THOUGH the priestesses of Demeter, goddess of the cornfield, initiate brides and bridegrooms into the secrets of the couch, she has no husband of her own. While still young and gay, she bore Core and the lusty Iacchus to Zeus, her brother, out of wedlock. She also bore Plutus to the Titan Iasius, or Iasion, with whom she fell in love at the wedding of Cadmus and Harmonia. Inflamed by the nectar which flowed like water at the feast, the lovers slipped out of the house and lay together openly in a thrice-ploughed field. On their return, Zeus guessing from their demeanour and the mud on their arms and legs what they had been at, and enraged that Iasius should have dared to touch Demeter, struck him dead with a thunderbolt. But some say that Iasius was killed by his brother Dardanus, or torn to pieces by his own horses.
b. Demeter herself has a gentle soul, and Erysichthon, son of Tropias, was one of the few men with whom she ever dealt harshly. At the head of twenty companions, Erysichthon dared invade a grove which the Pelasgians had planted for her at Dotium, and began cutting down the sacred trees, to provide timber for his new banqueting hall. Demeter assumed the form of Nicippe, priestess of the grove, and mildly ordered Erysichthon to desist. It was only when he threatened her with his axe that she revealed herself in splendour and condemned him to suffer perpetual hunger, however much he might eat. Back he went to dinner, and gorged all day at his parents' expense, growing hungrier and thinner the more he ate, until they could no longer afford to keep him supplied with food, and he became a beggar in the streets, eating frith. Contrariwise, on Pandareus the Cretan, who stole Zeus's golden dog and thus avenged her for the killing of Iasius, Demeter bestowed the royal gift of never suffering from the belly-ache.
c. Demeter lost her gaiety for ever when young Core, afterwards called Persephone, was taken from her. Hades fell in love with Core, and went to ask Zeus's leave to marry her. Zeus feared to offend his eldest brother by a downright refusal, but knew also that Demeter would not forgive him if Core were committed to Tartarus; he therefore answered politically that he could neither give nor withhold his consent. This emboldened Hades to abduct the girl, as she was picking flowers in a meadow - it may have been at Sicilian Enna; or at Attic Colonus; or at Hermione; or somewhere in Crete, or near Pisa, or near Lerna; or beside Arcadian Pheneus, or at Boeotian Nysa, or anywhere else in the widely separated regions which Demeter visited in her wandering search for Core. But her own priests say that it was at Eleusis. She sought Core without rest for nine days and nights, neither eating nor drinking, and calling fruitlessly all the while. The only news she could get came from old Hecate, who early one morning had heard Core crying ‘A rape! A rape!' but, on hurrying to the rescue, found no sign of her.
e. ‘Oh, how greedily you drink!’ cried Abas, an elder son of Celeus’s, as Demeter gulped the pitcherful of barley-water, which was flavoured with mint. Demeter threw him a grim look, and he was metamorphosed into a lizard. Somewhat ashamed of herself, Demeter now decided to do Celeus a service, by making Demophoön immortal. That night she held him over the fire, to burn away his mortality. Metaneira, who was the daughter of Amphicyon, happened to enter the hall before the process was complete, and broke the spell; so Demophoön died. ‘Mine is an unlucky house!’ Celeus complained, weeping at the fate of his two sons, and thereafter was called Dysaules, ‘Dry your tears, Dysaules,’ said Demeter, ‘You will have three sons, including Triptolemus on whom I intend to confer such great gifts that you will forget your double loss.’
f. For Triptolemus who herded his father’s cattle, had recognized Demeter and given her the news she needed: ten days before this his brothers Eumolpus, a shepherd, and Eubuleus, a swineherd, had been out in the fields, feeding their beasts, when the earth suddenly gaped open, engulfing Eubuleus’s swine before his very eyes; then, with a heavy thud of hooves, a chariot drawn by black horses appeared, and dashed down the chasm. The chariot-driver’s face was invisible, but his right arm was tightly clasped around a shrieking girl. Eumolpus had been told of the event by Eubuleus, and made it the subject for a lament.
