With water to dandle me,
grass to grow for me, trees to talk
to me, sky to sing to me,
birds and a white light
In the back of my mind to
guide me . . .
-LOUIS MACNEICE,
"PRAYER BEFORE BIRTH"
MODERN DEMETER
Hard to mistake Demeter. She's the
one surrounded by kids; the one whom babies seem to hang on as
from a sturdy tree; the one dishing out the peanut butter and
jelly sandwiches; the one who does know where the diapers are; the
one tending the bruised knees; the one happily cooking for the
extra six her husband casually brought home from baseball; the one
up all night tending that fever; the one with the seemingly
inexhaustible reserves of energy.
The Demeter woman is, in short, the
mother among the goddess types. Demeter is more than just a
biological mother, though. It's not just having children that
makes a true mother, it's an attitude, an instinctive way of
caring for all that is young, tiny, needy, and helpless. Demeter
love is a totally dedicated and selfless form of giving and
nurturing that we all recognize, however dimly, in the word
mothering.
Of course, we might not have had
such mothering as children; we might only know it through the
archetype Erma Bombeck calls Everybody Else's Mother. But the
longing is still there even if we didn't experience it, a deep,
unshakable fantasy of that warm, enveloping, and utterly
satisfying embrace.
It is important to understand what
is unique about Demeter's mothering. We are not saying that the
other goddesses cannot be mothers, but that to be a mother is the
primary guiding principle in Demeter's life. All the goddess types
can and do have children and mother them in their different ways.
Aphrodite mothers in her indulgent, sensuous way, loving to dress
her children up, spoil them with treats, and take them out to the
movies. Artemis mothers in a rather fiercely tender, feral way,
treating her offspring more like whelps than anything. Athena
can't wait till hers are fully articulate so that she can talk to
them and nurture their education and mental growth. Persephone,-
too, is deeply caught up in her children, but in a more psychic
and intuitive way than in terms of their physical well-being.
Hera's mothering is so full of rules, strictures, and expectations
that there is little tenderness in her nurturing.
Yet it is only Demeter who is fully
identified with the very activity of mothering, almost to the
exclusion of most other concerns. That inexhaustible energy we
noted is derived from her total dedication of purpose. She lives
almost entirely for, her children;, she is literally on call
twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.
The Demeter woman is so caught up
in being a mother that she neither has nor makes time to worry
about getting a new dress or her hair done (Aphrodite concerns).
She has not the slightest wish to go off alone (Artemis) and
mostly hates the thought of leaving home at all. She has little or
no interest in reading books or newspapers or catching the news on
TV (Athena obsessions), nor the slightest concern about her
children's horoscope or their past lives (Persephone
fundamentals). Being on the board of the local planning commission
(Hera priorities) excites her about as much as her husband's
humdrum job.
Naturally the Demeter woman could
find time for all or any of these activities and interests that
are so dear to the other goddesses - she knows about baby-sitters
- but the fact is, she really doesn't want to. She is happy and
deeply fulfilled doing exactly what she is doing, being a mother.
Nothing illustrates Jung's idea
that archetypes are impersonal sources of energy better than the
Demeter woman. Even though she is constantly giving out to
children, husband, and every stray friend in the vicinity, she
never seems to tire or to think of herself. It is truly
instinctive and unself-conscious, without any ego on her part.
There is an open mouth - she fills it; a child is crying - she
comforts it; a hand is bleeding - she puts a bandage on it. She is
no more an individual personality when she gives out in this way
than a mother bird or a mother cat is to her young; she is simply
mother.
DEMETER, THE
NURTURER
Other goddess types are sometimes
in awe of Demeter's prodigious nurturing energy and her seemingly
selfless devotion to her children and family. "Can she be faking
it?" an Athena might ask. "Is she really so unflappable in the
face of all that infant mess, noise, and chaos?" Hera might
wonder. "How does she always have meals, clothing, lunch boxes,
and pills there at the ready?" Persephone might ask in amazement.
