and with their habitation there. The pathetic beauty of the first fable—in which we can hardly abstain from seeing some symbolical meaning—expresses for us something of the mystic exaltation of the local rites; while the other tale of Celeus, his wife, his daughters, and his son, whom his nurse, the disguised goddess, almost succeeds in endowing with immortality, celebrates the ancient divine affinities of the chiefs of the Eleusinian state.

The first story is too familiar to need recounting; who has not heard of the gentle Persephone gathering flowers in the meadow and suddenly swallowed by the yawning earth and carried away to Hades, the god of the nether world, to share his sombre but sublime dominion over the shades?—a dignity of which she is not insensible, much as she grieves at the separation from her beloved mother; and how Demeter in turn is disconsolate and (in her wrath and despair at the indifference of the gods) conceals her divinity, refuses the fruits of the earth, and wanders about in the guise of an old woman, nursing her grief, until at last Zeus sends his messenger to Hades to effect a compromise; and Persephone, after eating the grain of pomegranate that obliges her to return yearly to her husband, is allowed to come back to the upper world to dwell for two-thirds of the year in her mother's company.

The underlying allegory is here very interesting. We observe how the genius of the Greek religion, while too anthropomorphic to retain any clear consciousness of the cosmic processes that were symbolized by its deities and their adventures, was anthropomorphic also in a moral way, and tended to turn the personages which it ceased to regard as symbols of natural forces into types of human experience. So the parable of the seed that must die if it is to rise again and live an immortal, if interrupted, life in successive generations, gives way in the tale of Demeter and Persephone, to a prototype of human affection. The devotee, no longer reminded by his religion of any cosmic laws, was not reduced to a mere superstition,—to a fable and a belief in the efficacy of external rites,—he was encouraged to regard the mystery as the divine counterpart of his own experience. His religion in forgetting to be natural had succeeded in becoming moral; the gods were now models of human endurance and success; their histories offered sublime consolations to mortal destiny. Fancy had turned the aspects of Nature into persons; but devotion, directed upon these imaginary persons, turned them into human ideals and into patron saints, thereby relating them again to life and saving them from insignificance.

A further illustration of the latter 

 Prev. P 22/162 next