and by a Maiden. Why then did the Greeks represent the corn both as a mother and a daughter? In the Breton custom the mother-sheaf—a large figure made out of the last sheaf with a small corn-doll inside of it—clearly represents both the Corn-mother and the Corn-daughter, the latter still unborn.[1] Again, in the Prussian custom just described, the woman who plays the part of Corn-mother represents the ripe corn; the child appears to represent next year’s corn, which may be regarded, naturally enough, as the child of this year’s corn, since it is from the seed of this year’s harvest that next year’s corn will spring. Demeter would thus be the ripe corn of this year; Proserpine the seed-corn taken from it and sown in autumn, to reappear in spring. The descent of Proserpine into the lower world[2] would thus be a mythical expression for the sowing of the seed; her reappearance in spring[3] would express the sprouting of the young corn. Thus the Proserpine of this year becomes the Demeter of the next, and this may very well have been the original form of the myth. But when with the advance of religious thought the corn came to be personified, no longer as a being that went through the whole cycle of birth, growth, reproduction, and death within a year, but as an immortal goddess, consistency requires that one of the two personifications, the mother or the daughter, should be sacrificed. But the double conception of the corn as mother and daughter was too old and too
- ↑ See above, p. 335 sq.
- ↑ Cp. Preller, Griech. Mythol.3 i. 628, note 3. In Greece the annual descent of Proserpine appears to have taken place at the Great Eleusinian Mysteries and at the Thesmophoria, that is, about the time of the autumn sowing. But in Sicily her descent seems to have been celebrated when the corn was fully ripe (Diodorus, v. 4), that is, in summer.
- ↑ Homer, Hymn to Demeter, 401 sqq.; Preller, l.c.