Actually some degree of cynicism
might be in order around the slightly saintly aura of certain
Demeter women. America in the fifties developed a stereotype of
the flawless mother in sitcoms like Ozzie and Harriet and
Leave It to Beaver, which may have been a sentimental model
for many mothers but an irritation to those who fell short of it.
And
yet, like all media stereotypes,
these shows hit upon a fundamental aspe ct of the archetype, the
selfless devotion of the Madonna.
What the other goddess types may
not comprehend, if they have never experienced within themselves
the incredible power of the mother archetype, is the deep,
natural, instinctual fulfillment in everything that Demeter does.
It is not ego fulfillment as Athena and Hera
might understand it, nor even
spiritual satisfaction, as in Persephone's book, but something
quite unknown to any of them.
Closest in temperament to
Aphrodite, her opposite on the Goddess Wheel, Demeter is ruled by
love - not independence like Athena and Artemis, or power like
Hera and Persephone. Like Aphrodite she lives for the other, gives
herself for the other, loses herself in the other; it is the other
that is the source of all her fulfillment, not herself. The only
difference between Demeter and Aphrodite in regard to love is that
for Aphrodite the other is the adult beloved, whereas for Demeter
the other is the child.
Symbolically Demeter stands for
everything to do with earth and vegatative nature; for the Greeks
she was a goddess of grains and the mystery of planting the seed
that will grow into new life and food. Later, when we examine her
mythic background, we will see how multilayered the Greek
understanding of this mystery was. But for the moment let us note
how deep her connection is to every aspect of the life force,
particularly as it affects young, growing and needy beings,
A healthy Demeter woman is always
in touch with physical reality, which is to say the realities of
the body and its needs, be they food, warm clothing, getting
enough sleep, illness or injury, and - in little babies - needs to
eliminate. She seems to understand all the basic instincts that
belong to our animal and bodily nature. In this respect she is
very different from Athena, whose awareness is very mental and
often quite alienated from the body.
DEMETER GROWING
UP
The Demeter instinct to nurture can
easily be spotted in young girls playing with their dolls. It will
be there in those elder sisters who derive pleasure from helping
mother with the new baby. Not so much in Artemis, off playing with
the boys, or Athena, with her nose in a book, or Hera, organizing
some club that she will head. When Demeter is strong in a growing
girl, she will be sweet, with a loving temperament appealing to
all who know her.
Because the young Demeter is so
identified with her mother, there will be an almost symbiotic
relationship between them. Mother's values are totally her values,
mother's dreams are unquestionably hers too. Whatever her mother's
goddess style, the Demeter girl will model herself upon this. If
mother loves to cook, daughter Demeter will excel at cooking; if
mother raises pedigree puppies, she will too. But most of all she
will idealize the style of mother's home and how she raises them
all as children, longing for the day when she can replicate such a
home and children for herself (When, as will happen, a mother does
not provide any role modeling for young Demeter, she will be
obliged to become her own rn ' other's mother. She will "carry"
her mother emotionally, becoming rather old and serious before her
time. Since she has experienced some of Persephone's "mother loss"
very early in life, she may well com ensate this loss by marrying
and having children while still quite young. This pattern is
evident in the burgeoning population of pregnant and mothering
teenagers.)
In the healthy young Demeter,
however, her worldly horizons will be quite limited by her fixed
idea about home and family. During adolescence she will seem to be
a sweet, but rather dull homebody to her other, more ambitious
goddess sisters. While her Aphrodite sister is absorbed in teenage
fashion magazines and the dating game, Athena is out campaigning
for human rights, and Artemis is away at national athletic meets,
budding Demeter is still mostly at home swapping neighborhood
stories with mother.
Adolescent Demeter is not averse to
the opposite sex. Her sexuality, as it blooms, is usually quite
natural and uncomplicated, even earthy, though she sometimes risks
being overly attendant to her partner's needs at the expense of
her own. It is simply the nurturer in her that always puts the
other first. She will often be as attractive as her 'Aphrodite
sisters but in a quite unself-conscious way; hours in front ,of
the bedroom mirror is not her style. "Be yourself" is her motto.
