Korê, the Maiden, anything originally to do with Persephone: in Homer, Demeter is a goddess, but not the mother of Persephone, and Persephone is wife of the god Hades and queen of the dead, but is not the daughter of Demeter, and was not carried off by Hades against her mother's will. Yet in the "Homeric" Hymn to Demeter, which is much later than the Iliad and Odyssey, but is certainly not later than the middle of the sixth century B.C., Persephone has become identified with Korê, and it is participation in the worship of Demeter and Persephone which confers the better lot in the next world. But it was in the sixth century B.C. that Greece was invaded by the teaching that the next life was not necessarily and for all men the shadowy, empty, weary existence which it had hitherto been supposed to be, but that there were rites of purification and sacrifices of a sacramental kind which gave man a better hope of the next world. Sanctuaries, therefore, in which archaic ritual still prevailed, were eagerly sought out; and it so happened that just at this time one sanctuary, of which the rites were peculiarly ancient and striking, was now first thrown open to the Athenians-it was the sanctuary at Eleusis. To it, then, those Athenians who were touched by the new movement repaired, being convinced that its antique and mysterious ceremonial offered the kind of worship of which they were in search, and on participation in which future blessedness was conditional. But though the strange and unfamiliar rites satisfied the emotions, the mind still required to understand how and why the worship was connected with the doctrine of happiness in the next world. The necessary explanation took, as usual, the form of a myth, i.e. of a hypothesis such as the facts themselves seemed to point to. This myth is contained in the Hymn to Demeter, which accordingly is the source to which we must look for information as to the Eleusinian rites in their earliest form.

The soil of Attica was as a rule poor and thin, but there was one spot of exceptional fertility-the Rarian plain, the territory of the small State of Eleusis. The wealth which the fertility of its soil gave to Eleusis enabled it to maintain its independence long after all the other village-communities in Attica had been merged in the Athenian State; it was

not until the time of Solon1 that Eleusis was brought into political union with Athens, and the goddesses of Eleusis took their place amongst the deities of the Athenian State. The long resistance to this political synoikismos and religious fusion which the Eleusinians offered was probably due to religious causes. Like other primitive agricultural communities, the Eleusinians worshipped the corn which they cultivated, both the ripe ear the Corn-Mother, and the green blade or Corn-Maiden.2 Their cultivation of the corn was to them no mere agricultural operation, but a religious worship. Their abundant crops were due in their eyes not to their own skill in farming, or to the chemical properties of the soil, but to the favour which the Corn-Goddess showed to her true and faithful worshippers. Now that favour was earned by the minute and punctilious performance of the traditional rites and ancient worship of the goddesses; and it was not to be expected that the Eleusinians would either forsake their own goddesses, who blessed them exceedingly, for strange gods, or admit foreigners as fellow-citizens, fellow-worshippers, and partners in the blessings which the Eleusinian goddesses had the power to bestow.

The nature of the Eleusinian goddesses was obviously the same as that of cereal goddesses all over the world; and their ritual identical with that everywhere used in the worship of plant totems. Originally every ear of corn was sacred to the tribe which took corn for its totem, just as every owl was sacred to an Owl-clan. Then some one particular ear or sheaf of ripe corn was selected to represent the Corn-Spirit, and was preserved until the following year, in order that the worshippers might not be deprived during the winter of the presence and protection of their totem. The corn thus preserved served at first unintentionally as seed, and suggested the practice of sowing; and even when a larger and proper stock of seed-corn was laid in, the one particular sheaf was still regarded as the Corn-Mother, which, like the Peruvian Mother of the Maize,3 determined by her supernatural power the kind and quantity of the following harvest. In Eleusis this sheaf was dressed up as an old woman, and was pre

1 Hdt. i. 30. Supra, p. 212.

2 Cf. supra, p. 239, 241, 243.

4

* Η. Η. ν. 101 : γρηῒ παλαιγενέϊ ἐναλίγκιος.

served from harvest to seed-time in the house of the headman of the village originally, and in later times in a temple. This sheaf was probably highly taboo, and not allowed to be touched or even seen1 except on certain occasions, and then only by those who had elaborately purified themselves of their uncleanness: the whole future harvest depended on the sheaf in question, and its sanctity would naturally be great and anxiously protected. It was at the time of sowing, after the seed had been committed to the ground, and during the period of uncertainty as to whether the young plant, the Maiden or Corn-Maiden, would ever appear above ground, that the favour of the Corn-Mother was especially necessary, and that her protection was particularly invoked. The rites by which the Eleusinians on this occasion annually sought to place themselves in close communion with their goddess, were rather solemn than joyous, more in the nature of a fast than a festival. They purified their fields by fire, running over them in all directions with lighted torches for this purpose.2 Their children they purified in the same way, passing them through the fire by night,3 or making them jump over it, in a way which survives here and there in Europe even to the present day. The adults prepared themselves for the crowning ceremony by fasting and abstaining from washing 5 for nine days. They also "renewed the bond" with their deity by offerings of their own blood, which they made to flow, not as in Polynesia by beating each other's heads with clubs, but by pelting each other with stones.6 At the end of this trying time of preparation and preliminary purification, they were ritually "clean" and prepared for the two great and solemn acts of worship by which they were to be united to their deity and to become recipients of her favour. The first was a sacrament. As the worshippers of animal totems at their annual sacrifice consumed the flesh of their god and thus partook of his divine life, so the worshippers of the Corn-Goddess annually partook of the body of their deity, i.e.

