by Walter Pater
“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 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. 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 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 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 — epainκ Persephonκ+ — 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 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!
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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 Dτs — 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, 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 preserve
r 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.
In this phase, then, the story of Demeter appears as the peculiar 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 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 Franηois 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 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 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.