
the Eleusinian Mysteries as the tradition of the Pawnees. In Attica,
Hades, Lord of the Dead, ravishes away Persephone, the vernal daughter of
Demeter. Demeter then wanders among men, and is hospitably received by
Celeus, King of Eleusis. Baffled in her endeavour to make his son
immortal, she demands a temple, where she sits in wrath, blighting the
grain. She is reconciled by the restoration of her daughter, at the
command of Zeus. But for a third of the year Persephone, having tasted a
pomegranate seed in Hades, has to reign as Queen of the Dead, beneath the
earth. Scenes from this tale were, no doubt, enacted at the Mysteries,
with interludes of buffoonery, such as relieved most ancient and all
savage Mysteries. The allegory of the year's death and renewal probably
afforded a text for some discourse, or spectacle, concerned with the
future life.
Among the Pawnees, not a mother and daughter, but two primal beings,
brothers, named Manabozho and Chibiabos, are the chief characters. The
Manitos (spirits or gods) drown Chibiabos. Manabozho mourns and smears
his face with black, as Demeter wears black raiment. He laments
Chibiabos ceaselessly till the Manitos propitiate him with gifts and
ceremonies. They offer to him a cup, like the beverage prepared for
Demeter, in the Hymn, by Iambe. He drinks it, is glad, washes off the
black stain of mourning, and is himself again, while Earth again is
joyous. The Manitos restore Chibiabos to life; but, having once died, he
may not enter the temple, or "Medicine Lodge." He is sent to reign over
the souls of the departed as does Persephone. Manabozho makes offerings
to Mesukkumikokwi, the "Earth Mother" of the Pawnees. The story is
enacted in the sacred dances of the Pawnees. {69}
The Pawnee ideas have fallen, with singularly accurate coincidence, into
the same lines as those of early Greece. Some moderns, such as M.
Foucart, have revived the opinion of Herodotus, that the Mysteries were
brought from Greece to Egypt. But, as the Pawnee example shows, similar
natural phenomena may anywhere beget similar myths and rites. In Greece
the _donnee_ was a nature myth, and a ritual in which it was enacted.
That ritual was a form of sympathetic magic, and the myth explained the
performances. The refinement and charm of the legend (on which Homer, as
we saw, does not touch) is due to the unique genius of Greece. Demeter
became the deity most familiar to the people, nearest to their hearts and
endowed with most temples; every farm possessing her rural shrine. But
the Chthonian, or funereal, aspect of Chibiabos, or of Persephone, is due
to a mood very distinct from that which sacrifices pigs as embodiments of
the Corn Spirit, if that be the real origin of the practice.
We should much misconceive the religious spirit of the Greek rite if we
undertook to develop it all out an origin in sympathetic magic: which, of
course, I do not understand Mr. Frazer to do. Greek scholars, again, are
apt to view these researches into savage or barbaric origins with great
distaste and disfavour. This is not a scientific frame of mind. In the
absence of such researches other purely fanciful origins have been
invented by scholars, ancient or modern. It is necessary to return to
the pedestrian facts, if merely in order to demonstrate the futility of
the fancies. The result is in no way discreditable to Greece. Beginning,
like other peoples, with the vague unrealised conception of the Corn
Mother (an idea which could not occur before the agricultural stage of
civilisation), the Greeks refined and elevated the idea into the Demeter
of the Hymn, and of the Cnidian statue. To do this was the result of
their unique gifts as a race. Meanwhile the other notion of a Ruler of
Souls, in Greece attached to Persephone, is found among peoples not yet
agricultural: nomads living on grubs, roots, seeds of wild grasses, and
the products of the chase. Almost all men's ideas are as old as mankind,
so far as we know mankind.
Conceptions originally "half-conscious," and purely popular, as of a
Spirit of Vegetation, incarnate, as it were, in each year's growth, were
next handled by conscious poets, like the author of our Hymn, and then
are "realised as abstract symbols, because intensely characteristic
examples of moral, or spiritual conditions." {72} Thus Demeter and
Persephone, no longer pigs or Grain-Mothers, "lend themselves to the
elevation and the correction of the sentiments of sorrow and awe, by the
presentment to the senses and imagination of an ideal expression of them.
Demeter cannot but seem the type of divine grief. Persephone is the
Goddess of Death, yet with a promise of life to come."
That the Eleusinia included an ethical element seems undeniable. This
one would think probable, _a priori_, on the ground that Greek Mysteries
are an embellished survival of the initiatory rites of savages, which do
contain elements of morality. This I have argued at some length in
"Myth, Ritual, and Religion." Many strange customs in some Greek
Mysteries, such as the daubing of the initiate with clay, the use of the
[Greek text] (the Australian _Tundun_, a small piece of wood whirled
noisily by a string), the general suggestion of _a new life_, the
flogging of boys at Sparta, their retreat, each with his instructor
(Australian _kabbo_, Greek [Greek text]) to the forests, are precisely
analogous to things found in Australia, America, and Africa. Now savage
rites are often associated with what we think gross cruelty, and, as in
Fiji, with abandoned license, of which the Fathers also accuse the
Greeks. But, among the Yao of Central Africa, the initiator, observes
Mr. Macdonald, "is said to give much good advice. His lectures condemn
selfishness, and a selfish person is called _mwisichana_, that is,
'uninitiated.'" {74a}
Among the Australians, Dampier, in 1688, observed the singular unselfish
generosity of distribution of food to the old, the weak, and the sick.
