“At the Theatre of Empedocles will be presented the Cinematograph of Edison.” Here in ancient Syracuse, the ends of the earth are brought together—Empedocles and Edison; what a combination!
My last impression of Girgenti is of our visit to a little church—the name is forgotten—and of Patsy’s chatter about what we saw there.
“This,” he said, as we walked along a dusty road of “splendor-loving Acragas,” “is the Temple to Demeter and Persephone, though you wouldn’t know it if I didn’t tell you.”
The little church shows few traces of the ancient temple. Its chief treasure is a famous crucifix, that hangs against the wall, surrounded by votive offerings, wax models of hands, feet, breasts and stomachs (very like those of terra-cotta I saw at the Temple of Juno in Veii), the most gross things of the kind I have seen in a Christian church.
“A lady who had paralysis of the hands,” said the cripple who served as cicerone, “promised the Lord, if he would cure her, to pay him this compliment. Eccelenza, she had faith—aimé if we all had her faith—she was cured. My grandmother herself saw this thing. Those two wax arms she hung up in gratitude, they cost a horror; she gave the prete ten francs as well for the poor. It is a miraculous crucifix, davvero, but to deserve the miracle one must have faith!”
From an olive grove came the sound of a shepherd’s flute; the thin sweet music of the pastorale was the only sound that broke the noontide quiet as we sat outside the old temple of Demeter and Persephone, dreaming!
“It all happened here,” said Patsy. “It was through these very fields Persephone wandered picking violets when Pluton, king of Hades, sprang from a dark cave and carried her off to his kingdom underground. Then came the mother Demeter, in her hands the sceptre, corn, and the mystic basket, searching for her lost daughter; she lighted Etna for a torch to show the way; she looked high and low, she asked all she met for news of her child. Kyane, Persephone’s playmate, alone had met Pluton carrying off the maid, and because she begged him to set free her friend, Kyane was turned into a beautiful spring (that very spring where the custode’s son went for papyrus). The voice of Demeter was heard calling Persephone, Persephone, through these very fields and meadows. In vain! Persephone, even if she heard her mother’s voice in the dark kingdom of the dead, could not return; she had eaten the seed of the pomegranate, she was the wife of Pluton. There was a great to-do; Olympus was shaken to its foundations. Demeter refused to attend the counsel of the gods, she laid a spell upon the land so that it bore no fruit, no wheat, and was threatened by famine. In the end however the matter was arranged, the family became reconciled. Zeus gave Sicily to Persephone, as a wedding gift; the daughter now spends half the year in her mother’s house, and half in her husband’s.”
So he repeated the lovely old fable-allegory of the seed hidden in the earth half the year, and half the year alive again. How it echoes in the thunder of the burial service!
“It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body.”
Paul had been at Eleusis; he knew the mysteries, had perhaps seen the ancient marble bas-relief in the temple there of Demeter laying in the hand of Triptolemus the precious grains of corn!