ocial conditions. Monsieur Foucart, however, has lately argued in
favour of an Egyptian origin of the Eleusinia. {82}

The Greeks naturally identified Demeter and Dionysus with Isis and
Osiris. There were analogies in the figures and the legends, and that
was enough. So, had the Greeks visited America, they would have
recognised Demeter in the Pawnee Earth Mother, and Persephone or
Eubouleus in Chibiabos. To account for the similarities they would
probably have invented a fable of Pawnee visitors to Greece, or of Greek
missionaries among the Pawnees. So they were apt to form a theory of an
Egyptian origin of Dionysus and Demeter.

M. Foucart, however, argues that agriculture, corn-growing at least, came
into Greece at one stride, barley and wheat not being indigenous in a
wild state. The Greeks, however, may have brought grain in their
original national migration (the Greek words for grain and ploughing are
common to other families of Aryan speech) or obtained it from Phoenician
settlements. Demeter, however, in M. Foucart's theory, would be the
Goddess of the foreigners who carried the grain first to Hellas. Now
both the Homeric epics and the Egyptian monuments show us Egypt and
Greece in contact in the Greek prehistoric period. But it does not
exactly follow that the prehistoric Greeks would adopt Egyptian gods; or
that the Thesmophoria, an Athenian harvest-rite of Demeter, was founded
by colonists from Egypt, answering to the daughters of Danaus. {84}
Egyptians certainly did not introduce the similar rite among the Khonds,
or the Incas. The rites _could_ grow up without importation, as the
result of the similarities of primitive fancy everywhere. If Isis is
Lady of the Grain in Egypt, so is Mama in Peru, and Demeter need no more
have been imported from Egypt than Mama. If Osiris taught the arts of
life and the laws of society in Egypt, so did Daramulun in Australia, and
Yehl in British Columbia. All the gods and culture heroes everywhere
play this _role_--in regions where importation of the idea from Egypt is
utterly out of the question. Even in minute details, legends recur
everywhere; the _phallus_ of a mutilated Australian being of the fabulous
"Alcheringa time," is hunted for by his wives; exactly as Isis wanders in
search of the _phallus_ of the mutilated Osiris. {85a} Is anything in
the Demeter legend so like the Isis legend as this Australian
coincidence? Yet the Arunta did not borrow it from E