to smile. She refused to drink wine, but tasted of a cup mingled of
water and barley, flavoured with mint. It happened that Metaneira
had lately borne a child. It had come beyond hope, long after its
elder brethren, and was the object of a peculiar tenderness and of
many prayers with all. Demeter consented to remain, and become the
nurse of this child. She took the child in her immortal hands, and
placed it in her fragrant bosom; and the heart of the mother
rejoiced. Thus Demeter nursed Demophoon. And the child grew like a
god, neither sucking the breast, nor eating bread; but Demeter daily
anointed it with ambrosia, as if it had indeed been the child of a
god, breathing sweetly over it and holding it in her bosom; and at
nights, when she lay alone with the child, she would hide it secretly
in the red strength of the fire, like a brand; for her heart yearned
towards it, and she would fain have given to it immortal youth.
"But the foolishness of his mother prevented it. For a suspicion
growing up within her, she awaited her time, and one night peeped in
upon [88] them, and thereupon cried out in terror at what she saw.
And the goddess heard her; and a sudden anger seizing her, she
plucked the child from the fire and cast it on the ground,--the child
she would fain have made immortal, but who must now share the common
destiny of all men, though some inscrutable grace should still be
his, because he had lain for awhile on the knees and in the bosom of
the goddess.
"Then Demeter manifested herself openly. She put away the mask of
old age, and changed her form, and the spirit of beauty breathed
about her. A fragrant odour fell from her raiment, and her flesh
shone from afar; the long yellow hair descended waving over her
shoulders, and the great house was filled as with the brightness of
lightning. She passed out through the halls; and Metaneira fell to
the earth, and was speechless for a long time, and remembered not to
lift the child from the ground. But the sisters, hearing its piteous
cries, leapt from their beds and ran to it. Then one of them lifted
the child from the earth, and wrapped it in her bosom, and another
hastened to her mother's chamber to awake her: they came round the
child, and washed away the flecks of the fire from its panting body,
and kissed it tenderly all about: but the anguish of the child ceased
not; the arms of other and different nurses were about to enfold it.
"So, all night, trembling with fear, they [89] sought to propitiate
the glorious goddess; and in the morning they told all to their
father, Celeus. And he, according to the commands of the goddess,
built a fair temple; and all the people assisted; and when it was
finished every man departed to his own home. Then Demeter returned,
and sat down within the temple-walls, and remained still apart from
the company of the gods, alone in her wasting regret for her daughter
Persephone.
"And, in her anger, she sent upon the earth a year of grievous
famine. The dry seed remained hidden in the soil; in vain the oxen
drew the ploughshare through the furrows; much white seed-corn fell
fruitless on the earth, and the whole human race had like to have
perished, and the gods had no more service of men, unless Zeus had
interfered. First he sent Iris, afterwards all the gods, one by one,
to turn Demeter from her anger; but none was able to persuade her;
she heard their words with a hard countenance, and vowed by no means
to return to Olympus, nor to yield the fruit of the earth, until her
eyes had seen her lost daughter again. Then, last of all, Zeus sent
Hermes into the kingdom of the dead, to persuade Aidoneus to suffer
his bride to return to the light of day. And Hermes found the king
at home in his palace, sitting on a couch, beside the shrinking
Persephone, consumed within herself by desire for her mother. A
doubtful smile passed over [90] the face of Aidoneus; yet he obeyed
the message, and bade Persephone return; yet praying her a little to
have gentle thoughts of him, nor judge him too hardly, who was also
an immortal god. And Persephone arose up quickly in great joy; only,
ere she departed, he caused her to eat a morsel of sweet pomegranate,
designing secretly thereby, that she should not remain always upon
earth, but might some time return to him. And Aidoneus yoked the
horses to his chariot; and Persephone ascended into it; and Hermes
took the reins in his hands and drove out through the infernal halls;
and the horses ran willingly; and they two quickly passed over the
ways of that long journey, neither the waters of the sea, nor of the
rivers, nor the deep ravines of the hills, nor the cliffs of the
shore, resisting them; till at last Hermes placed Persephone before
the door of the temple where her mother was; who, seeing her, ran out
quickly to meet her, like a Maenad coming down a mountain-side, dusky
with woods.
