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In this way the Persephone of one year becomes the Demeter of the next, and this may very well have been the original form of the myth.
So I did as he said, and went before the guardians of the water. Now they were veiled, and their voices, when they answered me, seemed to come from far away. "Thou comest to the pure, from the pure," they said, "and thou art a suppliant of holy Persephone. Happy and most blessed art thou, advance to the reward of the crown desirable, and be no longer mortal, but divine."
While Dionysus, Demeter, Hades, and Persephone remained earthly, and Helios, Eos, Iris, and Hecate, heavenly divinities, and Oceanus, Poseidon, Amphitrite, Proteus, and Nereus ruled the waters, Zeus was conceived as the god of the sky and of thunder, who hurled the bolts, the great king and lawgiver, the father of men, and Hera, originally the air, became the protecting goddess of married life; Apollo, the god of light, who shot forth his arrows, not at first identified with Helios, became the god of divination and poetry, who led the choir of the muses; the goddess of light, Athene, became the contentious goddess of wisdom; Aphrodite, born of the foam of the sea, once the symbol of the fruitful power of nature, later, encircled by the Graces, became the type of womanly beauty and charm, to which the strength of man, personified in Ares, corresponds.
'Now when holy Persephone had scattered this way and that the spirits of the women folk, thereafter came the soul of Agamemnon, son of Atreus, sorrowing; and round him others were gathered, the ghosts of them who had died with him in the house of Aegisthus and met their doom.
The Ulysses of Tennyson, of course, is Dante's Ulysses, not Homer's Odysseus, who brought home to Ithaca not one of his mariners. His last known adventure, the journey to the land of men who knew not the savour of salt, Odysseus was to make on foot and alone; so spake the ghost of Tiresias within the poplar pale of Persephone.
Judged by these analogies Demeter would be the ripe crop of this year; Persephone would be the seed-corn taken from it and sown in autumn, to reappear in spring. The descent of Persephone into the lower world would thus be a mythical expression for the sowing of the seed; her reappearance in spring would signify the sprouting of the young corn.
But unfortunately the Demeter and Persephone whom we know were the denizens of towns, the majestic inhabitants of lordly temples; it was for such divinities alone that the refined writers of antiquity had eyes; the uncouth rites performed by rustics amongst the corn were beneath their notice.
Once when Demeter was going through the world, giving men grain to be sown in their fields, she heard a cry that came to her from across high mountains and that mounted up to her from the sea. Demeter's heart shook when she heard that cry, for she knew that it came to her from her daughter, from her only child, young Persephone.
"Do you remember in the old myth of Demeter and Persephone," Kate asked me, "where Demeter takes care of the child and gives it ambrosia and hides it in fire, because she loves it and wishes to make it immortal, and to give it eternal youth; and then the mother finds it out and cries in terror to hinder her, and the goddess angrily throws the child down and rushes away?
But ere that might be the myriad tribes of the dead thronged up together with wondrous clamour: and pale fear gat hold of me, lest the high goddess Persephone should send me the head of the Gorgon, that dread monster, from out of Hades. 'Straightway then I went to the ship, and bade my men mount the vessel, and loose the hawsers. So speedily they went on board, and sat upon the benches.
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