Demeter, Goddess

Demeter was the Greek goddess of fertility, vegetation, and harvest, symbolized together with the life symbols of snakes and wheat (note: her Latin name Ceres is the root for the word “cereal”). She was particularly well known as the archetypal loving mother of her daughter, Persephone or Kore, meaning maiden, as recounted in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter II.

Demeter had many powers beyond being the goddess of the harvest: she also controlled the seasons, which meant that she could control all life on Earth. Demeter had a daughter named Persephone, who was abducted while picking flowers by Hades, the god of the underworld. A chasm in the Earth opened, and Hades emerged to abduct her down into the underworld by force. Demeter searched endlessly for her daughter, causing the Earth not to be fruitful. This initiated a period of famine, which could have destroyed Earth and its inhabitants, as well as depriving the gods of their sacrifices.

While Demeter was searching for her daughter, she traveled to the town of Eleusis, disguised as an old woman, where she was taken into the royal household to nurse their sons Demophon and Triptolemus. Demeter planned to make Demophon a god, and gave him ambrosia and held him in the fire to purge his mortality, but when his mother observed this and screamed, an angry Demeter stopped the process. Instead, Demeter taught the other son, Triptolemus, the art of planting and sowing crops.

Zeus wanted to put an end to the famine, and commanded Hades to return Persephone to her mother. There are many versions of the myth, but in all of them, Hades made Persephone return to the underworld for four months of the year, staying with her mother the other eight months, thus explaining the cycle of death and regeneration in nature, when Demeter the harvest goddess mourns her daughter's return to the underworld each winter.

Agreeing to this compromise, Demeter restored life to Earth and sent Triptolemus out to teach agriculture and the Mysteries of Eleusis, which were celebrated for nearly 2,000 years, offering its initiates the hope of eternal life, as seen through the pattern of death and rebirth in nature.

In other versions of the myth of Demeter, she was raped in the form of a mare by Poseidon, in the form of a stallion, thus sharing her daughter's fate. The roles of these two goddesses represented women's lives, from the fruitful Earth and their progeny, as well as their subjection to violence and death, with Persephone becoming an underworld judge.

Demeter protested against patriarchal forces as she sought after her beloved daughter, and although she finally made a compromise with Zeus, she first showed her tremendous power to give or deny life on Earth.