The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (Third Edition, Vol. 07 of 12) - Frazer James George

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rel="nofollow" href="#n204" type="note">204 We may suppose that the festival or some part of it was celebrated on the Sacred Threshing-floor of Triptolemus at Eleusis;205 for as Triptolemus was the hero who is said to have diffused the knowledge of the corn all over the world, nothing could be more natural than that the Festival of the Threshing-floor should be held on the sacred threshing-floor which bore his name. As for Demeter, we have already seen how intimate was her association with the threshing-floor and the operation of threshing; according to Homer, she is the yellow goddess who parts the yellow grain from the white chaff at the threshing, and in Cos her image with the corn-stalks and the poppies in her hands stood on the threshing-floor.206 The festival lasted one day, and no victims might be sacrificed at it;207 but special use was made, as we have seen, of the first-fruits of the corn. With regard to the dating of the festival we are informed that it fell in the month Poseideon, which corresponds roughly to our December, and as the date rests on the high authority of the ancient Athenian antiquary Philochorus,208 and is, moreover, indirectly confirmed by inscriptional evidence,209 we are bound to accept it. But it is certainly surprising to find a Festival of the Threshing-floor held so late in the year, long after the threshing, which in Greece usually takes place not later than midsummer, though on high ground in Crete it is sometimes prolonged till near the end of August.210 We seem bound to conclude that the Festival of the Threshing-floor was quite distinct from the actual threshing of the corn.211 It is said to have included certain mystic rites performed by women alone, who feasted and quaffed wine, while they broke filthy jests on each other and exhibited cakes baked in the form of the male and female organs of generation.212 If the latter particulars are correctly reported we may suppose that these indecencies, like certain obscenities which seem to have formed part of the Great Mysteries at Eleusis,213 were no mere wanton outbursts of licentious passion, but were deliberately practised as rites calculated to promote the fertility of the ground by means of homoeopathic or imitative magic. A like association of what we might call indecency with rites intended to promote the growth of the crops meets us in the Thesmophoria, a festival of Demeter celebrated by women alone, at which the character of the goddess as a source of fertility comes out clearly in the custom of mixing the remains of the sacrificial pigs with the seed-corn in order to obtain a plentiful crop. We shall return to this festival later on.214

      The Green Festival and the Festival of the Cornstalks at Eleusis. Epithets of Demeter referring to the corn.

      Other festivals held at Eleusis in honour of Demeter and Persephone were known as the Green Festival and the Festival of the Cornstalks.215 Of the manner of their celebration we know nothing except that they comprised sacrifices, which were offered to Demeter and Persephone. But their names suffice to connect the two festivals with the green and the standing corn. We have seen that Demeter herself bore the title of Green, and that sacrifices were offered to her under that title which plainly aimed at promoting fertility.216 Among the many epithets applied to Demeter which mark her relation to the corn may further be mentioned “Wheat-lover,”217 “She of the Corn,”218 “Sheaf-bearer,”219 “She of the Threshing-floor,”220 “She of the Winnowing-fan,”221 “Nurse of the Corn-ears,”222 “Crowned with Ears of Corn,”223 “She of the Seed,”224 “She of the Green Fruits,”225 “Heavy with Summer Fruits,”226 “Fruit-bearer,”227 “She of the Great Loaf,” and “She of the Great Barley Loaf.”228 Of these epithets it may be remarked that though all of them are quite appropriate to a Corn Goddess, some of them would scarcely be applicable to an Earth Goddess and therefore they add weight to the other arguments which turn the scale in favour of the corn as the fundamental attribute of Demeter.

      Belief in ancient and modern times that the corn-crops depend on possession of an image of Demeter.

      How deeply implanted in the mind of the ancient Greeks was this faith in Demeter as goddess of the corn may be judged by the circumstance that the faith actually persisted among their Christian descendants at her old sanctuary of Eleusis down to the beginning of the nineteenth century. For when the English traveller Dodwell revisited Eleusis, the inhabitants lamented to him the loss of a colossal image of Demeter, which was carried off by Clarke in 1802 and presented to the University of Cambridge, where it still remains. “In my first journey to Greece,” says Dodwell, “this protecting deity was in its full glory, situated in the centre of a threshing-floor, amongst the ruins of her temple. The villagers were impressed with a persuasion that their rich harvests were the effect of her bounty, and since her removal, their abundance, as they assured me, has disappeared.”229 Thus we see the Corn Goddess Demeter standing on the threshing-floor of Eleusis and dispensing corn to her worshippers in the nineteenth century of the Christian era, precisely as her image stood and dispensed corn to her worshippers on the threshing-floor of Cos in the days of Theocritus. And just as the people of Eleusis last century attributed the diminution of their harvests to the loss of the image of Demeter, so in antiquity the Sicilians, a corn-growing people devoted to the worship of the two Corn Goddesses, lamented that the crops of many towns had perished because the unscrupulous Roman governor Verres had impiously carried off the image of Demeter from her famous temple at Henna.230 Could we ask for a clearer proof that Demeter was indeed the goddess of the corn than this belief, held by the Greeks down to modern times, that the corn-crops depended on her presence and bounty and perished when her image was removed?