g. Armed with this evidence, Demeter summoned Hecate. Together they approached Helius, who sees everything, and forced him to admit that Hades had been the villain, doubtless wire, Persephone, and Hecate wth the connivance of his brother Zeus. Demeter was so angry that, instead of returning to Olympus, she continued to wander about the earth, forbidding the trees to yield fruit and the herbs to grow, until the race of men stood in danger of extinction. Zeus, ashamed to visit Demeter in person at Eleusis, sent her first a message by Iris (of which she took no notice), and then a deputation of the Olympian gods, with conciliatory gifts, begging her to be reconciled to his will. But she would not return to Olympus, and swore that the earth must remain barren until Core had been restored.
h. Only one course of action remained for Zeus. He sent Hermes with a message to Hades: ‘If you do not restore Core, we are all undone!’ and with another to Demeter: ‘You may have your daughter again, on the single condition that she has not yet tasted the food of the dead.’
i. Because Core had refused to eat so much as a crust of bread ever since her abduction, Hades was obliged to cloak his vexation, telling her mildly: ‘My child, you seem to be unhappy here, and your mother weeps for you. I have therefore decided to send you home.’
j. Core’s tears ceased to flow, and Hermes helped her to mount his chariot, But, just as she was setting off for Eleusis, one of Hades’ gardeners, by name Ascalaphus, began to cry and hoot derisively. ‘Having seen the Lady Core,’ he said, ‘pick a pomegranate from a tree in your orchard, and eat seven seeds, I am ready to bear witness that she has tasted the food of the dead!’ Hades grinned, and told Ascalaphus to perch on the back of Hermes’s chariot.
k. At Eleusis, Demeter joyfully embraced Core; but, on hearing about the pomegranate, grew more dejected than ever, and said again: ‘I will neither return to Olympus, nor remove my curse from the land.’ Zeus then persuaded Rhea, the mother of Hades, Demeter, and himself, to plead with her; and a compromise was at last reached. Core should spend three months of the year in Hades’s company, as Queen of Tartarus, with the title of Persephone, and the remaining nine in Demeter’s. Hecate offered to make sure that this arrangement was kept, and to keep constant watch on Core.
l. Demeter finally consented to return home. Before leaving Eleusis, she instructed Triptolemus, Eumolpus, and Celeus (together with Diocles, King of Pherae, who had been assiduously searching for Core all the while) in her worship and mysteries. But she punished Ascalaphus for his tale-bearing by pushing him down a hole and covering it with an enormous rock, from which he was finally released by Heracles; and then she changed him into a short-eared owl. She also rewarded the Pheneations of Arcadia, in whose house she rested after Poseidon had outraged her, with all kinds of grain, but forbade them to sow beans. One Cyamites was the first who dared do so; he has a shrine by the river Cephissus. Triptolemus she supplied with seed-corn, a wooden plough, and a chariot drawn by serpents; and sent him all over the world to teach mankind the art of agriculture. But first she gave him lessons on the Rarian Plain, which is why some call him the son of King Rarus. And to Phytalus, who had treated her kindly on the banks of the Cephissus, she gave a fig-tree, the first ever seen in Attica, and taught him
1. Core, Persephone, and Hecate were, clearly, the Goddess in Triad as Maiden, Nymph, and Crone, at a time when only women practised the mysteries of agriculture. Core stands for the green corn, Persephone for the ripe ears, and Hecate for the harvested corn-the ‘carline wife’ of the English countryside. But Demeter was the goddess’s general title, and Persephone’s name has been given to Core, which confuses the story. The myth of Demeter’s adventure in the thrice-ploughed field points to a fertility rite, which survived until recently in the Balkans: the corn priestess will have openly coupled with the sacred king at the autumn sowing in order to ensure a good harvest. In Attica the field was first ploughed in spring; then, after the summer harvest, cross-ploughed with a lighter share; finally, when sacrifices had been offered to the Tillage gods, ploughed again in the original direction during the autumn month of Pyanepsion, as a preliminary for sowing (Hesiod: Works and Days; Plutarch: On Isis and Osiris; Against Colores).
