creation of country-people of a high impressibility, dreaming over
their work in spring or autumn, half consciously touched by a sense
of its sacredness, and a sort of [104] mystery about it. For there
is much in the life of the farm everywhere which gives to persons of
any seriousness of disposition, special opportunity for grave and
gentle thoughts. The temper of people engaged in the occupations of
country life, so permanent, so "near to nature," is at all times
alike; and the habitual solemnity of thought and expression which
Wordsworth found in the peasants of Cumberland, and the painter
François Millet in the peasants of Brittany, may well have had its
prototype in early Greece. And so, even before the development, by
the poets, of their aweful and passionate story, Demeter and
Persephone seem to have been pre-eminently the venerable, or aweful,
goddesses. Demeter haunts the fields in spring, when the young lambs
are dropped; she visits the barns in autumn; she takes part in mowing
and binding up the corn, and is the goddess of sheaves. She presides
over all the pleasant, significant details of the farm, the
threshing-floor and the full granary, and stands beside the woman
baking bread at the oven. With these fancies are connected certain
simple rites; the half-understood local observance, and the half-
believed local legend, reacting capriciously on each other. They
leave her a fragment of bread and a morsel of meat, at the cross-
roads, to take on her journey; and perhaps some real Demeter carries
them away, as she wanders through the country. The incidents of
their yearly labour become to [105] them acts of worship; they seek
her blessing through many expressive names, and almost catch sight of
her, at dawn or evening, in the nooks of the fragrant fields. She
lays a finger on the grass at the road-side, and some new flower
comes up. All the picturesque implements of country life are hers;
the poppy also, emblem of an inexhaustible fertility, and full of
mysterious juices for the alleviation of pain. The countrywoman who
puts her child to sleep in the great, cradle-like, basket, for
winnowing the corn, remembers Demeter Courotrophos, the mother of
corn and children alike, and makes it a little coat out of the dress
worn by its father at his initiation into her mysteries. Yet she is
an angry goddess too, sometimes--Demeter Erinnys, the goblin of the
neighbourhood, haunting its shadowy places. She lies on the ground
out of doors on summer nights, and becomes wet with the dew. She
grows young again every spring, yet is of great age, the wrinkled
woman of the Homeric hymn, who becomes the nurse of Demophoon. Other
lighter, errant stories nest themselves, as time goes on, within the
greater. The water-newt, which repels the lips of the traveller who
stoops to drink, is a certain urchin, Abas, who spoiled by his
mockery the pleasure of the thirsting goddess, as she drank once of a
wayside spring in her wanderings. The night-owl is the transformed
Ascalabus, who alone had seen Persephone eat that morsel [106] of
pomegranate, in the garden of Aidoneus. The bitter wild mint was
once a girl, who for a moment had made her jealous, in Hades.
The episode of Triptolemus, to whom Demeter imparts the mysteries of
the plough, like the details of some sacred rite, that he may bear
them abroad to all people, embodies, in connexion with her, another
group of the circumstances of country life. As with all the other
episodes of the story, there are here also local variations,
traditions of various favourites of the goddess at different places,
of whom grammarians can tell us, finally obscured behind the greater
fame of Triptolemus of Eleusis. One might fancy, at first, that
Triptolemus was a quite Boeotian divinity, of the ploughshare. Yet
we know that the thoughts of the Greeks concerning the culture of the
earth from which they came, were most often noble ones; and if we
examine carefully the works of ancient art which represent him, the
second thought will suggest itself, that there was nothing clumsy or
coarse about this patron of the plough--something, rather, of the
movement of delicate wind or fire, about him and his chariot. And
this finer character is explained, if, as we are justified in doing,
we bring him into closest connexion with that episode, so full of a
strange mysticism, of the Nursing of Demophoon, in the Homeric hymn.
For, according to some traditions, none other [107] than Triptolemus
himself was the subject of that mysterious experiment, in which
Demeter laid the child nightly, in the red heat of the fire; and he
lives afterwards, not immortal indeed, not wholly divine, yet, as
Shakspere says, a "nimble spirit," feeling little of the weight of
the material world about him--the element of winged fire in the clay.
