Page:Greek and Roman Mythology.djvu/77

 THE GREEK GODS 63 3. DIVINITIES OF GROWTH 81. The vital force that shows itself in the fruitful- ness of the ground the ancients could not explain except on the hypothesis that such forces were to be traced to living beings, whose activity was patterned after the analogy of the reproduction of animals or human beings. Therefore it was assumed that in the ground were effec- tive male and female divinities. With the former was associated the idea of fructifying moisture; with the latter, that of the reception and absorption of such moisture and the development of the seed into the plant. For the same reason fructification appears as an important element in the nature of those gods espe- cially connected with water in the sky and on earth, the rain-bringers Zeus and Hermes, Poseidon, the river gods, and the Centaurs ; and in the Satyrs, Pan, and Dio- nysus, this idea has embodied itself quite independently. On the other hand, Demeter, Gaea, and the originally for- eign goddess, Rhea-Cybele (to whom the Ephesian Artemis and Aphrodite are akin), are goddesses of the receptive fruitfulness of the earth. The nymphs discussed above ( 80) are very closely related to these goddesses. 82. The SatyrI (' Satyrs ? ) are the only individual divini- ties found, in more recent times, that originally belonged to the Peloponnesus. There the mountain districts were inhabited principally by goatherds, whose imagination em- bodied the fruitfulness of the earth in the form of the he-goat, because to them this animal naturally appeared to be the one especially adapted to produce fruitfulness. In their transition into human form, the Satyrs retained from this earlier stage of development the goat's ears and the little tail as symbols indicating their nature.