      Sacred marriage of Zeus and Demeter at Eleusis. Homer on the love of Zeus for Demeter. Zeus the Sky God may have been confused with Subterranean Zeus, that is, Pluto. Demeter may have been confused with Persephone; in art the types of the two goddesses are often very similar.

      In a former part of this work I followed an eminent French scholar in concluding, from various indications, that part of the religious drama performed in the mysteries of Eleusis may have been a marriage between the sky-god Zeus and the corn-goddess Demeter, represented by the hierophant and the priestess of the goddess respectively.231 The conclusion is arrived at by combining a number of passages, all more or less vague and indefinite, of late Christian writers; hence it must remain to some extent uncertain and cannot at the best lay claim to more than a fair degree of probability. It may be, as Professor W. Ridgeway holds, that this dramatic marriage of the god and goddess was an innovation foisted into the Eleusinian Mysteries in that great welter of religions which followed the meeting of the East and the West in the later ages of antiquity.232 If a marriage of Zeus and Demeter did indeed form an important feature of the Mysteries in the fifth century before our era, it is certainly remarkable, as Professor Ridgeway has justly pointed out, that no mention of Zeus occurs in the public decree of that century which regulates the offerings of first-fruits and the sacrifices to be made to the gods and goddesses of Eleusis.233 At the same time we must bear in mind that, if the evidence for the ritual marriage of Zeus and Demeter is late and doubtful, the evidence for the myth is ancient and indubitable. The story was known to Homer, for in the list of

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<p>205</p>

The threshing-floor of Triptolemus at Eleusis (Pausanias, i. 38. 6) is no doubt identical with the Sacred Threshing-floor mentioned in the great Eleusinian inscription of 329 b. c. (Dittenberger, Sylloge Inscriptionum Graecarum,2 No. 587, line 234). We read of a hierophant who, contrary to ancestral custom, sacrificed a victim on the hearth in the Hall at Eleusis during the Festival of the Threshing-floor, “it being unlawful to sacrifice victims on that day” (Demosthenes, Contra Neaeram, 116, pp. 1384 sq.), but from such an unlawful act no inference can be drawn as to the place where the festival was held. That the festival probably had special reference to the threshing-floor of Triptolemus has already been pointed out by O. Rubensohn (Die Mysterienheiligtümer in Eleusis und Samothrake, Berlin, 1892, p. 118).

<p>206</p>

See above, pp. 41 sq., 43. Maximus Tyrius observes (Dissertat. xxx. 5) that husbandmen were the first to celebrate sacred rites in honour of Demeter at the threshing-floor.

<p>207</p>

See above, p. , note 4.

<p>208</p>

Harpocration, s. v. Ἁλῶα (vol. i. p. 24, ed. G. Dindorf).

<p>209</p>

Dittenberger, Sylloge Inscriptionum Graecarum,2 No. 587, lines 124, 144, with the editor's notes; August Mommsen, Feste der Stadt Athen im Altertum, p. 360.

<p>210</p>

So I am informed by my friend Professor J. L. Myres, who speaks from personal observation.

<p>211</p>

This is recognised by Professor M. P. Nilsson. See his Studia de Dionysiis Atticis (Lund, 1900), pp. 95 sqq., and his Griechische Feste, p. 329. To explain the lateness of the festival, Miss J. E. Harrison suggests that “the shift of date is due to Dionysos. The rival festivals of Dionysos were in mid-winter. He possessed himself of the festivals of Demeter, took over her threshing-floor and compelled the anomaly of a winter threshing festival” (Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, Second Edition, p. 147).

<p>212</p>

Scholiast on Lucian, Dial. Meretr. vii. 4 (Scholia in Lucianum, ed. H. Rabe, Leipsic, 1906, pp. 279-281).