2. Persephone (from phero and phonos, ‘she who brings destruction’), also called Persephatta at Athens (from ptersis and ephapto, ‘she who fixes destruction’) and Proserpina (‘the fearful one’) at Rome was, it seems, a title of the Nymph when she sacrificed the sacred king. The title ‘Hecate’ (‘one hundred’) apparently refers to the hundred lunar months of his reign, and to the hundredfold harvest. The king’s death by a thunderbolt, or by the teeth of horses, or at the hands of the tanist, was his common fate in primitive Greece.
3. Core’s abduction by Hades forms part of the myth in which the Hellenic trinity of gods forcibly marry the pre-Hellenic Triple-goddess-Zeus Hera; Zeus or Poseidon Demeter; Hades Core-as in Irish myth Brian, Iuchar, and Iucharba marry the Triple-goddess Eire, Fodhla, and Banbha. It refers to male usurpation of the female agricultural mysteries in primitive times. Thus the incident of Demeter’s refusal to provide corn for mankind is only another version of Ino’s conspiracy to destroy Athamas’s harvest. Further, the Core myth accounts for the winter burial of a female corn-puppet, which was uncovered in the early spring and found to be sprouting: this pre-Hellenic custom survived in the countryside in Classical times, and is illustrated by vase-paintings of men freeing Core from a mound of earth with mattocks, or breaking open Mother Earth’s head with axes.
4. The story of Erysichthon, son of Tropias, is moral anecdote: among the Greeks, as among the Latin and early Irish, the felling of a sacred grove carried the death penalty. But a desperate and useless hunger for food, which the Elizabethans called ‘the wolf’, would not be an appropriate punishment for tree-felling, and Erysichthon’s name-also borne by a son of Cecrops-the patriarchalist and introducer of barley-cakes-means ‘earth-rearer’, which suggests that his real crime was daring to plough without Demeter’s consent, like Athamas. Pandareus’s stealing of the golden dog suggests Cretan intervention m Greece, when the Achaeans tried to reform agricultural ritual. This dog, taken from the Earth-goddess, seems to have been the visible proof of the Achaean High King’s independence of her.
5. The myths of Hylas (‘of the woodland’), Adonis, Lityerses, and Linus describe the annual mourning for the sacred king, or his boy-surrogate, sacrificed to placate the goddess of vegetation. This same surrogate appears in the legend of Triptolemus, who rode in a serpent- drawn chariot and carried sacks of corn, to symbolize that his death brought wealth. He was also Plutus (‘wealth’), begotten in the ploughed field, from whom Hades’s euphemistic title ‘Pluto’ is borrowed. Triptolemus (triptolmaios, ‘thrice daring’) may be a title awarded the sacred king for having three times dared to plough the field and couple with the corn-priestess. Celeus, Diocles, and Eumolpus, whom Demeter taught the art of agriculture, represent priestly heads of the Amphictyonic League-Metaneira is described as Amphictyon’s daughter-who honoured her at Eleusis.
6. It was at Eleusis (‘advent’), a Mycenaean city, that the great Eleusinian Mysteries were celebrated, in the month called Boedromion (‘running for help’). Demeter’s ecstatic initiates symbolically consummated her love affair with Iasius, or Triptolemus, or Zeus, in an inner recess of the shrine, by working a phallic object up and down a woman’s top-boot; hence Eleusis suggests a worn-down derivative of Eilythuies, ‘[the temple] of her who rages in a lurking place’. The mystagogues, dressed as shepherds, then entered with joyful shouts, and displayed a winnowing-fan, containing the child Branus, son of Brimo (‘angry one’), the immediate fruit of this ritual marriage. Brimo was a title of Demeter’s, and Brimus- synonym for Plutus; but his celebrants knew him best as Iacchus-from the riotous hymn, the Iacchus, which was sung on the sixth day of the Mysteries during a torchlight procession from Demeter’s temple.
