What we see is a reduction of species variety together with an increase in actual numbers of some animals. That is just what happened at the end of the Cretaceous.

Who Lies Sleeping?

Demeter, Persephone and Dionysos—Ceres, Proserpine and Bacchus

Demeter, Persephone and Dionysos—Ceres, Proserpine and Bacchus

Demeter means Grain Mother. She is a type of the earlier Earth Mother. Primitive hunter gatherers saw the earth as a mother before they settled into agriculture. When the hunters settled as herdsmen, then as agriculturalists, the Great Mother evolved into a Grain Mother, Demeter.

It might seem odd that heavy farming work like ploughing, sowing and harvesting grain should be attributed to a mother, but mothers produce children and the earth was always a goddess in that sense. Moreover, women did start agriculture. In the pre-settled existence of hunter gathering, men went off in groups hunting. Woman, responsible for children stayed close to home, gathering roots and fruits. They were the ones who first gathered nutritious seeds from wild grasses and took them home to nibble, inventing pots and baskets to carry them in. They were the ones who noticed that these same grasses began to grow around their huts, and realized why. Always at least two out of three parts of the diet were gathered rather than hunted. Gathering always provided the food staples. Hunting was haphazard, and a bonus when successful. The men accepted it was what the women did that fed them most of the time, and that their own efforts gave them a feast occasionally. They dare not interfere in what they thought must be magical, and had something to do with the women bringing forth children. In Payne’s History of the New World, an Indian explained:

When the women plant maize, the stalk produces two or three ears. Why? Because women know how to produce children. Only they know how to plant the corn so as to be sure of it germinating. Then let them plant it, they know more than we do.

It shows precisely the attitude of Stone Age men to women in a suggested matriarchal society, though patriarchal historians and anthropologists cannot bear to hear of it.

Homer will not say anything about the Rape of Persephone and the Mourning of Demeter, of the Kathodos—the “going down” into Hades, and the Anodos, the rising up in spring. He mentions Demeter as dwelling on earth, not on Olympus. She stands with her yellow hair at the sacred threshing floor when men are winnowing, demeaned into dividing grain from chaff. Persephone is for Homer not Korê, not the lovely uprising maiden form of the Grain Mother in the spring, but the dread Queen of the underworld, ruling in Hades. Odysseus, wanting to talk to the dead heroes in Hades was scared that “Persephone the dread from Hades should send up the awful monster’s grisly head’.”

In fact, Demeter did have a dark side, like Kali, the Indian goddess. The Earth yielded her gifts but it also received the dead:

Yea, summon Earth, who brings all things to life, And rears and takes again into her womb.
Æschylus

Athenians called the dead Demetreioi, Demeter’s People, and the Gorgon’s head is a ritual mask meant to be a ghost or somebody dead. They are commonplace among the rituals of primitive tribes still. The gorgon is a monster invented to account for the ritual mask. The Earth Mother, as guardian of the dead, has a terrifying aspect, that of a gorgon. A Rhodian plate in the British Museum shows the Great Mother grasping in her hands two birds, with human body and feet. She is winged, and has a gorgon’s head with pendent tongue, glaring eyes and great tusks.

Demeter, as guardian of ghosts, is called Demeter Erinys, erinys being an angry ghost. Erinyes, angry ghosts, figures of terror and vengeance, become in the Eumenides of Æschylus, figures of fertility, holy and benign, carrying, in one hand, their underground snakes, in the other, fruit and flowers. Greek religion, as understood by dramatists like Æschylus, was meant to tranform fear and ugliness into beauty and tranquillity.

Last uploaded: 19 April, 2008.

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