<p>213</p>

Clement of Alexandria, Protrept. ii. 15 and 20, pp. 13 and 17 ed. Potter; Arnobius, Adversus Nationes, v. 25-27, 35, 39.

<p>214</p>

See below, p. 116; vol. ii. pp. 17 sqq.

<p>215</p>

Dittenberger, Sylloge Inscriptionum Graecarum,2 No. 640; Ch. Michel, Recueil d'Inscriptions Grecques (Brussels, 1900), No. 135, p. 145. To be exact, while the inscription definitely mentions the sacrifices to Demeter and Persephone at the Green Festival, it does not record the deities to whom the sacrifice at the Festival of the Cornstalks (τὴν τῶν Καλαμαίων θυσίαν) was offered. But mentioned as it is in immediate connexion with the sacrifices to Demeter and Persephone at the Green Festival, we may fairly suppose that the sacrifice at the Festival of the Cornstalks was also offered to these goddesses.

<p>216</p>

See above, p. 42.

<p>217</p>

Anthologia Palatina, vi. 36. 1 sq.

<p>218</p>

Polemo, cited by Athenaeus, iii. 9, p. 416 b.

<p>219</p>

Nonnus, Dionys. xvii. 153. The Athenians sacrificed to her under this title (Eustathius, on Homer, Iliad, xviii. 553, p. 1162).

<p>220</p>

Theocritus, Idyl. vii. 155; Orphica, xl. 5.

<p>221</p>

Anthologia Palatina, vi. 98. 1.

<p>222</p>

Orphica, xl. 3.

<p>223</p>

Anthologia Palatina, vi. 104. 8.

<p>224</p>

Orphica, xl. 5.

<p>225</p>

Ibid.

<p>226</p>

Orphica, xl. 18.

<p>227</p>

This title she shared with Persephone at Tegea (Pausanias, viii. 53. 7), and under it she received annual sacrifices at Ephesus (Dittenberger, Sylloge Inscriptionum Graecarum,2 No. 655). It was applied to her also at Epidaurus (Ἐφημ. Ἀρχ., 1883, col. 153) and at Athens (Aristophanes, Frogs, 382), and appears to have been a common title of the goddess. See L. R. Farnell, The Cults of the Greek States, iii. 318 note 30.

<p>228</p>

Polemo, cited by Athenaeus, iii. 73, p. 109 a b, x. 9. p. 416 c.

<p>229</p>

E. Dodwell, A Classical and Topographical Tour through Greece (London, 1819), i. 583. E. D. Clarke found the image “on the side of the road, immediately before entering the village, and in the midst of a heap of dung, buried as high as the neck, a little beyond the farther extremity of the pavement of the temple. Yet even this degrading situation had not been assigned to it wholly independent of its antient history. The inhabitants of the small village which is now situated among the ruins of Eleusis still regarded this statue with a very high degree of superstitious veneration. They attributed to its presence the fertility of their land; and it was for this reason that they heaped around it the manure intended for their fields. They believed that the loss of it would be followed by no less a calamity than the failure of their annual harvests; and they pointed to the ears of bearded wheat, upon the sculptured ornaments upon the head of the figure, as a never-failing indication of the produce of the soil.” When the statue was about to be removed, a general murmur ran among the people, the women joining in the clamour. “They had been always,” they said, “famous for their corn; and the fertility of the land would cease when the statue was removed.” See E. D. Clarke, Travels in various Countries of Europe, Asia, and Africa, iii. (London, 1814) pp. 772-774, 787 sq. Compare J. C. Lawson, Modern Greek Folklore and Ancient Greek Religion (Cambridge, 1910), p. 80, who tells us that “the statue was regularly crowned with flowers in the avowed hope of obtaining good harvests.”

<p>230</p>

Cicero, In C. Verrem, act. ii. lib. iv. 51.

<p>231</p>

The Magic Art and the Evolution of Kings, ii. 138 sq.

<p>232</p>

This view was expressed by my friend Professor Ridgeway in a paper which I had the advantage of hearing him read at Cambridge in the early part of 1911. Compare The Athenaeum, No. 4360, May 20th, 1911, p. 576.

<p>233</p>

Dittenberger, Sylloge Inscriptionum Graecarum,2 No. 20; E. S. Roberts and E. A. Gardner, Introduction to Greek Epigraphy, ii. (Cambridge, 1905) No. 9, pp. 22 sq. See above, pp. 55 sq.