us in Homer knows her, though neither Iliad nor Odyssey recognises
_Kore_ 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."

[Silver denarius of C. Vibius Pansa (about 90 B.C.). Obv. Head of
Apollo. Rev. Demeter searching for Persephone: lang56.jpg]

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,