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THE HYMN TO HERMES

The Hymn to Hermes is remarkable for the corruption of the text, which appears even to present lacunæ. The English reader will naturally prefer the lively and charming version of Shelley to any other. The poet can tell and adorn the story without visibly floundering in the pitfalls of a dislocated text. If we may judge by line 51, and if Greek musical tradition be correct, the date of the Hymn cannot be earlier than the fortieth Olympiad. About that period Terpander is said to have given the lyre seven strings (as Mercury does in the poem), in place of the previous four strings. The date of Terpander is dubious, but probably the seven-stringed lyre had long been in common use before the poet attributed the invention to Hermes. The same argument applies to the antiquity of writing, assigned by poets as the invention of various mythical and prehistoric heroes. But the poets were not careful archæologists, and regarded anachronisms as genially as did Shakespeare or Scott. Moreover, the fact that Terpander did invent the seven chords is not beyond dispute historically, while, mythically, Apollo and Amphion are credited with the idea. That Hermes invented fire-sticks seems a fable which robs Prometheus of the honour. We must not look for any kind of consistency in myth.

The learned differ as to the precise purpose of the Hymn, and some even exclude the invention of the cithara. To myself it seems that the poet chiefly revels in a very familiar subject of savage humour (notably among the Zulus), the extraordinary feats and tricks of a tiny and apparently feeble and helpless person or animal, such as Brer Rabbit. The triumph of astuteness over strength (a triumph here assigned to the infancy of a God) is the theme. Hermes is here a rustic doublure of Apollo, as he was, in fact, mainly a rural deity, though he became the Messenger of the Gods, and the Guide of Souls outworn. In these respects he answers to the Australian Grogoragally, in his double relation to the Father, Boyma, and to men living and dead. ¹¹

As a go-between of Gods and men, Hermes may be a doublure of Apollo, but, as the Hymn shows, he aspired in vain to Apollo’s oracular function. In one respect his behaviour has a singular savage parallel. His shoes woven of twigs, so as not to show the direction in which he is proceeding, answer to the equally shapeless feather sandals of the blacks who “go Kurdaitcha,” that is, as avengers of blood. I have nowhere else found this practice as to the shoes, which, after all, cannot conceal the direction of the spoor from a native tracker. ¹² The trick of driving the cattle backwards answers to the old legend that Bruce reversed the shoes of his horse when he fled from the court of Edward I.

The humour of the Hymn is rather rustic: cattle theft is the chief joke, cattle theft by a baby. The God, divine as he is, feels his mouth water for roast beef, a primitive conception. In fact, throughout this Hymn we are far from the solemn regard paid to Apollo, from the wistful beauty of the Hymn to Demeter, and from the gladness and melancholy of the Hymn to Aphrodite. Sportive myths are treated sportively, as in the story of Ares and Aphrodite in the Odyssey. Myths contained all conceivable elements, among others that of humour, to which the poet here abandons himself. The statues and symbols of Hermes were inviolably sacred; as Guide of Souls he played the part of comforter and friend: he brought men all things lucky and fortunate: he made the cattle bring forth abundantly: he had the golden wand of wealth. But he was also tricksy as a Brownie or as Puck; and that fairy aspect of his character and legend, he being the midnight thief whose maraudings account for the unexplained disappearances of things, is the chief topic of the gay and reckless hymn. Even the Gods, even angry Apollo, are moved to laughter, for over sport and playfulness, too, Greek religion throws her sanction. At the dishonesties of commerce (clearly regarded as a form of theft) Hermes winks his laughing eyes (line 516). This is not an early Socialistic protest against “Commercialism.” The early traders, like the Vikings, were alternately pirates and hucksters, as opportunity served. Every occupation must have its heavenly patron, its departmental deity, and Hermes protects thieves and raiders, “minions of the moon,” “clerks of St. Nicholas.” His very birth is a stolen thing, the darkling fruit of a divine amour in a dusky cavern. Il chasse de race. ¹³

