Seekers in Sicily: Being a Quest for Persephone by Jane and Peripatetica

by Elizabeth Bisland; Anne Hoyt

“Ætna, The Salient Fact of Sicily”

Always from the very earliest records the goddess of the harvest was worshipped in this place. Long before the coming of the Greeks the Siculians had here a shrine to Gaia, the Earth Mother, from whose brown breast man sucked his life and food. And the Siculians had traditions of the Sikels making pilgrimages to Enna to give thanks to a goddess representing some principle of fertility, by whose power the earth was made blessed to its children. Very vague and shadowy are the traditions of the worship of this Bread-giver. There are hints of a great cave with a rude dark figure within, this idol having, curiously, a head roughly resembling the head of a horse, where the people timidly laid their offerings of the first fruits of their primitive culture. This figure is heard of later at Eleusis, to which the Greeks transpose the image and the worship, but the myth, so sympathetic to the Greek nature, becomes refined and spiritualized; takes on many new plays of thought and colour, and when the great temple of Demeter is built here the story has cleared and defined itself, and is hung about with the garlands of a thousand gracious imaginings.

Our Lady of Bread—daughter herself of Zeus, the overarching sky—has one child, Persephone, the spirit of Spring, that dear vernal impulse which rejuvenates all the world and “puts a spirit of life in everything”; that is forever sweetly renewing hope of happiness. Persephone’s playmates are the maiden goddesses, Pallas and Artemis, and also those light spirits of the fields, the water and the air—the nymphs, the oreads, and the oceanides—but she is not without duties and labours too, for “Proserpina, filling the house soothingly with her low song, was working a gift against the return of her mother, with labour all to be in vain. In it she marked out with her needle the houses of the gods and the series of the elements, showing by what law nature, the parent of all, settled the strife of ancient times.... The lighter elements are borne aloft; the air grows bright with heat; the sea flows; the earth hangs in its place. And there were divers colours in it; she illuminated the stars with gold, infused a purple shade into the water, and heightened the shore with gems of flowers; and under her skilful hand the threads with their inwrought lustre swell up in counterfeit of the waves; you might think the sea wind caused them to creep over the rocks and sands. She put in the fire zones, marking with a red ground the midmost zone possessed by burning heat; on either side lay the two zones proper for human life, and at the extremes she drew the twin zones of numbing cold, making her work dun and sad with the lines of perpetual frost. She works in, too, the sacred places of Dis and the Manes so fatal to her. And an omen of her doom was not wanting, for as she worked, as if with foreknowledge of the future, her face became wet with a sudden burst of tears. And now in the utmost border of the tissue she had begun to wind in the wavy line of the Ocean that goes round about all, but the door sounds on its hinges, and she perceives the goddesses coming; the unfinished work drops from her hands and a ruddy blush lights her clear and snow-white face.”...

Leaving her needle in the many-coloured web, she wanders down the mountain side to Lake Pergusa, then lying like a blue jewel in enamelled meads, but ever since that tragic day dark and sulphurous, as with fumes of hell.

This is the story of the ravishment, as told in the great Homeric Hymn that was sung in honour of the Mother of Corn.

“I begin the song of Demeter. The song of Demeter and her daughter Persephone, whom Aidoneus carried away as she played apart from her mother with the deep-bosomed daughters of the Ocean, gathering flowers in a meadow of soft grass—roses and the crocus and the fair violets and flags and hyacinths, and above all the strange flower of the narcissus, which the Earth, favouring the desire of Aidoneus, brought forth for the first time to snare the footsteps of the flower-like girl. A hundred heads of blossom grew up from the roots of it, and the sky and the earth and the salt wave of the sea were glad at the scent thereof. She stretched forth her hands to take the flower; thereupon the earth opened and the King of the great nation of the Dead sprang out with his immortal horses. He seized the unwilling girl, and bore her away weeping on his golden chariot. She uttered a shrill cry, calling upon Zeus; but neither man nor god heard her voice, nor even the nymphs of the meadow where she played; except Hecate only, sitting as ever in her cave, half veiled with a shining veil, and thinking delicate thoughts, she, and the Sun also, heard her.

“So long as Persephone could still see the earth and the sky and the sea with the great waves moving, and the beams of the sun, and still thought to see again her mother, and the race of the ever-living gods, so long hope soothed her in the midst of her grief. The peaks of the hills and the depths of the sea echoed her cry. And the Mother heard it. A sharp pain seized her at the heart; she plucked the veil from her hair, and cast down the blue hood from her shoulders, and fled forth like a bird, seeking her daughter over dry land and sea.

“Nine days she wandered up and down upon the earth, having blazing torches in her hands, and in her great sorrow she refused to taste of ambrosia, or of the cup of the sweet nectar, nor washed her face. But when the tenth morning came Hecate met her, having a light in her hands. But Hecate had heard the voice only, and had seen no one, and could not tell Demeter who had borne the girl away. And Demeter said not a word, but fled away swiftly with Hecate, having the blazing torches in her hands, till they came to the Sun, the watchman of Gods and men; and the goddess questioned him, and the Sun told her the whole story.”...

What a picture the Greek singer makes of the melancholy earth calling for comfort to the moon! for Hecate was not Artemis, but a vaguer, vaster principle of the night; an impersonalized shadow of the Huntress, as Hertha was the shadow, formless and tremendous, of Demeter. Hecate was a pale luminous force, “half veiled with a shining veil, and thinking delicate thoughts,” and ten days later, having rounded to the full, the bereaved mother meets her “bearing a light in her hands,” though the night is nearing morning, and moon and earth turn together toward the coming sun.

The Homeric Hymn tells much of the wandering and grieving mother; of her disguises; of her nursing of the sick child Demophoon, whose own mother snatched him back from the immortality which the goddess was ensuring by passing him through the fire—as many a loving and timid mother since has held her son back from the fires that confer immortality. The Hymn tells of her teaching of Triptolemus of the winged feet, instructing him in Eleusinian mysteries—“those mysteries which no tongue may speak. Only blessed is he whose eyes have seen them; his lot after death is not as the lot of other men!”