Page:The Mythology of the Aryan Nations.djvu/551

Rh CHAP, It is in this kindly and attractive guise that Persephon^ appears in the myth of Eleusis. Here the story took root most firmly ; and the fountain where the daughters of Keleos accosted the mourning sinian mother, and the spot where lambe assailed her with friendly jests, were pointed out to the veneration of the faithful who came to celebrate her solemn mysteries. To the Eleusinians, beyond a doubt, the whole narrative was genuine and sacred history.^ But this belief would, of course, explain as little to them as it would to us the origin and nature of the story. Both are alike laid bare by a comparison which has shown that every incident may be matched with incidents in other legends so far resembling each other as to leave no room for questioning their real identity, yet so far unlike as to preclude the idea that the one was borrowed from or directly suggested by the other. But the Eleusinian could adduce in evidence of his belief not only the mysteries which were there enacted, but the geographical names which the story consecrated ; and here he found himself in the magic circle from which the inhabitants of Athens or Argos, Arkadia or Lykia, Delos or Ortygia, could never escape. Eleusis itself was a town or village in the land of the dawn-goddess Athene, and the name denoted simply the approach of Demeter to greet her returning child If, again, it pleased the Athenians to think that Persephone was stolen away from Kolonos, or even from the spot where she met her mother, there were other versions which localised this incident on some Nysaian plain, as in the Homeric hymn, in the Sicilian Enna, or near the well of Arethousa.

As we might expect, the myth of Demeter is intertAvined with D^metSr the legends of many other beings, both human and divine. Like si6n. Herakles and Zeus, she has, in many lands, many loves and many children. As the wife of Poseidon she is the mother of Despoina and Orion.^ The earth must love the beautifully tinted skies of morning; and thus Demeter loves lasion,'' the son of Zeus and Hemera, the heaven and the day, or of Minos and the nymph Pyronea,* and becomes the mother of Plouton or Ploutos, the god

" Grote, History of Greece, i. 55. the worship of the mother of the gods ' Max ISiuller, Zir/wt'j, second series, was not Phrygian in origin. — Brown, 517; Apollod. iii. 6, 8. Great Dionysiak Alyth, i. 129. ' lasion is the father of Kor)-bas, and * The name Minos, it has been must perhaps thus take his place along already said, is, hke RIenu, the same with his descendants the Korybantes word as man the measurer or thinker, as belonging to the world rather of But Minos himself is the husband of Pa- .Scmitic than of Aryan mythology ; but siphae the light-giver, and the father of it does not therefore follow of necessity Ariadne who guides Tlieseus to the den that his name is not Aryan. As he is of the Minotauros. It is scarcely ncces- said to have introduced the worship of sary to give all the names which occur Kybele into Asia, this may mean that in the story of lasion or other myths of