THE HYMN TO APHRODITE

The Hymn to Aphrodite is, in a literary sense, one of the most beautiful and quite the most Homeric in the collection. By “Homeric” I mean that if we found the adventure of Anchises occurring at length in the Iliad, by way of an episode, perhaps in a speech of Æneas, it would not strike us as inconsistent in tone, though occasionally in phrase. Indeed the germ of the Hymn occurs in Iliad, B. 820: “Æneas, whom holy Aphrodite bore to the embraces of Anchises on the knowes of Ida, a Goddess couching with a mortal.” Again, in E. 313, Æneas is spoken of as the son of Aphrodite and the neat-herd, Anchises. The celebrated prophecy of the future rule of the children of Æneas over the Trojans (Υ. 307), probably made, like many prophecies, after the event, appears to indicate the claim of a Royal House at Ilios, and is regarded as of later date than the general context of the epic. The Æneid is constructed on this hint; the Romans claiming to be of Trojan descent through Æneas. The date of the composition cannot be fixed from considerations of the Homeric tone; thus lines 238-239 may be a reminiscence of Odyssey, λ. 394, and other like suggestions are offered. ¹⁴ The conjectures as to date vary from the time of Homer to that of the Cypria, of Mimnermus (the references to the bitterness of loveless old age are in his vein) of Anacreon, or even of Herodotus and the Tragedians. The words σατινη, πρεσβειρα, and other indications are relied on for a late date: and there are obvious coincidences with the Hymn to Demeter, as in line 174, Demeter 109, f. Gemoll, however, takes this hymn to be the earlier.

About the place of composition, Cyprus or Asia Minor, the learned are no less divided than about the date. Many of the grounds on which their opinions rest appear unstable. The relations of Aphrodite to the wild beasts under her wondrous spell, for instance, need not be borrowed from Circe with her attendant beasts. If not of Homer’s age, the Hymn is markedly successful as a continuation of the Homeric tone and manner.

Modern Puritanism naturally “condemns” Aphrodite, as it “condemns” Helen. But Homer is lenient; Helen is under the spell of the Gods, an unwilling and repentant tool of Destiny; and Aphrodite, too, is driven by Zeus into the arms of a mortal. She is αιδοιη, shamefast; and her adventure is to her a bitter sorrow (199, 200). The dread of Anchises – a man is not long of life who lies with a Goddess – refers to a belief found from Glenfinlas to Samoa and New Caledonia, that the embraces of the spiritual ladies of the woodlands are fatal to men. The legend has been told to me in the Highlands, and to Mr. Stevenson in Samoa, while my cousin, Mr. J. J. Atkinson, actually knew a Kaneka who died in three days after an amour like that of Anchises. The Breton ballad, Le Sieur Nan, turns on the same opinion. The amour of Thomas the Rhymer is a mediæval analogue of the Idæan legend.

Aphrodite has better claims than most Greek Gods to Oriental elements. Herodotus and Pausanias (i. xiv. 6, iii. 23, I) look on her as a being first worshipped by the Assyrians, then by the Paphians of Cyprus, and Phœnicians at Askelon, who communicated the cult to the Cythereans. Cyprus is one of her most ancient sites, and Ishtar and Ashtoreth are among her Oriental analogues. She springs from the sea —

 
“The wandering waters knew her, the winds and the viewless ways,
And the roses grew rosier, and bluer the sea-blue streams of the bays.”
 

But the charm of Aphrodite is Greek. Even without foreign influence, Greek polytheism would have developed a Goddess of Love, as did the polytheism of the North (Frigga) and of the Aztecs. The rites of Adonis, the vernal year, are, even in the name of the hero, Oriental. “The name Adonis is the Phœnician Adon, ‘Lord.’” ¹⁵ “The decay and revival of vegetation” inspires the Adonis rite, which is un-Homeric; and was superfluous, where the descent and return of Persephone typified the same class of ideas. To whatever extent contaminated by Phœnician influence, Aphrodite in Homer is purely Greek, in grace and happy humanity.