"So they spent all that day together in intimate communion, having
many things to hear and tell. Then Zeus sent to them Rhea, his
venerable mother, the oldest of divine persons, to bring them back
reconciled, to the company of the gods; and he ordained that
Persephone should remain two parts of the year with her mother, and
one third part only with her husband, in the kingdom of the dead. So
Demeter suffered [91] the earth to yield its fruits once more, and
the land was suddenly laden with leaves and flowers and waving corn.
Also she visited Triptolemus and the other princes of Eleusis, and
instructed them in the performance of her sacred rites,--those
mysteries of which no tongue may speak. Only, blessed is he whose
eyes have seen them; his lot after death is not as the lot of other
men!"
In the story of Demeter, as in all Greek myths, we may trace the
action of three different influences, which have moulded it with
varying effects, in three successive phases of its development.
There is first its half-conscious, instinctive, or mystical, phase,
in which, under the form of an unwritten legend, living from mouth to
mouth, and with details changing as it passes from place to place,
there lie certain primitive impressions of the phenomena of the
natural world. We may trace it next in its conscious, poetical or
literary, phase, in which the poets become the depositaries of the
vague instinctive product of the popular imagination, and handle it
with a purely literary interest, fixing its outlines, and simplifying
or developing its situations. Thirdly, the myth passes into the
ethical phase, in which the persons and the incidents of the poetical
narrative are realised as abstract symbols, because intensely
characteristic examples, of moral or spiritual conditions. [92]
Behind the adventures of the stealing of Persephone and the
wanderings of Demeter in search of her, as we find them in the
Homeric hymn, we may discern the confused conception, under which
that early age, in which the myths were first created, represented to
itself those changes in physical things, that order of summer and
winter, of which it had no scientific, or systematic explanation, but
in which, nevertheless, it divined a multitude of living agencies,
corresponding to those ascertained forces, of which our colder modern
science tells the number and the names. Demeter--Demeter and
Persephone, at first, in a sort of confused union--is the earth, in
the fixed order of its annual changes, but also in all the accident
and detail of the growth and decay of its children. Of this
conception, floating loosely in the air, the poets of a later age
take possession; they create Demeter and Persephone as we know them
in art and poetry. From the vague and fluctuating union, in which
together they had represented the earth and its changes, the mother
and the daughter define themselves with special functions, and with
fixed, well-understood relationships, the incidents and emotions of
which soon weave themselves into a pathetic story. Lastly, in
proportion as the literary or aesthetic activity completes the
picture or the poem, the ethical interest makes itself felt. These
strange persons--Demeter and Persephone--these marvellous incidents--
the translation into Hades, the seeking [93] of Demeter, the return
of Persephone to her,--lend themselves to the elevation and
correction of the sentiments of sorrow and awe, by the presentment to
the senses and the 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. Those three
phases, then, which are more or less discernible in all mythical
development, and constitute a natural order in it, based on the
necessary conditions of human apprehension, are fixed more plainly,
perhaps, than in any other passage of Greek mythology in the story of
Demeter. And as the Homeric hymn is the central expression of its
literary or poetical phase, so the marble remains, of which I shall
have to speak by and bye, are the central extant illustration of what
I have called its ethical phase.
Homer, in the Iliad, knows Demeter, but only as the goddess of the
fields, the originator and patroness of the labours of the
countryman, in their yearly order. She stands, with her hair yellow
like the ripe corn, at the threshing-floor, and takes her share in
the toil, the heap of grain whitening, as the flails, moving in the
wind, disperse the chaff. Out in the fresh fields, she yields to the
embraces of Iasion, to the extreme jealousy of Zeus, who slays her
mortal lover with lightning. The flowery town of Pyrasus--the wheat-
town,--an ancient place in Thessaly, is her sacred precinct. But
when [94] Homer gives a list of the orthodox gods, her name is not
mentioned.