In her late teens young Demeter may
already have a sweetheart teady with, one she will eventually
marry. He is likely to be a dependable
young man who intends to work in a local sales
business that won't take him far from
the hometown. Unless she herself has some
idea about nursing or wants to work in a day care center,
working will rarely figure in her
plans. Occasionally she develops some practical
skill, such as baking, catering, dressmaking, or pottery, that she
can use close to or in her home, but just as often she will have
no
vocational ambitions at this stage
in her life. In her dreams she mostly enivisions
a cozy home not too far from mother and, of course, those adorable
babies that, it seems, she was born to raise.
Unlike young Hera, Demeter doesn't
marry for position and prestige in the community; the "young man
most likely to succeed" doesn't necessarily attract her. Basically
she is looking for a worthy and reliable father for her children
who will provide for them all. She may in fact be very naive about
work and income for herself, hoping to leave that entirely to her
mate. It is simply not in her consciousness to think about being
independent and having a career the way Athena, Artemis, and Hera
do so naturally.
Many a young Demeter mother whose
marriage collapses finds herself in serious trouble as a single
mother. She is unable to fit into an economic system that she is
in no way trained for and that basically favors men. These are
issues her feminist Athena sisters may have thought about
theoretically, but there is a huge and unacknowledged gulf between
the Demeter and Athena worlds. The busy single career woman in the
city and the housewife in the suburbs, ferrying kids around, have
little or no common ground in modern society. So, Athena's
insights, brilliant and accurate as they are, come too late to
divorced Demeter as she encounters the harsh realities of a social
system that effectively punishes mothers who are not part of a
marriage unit.
Part of modern Demeter's
woundedness is that there is no place for single mothers and
indeed for women with their children in the world; they have both
been effectively banished from the world in order to maintain for
men a sentimental abstraction called "the home and the family."
Historically this is a relatively recent happening, but it is
essentially an unhealthy state of affairs, one that we will return
to later in this chapter.
DEMETER AND MATRIARCHAL
CONSCIOUSNESS
In ancient Greece, Demeter was the
preeminent Mother Goddess and had the specialized function of
presiding over all forms of reproduction and renewal of life,
especially that of plant life. An evolved and complex figure, she
stands historically midway between the ancient Neolithic cults of
the Great Mother, which flourished in Sumer, Asia Minor, Egypt,
and Crete from approximately 4000 B.C. to 1000 B.C., and the
Christian era in the West. She retains many of the characteristics
of these early cults: she is a goddess of fecundity, fertility,
and regeneration; she has a mystical identity with her dark
underworld sister, the Queen of the Dead; she gives birth to a
Divine Son, who remains her youthful consort rather than becoming
a husband or mature equal.
Demeter's central symbol was the
sheaf of wheat and, in her mysteries at Eleusis, a single ear of
corn. We shall have much to say about the symbolism of flower,
fruit, and seed, which makes her very much our Lady of Plants. Her
sacred land animal was the pig -frequently a fertility sacrifice
all over the world because of its multiple uterus. Her sacred
animal at sea was the dolphin.
Demeter's cult is thought to have
arrived in Greece from Crete via the early Mycenaean culture of
the Peloponnesian peninsula. If this is true, then she is a direct
descendant of the Cretan Mother Goddess, who flourished with her
attendant maidens, snake-bearing priestesses, and bull cult during
the third and second millennia B.C. In other words, Demeter
represents the survival of matriarchal religion and its values
well into the patriarchal warrior culture of the classical Greeks.
The miracle is that the tolerant religious pluralism of the times
did not suppress it. Instead, as historian of religion Mircea
Eliade.describes it, Demeter's religion came very much to
complement the ruling patriarchal spirit of Zeus's Olympian cult.
The sanctuary of Demeter at
Eleusis, where her Mysteries were celebrated, was in active use
for nearly two thousand years. In A.D. 396 this, "the oldest and
the most important religious center in Europe," as Eliade calls
it, was destroyed by Alaric the Goth. In his wake came "41 men in
black," the Christian monks. A certain local uncanonized "Saint
Demetra" survived the Christian suppression, however, and is still
known today. Eliade speculates that the spirit of the Mysteries
did not entirely disappear, while Ezra Pound was convinced that
the troubadours' spring celebrations of kalenda maia and
their courtly worship of "the lady" drew upon remnants of
Eleusinian worship that survived among country peoples of Europe.