According to Mr. Howitt, the boys of the Coast Murring tribe are taught
in the Mysteries "to speak the straightforward truth while being
initiated, and are warned to avoid various offences against propriety and
morality." The method of instruction is bad, a pantomimic representation
of the sin to be avoided, but the intention is excellent. {74b} Among
the Kurnai respect for the old, for unprotected women, the duty of
unselfishness, and other ethical ideas are inculcated, {74c} while
certain food taboos prevail during the rite, as was also the case in the
Eleusinia. That this moral idea of "sharing what they have with their
friends" is not confined merely to the tribe, is proved by the experience
of John Finnegan, a white man lost near Moreton Bay early in this
century. "At all times, whether they had much or little, fish or
kangaroo, they always gave me as much as I could eat." Even when the
whites stole the fish of the natives, and were detected, "instead of
attempting to repossess themselves of the fish, they instantly set at
work to procure more for us, and one or two fetched us as much _dingowa_
as they could carry." {75} The first English settlers in Virginia, on
the other hand, when some native stole a cup, burned down the whole town.
Thus the morality of the savage is not merely tribal (as is often
alleged), and is carried into practice, as well as inculcated, in some
regions, not in all, during the Mysteries.
For these reasons, if the Greek Mysteries be survivals of savage
ceremonies (as there is no reason to doubt that they are), the savage
association of moral instruction with mummeries might survive as easily
as anything else. That it did survive is plain from numerous passages in
classical authors. {76a} The initiate "live a pious life in regard to
strangers and citizens." They are to be "conscious of no evil": they are
to "protect such as have wrought no unrighteousness." Such precepts
"have their root in the ethico-religious consciousness." {76b} It is not
mere ritual purity that the Mysteries demand, either among naked
Australians, or Yao, or in Greece. Lobeck did his best to minimise the
testimony to the higher element in the Eleusinia, but without avail. The
study of early, barbaric, savage, classical, Egyptian, or Indian
religions should not be one-sided. Men have always been men, for good as
well as for evil; and religion, almost everywhere, is allied with ethics
no less than it is overrun by the parasite of myth, and the survival of
magic in ritual. The Mother and the Maid were "Saviours" ([Greek text]),
"holy" and "pure," despite contradictory legends. {77} The tales of
incest, as between Zeus and Persephone, are the result of the
genealogical mania. The Gods were grouped in family-relationships, to
account for their companionship in ritual, and each birth postulated an
amour. None the less the same deities offered "salvation," of a sort,
and were patrons of conduct.
Greek religion was thus not destitute of certain chief elements in our
own. But these were held in solution, with a host of other warring
elements, lustful, cruel, or buffooning. These elements Greece was
powerless to shake off; philosophers, by various expedients, might
explain away the contradictory myths which overgrew the religion, but
ritual, the luck of the State, and popular credulity, were tenacious of
the whole strange mingling of beliefs and practices.
* * * * *
The view taken of the Eleusinia in this note is hardly so exalted as that
of Dr. Hatch. "The main underlying conception of initiation was that
there were elements in human life from which the candidate must purify
himself before he could be fit to approach God." The need of
purification, ritual and moral, is certain, but one is not aware of
anything in the purely popular or priestly religion of Greece which
exactly answers to our word "God" as used in the passage cited.
Individuals, by dint of piety or of speculation, might approach the
conception, and probably many did, both in and out of the philosophic
schools. But traditional ritual and myth could scarcely rise to this
ideal; and it seems exaggerated to say of the crowded Eleusinian throng
of pilgrims that "the race of mankind was lifted on to a higher plane
when it came to be taught that only the pure in heart can see God." {78}
The black native boys in Australia pass through a purgative ceremony to
cure them of selfishness, and afterwards the initiator points to the blue
vault of sky, bidding them behold "Our Father, Mungan-ngaur." This is
very well meant, and very creditable to untutored savages: and creditable
ideas were not absent from the Eleusinia. But when we use the quotation,
"Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God," our meaning,
though not very definite, is a meaning which it would be hazardous to
attribute to a black boy,--or to Sophocles. The idea of the New Life
appears to occur in Australian Mysteries: a tribesman is buried, and
rises at a given signal. But here the New Life is rather that of the lad
admitted to full tribal privileges (including moral precepts) than that
of a converted character. Confirmation, rather than conversion, is the
analogy. The number of those analogies of ancient and savage with
Christian religion is remarkable. But even in Greek Mysteries the
conceptions are necessarily not so purely spiritual as in the Christian
creed, of which they seem half-conscious and fragmentary anticipations.
Or we may regard them as suggestions, which Christianity selected,
accepted, and purified.