The delicate, fresh, farm-lad we may still actually see sometimes,
like a graceful field-flower among the corn, becomes, in the sacred
legend of agriculture, a king's son; and then, the fire having
searched out from him the grosser elements on that famous night, all
compact now of spirit, a priest also, administering the gifts of
Demeter to all the earth. Certainly, the extant works of art which
represent him, gems or vase-paintings, conform truly enough to this
ideal of a "nimble spirit," though he wears the broad country hat,
which Hermes also wears, going swiftly, half on the airy, mercurial
wheels of his farm instrument, harrow or plough--half on wings of
serpents--the worm, symbolical of the soil, but winged, as sending up
the dust committed to it, after subtle firing, in colours and odours
of fruit and flowers. It is an altogether sacred character, again,
that he assumes in another precious work, of the severer period of
Greek art, lately discovered at Eleusis, and now preserved in the
museum of Athens, a singularly refined bas-relief, in which he
stands, a firm and serious youth, between Demeter and [108]
Persephone, who places her hand as with some sacred influence, and
consecrating gesture, upon him.
But the house of the prudent countryman will be, of course, a place
of honest manners; and Demeter Thesmophoros is the guardian of
married life, the deity of the discretion of wives. She is therefore
the founder of civilised order. The peaceful homes of men, scattered
about the land, in their security--Demeter represents these fruits of
the earth also, not without a suggestion of the white cities, which
shine upon the hills above the waving fields of corn, seats of
justice and of true kingship. She is also in a certain sense the
patron of travellers, having, in her long wanderings after
Persephone, recorded and handed down those omens, caught from little
things--the birds which crossed her path, the persons who met her on
the way, the words they said, the things they carried in their hands,
einodia symbola+--by noting which, men bring their journeys to a
successful end; so that the simple countryman may pass securely on
his way; and is led by signs from the goddess herself, when he
travels far to visit her, at Hermione or Eleusis.
So far the attributes of Demeter and Kore are similar. In the
mythical conception, as in the religious acts connected with it, the
mother and the daughter are almost interchangeable; [109] they are
the two goddesses, the twin-named. Gradually, the office of
Persephone is developed, defines itself; functions distinct from
those of Demeter are attributed to her. Hitherto, always at the side
of Demeter and sharing her worship, she now appears detached from
her, going and coming, on her mysterious business. A third part of
the year she abides in darkness; she comes up in the spring; and
every autumn, when the countryman sows his seed in the earth, she
descends thither again, and the world of the dead lies open, spring
and autumn, to let her in and out. Persephone, then, is the summer-
time, and, in this sense, a daughter of the earth; but the summer as
bringing winter; the flowery splendour and consummated glory of the
year, as thereafter immediately beginning to draw near to its end, as
the first yellow leaf crosses it, in the first severer wind. She is
the last day of spring, or the first day of autumn, in the threefold
division of the Greek year. Her story is, indeed, but the story, in
an intenser form, of Adonis, of Hyacinth, of Adrastus--the king's
blooming son, fated, in the story of Herodotus, to be wounded to
death with an iron spear--of Linus, a fair child who is torn to
pieces by hounds every spring-time--of the English Sleeping Beauty.
From being the goddess of summer and the flowers, she becomes the
goddess of night and sleep and death, confuseable with Hecate, the
goddess of midnight [110] terrors--Korê arrêtos,+ the mother of the
Erinnyes, who appeared to Pindar, to warn him of his approaching
death, upbraiding him because he had made no hymn in her praise,
which swan's song he thereupon began, but finished with her. She is
a twofold goddess, therefore, according as one or the other of these
two contrasted aspects of her nature is seized, respectively. A
duality, an inherent opposition in the very conception of Persephone,
runs all through her story, and is part of her ghostly power. There
is ever something in her of a divided or ambiguous identity: hence
the many euphemisms of later language concerning her.
