§ 8.—Demeter and Proserpine
The Greek myth of Demeter and Proserpine is substantially identical with the Syrian myth of Aphrodite (Astarte) and Adonis, the Phrygian myth of Cybele and Attis, and the Egyptian myth of Isis and Osiris. In the Greek myth, as in its Asiatic and Egyptian counterparts, a goddess—Demeter—mourns the loss of a loved one—Proserpine—who personifies the vegetation, more especially the corn, which dies in summer[1] to revive in spring. But in the Greek myth the loved and lost one is the daughter instead of the husband or lover of the goddess; and the mother as well as the daughter is a goddess of the corn.[2] Thus, as modern scholars have recognised,[3] Demeter and Proserpine are merely a mythical reduplication of the same natural phenomenon. Proserpine, so ran the Greek myth,[4] was gathering flowers when the earth gaped, and Pluto, lord of the Dead, issuing from the abyss, carried her off on his golden car to be his bride in the gloomy subterranean world. Her sorrowing mother Demeter sought her over land and sea, and learning from the
- ↑ It is to be remembered that on the Mediterranean coasts the harvest never falls so late as autumn.
- ↑ On Demeter as a corn-goddess see Mannhardt, Mythologische Forschungen, p. 224 sqq.; on Proserpine in the same character see Cornutus, De nat. deor. c. 28; Varro in Augustine, Civ. Dei, vii. 20; Hesychius, s.v. Φερσεφόνεια; Firmicus Maternus, De errore prof. relig. 17. In his careful account of Demeter as a corn-goddess Mannhardt appears to have overlooked the very important statement of Hippolytus (Refnt. omn. haeres. v. 8, p. 162, ed. Duncker and Schneidewin) that at the initiation into the Eleusinian mysteries (the most famous of all the rites of Demeter) the central mystery revealed to the initiated was a reaped ear of corn.
- ↑ Welcker, Griechische Götterlehre, ii. 532; Preller, in Pauly’s Real-Encyclopädie für class. Alterthumswiss. vi. 107; Lenormant, in Daremberg et Saglio, Dictionnaire des Antiquités grecques et romaines, i. pt. ii. 1047 sqq.
- ↑ Homer, Hymn to Demeter;i Apollodorus, i. 5; Ovid, Fasti, iv. 425 sqq., id., Metam. v. 385 sqq.