4

1 For the consequences of seeing things taboo, see supra, pp. 59, 60.

2 Η. Η. v. 48 : στρωφᾶτ ̓ αἰθομένας δαΐδας μετὰ χερσὶν ἔχουσα.

3 Ibid. 239 : νύκτας δὲ κρύπτεσκε πυρὸς μένει.

5 Ibid. 50 : οὐδὲ χρόα βάλλετο λουτροῖς.

6 For this practice elsewhere in Greece, see supra, p. 292.

4 Ibid. 49.

of a cake or paste or posset made of the meal of wheat and water. The joint participation in this by all the worshippers not only renewed the bond between them and their deity, it also once more united the fellow-worshippers in a mystic bond with one another; and for the younger members, now taking part in the ceremony for the first time, it was an initiation, μúnois. Thus fortified by this sacramental meal, the worshippers were considered to be properly prepared for the second great act of worship. This consisted in the presentation to the eyes of the worshippers of the actual ear or sheaf which was the Corn-Mother herself, and which might now be seen without danger, because her worshippers were no longer "unclean." This manifestation of the Corn-Goddess afforded not merely a visible hope and tangible promise that the sowing of the seed should be followed by a harvest of ripe corn, but in itself constituted a direct communion with the deity; and it was in the confidence inspired by that communion that the worshipper ventured to breathe the simple prayer for the fall of rain and the growth of the crops 2 with which the ceremony terminated.

Those were the rites on which the prosperity of Eleusis and the welfare, both spiritual and material, of its citizens depended. They were the rites which, with whatever additions, constituted the Eleusinian mysteries. Their meaning may have been obscure even to the Eleusinians of the sixth century B.C. To the town-bred Athenian of Solon's time, whom the Eleusinians had hitherto jealously and successfully excluded from any share in the worship of their powerful goddesses, the ritual now thrown open must have appeared even more mysterious, and by its gloomy and in some respects even savage character must have been unusually impressive. But though the vagueness of the rites made it easy for the Athenian to read into them a meaning which was not theirs originally; and although the rites were archaic enough to carry conviction to those who started with the belief that happiness in the next world was to be secured by the performance of mysterious rites in this; still something more definite than this, some explicit statement, was necessary. At the same time the relation of the Eleusinian goddesses 1 Η. Η. ν. 208 : ἄλφι καὶ ὕδωρ.

2 ϋε, κύε.

to the company of the Athenian deities into which they were now received, had to be defined to the popular satisfaction; and the myth which did this explained also why it was that the worship of the two goddesses conferred future bliss on the worshippers.

Whether the etymological meaning of the name Demeter is or is not "corn-mother," whether Demeter was originally a cereal goddess or a chthonic deity, it is certain that her form and functions were such as to allow of her being readily identified with the various nameless corn-goddesses who were worshipped locally in various parts of Greece, and that the cereal goddess who was probably known in Eleusis, as in various parts of Europe still, as the Old Woman, was at once identified by the Athenians with the Demeter of Homer and of their own Thesmophoria. The only point that required any explanation here was that whereas Demeter certainly dwelt with the other gods and goddesses in Olympus, the Old Woman of Eleusis equally certainly dwelt, for part of the year, in the house of the head-man of the village of Eleusis, and was actually seen there once a year by the whole body of worshippers. There was, of course, no difficulty in imagining that Demeter did actually descend from Olympus and dwell for a time in Eleusis, and that she appeared in the guise of an old woman to the Eleusinians, who accordingly did. not recognise in her the goddess Demeter ; χαλεποὶ δὲ θεοὶ θνητοῖσιν ὁρᾶσθαι. But Demeter must have had some motive for thus withdrawing herself from Olympus and seeking for a home in the abodes of men, as she first did, according to Eleusinian tradition, in the house of Keleos, a mythical king of Eleusis. If she withdrew from the courts of Zeus and the company of her fellow-gods and goddesses, it obviously was because she had some cause of quarrel with them. Equally plain was it that the quarrel had some reference to her daughter the Corn-Maiden, for the time at which Demeter appeared at Eleusis in the disguise of an old Woman was the time during which the young corn was below ground: when the green blade at length shot up, the old woman was no longer seen in Eleusis-she returned to Olympus. In other words, Demeter's wrath terminated

1 H. H. v. 111.