Homer, in the Odyssey, knows Persephone also, but not as Kore; only
as the queen of the dead--epainê Persephonê+--dreadful Persephone, the
goddess of destruction and death, according to the apparent import of
her name.+ She accomplishes men's evil prayers; she is the mistress
and manager of men's shades, to which she can dispense a little more
or less of life, dwelling in her mouldering palace on the steep shore
of the Oceanus, with its groves of barren willows and tall poplars.
But that Homer knew her as the daughter of Demeter there are no
signs; and of his knowledge of the rape of Persephone there is only
the faintest sign,--he names Hades by the golden reins of his
chariot, and his beautiful horses.
The main theme, then, the most characteristic peculiarities, of the
story, as subsequently developed, are not to be found, expressly, in
the true Homer. We have in him, on the one hand, Demeter, as the
perfectly fresh and blithe goddess of the fields, whose children, if
she has them, must be as the perfectly discreet and peaceful,
unravished Kore; on the other hand, we have Persephone, as the wholly
terrible goddess of death, who brings to Ulysses the querulous
shadows of the dead, and has the head of the gorgon Medusa in her
keeping. And it is only when these two contrasted images have been
[95] brought into intimate relationship, only when Kore and
Persephone have been identified, that the deeper mythology of Demeter
begins.
This combination has taken place in Hesiod; and in three lines of the
Theogony we find the stealing of Persephone by Aidoneus,*--one of
those things in Hesiod, perhaps, which are really older than Homer.
Hesiod has been called the poet of helots, and is thought to have
preserved some of the traditions of those earlier inhabitants of
Greece who had become a kind of serfs; and in a certain shadowiness
in his conceptions of the gods, contrasting with the concrete and
heroic forms of the gods of Homer, we may perhaps trace something of
the quiet unspoken brooding of a subdued people--of that silently
dreaming temper to which the story of Persephone properly belongs.
However this may be, it is in Hesiod that the two images,
unassociated in Homer--the goddess of summer and the goddess of
death, Kore and Persephone--are identified with much significance;
and that strange, dual being makes her first appearance, whose latent
capabilities the poets afterwards developed; among the rest, a
peculiar blending of those two contrasted aspects, full of purpose
for the duly chastened intelligence; death, resurrection,
rejuvenescence.--Awake, and sing, ye that dwell in the dust!
[96] Modern science explains the changes of the natural world by the
hypothesis of certain unconscious forces; and the sum of these
forces, in their combined action, constitutes the scientific
conception of nature. But, side by side with the growth of this more
mechanical conception, an older and more spiritual, Platonic,
philosophy has always maintained itself, a philosophy more of
instinct than of the understanding, the mental starting-point of
which is not an observed sequence of outward phenomena, but some such
feeling as most of us have on the first warmer days in spring, when
we seem to feel the genial processes of nature actually at work; as
if just below the mould, and in the hard wood of the trees, there
were really circulating some spirit of life, akin to that which makes
its energies felt within ourselves. Starting with a hundred
instincts such as this, that older unmechanical, spiritual, or
Platonic, philosophy envisages nature rather as the unity of a living
spirit or person, revealing itself in various degrees to the kindred
spirit of the observer, than as a system of mechanical forces. Such
a philosophy is a systematised form of that sort of poetry (we may
study it, for instance, either in Shelley or in Wordsworth), which
also has its fancies of a spirit of the earth, or of the sky,--a
personal intelligence abiding in them, the existence of which is
assumed in every suggestion such poetry makes to us of a sympathy
between the ways [97] and aspects of outward nature and the moods of
men. And what stood to the primitive intelligence in place of such
metaphysical conceptions were those cosmical stories or myths, such
as this of Demeter and Persephone, which springing up spontaneously
in many minds, came at last to represent to them, in a certain number
of sensibly realised images, all they knew, felt, or fancied, of the
natural world about them. The sky in its unity and its variety,--the
sea in its unity and its variety,--mirrored themselves respectively