The origins of Aphrodite, unlike the origins of Apollo, cannot be found in a state of low savagery. She is a departmental Goddess, and as such, as ruling a province of human passion, she belongs to a late development of religion. To Christianity she was a scandal, one of the scandals which are absent from the most primitive of surviving creeds. Polytheism, as if of set purpose, puts every conceivable aspect of life, good or bad, under divine sanction. This is much less the case in the religion of the very backward races. We do not know historically, what the germs of religion were; if we look at the most archaic examples, for instance in Australia or the Andaman Islands, we find neither sacrifice nor departmental deities.

Religion there is mainly a belief in a primal Being, not necessarily conceived as spiritual, but rather as an undying magnified Man, of indefinitely extensive powers. He dwells above “the vaulted sky beyond which lies the mysterious home of that great and powerful Being, who is Bunjil, Baiame, or Daramulun in different tribal languages, but who in all is known by a name the equivalent of the only one used by the Kurnai, which is Mungan-ngaur, or ‘Our Father.’” ¹⁶ This Father is conceived of in some places as “a very great old man with a long beard,” enthroned on, or growing into, a crystal throne. Often he is served by a son or sons (Apollo, Hermes), frequently regarded as spiritually begotten; elsewhere, looked on as the son of the wife of the deity, and as father of the tribe. ¹⁷ Scandals connected with fatherhood, amorous intrigues so abundant in Greek mythology, are usually not reported among the lowest races. In one known case, the deity, Pundjel or Bunjil, takes the wives of Karween, who is changed into a crane. ¹⁸ This is one of the many savage ætiological myths which account for the peculiarities of animals as a result of metamorphosis, in the manner of Ovid. It has been connected with the legend of Bunjil, who is thus envisaged, not as “Our Father” beyond the vault of heaven, who still inspires poets, ¹⁹ but as a wandering, shape-shifting medicine-man. Zeus, the Heavenly Father, of course appears times without number in the same contradictory aspect.

But such anecdotes are either not common, or are not frequently reported, in the faiths of the most archaic of known races. Much more frequently we find the totemistic conception. All the kindreds with animal names (why adopted we do not know) are apt to explain these designations by descent from the animals selected, or by metamorphosis of the primal beasts into men. This collides with the other notions of descent from, or creation or manufacture out of clay, by the primal Being, “Father Ours.” Such contradictions are nothing to the savage theologian, who is no reconciler or apologist. But when reconciliation and apology are later found to be desirable, as in Greece, it is easy to explain that we are descended both from Our Father, and from a swan, cow, ant, serpent, dog, wolf, or what you will. That beast was Our Father, say Father Zeus, in animal disguise. Thus Greek legends of bestial amours of a God are probably, in origin, not primitive, but scandals produced in the effort to reconcile contradictory myths. The result is a worse scandal, an accretion of more low myths about a conception of the primal Being which was, relatively, lofty and pure.

Again, as aristocracies arose, the chief families desired to be sons of the Father in a special sense: not as common men are. Her Majesty’s lineage may thus be traced to Woden! Now each such descent required a separate divine amour, and a new scandalous story of Zeus or Apollo, though Zeus may originally have been as celibate as the Australian Baiame or Noorele are, in some legends. Once more, syncretism came in as a mythopœic influence. Say that several Australian nations, becoming more polite, amalgamated into a settled people. Then we should have several Gods, the chief Beings of various tribes, say Noorele, Bunjil, Mungan-ngaur, Baiame, Daramulun, Mangarrah, Mulkari, Pinmeheal. The most imposing God of the dominant tribe might be elevated to the sovereignty of Zeus. But, in the new administration, places must be found for the other old tribal Gods. They are, therefore, set over various departments: Love, War, Agriculture, Medicine, Poetry, Commerce, while one or more of the sons take the places of Apollo and Hermes. There appears to be a very early example of syncretism in Australia. Daramulun (Papang, Our Father) is “Master of All,” on the coast, near Shoalhaven River. Baiame is “Master of All,” far north, on the Barwan. But the locally intermediate tribe of the Wiraijuri, or Wiradthuri, have adopted Baiame, and reduced Daramulun to an exploded bugbear, a merely nominal superintendent of the Mysteries; and the southern Coast Murring have rejected Baiame altogether, or never knew him, while making Daramulun supreme.