The "worship of sorrow," as Goethe called it, is sometimes supposed
to have had almost no place in the religion of the Greeks. Their
religion has been represented as a religion of mere cheerfulness, the
worship by an untroubled, unreflecting humanity, conscious of no
deeper needs, of the embodiments of its own joyous activity. It
helped to hide out of their sight those traces of decay and
weariness, of which the Greeks were constitutionally shy, to keep
them from peeping too curiously into certain shadowy places,
appropriate enough to the gloomy imagination of the middle age; and
it hardly proposed to itself to give consolation to people who, in
truth, were never "sick or sorry." But this familiar view of Greek
religion is based on a consideration of a part only of what is known
[111] concerning it, and really involves a misconception, akin to
that which underestimates the influence of the romantic spirit
generally, in Greek poetry and art; as if Greek art had dealt
exclusively with human nature in its sanity, suppressing all motives
of strangeness, all the beauty which is born of difficulty,
permitting nothing but an Olympian, though perhaps somewhat wearisome
calm. In effect, such a conception of Greek art and poetry leaves in
the central expressions of Greek culture none but negative qualities;
and the legend of Demeter and Persephone, perhaps the most popular of
all Greek legends, is sufficient to show that the "worship of sorrow"
was not without its function in Greek religion; their legend is a
legend made by and for sorrowful, wistful, anxious people; while the
most important artistic monuments of that legend sufficiently prove
that the Romantic spirit was really at work in the minds of Greek
artists, extracting by a kind of subtle alchemy, a beauty, not
without the elements of tranquillity, of dignity and order, out of a
matter, at first sight painful and strange.
The student of origins, as French critics say, of the earliest stages
of art and poetry, must be content to follow faint traces; and in
what has been here said, much may seem to have been made of little,
with too much completion, by a general framework or setting, of what
after [112] all are but doubtful or fragmentary indications. Yet
there is a certain cynicism too, in that over-positive temper, which
is so jealous of our catching any resemblance in the earlier world to
the thoughts that really occupy our own minds, and which, in its
estimate of the actual fragments of antiquity, is content to find no
seal of human intelligence upon them. Slight indeed in themselves,
these fragmentary indications become suggestive of much, when viewed
in the light of such general evidence about the human imagination as
is afforded by the theory of "comparative mythology," or what is
called the theory of "animism." Only, in the application of these
theories, the student of Greek religion must never forget that, after
all, it is with poetry, not with systematic theological belief or
dogma, that he has to do. As regards this story of Demeter and
Persephone, what we actually possess is some actual fragments of
poetry, some actual fragments of sculpture; and with a curiosity,
justified by the direct aesthetic beauty of these fragments, we feel
our way backwards to that engaging picture of the poet-people, with
which the ingenuity of modern theory has filled the void in our
knowledge. The abstract poet of that first period of mythology,
creating in this wholly impersonal, intensely spiritual way,--the
abstract spirit of poetry itself, rises before the mind; and, in
speaking of this poetical age, we must take heed, before all things,
in no sense to misconstrue the poets.
NOTES
94. +Transliteration: epainê Persephonê. Translation: "dread
Persephone." See, for example, Odyssey, Book 10.490 and 563.
94. +"According to the apparent import of her name"; Pater likely
refers to the etymology of "Persophone"--"bringer of destruction."
95. *Theogony, 912-14:
+Transliteration:
Autar ho Dêmêtros polyphorbês es lechos êlthen
ê teke Persephonên leukôlenon, hên Aidôneus
hêrpasen hês para mêtros, edôke de mêtieta Zeus.
+Translation: "And he came to bountiful Demeter’s bed, / and she
gave birth to white-armed Persephone, whom Aidoneus / took from her
mother’s side; but Zeus, wise counsellor, gave her to him." Hesiod.
The Homeric Hymns and Homerica. Theogony. Cambridge, MA., Harvard
University Press. London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1914.
103. *In the Homeric hymn, pre-eminently, of the flower which grew up
for the first time, to snare the footsteps of Kore, the fair but
deadly Narcissus, the flower of narkê, the numbness of death.
108. +Transliteration: einodia symbola. Translation: "signs along
the roadside."
110. +Transliteration: Korê arrêtos. Translation: "Korê the
mysterious, the horrible ."
