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 transformation may be found in the second story contained in our hymn. Demeter, weary of her wanderings and sick at heart, has come to sit down beside a well, near the house of Celeus. His four young daughters, dancing and laughing, come to fetch water in their golden jars,—
"As hinds or heifers gambol in the fields
When Spring is young."
They speak kindly to the goddess, who asks them for employment. "And for me," she says,—
"And for me, damsels, harbour pitiful
And favouring thoughts, dear children, that I come
To some good man's or woman's house, to ply
My task in willing service of such sort
As agèd women use. A tender child
I could nurse well and safely in my arms,
And tend the house, and spread the master's couch
Recessed in the fair chamber, or could teach
The maids their handicraft."
The offer is gladly accepted, for Celeus himself has an infant son, Demophoon, the hope of his race: The aged woman enters the dwelling, making in her long-robed grief a wonderful contrast to the four sportive girls:—
"Who lifting up their ample kirtle-folds
Sped down the waggon-furrowed way, and shook
Their curls about their shoulders—yellow gold
Like crocuses in bloom."
Once within the house, which she awes with her uncomprehended presence, the goddess sits absorbed in grief, until she is compelled to smile for a moment at the jests of the quick-witted maid Iambe, and consents to take in lieu of the wine that is offered her, a beverage of beaten barley, water, and herbs. These details are of course introduced to justify the ritual of Eleusis, in which the clown and the barley-water played a traditional part.
Thus Demeter becomes nurse to Demophoon, but she has ideas of her duties differing from the common, and worthy of her unusual qualifications. She neither suckles nor feeds the infant but anoints him with ambrosia and lays him at night to sleep on the embers of the hearth. This his watchful mother discovers with not unnatural alarm; when the goddess reveals herself and departs, foiled in her desire to make her nursling immortal.
The spirit that animates this fable is not that poetic frivolity which we are accustomed to associate with Paganism. Here we find an immortal in profoundest grief and mortals entertaining an angel unawares; we are told of supernatural food, and of a burning fire that might make this mortal put on immortality did not the generous but ignorant impulses of the natural man break in upon that providential purpose and prevent its consummation. Eleusis was the natural home for such a myth, and we may well believe that those initiated into the mysteries there were taught to dwell on its higher interpretation.