Book: Greek Studies: A Series of Essays

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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 narke, the numbness of death.

108. +Transliteration: einodia symbola. Translation: "signs along
the roadside."

110. +Transliteration: Kore arretos. Translation: "Kore 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--kalykopis+--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.

And as there are traces in the Homeric hymn of the primitive cosmical
myth, relics of the first stage of the development of the story, so
also many of its incidents are probably suggested by the
circumstances and details of the Eleusinian ritual. There were
religious usages before there were distinct religious conceptions,
and these antecedent religious usages shape and determine, at many
points, the ultimate religious conception, as the details of the myth
interpret or explain the religious custom. The hymn relates the
legend of certain holy places, to which various impressive religious
rites had attached themselves--the holy well, the old fountain, the
stone of sorrow, which it was the office of the "interpreter" of the
holy places to show to the people. The sacred way which led from
Athens to Eleusis was rich in such memorials. The nine days of the
wanderings of Demeter in the Homeric hymn are the nine days of the
duration of the greater or autumnal mysteries; the jesting of the old
woman Iambe, who endeavours to make Demeter smile, are the customary
mockeries with which the worshippers, as they rested on the bridge,
on the seventh day of the feast, assailed those who passed by. The
torches in the hands of Demeter are borrowed from the same source;
and the shadow in which she is [121] constantly represented, and
which is the peculiar sign of her grief, is partly ritual, and a
relic of the caves of the old Chthonian worship, partly poetical--
expressive, half of the dark earth to which she escapes from Olympus,
half of her mourning. She appears consistently, in the hymn, as a
teacher of rites, transforming daily life, and the processes of life,
into a religious solemnity. With no misgiving as to the proprieties
of a mere narration, the hymn-writer mingles these symbolical
imitations with the outlines of the original story; and, in his
Demeter, the dramatic person of the mysteries mixes itself with the
primitive mythical figure. And the worshipper, far from being
offended by these interpolations, may have found a special
impressiveness in them, as they linked continuously its inner sense
with the outward imagery of the ritual.

And, as Demeter and her story embodied themselves gradually in the
Greek imagination, so these mysteries in which her worship found its
chief expression, grew up little by little, growing always in close
connexion with the modifications of the story, sometimes prompting
them, at other times suggested by them. That they had a single
special author is improbable, and a mere invention of the Greeks,
ignorant of their real history and the general analogy of such
matters. Here again, as in the story itself, the idea of
development, of degrees, of a slow [122] and natural growth, impeded
here, diverted there, is the illuminating thought which earlier
critics lacked. "No tongue may speak of them," says the Homeric
hymn; and the secret has certainly been kept. The antiquarian,
dealing, letter by letter, with what is recorded of them, has left
few certain data for the reflexion of the modern student of the Greek
religion; and of this, its central solemnity, only a fragmentary
picture can be made. It is probable that these mysteries developed
the symbolical significance of the story of the descent into Hades,
the coming of Demeter to Eleusis, the invention of Persephone. They
may or may not have been the vehicle of a secret doctrine, but were
certainly an artistic spectacle, giving, like the mysteries of the
middle age, a dramatic representation of the sacred story,--perhaps a
detailed performance, perhaps only such a conventional
representation, as was afforded for instance by the medieval
ceremonies of Palm Sunday; the whole, probably, centering in an image
of Demeter--the work of Praxiteles or his school, in ivory and gold.
There is no reason to suppose any specific difference between the
observances of the Eleusinian festival and the accustomed usages of
the Greek religion; nocturns, libations, quaint purifications,
processions--are common incidents of all Greek worship; in all
religious ceremonies there is an element of dramatic symbolism; and
what we really do see, through those scattered notices, [123] are
things which have their parallels in a later age, the whole being not
altogether unlike a modern pilgrimage. The exposition of the sacred
places--the threshing-floor of Triptolemus, the rocky seat on which
Demeter had rested in her sorrow, the well of Callichorus--is not so
strange, as it would seem, had it no modern illustration. The
libations, at once a watering of the vines and a drink-offering to
the dead--still needing men's services, waiting for purification
perhaps, or thirsting, like Dante's Adam of Brescia, in their close
homes--must, to almost all minds, have had a certain natural
impressiveness; and a parallel has sometimes been drawn between this
festival and All Souls' Day.