THE MYTH OF DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE: II
[113] THE stories of the Greek mythology, like other things which
belong to no man, and for which no one in particular is responsible,
had their fortunes. In that world of floating fancies there was a
struggle for life; there were myths which never emerged from that
first stage of popular conception, or were absorbed by stronger
competitors, because, as some true heroes have done, they lacked the
sacred poet or prophet, and were never remodelled by literature;
while, out of the myth of Demeter, under the careful conduct of
poetry and art, came the little pictures, the idylls, of the Homeric
hymn, and the gracious imagery of Praxiteles. The myth has now
entered its second or poetical phase, then, in which more definite
fancies are grouped about the primitive stock, in a conscious
literary temper, and the whole interest settles round the images of
the beautiful girl going down into the darkness, and the weary woman
who seeks her lost daughter--divine persons, then sincerely believed
in by the majority of the Greeks. The Homeric hymn [114] is the
central monument of this second phase. In it, the changes of the
natural year have become a personal history, a story of human
affection and sorrow, yet with a far-reaching religious significance
also, of which the mere earthly spring and autumn are but an analogy;
and in the development of this human element, the writer of the hymn
sometimes displays a genuine power of pathetic expression. The whole
episode of the fostering of Demophoon, in which over the body of the
dying child human longing and regret are blent so subtly with the
mysterious design of the goddess to make the child immortal, is an
excellent example of the sentiment of pity in literature. Yet though
it has reached the stage of conscious literary interpretation, much
of its early mystical or cosmical character still lingers about the
story, as it is here told. Later mythologists simply define the
personal history; but in this hymn we may, again and again, trace
curious links of connexion with the original purpose of the myth.
Its subject is the weary woman, indeed, our Lady of Sorrows, the
mater dolorosa of the ancient world, but with a certain latent
reference, all through, to the mystical person of the earth. Her
robe of dark blue is the raiment of her mourning, but also the blue
robe of the earth in shadow, as we see it in Titian's landscapes; her
great age is the age of the immemorial earth; she becomes a nurse,
therefore, holding Demophoon in her bosom; [115] the folds of her
garment are fragrant, not merely with the incense of Eleusis, but
with the natural perfume of flowers and fruit. The sweet breath with
which she nourishes the child Demophoon, is the warm west wind,
feeding all germs of vegetable life; her bosom, where he lies, is the
bosom of the earth, with its strengthening heat, reserved and shy,
offended if human eyes scrutinise too closely its secret chemistry;
it is with the earth's natural surface of varied colour that she has,
"in time past, given pleasure to the sun"; the yellow hair which
falls suddenly over her shoulders, at her transformation in the house
of Celeus, is still partly the golden corn;--in art and poetry she is
ever the blond goddess; tarrying in her temple, of which an actual
hollow in the earth is the prototype, among the spicy odours of the
Eleusinian ritual, she is the spirit of the earth, lying hidden in
its dark folds until the return of spring, among the flower-seeds and
fragrant roots, like the seeds and aromatic woods hidden in the
wrappings of the dead. Throughout the poem, we have a sense of a
certain nearness to nature, surviving from an earlier world; the sea
is understood as a person, yet is still the real sea, with the waves
moving. When it is said that no bird gave Demeter tidings of
Persephone, we feel that to that earlier world, ways of communication
between all creatures may have seemed open, which are closed to us.
It is Iris who brings to Demeter the message of Zeus; [116] that is,
the rainbow signifies to the earth the good-will of the rainy sky
towards it. Persephone springing up with great joy from the couch of
Aidoneus, to return to her mother, is the sudden outburst of the
year. The heavy and narcotic aroma of spring flowers hangs about
her, as about the actual spring. And this mingling of the primitive
cosmical import of the myth with the later, personal interests of the
story, is curiously illustrated by the place which the poem assigns
to Hecate. This strange Titaness is, first, a nymph only;
afterwards, as if changed incurably by the passionate cry of
Persephone, she becomes her constant attendant, and is even
identified with her. But in the Homeric hymn her lunar character is
clear; she is really the moon only, who hears the cry of Persephone,
as the sun saw her, when Aidoneus carried her away. One morning, as
the mother wandered, the moon appeared, as it does in its last
quarter, rising very bright, just before dawn; that is, in the words
of the Homeric hymn--"on the tenth morning Hecate met her, having a
light in her hands." The fascinating, but enigmatical figure,
"sitting ever in her cave, half-veiled with a shining veil, thinking
delicate thoughts," in which we seem to see the subject of some
picture of the Italian Renaissance, is but the lover of Endymion--
like Persephone, withdrawn, in her season, from the eyes of men. The
sun saw her; the moon saw her not, but heard her cry, and is [117]
ever after the half-veiled attendant of the queen of dreams and of
the dead.