7. Eumolpus represents the singing shepherds who brought in the child; Triptolemus is a cowherd, in service to Io the Moon-goddess as cow, who watered the seed-corn; and Eubuleus a swineherd, in service to the goddess Marpessa, Phorcis, Choere, or Cerdo, the Sow-goddess, who made the corn sprout. Eubuleus was the first to reveal Core’s fate, because ‘swineherd’, in early European myth, means soothsayer, or magician. Thus Eumaeus (‘searching well’), Odysseus’s swineherd, is addressed as dios (‘god-like’); and though, by Classical times, swineherds had long ceased to exercise their prophetic art, swine were still sacrificed to Demeter and Persephone by being thrown down natural chasms. Eubuleus is not said to have benefited from Demeter’s instruction, probably because her cult as Sow-goddess had been suppressed at Eleusis.
8. ‘Rarus’, whether it means ‘an abortive child’, or ‘a womb’, is an inappropriate name for a king, and will have referred to the womb Corn-mother from which the corn sprang.
9. Iambe and Baubo personify the obscene songs, in iambic metre, which were sung to relieve emotional tension at the Eleusinian Mysteries; but Iambe, Demeter, and Baubo form the familiar triad of maiden, nymph, and crone. Old nurses in Greek myth nearly always stand for the goddess as Crone. Abas was turned into a lizard, because lizards are found in the hottest and driest places, and can live without water; this is a moral anecdote told to teach children respect for their elders and reverence for the gods.
10. The story of Demeter’s attempt to make Demophoön immortal is paralleled in the myths of Medea and Thetis. It refers, partly, to the widespread primitive custom of ‘shining’ children against evil spirits with sacred fire carried around them at birth, or with a hot griddle set under them; partly to the custom of burning boys to death, as a vicarious sacrifice for the sacred king, and so conferring immortality on them. Celeus, the name of Demophoön’s father, can mean ‘burner’ as well as ‘woodpecker’ or ‘sorcerer’.
11. A primitive taboo rested on red-coloured food, which might be offered to the dead only; and the pomegranate was supposed to have sprung-like the eight-petalled scarlet anemone-from the blood of Adonis, or Tammuz. The seven pomegranate seeds represent, perhaps, the seven phases of the moon during which farmers wait for the green corn-shoots to appear. But Persephone eating the pomegranate is originally Sheol, the Goddess of Hell, devouring Tammuz; while Ishtar (Sheol herself in a different guise) weeps to placate his ghost. Hera, as a former Death-goddess, also held a pomegranate.
12. The ascalaphos, or short-eared owl, was a bird of evil omen; and the fable of his tale- bearing is told to account for the noisiness of owls in November, before the three winter months of Core’s absence begin. Heracles released Ascalaphus.
13. Demeter’s gift of the fig to Phytalus, whose family was a leading one in Attica, means no more than that the practice of fig caprification-pollonizing the domestic tree with a branch of the wild one-ceased to be a female prerogative at the same time as agriculture. The taboo on the planting of beans by men seems to have survived later than that on grain, because of the close connexion between beans and ghosts. In Rome beans were thrown to ghosts at the All Souls’ festival, and if a plant grew from one of these, and a woman ate its beans, she would be impregnated by a ghost. Hence the Pythagoreans abstained from beans lest they might deny an ancestor his chance of reincarnation.
14. Demeter is said to have reached Greece by way of Crete, landing at Thoricus in Attica (Hymn to Demeter). This is probable: the Cretans had established themselves in Attica, where they first worked the silver mines at Laureium. Moreover, Eleusis is a Mycenaean site, and Diodorus Siculus says that rites akin to the Eleusinian were performed at Cnossus for all who cared to attend, and that according to the Cretans all rites of initiation were invented by their ancestors. Demeter’s origin is to be looked for in Libya.
15. The flowers which, according to Ovid, Core was picking were poppies. An image of a goddess with poppy-heads in her headdress, found at Gazi in Crete; another goddess on a mould from Palaiokastro, holds poppies in her hand; and on the gold ring from the Acropolis Treasure at Mycenae a seated Demeter gives three poppy-heads to standing Core. Poppy- seeds were used as a condiment on bread, thus poppies are naturally associated with Demeter, since they grow in co fields; but Core picks or accepts poppies because of their soporific qualities, and because of their scarlet colour which promises resurrection after death. She is about to retire for her annual sleep.
Comments
Post a Comment