One obvious method of reconciling various tribal Gods in a syncretic Olympus, is the genealogical. All are children of Zeus, for example, or grandchildren, or brothers and sisters. Fancy then provides an amour to account for each relationship. Zeus loved Leto, Leda, Europa, and so forth. Thus a God, originally innocent and even moral, becomes a perfect pattern of vice; and the eternal contradiction vexes the souls of Xenophanes, Plato, and St. Augustine. Sacrifices, even human sacrifices, wholly unknown to the most archaic faiths, were made to ghosts of men: and especially of kings, in the case of human sacrifice. Thence they were transferred to Gods, and behold a new scandal, when men began to reflect under more civilised conditions. Thus all these legends of divine amours and sins, or most of them, including the wanton legend of Aphrodite, and all the human sacrifices which survived to the disgrace of Greek religion, are really degrading accessories to the most archaic beliefs. They are products, not of the most rudimentary savage existence, but of the evolution through the lower and higher barbarism. The worst features of savage ritual are different – taking the lines of sorcery, of cruel initiations, and, perhaps, of revival of the licence of promiscuity, or of Group Marriage. Of these things the traces are not absent from Greek faith, but they are comparatively inconspicuous.

Buffoonery, as we have seen, exists in all grades of civilised or savage rites, and was not absent from the popular festivals of the mediæval Church: religion throwing her mantle over every human field of action, as over Folk Medicine. On these lines I venture to explain what seem to me the strange and repugnant elements of the religion of a people so refined, and so capable of high moral ideas, as the Greeks. Aphrodite is personified desire, but religion did not throw her mantle over desire alone; the cloistered life, the frank charm of maidenhood, were as dear to the Greek genius, and were consecrated by the examples of Athene, Artemis, and Hestia. She presides over the pure element of the fire of the hearth, just as in the household did the daughter of the king or chief. Hers are the first libations at feasts (xxviii. 5), though in Homer they are poured forth to Hermes.

We may explain the Gods of the minor hymns in the same way. Pan, for instance, as the son of Hermes, inherits the wild, frolicsome, rural aspect of his character. The Dioscuri answer to the Vedic Asvins, twin rescuers of men in danger on land or sea: perhaps the Evening and Morning Star. Dionysus is another aspect of the joy of life and of the world and the vintaging. Moon and Sun, Selene and Helios, appear as quite distinct from Artemis and Apollo; Gæa, the Earth, is equally distinct from Demeter. The Hymn to Ares is quite un-Homeric in character, and is oddly conceived in the spirit of the Scottish poltroon, who cries to his friend, “Haud me, haud me, or I’ll fecht!” The war-god is implored to moderate the martial eagerness of the poet. The original collector here showed lack of discrimination. At no time, however, was Ares a popular God in Greece; in Homer he is a braggart and coward.