Another vestige of the old
matriarchal consciousness of the Mother Goddess was transmitted in
the popular Catholic devotion to the Virgin Mary among
Mediterranean people. Almost certainly there is a psychic if not a
cultural continuity between Mary, the Mother of God, and the
ancient Great Mother goddesses of the Mediterranean and Near East
and the goddess Demeter. But even though we know of many medieval
representations of Mary with corn and flowers, she lacks the
emotional power of the ancient Earth Mothers and their daughters.
Like everything else Christian, the
Blessed Virgin suffered a severe dislocation from the very earth
itself; her honorific title, Queen of Heaven, indicates that her
divine nature was thought of as spiritual in a "higher" rather
than in a cthonic or earthy sense.* Even then, strictly speaking,
her status remains that of a divinely chosen woman, not a goddess.
Whatever earth connections she once had have long since
disappeared.
* Several Greek gods and goddesses
are given the attribute cthonios, which means "subterranean" or
"dwelling beneath the earth." Some, like the spring-born
Persephone are thus "autochthonous," which means "born from the
earth."
It is hard for us today to imagine
what it must have been like to have a goddess and her earth
mysteries at the center of cultural and spiritual life. More than
two thousand years of Judeo-Christian culture have accustomed us
to thinking of everything divine as masculine and somehow
belonging "up there" in the heavens. As a result we have almost
forgotten what it is to regard the earth we walk upon as sacred,
as truly our mother, and as the dwelling place of both goddesses
and gods.
Outside of the cities, with their
supposedly superior, "civilized" consciousness, certain
places-caves, springs, groves, mountains have always been felt to
be sacred by virtue of the spiritual energy that emanates from
them. They were often sites of great and awe-inspiring natural
beauty. Delphi, where Apollo was worshipped, is one such place
that has survived virtually unspoiled to this day. All over
Ireland, originally a matriarchal culture, there are many "holy
wells" that, though later benignly Christianized, were seen
originally as the genitals of the Earth Mother, from which the
life force, the woivre, or "serpent power," flowed. The
sanctuary of Demeter at Eleusis was also built up over a sacred
well, where doubtless telluric or geomagnetic earth energy welled
up and was felt by the more sensitive of the initiates into the
mysteries.
Although Demeter is not strictly an
Earth Mother - this title belongs to her grandmother, Gaia or. Ge,
whose name means "earth" - her myth and her cult belong very much
to what happens in and beneath the earth. She and her daughter
symbolize the dynamic cycles of nature that occur within the body
of the earth and, by virtue of the mystical principle of
correspondence, within the body of evety woman.
Representations of Demeter are
actually not of a huge, rotund, pregnant figure like many ancient
Earth Mother goddess icons that have come down to us from the
Neolithic Age. In all her stories and vase paintings Demeter is
represented as approachably human and even modern in her
iconography. According to The Homeric Hymn to Demeter, the goddess
is tall, radiantly beautiful, "slim-ankled," and "golden haired"
(like the corn). As a goddess she is awesome when fully revealed,
but there is nothing primitive in this image of her. Like all of
the classical Greek goddesses, hers is a highly evolved and
many-sided psychological and symbolic portrait.
ETERNAL MOTHER AND
DAUGHTER
When we talk about Demeter as she
was imagined by the Greeks, we must really talk about two
goddesses, not one. The heart of both Demeter's myth and her cult
- the so-called Mysteries of Eleusis - revolved around her loss,
mourning, and reunion with her beloved daughter, Kore (pronounced
kore-eh), whose name simply means "maiden" in Greek. Nearly all
the stone steles and vase paintings that survive show two mature
women: Demeter and Kore together. They hold either sheaves or ears
of wheat, flowers or torches, or combinations of both - and
sometimes serpents.
