In
this way, starting from a single personification of the corn as
female, mythic fancy might in time reach a double personification of
it as mother and daughter. It would be very rash to affirm that this
was the way in which the myth of Demeter and Persephone actually
took shape; but it seems a legitimate conjecture that the
reduplication of deities, of which Demeter and Persephone furnish an
example, may sometimes have arisen in the way indicated. For
example, among the pairs of deities dealt with in a former part of
this work, it has been shown that there are grounds for regarding
both Isis and her companion god Osiris as personifications of the
corn. On the hypothesis just suggested, Isis would be the old
corn-spirit, and Osiris would be the newer one, whose relationship
to the old spirit was variously explained as that of brother,
husband, and son; for of course mythology would always be free to
account for the coexistence of the two divinities in more ways than
one. It must not, however, be forgotten that this proposed
explanation of such pairs of deities as Demeter and Persephone or
Isis and Osiris is purely conjectural, and is only given for what it
is worth.
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