THE HYMN TO DEMETER

The beautiful Hymn to Demeter, an example of Greek religious faith in its most pensive and most romantic aspects, was found in the last century (1780), in Moscow. Inter pullos et porcos latitabat: the song of the rural deity had found its way into the haunts of the humble creatures whom she protected. A discovery even more fortunate, in 1857, led Sir Charles Newton to a little sacellum, or family chapel, near Cnidos. On a platform of rock, beneath a cliff, and looking to the Mediterranean, were the ruins of the ancient shrine: the votive offerings; the lamps long without oil or flame; the Curses, or Diræ, inscribed on thin sheets of lead, and directed against thieves or rivals. The head of the statue, itself already known, was also discovered. Votive offerings, cheap curses, objects of folk-lore rite and of sympathetic magic, – these are connected with the popular, the peasant aspect of the religion of Demeter. She it is to whom pigs are sacrificed: who makes the fields fertile with scattered fragments of their flesh; and her rustic effigy, at Theocritus’s feast of the harvest home, stands smiling, with corn and poppies in her hands.

But the Cnidian shrine had once another treasure, the beautiful melancholy statue of the seated Demeter of the uplifted eyes; the mourning mother: the weary seeker for the lost maiden: her child Persephone. Far from the ruins above the sea, beneath the scorched seaward wall of rock: far from the aromatic fragrance of the rock-nourished flowers, from the bees, and the playful lizards, Demeter now occupies her place in the great halls of the British Museum. Like the Hymn, this melancholy and tender work of art is imperfect, but the sentiment is thereby rather increased than impaired. The ancients buried things broken with the dead, that the shadows of tool, or weapon, or vase might be set free, to serve the shadows of their masters in the land of the souls. Broken as they, too, are, the Hymn and the statue are “free among the dead,” and eloquent of the higher religion that, in Greece, attached itself to the lost Maiden and the sorrowing Mother. Demeter, in religion, was more than a fertiliser of the fields: Korê, the Maiden, was more than the buried pig, or the seed sown to await its resurrection; or the harvest idol, fashioned of corn-stalks: more even than a symbol of the winter sleep and vernal awakening of the year and the life of nature. She became the “dread Persephone” of the Odyssey,

“A Queen over death and the dead.”

In her winter retreat below the earth she was the bride of the Lord of Many Guests, and the ruler “of the souls of men outworn.” In this office Odysseus in Homer knows her, though neither Iliad nor Odyssey recognises Korê as the maiden Spring, the daughter and companion of Demeter as Goddess of Grain. Christianity, even, did not quite dethrone Persephone. She lives in two forms: first, as the harvest effigy made of corn-stalks bound together, the last gleanings; secondly, as “the Fairy Queen Proserpina,” who carried Thomas the Rhymer from beneath the Eildon Tree to that land which lies beyond the stream of slain men’s blood.

“For a’ the bluid that’s shed on earth

Flows through the streams of that countrie.”

Thus tenacious of life has been the myth of Mother and Maiden, a natural flower of the human heart, found, unborrowed, by the Spaniards in the maize-fields of Peru. Clearly the myth is a thing composed of many elements, glad and sad as the waving fields of yellow grain, or as the Chthonian darkness under earth where the seed awaits new life in the new year. The creed is practical as the folk-lore of sympathetic magic, which half expects to bring good harvest luck by various mummeries; and the creed is mystical as the hidden things and words unknown which assured Pindar and Sophocles of secure felicity in this and in the future life.

The creed is beautiful as the exquisite profile of the corn-tressed head of Persephone on Syracusan coins: and it is grotesque as the custom which bade the pilgrims to Eleusis bathe in the sea, each with the pig which he was about to sacrifice. The highest religious hopes, the meanest magical mummeries are blended in this religion. That one element is earlier than the other we cannot say with much certainty. The ritual aspect, as concerned with the happy future of the soul, does not appear in Iliad or Odyssey, where the Mysteries are not named. But the silence of Homer is never a safe argument in favour of his ignorance, any more than the absence of allusion to tobacco in Shakspeare is a proof that tobacco was, in his age, unknown.