This closeness of mother and
daughter emphasizes how profoundly feminine this religious and
mythological constellation is. It must harken back to those
Neolithic times when, in matriarchal consciousness, the male was
totally other and secondary. As Erich Neumann puts it in his book
The Great Mother,
The close connection between mother
and daughter, who form the nucleus of the female group, is
reflected in the "primordial relationship" between them. In the
eyes of the female group, the male is the alien, who comes from
without and takes the daughter from the mother. (pp. 305-6)
Kore, the daughter, later came to
be known as Persephone. Contemporary scholars cannot agree as to
whether this Persephone, who was queen of the underworld, was
originally a separate goddess, whose worship became assimilated
into that of Demeter, or whether she is merely another aspect of
Demeter herself. We treat Persephone as a separate goddess in this
book only in the sense that when, in her mature form, she became
queen of the underworld, she acquired particular powers and
atributions that are unique to her. Psychologically we view it as
artificial and indeed dangerous for any individual woman to treat
the goddess of death separately from the goddess of life. In fact,
as our chapter on Persephone shows, when a women overidentifies
with Persephone's closeness to the.spirits of the departed and the
death realm to th& exclusion of the other goddesses,
especially Demeter, psychic disturbance is a predictable outcome.
For the moment, when speaking of Demeter, we shall refer to her
daughter simply as Kore, the maiden, so as to distinguish the
different perspectives.
What, then, was the story of
Demeter and her daughter upon which the celebrated Mysteries of
Eleusis were based? It is one of the most elaborate core stories
of any of the Greek myths and one that we shall only summarize for
its main themes and psychological dynamic. As for the Mysteries
themselves, though much has been written about them, we have found
most scholarly commentaries to be speculative and inconclusive
though at times richly suggestive.
The myth, as most fully treated in
The Homeric Hymn to Demeter, runs as follows:
While gathering flowers with the
daughters of Ocean, her other maiden sisters, Kore, Demeter's
daughter, is abducted by Hades, god of the underworld, and carried
off to his realm. For nine days, grieving inconsolably, Demeter
wanders the earth, but neither gods nor men dare tell her of her
daughter's true fate. Finally Helios, who sees all, tells her it
was Zeus who had plotted with his brother Hades to let the Dark
Lord marry the maiden.
Her grief now swelled to anger at
Zeus, Demeter deserts Olympus and hides herself among mortals
disguised as an old woman. She comes to Eleusis and sits by the
Well of the Maidens. When the king's daughters question her, she
tells them she has just escaped from pirates who have forcibly
carried her from Crete. When she offers her services as a
nursemaid, the daughters of King Keleos arrange for her to help
raise the infant Demophon, son of the queen, Metaneira.
But Demeter does not nurse the
infant Demophon. Instead, she rubs him with ambrosia and at night
secretly hides him in a fire, for the purpose of making him
immortal and eternally young. Before the ritual is completed, the
horrified Metaneira discovers her son in the fire. Demeter berates
Metaneira for her shortsightedness, saying that her son is now
denied immortality. The goddess now sloughs off her disguise of
old woman and reveals herself in full grandeur and beauty, so that
the house is filled with dazzling light. She idemands that the
people build her a temple with an altar below it and promises to
teach her rites to human beings henceforth.
Once her temple is completed,
Demeter retires inside it and stays "far from the blessed gods,
wasting with grief for her daughter." And now she sends a terrible
drought upon the earth, which threatens to destroy the human race.
She spurns all messengers from Zeus, refusing to set foot on
Olympus or to let any fruit grow on the earth until she sees her
daughter once more.
Finally, persuaded by Zeus, Hades
relents, but not before giving Kore a sweet pomegranate seed,
which she eats. By this it is agreed by Zeus that she will spend
one-third of the year with her husband, Hades, in the underworld
and the rest with her mother, Demeter, and other immortals. Mother
and daughter are joyously reunited at Demeter's temple at Eleusis,
and Demeter miraculously sends up fruit and foliage all over the
earth. Finally, before returning to Olympus, Demeter instructs the
inhabitants of Eleusis in her sacred and secret rites.
"Blessed is he among mortals who
witnesses these things," concludes The Hymn to Demeter, "but
whoever is not initiated into them or dies without them descends
unblessed into the gloomy darkness.... And greatly blessed on
earth is he whom the gods love for they send Ploutos with his
abundant wealth to this man's great house."
