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Judged by these analogies Demeter would
be the ripe crop of this year; Persephone would be the seed-corn
taken from it and sown in autumn, to reappear in spring. The descent
of Persephone into the lower world would thus be a mythical
expression for the sowing of the seed; her reappearance in spring
would signify the sprouting of the young corn. In this way the
Persephone of one year becomes the Demeter of the next, and this may
very well have been the original form of the myth. But when with the
advance of religious thought the corn came to be personified no
longer as a being that went through the whole cycle of birth,
growth, reproduction, and death within a year, but as an immortal
goddess, consistency required that one of the two personifications,
the mother or the daughter, should be sacrificed. However, the
double conception of the corn as mother and daughter may have been
too old and too deeply rooted in the popular mind to be eradicated
by logic, and so room had to be found in the reformed myth both for
mother and daughter.


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