We shall find that a barbaric people, the Pawnees, hold a mystery precisely parallel to the Demeter legend: a Mystery necessarily unborrowed from Greece. The Greeks, therefore, may have evolved the legend long before Homer’s day, and he may have known the story which he does not find occasion to tell. As to what was said, shown, and done in the Eleusinia, we only gather that there was a kind of Mystery Play on the sacred legend; that there were fastings, vigils, sacrifices, secret objects displayed, sacred words uttered; and that thence such men as Pindar and Sophocles received the impression that for them, in this and the future life, all was well, was well for those of pure hearts and hands. The “purity” may partly have been ritual, but was certainly understood, also, as relating to excellence of life. Than such a faith (for faith it is) religion has nothing better to give. But the extreme diligence of scholars and archæologists can tell us nothing more definite. The impressions on the souls of the initiated may have been caused merely by that dim or splendid religious light of the vigils, and by association with sacred things usually kept in solemn sanctuaries. Again, mere buffoonery (as is common in savage Mysteries) brought the pilgrims back to common life when they crossed the bridge on their return to Athens; just as the buffooneries of Baubo brought a smile to the sad lips of Demeter. Beyond this all is conjecture, and the secret may have been so well kept just because, in fact, there was no secret to keep. ²⁰

Till the end of the present century, mythologists did not usually employ the method of comparing Greek rites and legends with, first, the sympathetic magic and the fables of peasant folk-lore; second, with the Mysteries and myths of contemporary savage races, of which European folk-lore is mainly a survival. For a study of Demeter from these sides (a study still too much neglected in Germany) readers may consult Mannhardt’s works, Mr. Frazer’s “Golden Bough,” and the present translator’s “Custom and Myth,” and “Myth, Ritual, and Religion.” Mr. Frazer, especially, has enabled the English reader to understand the savage and rural element of sympathetic magic as a factor in the Demeter myth. Meanwhile Mr. Pater has dealt with the higher sentiment, the more religious aspect, of the myth and the rites. I am not inclined to go all lengths with Mr. Frazer’s ingenious and learned system, as will be seen, while regretting that the new edition of his “Golden Bough” is not yet accessible.

If we accept (which I do not entirely) Mr. Frazer’s theory of the origin of the Demeter myth, there is no finer example of the Greek power of transforming into beauty the superstitions of Barbarism. The explanation to which I refer is contained in Mr. J. G. Frazer’s learned and ingenious work, “The Golden Bough.” While mythologists of the schools of Mr. Max Müller and Kuhn have usually resolved most Gods and heroes into Sun, Sky, Dawn, Twilight; or, again, into elemental powers of Thunder, Tempest, Lightning, and Night, Mr. Frazer is apt to see in them the Spirit of Vegetation. Osiris is a Tree Spirit or a Corn Spirit (Mannhardt, the founder of the system, however, took Osiris to be the Sun). Balder is the Spirit of the Oak. The oak, “we may certainly conclude, was one of the chief, if not the very chief divinity of the Aryans before the dispersion.” ²¹ If so, the Aryans before the dispersion were on an infinitely lower religious level than those Australian tribes, whose chief divinity is not a gum-tree, but a being named “Our Father,” dwelling beyond the visible heavens. When we remember the vast numbers of gods of sky or heaven among many scattered races, and the obvious connection of Zeus with the sky (sub Jove frigido), and the usually assigned sense of the name of Zeus, it is not easy to suppose that he was originally an oak. But Mr. Frazer considers the etymological connection of Zeus with the Sanscrit word for sky, an insufficient reason for regarding Zeus as, in origin, a sky-god. He prefers, it seems, to believe that, as being the wood out of which fire was kindled by some Aryan-speaking peoples, the oak may have come to be called “The Bright or Shining One” (Zeus, Jove), by the ancient Greeks and Italians. ²² The Greeks, in fact, used the laurel (daphne) for making fire, not, as far as I am aware, the oak. Though the oak was the tree of Zeus, the heavens were certainly his province, and, despite the oak of Dodona, and the oak on the Capitol, he is much more generally connected with the sky than with the tree. In fact this reduction of Zeus, in origin, to an oak, rather suggests that the spirit of system is too powerful with Mr. Frazer.