in these simple, but profoundly impressible spirits, as Zeus, as
Glaucus or Poseidon. And a large part of their experience--all, that
is, that related to the earth in its changes, the growth and decay of
all things born of it--was covered by the story of Demeter, the myth
of the earth as a mother. They thought of Demeter as the old Germans
thought of Hertha, or the later Greeks of Pan, as the Egyptians
thought of Isis, the land of the Nile, made green by the streams of
Osiris, for whose coming Isis longs, as Demeter for Persephone; thus
naming together in her all their fluctuating thoughts, impressions,
suspicions, of the earth and its appearances, their whole complex
divination of a mysterious life, a perpetual working, a continuous
act of conception there. Or they thought of the many-coloured earth
as the garment of Demeter, as the great modern pantheist poet speaks
of it as the "garment of God." Its [98] brooding fertility; the
spring flowers breaking from its surface, the thinly disguised
unhealthfulness of their heavy perfume, and of their chosen places of
growth; the delicate, feminine, Prosperina-like motion of all growing
things; its fruit, full of drowsy and poisonous, or fresh, reviving
juices; its sinister caprices also, its droughts and sudden volcanic
heats; the long delays of spring; its dumb sleep, so suddenly flung
away; the sadness which insinuates itself into its languid
luxuriance; all this grouped itself round the persons of Demeter and
her circle. They could turn always to her, from the actual earth
itself, in aweful yet hopeful prayer, and a devout personal
gratitude, and explain it through her, in its sorrow and its promise,
its darkness and its helpfulness to man.
The personification of abstract ideas by modern painters or
sculptors, of wealth, of commerce, of health, for instance, shocks,
in most cases, the aesthetic sense, as something conventional or
rhetorical, as a mere transparent allegory, or figure of speech,
which could please almost no one. On the other hand, such symbolical
representations, under the form of human persons, as Giotto's Virtues
and Vices at Padua, or his Saint Poverty at Assisi, or the series of
the planets in certain early Italian engravings, are profoundly
poetical and impressive. They seem to be something more than mere
symbolism, [99] and to be connected with some peculiarly sympathetic
penetration, on the part of the artist, into the subjects he intended
to depict. Symbolism intense as this, is the creation of a special
temper, in which a certain simplicity, taking all things literally,
au pied de la lettre, is united to a vivid pre-occupation with the
aesthetic beauty of the image itself, the figured side of figurative
expression, the form of the metaphor. When it is said, "Out of his
mouth goeth a sharp sword," that temper is ready to deal directly and
boldly with that difficult image, like that old designer of the
fourteenth century, who has depicted this, and other images of the
Apocalypse, in a coloured window at Bourges. Such symbolism cares a
great deal for the hair of Temperance, discreetly bound, for some
subtler likeness to the colour of the sky in the girdle of Hope, for
the inwoven flames in the red garment of Charity. And what was
specially peculiar to the temper of the old Florentine painter,
Giotto, to the temper of his age in general, doubtless, more than to
that of ours, was the persistent and universal mood of the age in
which the story of Demeter and Persephone was first created. If some
painter of our own time has conceived the image of The Day so
intensely, that we hardly think of distinguishing between the image,
with its girdle of dissolving morning mist, and the meaning of the
image; if William Blake, to our so great delight, makes the morning
stars [100] literally "sing together,"--these fruits of individual
genius are in part also a "survival" from a different age, with the
whole mood of which this mode of expression was more congruous than
it is with ours. But there are traces of the old temper in the man
of to-day also; and through these we can understand that earlier
time--a very poetical time, with the more highly gifted peoples--in
which every impression men received of the action of powers without
or within them suggested to them the presence of a soul or will, like
their own--a person, with a living spirit, and senses, and hands, and
feet; which, when it talked of the return of Kore to Demeter, or the
marriage of Zeus and Here, was not using rhetorical language, but
yielding to a real illusion; to which the voice of man "was really a
stream, beauty an effluence, death a mist."