But the story of Demeter and Persephone lends itself naturally to
description, and it is in descriptive beauties that the Homeric hymn
excels; its episodes are finished designs, and directly stimulate the
painter and the sculptor to a rivalry with them. Weaving the names
of the flowers into his verse, names familiar to us in English,
though their Greek originals are uncertain, the writer sets
Persephone before us, herself like one of them--kalykôpis+--like the
budding calyx of a flower,--in a picture, which, in its mingling of a
quaint freshness and simplicity with a certain earnestness, reads
like a description of some early Florentine design, such as Sandro
Botticelli's Allegory of the Seasons. By an exquisite chance also, a
common metrical expression connects the perfume of the newly-created
narcissus with the salt odour of the sea. Like one of those early
designs also, but with a deeper infusion of religious earnestness, is
the picture of Demeter sitting at the wayside, in shadow as always,
with the well of water and the olive-tree. She has been journeying
all night, and now it is morning, and the daughters of Celeus bring
their vessels to draw water. That image of the seated Demeter,
resting after her long flight "through the dark continent," or in the
house of Celeus, when she refuses the red wine, or again, solitary,
in her newly-finished [118] temple of Eleusis, enthroned in her
grief, fixed itself deeply on the Greek imagination, and became a
favourite subject of Greek artists. When the daughters of Celeus
come to conduct her to Eleusis, they come as in a Greek frieze, full
of energy and motion and waving lines, but with gold and colours upon
it. Eleusis--coming--the coming of Demeter thither, as thus told in
the Homeric hymn, is the central instance in Greek mythology of such
divine appearances. "She leaves for a season the company of the gods
and abides among men;" and men's merit is to receive her in spite of
appearances. Metaneira and others, in the Homeric hymn, partly
detect her divine character; they find charis+;--a certain gracious
air--about her, which makes them think her, perhaps, a royal person
in disguise. She becomes in her long wanderings almost wholly
humanised, and in return, she and Persephone, alone of the Greek
gods, seem to have been the objects of a sort of personal love and
loyalty. Yet they are ever the solemn goddesses,--theai semnai,+
the word expressing religious awe, the Greek sense of the divine
presence.
Plato, in laying down the rules by which the poets are to be guided
in speaking about divine things to the citizens of the ideal
republic, forbids all those episodes of mythology which represent the
gods as assuming various forms, and visiting the earth in disguise.
Below the [119] express reasons which he assigns for this rule, we
may perhaps detect that instinctive antagonism to the old Heraclitean
philosophy of perpetual change, which forces him, in his theory of
morals and the state, of poetry and music, of dress and manners even,
and of style in the very vessels and furniture of daily life, on an
austere simplicity, the older Dorian or Egyptian type of a rigid,
eternal immobility. The disintegrating, centrifugal influence, which
had penetrated, as he thought, political and social existence, making
men too myriad-minded, had laid hold on the life of the gods also,
and, even in their calm sphere, one could hardly identify a single
divine person as himself, and not another. There must, then, be no
doubling, no disguises, no stories of transformation. The modern
reader, however, will hardly acquiesce in this "improvement" of Greek
mythology. He finds in these stories, like that, for instance, of
the appearance of Athene to Telemachus, in the first book of the
Odyssey, which has a quite biblical mysticity and solemnity,--stories
in which, the hard material outline breaking up, the gods lay aside
their visible form like a garment, yet remain essentially
themselves,--not the least spiritual element of Greek religion, an
evidence of the sense therein of unseen presences, which might at any
moment cross a man's path, to be recognised, in half disguise, by the
more delicately trained eye, here or there, by one and not by [120]
another. Whatever religious elements they lacked, they had at least
this sense of subtler and more remote ways of personal presence.