He makes, perhaps, a more plausible case for his reduction of dread Persephone to a Pig. The process is curious. Early agricultural man believed in a Corn Spirit, a spiritual essence animating the grain (in itself no very unworthy conception). But because, as the field is mown, animals in the corn are driven into the last unshorn nook, and then into the open, the beast which rushed out of the last patch was identified with the Corn Spirit in some animal shape, perhaps that of a pig; many other animals occur. The pig has a great part in the ritual of Demeter. Pigs of pottery were found by Sir Charles Newton on her sacred ground. The initiate in the Mysteries brought pigs to Eleusis, and bathed with them in the sea. The pig was sacrificed to her; in fact (though not in our Hymn) she was closely associated with pigs. “We may now ask.. may not the pig be nothing but the Goddess herself in animal form?” ²³ She would later become anthropomorphic: a lovely Goddess, whose hair, as in the Hymn, is “yellow as ripe corn.” But the prior pig could not be shaken off. At the Attic Thesmophoria the women celebrated the Descent and Ascent of Persephone, – a “double” of Demeter. In this rite pigs and other things were thrown into certain caverns. Later, the cold remains of pig were recovered and placed on the altar. Fragments were scattered for luck on the fields with the seed-corn. A myth explained that a flock of pigs were swallowed by Earth when Persephone was ravished by Hades to the lower world, of which matter the Hymn says nothing. “In short, the pigs were Proserpine.” ²⁴ The eating of pigs at the Thesmophoria was “a partaking of the body of the God,” though the partakers, one thinks, must have been totally unconscious of the circumstance. We must presume that (if this theory be correct) a very considerable time was needed for the evolution of a pig into the Demeter of the Hymn, and the change is quite successfully complete; a testimony to the transfiguring power of the Greek genius.

We may be inclined to doubt, however, whether the task before the genius of Greece, the task of making Proserpine out of a porker, was really so colossal. The primitive mind is notoriously capable of entertaining, simultaneously, the most contradictory notions. Thus, in the Australian “Legend of Eerin,” the mourners implore Byamee to accept the soul of the faithful Eerin into his Paradise, Bullimah. No doubt Byamee heard, yet Eerin is now a little owl of plaintive voice, which ratters warning cries in time of peril. ²⁵ No incongruity of this kind is felt to be a difficulty by the childlike narrators. Now I conceive that, starting with the relatively high idea of a Spirit of the Grain, early man was quite capable of envisaging it both spiritually and in zoomorphic form (accidentally conditioned here into horse, there into goat, pig, or what not). But these views of his need not exclude his simultaneous belief in the Corn Spirit as a being anthropomorphic, “Mother Earth,” or “Mother Grain,” as we follow the common etymology; or that of Mannhardt (ζεια (dæa) μητηρ=“barley-mother”). If I am right, poetry and the higher religion moved from the first on the line of the anthropomorphic Lady of the Harvest and the Corn, Mother Barley: while the popular folk-lore of the Corn Spirit (which found utterance in the mirth of harvesting, and in the magic ritual for ensuring fertility), followed on the line of the pig. At some seasons, and in some ceremonies, the pig represented the genius of the corn: in general, the Lady of the Corn was – Demeter. We really need not believe that the two forms of the genius of the corn were ever consciously identified. Demeter never was a Pig! ²⁶

“The Peruvians, we are told, believed all useful plants to be animated by a divine being who causes their growth,” says Mr. Frazer. ²⁷ The genealogical table, then, in my opinion, is: —

Thus the Greek genius had other and better materials to work on, in evolving Demeter, than the rather lowly animal which is associated with her rites. If any one objects that animal gods always precede anthropomorphic gods in evolution, we reply that, in the most archaic of known races, the deities are represented in human guise at the Mysteries, though there are animal Totems, and though, in myth, the deity may, and often does, assume shapes of bird or beast. ²⁸