Thus myth and ritual mutually explain and confirm each
other. The poet of the seventh century before our era gives us the
myth--he could not without sacrilege have revealed the ritual: the
Christian father reveals the ritual, and his revelation accords
perfectly with the veiled hint of the old poet. On the whole, then,
we may, with many modern scholars, confidently accept the statement
of the learned Christian father Clement of Alexandria, that the myth
of Demeter and Persephone was acted as a sacred drama in the
mysteries of Eleusis.
But if the myth was acted as a part, perhaps as the principal part,
of the most famous and solemn religious rites of ancient Greece, we
have still to enquire, What was, after all, stripped of later
accretions, the original kernel of the myth which appears to later
ages surrounded and transfigured by an aureole of awe and mystery,
lit up by some of the most brilliant rays of Grecian literature and
art? If we follow the indications given by our oldest literary
authority on the subject, the author of the Homeric hymn to Demeter,
the riddle is not hard to read; the figures of the two goddesses,
the mother and the daughter, resolve themselves into
personifications of the corn.
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