And who, everywhere, has not felt the mystical influence of that
prolonged silence, the mystic silence, from which the very word
"mystery" has its origin? Something also there undoubtedly was,
which coarser minds might misunderstand. On one day, the initiated
went in procession to the sea-coast, where they underwent a
purification by bathing in the sea. On the fifth night there was the
torchlight procession; and, by a touch of real life in him, we gather
from the first page of Plato's Republic that such processions were
popular spectacles, having a social interest, so that people made
much of attending them. There was the procession of the sacred
basket filled with poppy-seeds and pomegranates. There was the day
of rest, after [124] the stress and excitement of the "great night."
On the sixth day, the image of Iacchus, son of Demeter, crowned with
myrtle and having a torch in its hand, was carried in procession,
through thousands of spectators, along the sacred way, amid joyous
shouts and songs. We have seen such processions; we understand how
many different senses, and how lightly, various spectators may put on
them; how little definite meaning they may have even for those who
officiate in them. Here, at least, there was the image itself, in
that age, with its close connexion between religion and art,
presumably fair. Susceptibility to the impressions of religious
ceremonial must always have varied with the peculiarities of
individual temperament, as it varies in our own day; and Eleusis,
with its incense and sweet singing, may have been as little
interesting to the outward senses of some worshippers there, as the
stately and affecting ceremonies of the medieval church to many of
its own members. In a simpler yet profounder sense than has
sometimes been supposed, these things were really addressed to the
initiated only.*

We have to travel a long way from the Homeric hymn to the hymn of
Callimachus, who writes in the end of Greek literature, in the third
century before Christ, in celebration of the procession of the sacred
basket of Demeter, not [125] at the Attic, but at the Alexandrian
Eleusinia. He developes, in something of the prosaic spirit of a
medieval writer of "mysteries," one of the burlesque incidents of the
story, the insatiable hunger which seized on Erysichthon because he
cut down a grove sacred to the goddess. Yet he finds his
opportunities for skilful touches of poetry;--"As the four white
horses draw her sacred basket," he says, "so will the great goddess
bring us a white spring, a white summer." He describes the grove
itself, with its hedge of trees, so thick that an arrow could hardly
pass through, its pines and fruit-trees and tall poplars within, and
the water, like pale gold, running from the conduits. It is one of
those famous poplars that receives the first stroke; it sounds
heavily to its companion trees, and Demeter perceives that her sacred
grove is suffering. Then comes one of those transformations which
Plato will not allow. Vainly anxious to save the lad from his ruin,
she appears in the form of a priestess, but with the long hood of the
goddess, and the poppy in her hand; and there is something of a real
shudder, some still surviving sense of a haunting presence in the
groves, in the verses which describe her sudden revelation, when the
workmen flee away, leaving their axes in the cleft trees.

Of the same age as the hymn of Callimachus, but with very different
qualities, is the idyll of Theocritus on the Shepherds' Journey.
Although it is possible to define an epoch in mythological [126]
development in which literary and artificial influences began to
remodel the primitive, popular legend, yet still, among children, and
unchanging childlike people, we may suppose that that primitive stage
always survived, and the old, instinctive influences were still at
work. As the subject of popular religious celebrations also, the
myth was still the property of the people, and surrendered to its
capricious action. The shepherds in Theocritus, on their way to
celebrate one of the more homely feasts of Demeter, about the time of
harvest, are examples of these childlike people; the age of the poets
has long since come, but they are of the older and simpler order,
lingering on in the midst of a more self-conscious world. In an
idyll, itself full of the delightful gifts of Demeter, Theocritus
sets them before us; through the blazing summer day's journey, the
smiling image of the goddess is always before them; and now they have
reached the end of their journey:--

