earches other purely fanciful origins have been
invented by scholars, ancient or modern. It is necessary to return to
the pedestrian facts, if merely in order to demonstrate the futility of
the fancies. The result is in no way discreditable to Greece. Beginning,
like other peoples, with the vague unrealised conception of the Corn
Mother (an idea which could not occur before the agricultural stage of
civilisation), the Greeks refined and elevated the idea into the Demeter
of the Hymn, and of the Cnidian statue. To do this was the result of
their unique gifts as a race. Meanwhile the other notion of a Ruler of
Souls, in Greece attached to Persephone, is found among peoples not yet
agricultural: nomads living on grubs, roots, seeds of wild grasses, and
the products of the chase. Almost all men's ideas are as old as mankind,
so far as we know mankind.

Conceptions originally "half-conscious," and purely popular, as of a
Spirit of Vegetation, incarnate, as it were, in each year's growth, were
next handled by conscious poets, like the author of our Hymn, and then
are "realised as abstract symbols, because intensely characteristic
examples of moral, or spiritual conditions." {72} Thus Demeter and
Persephone, no longer pigs or Grain-Mothers, "lend themselves to the
elevation and the correction of the sentiments of sorrow and awe, by the
presentment to the senses and imagination of an ideal expression of them.
Demeter cannot but seem the type of divine grief. Persephone is the
Goddess of Death, yet with a promise of life to come."

That the Eleusinia included an ethical element seems undeniable. This
one would think probable, _a priori_, on the ground that Greek Mysteries
are an embellished survival of the initiatory rites of savages, which do
contain elements of morality. This I have argued at some length in
"Myth, Ritual, and Religion." Many strange customs in some Greek
Mysteries, such as the daubing of the initiate with clay, the use of the
[Greek text] (the Australian _Tundun_, a small piece of wood whirled
noisily by a string), the general suggestion of _a new life_, the
flogging of boys at Sparta, their retreat, each with his instructor
(Australian _kabbo_, Greek [Greek text]) to the forests, are precisely
analogous to things found in Australia, America, and Africa. Now savage
rites are often associated with what we think gross cruelty, and, as in
Fiji, with abandoned license, of which the Fathers also accuse