The gods of Greek mythology overlap each other; they are confused or
connected with each other, lightly or deeply, as the case may be, and
sometimes have their doubles, at first sight as in a troubled dream,
yet never, when we examine each detail more closely, without a
certain truth to human reason. It is only in a limited sense that it
is possible to lift, and examine by itself, one thread of the network
of story and imagery, which, in a certain age of civilisation, wove
itself over every detail of life and thought, over every name in the
past, and almost every place in [101] Greece. The story of Demeter,
then, was the work of no single author or place or time; the poet of
its first phase was no single person, but the whole consciousness of
an age, though an age doubtless with its differences of more or less
imaginative individual minds--with one, here or there, eminent,
though but by a little, above a merely receptive majority, the
spokesman of a universal, though faintly-felt prepossession,
attaching the errant fancies of the people around him to definite
names and images. The myth grew up gradually, and at many distant
places, in many minds, independent of each other, but dealing in a
common temper with certain elements and aspects of the natural world,
as one here, and another there, seemed to catch in that incident or
detail which flashed more incisively than others on the inward eye,
some influence, or feature, or characteristic of the great mother.
The various epithets of Demeter, the local variations of her story,
its incompatible incidents, bear witness to the manner of its
generation. They illustrate that indefiniteness which is
characteristic of Greek mythology, a theology with no central
authority, no link on historic time, liable from the first to an
unobserved transformation. They indicate the various, far-distant
spots from which the visible body of the goddess slowly collected its
constituents, and came at last to have a well-defined existence in
the popular mind. In this sense, Demeter appears to one in [102] her
anger, sullenly withholding the fruits of the earth, to another in
her pride of Persephone, to another in her grateful gift of the arts
of agriculture to man; at last only, is there a general recognition
of a clearly-arrested outline, a tangible embodiment, which has
solidified itself in the imagination of the people, they know not
how.
The worship of Demeter belongs to that older religion, nearer to the
earth, which some have thought they could discern, behind the more
definitely national mythology of Homer. She is the goddess of dark
caves, and is not wholly free from monstrous form. She gave men the
first fig in one place, the first poppy in another; in another, she
first taught the old Titans to mow. She is the mother of the vine
also; and the assumed name by which she called herself in her
wanderings, is Dôs--a gift; the crane, as the harbinger of rain, is
her messenger among the birds. She knows the magic powers of certain
plants, cut from her bosom, to bane or bless; and, under one of her
epithets, herself presides over the springs, as also coming from the
secret places of the earth. She is the goddess, then, at first, of
the fertility of the earth in its wildness; and so far, her
attributes are to some degree confused with those of the Thessalian
Gaia and the Phrygian Cybele. Afterwards, and it is now that her
most characteristic attributes begin to concentrate themselves, [103]
she separates herself from these confused relationships, as specially
the goddess of agriculture, of the fertility of the earth when
furthered by human skill. She is the preserver of the seed sown in
hope, under many epithets derived from the incidents of vegetation,
as the simple countryman names her, out of a mind full of the various
experiences of his little garden or farm. She is the most definite
embodiment of all those fluctuating mystical instincts, of which
Gaia,* the mother of the earth's gloomier offspring, is a vaguer and
mistier one. There is nothing of the confused outline, the mere
shadowiness of mystical dreaming, in this most concrete human figure.
No nation, less aesthetically gifted than the Greeks, could have thus
lightly thrown its mystical surmise and divination into images so
clear and idyllic as those of the solemn goddess of the country, in
whom the characteristics of the mother are expressed with so much
tenderness, and the "beauteous head" of Kore, then so fresh and
peaceful.