One of the six original Olympians, Demeter is the child of the King and Queen of the Titans -
Kronos and Rhea, and of all the Greek gods of the earth it is she who is
paramount. Demeter
rules over the fertility and lifespan of the fruits and vegetables of the earth
and especially of the grain, she is however also a patroness of human and
animal reproduction as well – the life force of all living things. Demeter is also
the goddess of the harvest and it was she who taught mankind how to sow and tend
crops so that they could settle land and end their wandering nomadic
lifestyle. She is also a goddess who
takes great care in the preservation of the ‘natural law’ and tradition
(whatever the society may see it as being); this is partly due to her popularity
among rural populations (who most directly benefited from her attention) which
are often more conservative and cling to older ways long after their urban
counterparts. Demeter is a pre-Olympian
deity; her worship extends far, far back into the times of Mycenaean Greece and
their nomadic forbearers; votive offerings of clay pigs (an offering unique to
Demeter have been found dating to Neolithic times). Her name probably in Greek means ‘distribution mother’
and is likely derived from the name of the Pre Indo-European mother-earth
goddess *dheghom *mater (the astrix indicates that this is a
reconstructed word and not one found in literature or modern languages).
Rarely is Demeter
ever portrayed with a husband or lover in classical mythology but in the older
regional myths if Eleusis
and in Linear B inscriptions she does appear with consorts. Karmanor fathered Demeter’s
daughter Khrysothemis the goddess of ‘the golden custom’ a harvest festival
incorporating song, sex and banqueting amongst the grain harvest. Iason was a
youth of Krete with whom Demeter laid with in a
‘thrice-plowed field’ and was killed by a jealous Zeus. Mykenean inscriptions link her with Poseidon under the names DA-MA-TE and PO-SE-DA-WO-NE (which seems to
translate as "consort of the distributor”). The link between these two carry over in to
Helleic mythology in an Arkadian myth of
Posidon persuing the reluctant goddess who hid herself as a mare
(Demeter was worshiped as a horse-headed deity into historical times in
Arkadia) among the herds of King Onkios though she was unsuccessful and was
found by the horse god. Demeter bore two
children from this union: Arion an immortal, talking stallion and Despoina, the
Arkadian version of Persephane.
Demeter’s
daughter by Zeus – Persephone – is the best known of all Demeter’s children and
at the center of the most important myths of her worship. Each year Persephone spends a season in the
underworld and Demeter in mourning withholds the gift
of fertility, bringing winter and barren fields. Though there are some that feel that her
decent was a one time event and not a yearly and was influenced by the
destruction of Thera and the black mourning cloak worn by Demeter the ash from
the explosion (the seasonal yearly explanation, in this theory, is a later
explanation based on Near Eastern decent mythologies).
When Persephone was abducted by Haides Demeter, taking
the form of an old women named Doso wandered the earth searching for her
daughter and in these travels she revealed the Eleusinian Mysteries to mankind. Tired from her wanderings she stops at the palace of Celeus, the King of Eleusis and becomes the nurse of his sons Demophon and
Triptolemus. In return Demeter attempted
to make Demophon immortal but was stopped by the fearful screams of his mother
when she saw the child in the hearth-flames, instead Demeter taught Triptolemus
the secrets of agriculture and gave him a winged chariot to carry him all over Greece
to spread the knowledge. This was the
start of the Eleusinian Mysteries. We
don’t know a lot about the rituals in the mysteries, the secrets have been well
kept; but we do know some pieces of information and others can be gleaned. Poppies and possibly ergot, a psychoactive
agent that grows on rye, were used to create a hallucinatory state among the
participants who would watch a recreation of the Eleusinian myths cycle and
then partake in a sacred meal. The
mysteries taught men how to call Persephone back from Haides but also instructed
followers in how to attain eternal life after death.
The worship of Demeter and Persephone is ancient, the two appear
linked on Linear B tablets as ‘the two goddesses’ or ‘the king and two queens’
(the king quite possibly revering to Poseidon).
She is also worshiped under the name of her mother, Rhea, and the two
were often seen as aspects of the same goddess.
This is especially true in Orphic cosmology in which Zeus impregnates
his mother Rhea with Persephone and after the child’s birth takes the name Demeter
– the mother. One of her common
epithets, which also shows up in Linear B, is Erinys – the furious and in this
form was often cruel and punishing. In
the Roman religion Demeter was merged with the grain goddess Ceres and had many
of the same myths and customs and had a special cult site on the highly
agricultural island
of Sicily.
My honoring of Demeter is very simple –
respect the earth, thank all that gives it’s life so that I may live and never
forget to marvel at the beauty of nature.
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