THE TRIPLE GODDESS AND THE
PSYCHOLOGY OF LOSS
According to ancient tradition the
Great Goddess was always triple. Her triplicity is to be seen in
the waxing moon, the full moon, and the waning moon, and in how
she ruled the upper world, the earth, and the underworld. In human
terms she was Maiden, Mother, and Crone. It is these major phases
of a woman's life, and the other triplicities by analogy, that are
encompassed by Demeter's story. For Demeter sees herself as
innocent and untouched Maiden in her daughter, Kore. She is Mother
of that daughter and of all that grows. And when she loses Kore,
she plays the old woman, the Crone, whose childbearing years are
gone and who stands close to the end of the cycle, to death.
Corresponding to each traditional
phase of the cycle are three great losses for every woman who
bears children, especially a woman who bears daughters. All of
these losses are hinted at in highly condensed form in this
extraordinary myth:
First, -as a young woman enters
puberty, she must undergo the loss of childhood innocence; this is
the inner "death of the maiden" that every woman to some extent
experiences (and which every mother may be reminded of when she
sees it happen in her daughter). This phase is symbolized by the
flower.
Second, there is the loss a mother
undergoes when her daughter (or son) is taken in marriage or
leaves home permanently. The marriage of a loved first daughter is
always a painfully wrenching experience, as every mother knows.
Finally, when all the children, of either sex, have left home, she
may experience an "empty nest" depression. This phase is
symbolized by the ripe fruit.
Third, there is the biological loss
each mother undergoes at menopause when she can no longer bear
children. Depression often occurs in women at this time, whether
or not they have been mothers. The fruitful phase in life has
passed, whether or not it was made manifest, and a certain
mourning is in order. Yet when successfully traversed, this loss
can become a rite of passage into the mature wisdom of the older
woman, whom the ancients called the Crone. This phase is
symbolized by the seed.
Poignant as these three losses and
their variations are, the myth also shows us that each of them is
an opportunity for an awakening to a new form of consciousness; in
fact, each of them is an initiation into the next phase of life.
When the maiden dies, she becomes a nubile young woman and before
long a mother herself, blessed with her own children. Many of the
stone steles from Eleusis show the joyous reunion of Kore with her
mother, Demeter. But she is no longer a girl; she is now a
full-grown woman and with her is a young son. The flower maiden
has now become a fruitful mother.
When the mother comes to the end of
her own childbearing, she passes the torch of motherhood to her
daughter, ceding the full power of fruitfulness. In dying to the
mother in her, the aging woman now has the potential to enter the
spiritual community of the elder women, the guardians of the
mystery of death.
These phases are rarely completed
successfully in the lives of many women today, partly because
there remains so little consciousness of these issues in a
predominantly masculine and aggressive culture. Nowhere do we find
a vision of motherhood and the feminine cycle that is both
spiritual and grounded in the body which feeds, nourishes, and
inspires women as it did in the period when Eleusis flourished.
Demeter today is wounded to the
same extent that our whole culture is alienated from the greater
cycles of the earth and the lesser cycles of individual women. We
have succeeded in reducing a mother to a convenient, if
unpredictable biological reproduction machine that either helps or
hinders (as in Third World countries) our relentless greed for
power and wealth. We have taken the mother out of the community
and workplace at large and confined her to a sentimental
abstraction called the family. There has been little or no room
for Demeter consciousness in our religious and cultural practices
until relatively recently, and even today mothers and children are
usually the very lowest priorities in any social or economic
planning.
Nevertheless, signs such as the
struggle for natural childbirth methods, family therapy, a new
awareness of nutrition, and the awakening of "Gaia" consciousness
of the earth as an organic whole (which Demeter shares with
Artemis) may herald the slow, if painful reemergence of Demeter in
our world. We may be a long way from the vision of the Greeks at
Eleusis, which nourished the classical world for nearly two
thousand years, but we hope that the commentary that follows, on
the three phases of the Demeter cycle, will help modern mothers
understand a little more deeply the sacred dignity of their
calling. ...
