Greek Studies A Series of Essays 7

Greek Studies A Series of Essays 7

So far the attributes of Demeter and Kore are similar. In the

mythical conception, as in the religious acts connected with it, the

mother and the daughter are almost interchangeable; [109] they are

the two goddesses, the twin-named. Gradually, the office of

Persephone is developed, defines itself; functions distinct from

those of Demeter are attributed to her. Hitherto, always at the side

of Demeter and sharing her worship, she now appears detached from

her, going and coming, on her mysterious business. A third part of

the year she abides in darkness; she comes up in the spring; and

every autumn, when the countryman sows his seed in the earth, she

descends thither again, and the world of the dead lies open, spring

and autumn, to let her in and out. Persephone, then, is the summer-

time, and, in this sense, a daughter of the earth; but the summer as

bringing winter; the flowery splendour and consummated glory of the

year, as thereafter immediately beginning to draw near to its end, as

the first yellow leaf crosses it, in the first severer wind. She is

the last day of spring, or the first day of autumn, in the threefold

division of the Greek year. Her story is, indeed, but the story, in

an intenser form, of Adonis, of Hyacinth, of Adrastus--the king's

blooming son, fated, in the story of Herodotus, to be wounded to

death with an iron spear--of Linus, a fair child who is torn to

pieces by hounds every spring-time--of the English Sleeping Beauty.

From being the goddess of summer and the flowers, she becomes the

goddess of night and sleep and death, confuseable with Hecate, the

goddess of midnight [110] terrors--Korê arrêtos,+ the mother of the

Erinnyes, who appeared to Pindar, to warn him of his approaching

death, upbraiding him because he had made no hymn in her praise,

which swan's song he thereupon began, but finished with her. She is

a twofold goddess, therefore, according as one or the other of these

two contrasted aspects of her nature is seized, respectively. A

duality, an inherent opposition in the very conception of Persephone,

runs all through her story, and is part of her ghostly power. There

is ever something in her of a divided or ambiguous identity: hence

the many euphemisms of later language concerning her.

 

The "worship of sorrow," as Goethe called it, is sometimes supposed

to have had almost no place in the religion of the Greeks. Their

religion has been represented as a religion of mere cheerfulness, the

worship by an untroubled, unreflecting humanity, conscious of no

deeper needs, of the embodiments of its own joyous activity. It

helped to hide out of their sight those traces of decay and

weariness, of which the Greeks were constitutionally shy, to keep

them from peeping too curiously into certain shadowy places,

appropriate enough to the gloomy imagination of the middle age; and

it hardly proposed to itself to give consolation to people who, in

truth, were never "sick or sorry." But this familiar view of Greek

religion is based on a consideration of a part only of what is known

[111] concerning it, and really involves a misconception, akin to

that which underestimates the influence of the romantic spirit

generally, in Greek poetry and art; as if Greek art had dealt

exclusively with human nature in its sanity, suppressing all motives

of strangeness, all the beauty which is born of difficulty,

permitting nothing but an Olympian, though perhaps somewhat wearisome

calm. In effect, such a conception of Greek art and poetry leaves in

the central __EXPRESSION__s of Greek culture none but negative qualities;

and the legend of Demeter and Persephone, perhaps the most popular of

all Greek legends, is sufficient to show that the "worship of sorrow"

was not without its function in Greek religion; their legend is a

legend made by and for sorrowful, wistful, anxious people; while the

most important artistic monuments of that legend sufficiently prove

that the Romantic spirit was really at work in the minds of Greek

artists, extracting by a kind of subtle alchemy, a beauty, not

without the elements of tranquillity, of dignity and order, out of a

matter, at first sight painful and strange.

 

The student of origins, as French critics say, of the earliest stages

of art and poetry, must be content to follow faint traces; and in

what has been here said, much may seem to have been made of little,

with too much completion, by a general framework or setting, of what

after [112] all are but doubtful or fragmentary indications. Yet

there is a certain cynicism too, in that over-positive temper, which

is so jealous of our catching any resemblance in the earlier world to

the thoughts that really occupy our own minds, and which, in its

estimate of the actual fragments of antiquity, is content to find no

seal of human intelligence upon them. Slight indeed in themselves,

these fragmentary indications become suggestive of much, when viewed

in the light of such general evidence about the human imagination as

is afforded by the theory of "comparative mythology," or what is

called the theory of "animism." Only, in the application of these

theories, the student of Greek religion must never forget that, after

all, it is with poetry, not with systematic theological belief or

dogma, that he has to do. As regards this story of Demeter and

Persephone, what we actually possess is some actual fragments of

poetry, some actual fragments of sculpture; and with a curiosity,

justified by the direct aesthetic beauty of these fragments, we feel

our way backwards to that engaging picture of the poet-people, with

which the ingenuity of modern theory has filled the void in our

knowledge. The abstract poet of that first period of mythology,

creating in this wholly impersonal, intensely spiritual way,--the

abstract spirit of poetry itself, rises before the mind; and, in

speaking of this poetical age, we must take heed, before all things,

in no sense to misconstrue the poets.

 

NOTES

 

94. +Transliteration: epainê Persephonê. Translation: "dread

Persephone." See, for example, Odyssey, Book 10.490 and 563.

 

94. +"According to the apparent import of her name"; Pater likely

refers to the etymology of "Persophone"--"bringer of destruction."

 

95. *Theogony, 912-14:

 

+Transliteration:

 

Autar ho Dêmêtros polyphorbês es lechos êlthen

ê teke Persephonên leukôlenon, hên Aidôneus

hêrpasen hês para mêtros, edôke de mêtieta Zeus.

 

+Translation: "And he came to bountiful Demeter’s bed, / and she

gave birth to white-armed Persephone, whom Aidoneus / took from her

mother’s side; but Zeus, wise counsellor, gave her to him." Hesiod.

The Homeric Hymns and Homerica. Theogony. Cambridge, MA., Harvard

University Press. London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1914.

 

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 narkê, the numbness of death.

 

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

the roadside."

 

110. +Transliteration: Korê arrêtos. Translation: "Korê 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--kalykôpis+--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