"So I, and Eucritus, and the fair Amyntichus, turned aside into the
house of Phrasidamus, and lay down with delight in beds of sweet
tamarisk and fresh cuttings from the vines, strewn on the ground.
Many poplars and elm-trees were waving over our heads, and not far
off the running of the sacred water from the cave of the nymphs
warbled to us; in the shimmering branches the sun-burnt grasshoppers
were busy with their talk, and from afar the little owl cried softly,
out of [127] the tangled thorns of the blackberry; the larks were
singing and the hedge-birds, and the turtle-dove moaned; the bees
flew round and round the fountains, murmuring softly; the scent of
late summer and of the fall of the year was everywhere; the pears
fell from the trees at our feet, and apples in number rolled down at
our sides, and the young plum-trees were bent to the earth with the
weight of their fruit. The wax, four years old, was loosed from the
heads of the wine-jars. O! nymphs of Castalia, who dwell on the
steeps of Parnassus, tell me, I pray you, was it a draught like this
that the aged Chiron placed before Hercules, in the stony cave of
Pholus? Was it nectar like this that made the mighty shepherd on
Anapus' shore, Polyphemus, who flung the rocks upon Ulysses' ships,
dance among his sheepfolds?--A cup like this ye poured out now upon
the altar of Demeter, who presides over the threshing-floor. May it
be mine, once more, to dig my big winnowing-fan through her heaps of
corn; and may I see her smile upon me, holding poppies and handfuls
of corn in her two hands!"

Some of the modifications of the story of Demeter, as we find it in
later poetry, have been supposed to be due, not to the genuine action
of the Greek mind, but to the influence of that so-called Orphic
literature, which, in the generation succeeding Hesiod, brought, from
Thessaly and Phrygia, a tide of mystical ideas into the Greek [128]
religion, sometimes, doubtless, confusing the clearness and
naturalness of its original outlines, but also sometimes imparting to
them a new and peculiar grace. Under the influence of this Orphic
poetry, Demeter was blended, or identified, with Rhea Cybele, the
mother of the gods, the wilder earth-goddess of Phrygia; and the
romantic figure of Dionysus Zagreus, Dionysus the Hunter, that most
interesting, though somewhat melancholy variation on the better known
Dionysus, was brought, as son or brother of Persephone, into her
circle, the mystical vine, who, as Persephone descends and ascends
from the earth, is rent to pieces by the Titans every year and
remains long in Hades, but every spring-time comes out of it again,
renewing his youth. This identification of Demeter with Rhea Cybele
is the motive which has inspired a beautiful chorus in the Helena--
the new Helena--of Euripides, that great lover of all subtle
refinements and modernisms, who, in this play, has worked on a
strange version of the older story, which relates that Helen had
never really gone to Troy at all, but sent her soul only there, apart
from her sweet body, which abode all that time in Egypt, at the court
of King Proteus, where she is found at last by her husband Menelaus,
so that the Trojan war was about a phantom, after all. The chorus
has even less than usual to do with the action of the play, being
linked to it only by a sort of parallel, which may be understood,
[129] between Menelaus seeking Helen, and Demeter seeking Persephone.
Euripides, then, takes the matter of the Homeric hymn into the region
of a higher and swifter poetry, and connects it with the more
stimulating imagery of the Idaean mother. The Orphic mysticism or
enthusiasm has been admitted into the story, which is now full of
excitement, the motion of rivers, the sounds of the Bacchic cymbals
heard over the mountains, as Demeter wanders among the woody valleys
seeking her lost daughter, all directly expressed in the vivid Greek
words. Demeter is no longer the subdued goddess of the quietly-
ordered fields, but the mother of the gods, who has her abode in the
heights of Mount Ida, who presides over the dews and waters of the
white springs, whose flocks feed, not on grain, but on the curling
tendrils of the vine, both of which she withholds in her anger, and
whose chariot is drawn by wild beasts, fruit and emblem of the earth
in its fiery strength. Not Hecate, but Pallas and Artemis, in full
armour, swift-footed, vindicators of chastity, accompany her in her
search for Persephone, who is already expressly, kore arretos+--"the
maiden whom none may name." When she rests from her long wanderings,
it is into the stony thickets of Mount Ida, deep with snow, that she
throws herself, in her profound grief. When Zeus desires to end her
pain, the Muses and the "solemn" Graces are sent to dance and sing
before her. It is then [130] that Cypris, the goddess of beauty, and
the original cause, therefore, of her distress, takes into her hands
the brazen tambourines of the Dionysiac worship with their Chthonian
or deep-noted sound; and it is she, not the old Iambe, who with this
wild music, heard thus for the first time, makes Demeter smile at
last. "Great," so the chorus ends with a picture, "great is the
power of the stoles of spotted fawn-skins, and the green leaves of
ivy twisted about the sacred wands, and the wheeling motion of the
tambourine whirled round in the air, and the long hair floating
unbound in honour of Bromius, and the nocturns of the goddess, when
the moon looks full upon them."

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