Page:The Mythology of the Aryan Nations.djvu/551

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DÊMÊTÊR AND IASIÔN.
519

CHAP. VIII.


It is in this kindly and attractive guise that Persephonê appears in the myth of Eleusis. Here the story took root most firmly; and the fountain where the daughters of Keleos accosted the mourning sinian mother, and the spot where Iambê assailed her with friendly jests, were pointed out to the veneration of the faithful who came to celebrate her solemn mysteries. To the Eleusinians, beyond a doubt, the whole narrative was genuine and sacred history.[1] But this belief would, of course, explain as little to them as it would to us the origin and nature of the story. Both are alike laid bare by a comparison which has shown that every incident may be matched with incidents in other legends so far resembling each other as to leave no room for questioning their real identity, yet so far unlike as to preclude the idea that the one was borrowed from or directly suggested by the other. But the Eleusinian could adduce in evidence of his belief not only the mysteries which were there enacted, but the geographical names which the story consecrated; and here he found himself in the magic circle from which the inhabitants of Athens or Argos, Arkadia or Lykia, Delos or Ortygia, could never escape. Eleusis itself was a town or village in the land of the dawn-goddess Athene, and the name denoted simply the approach of Dêmêtêr to greet her returning child If, again, it pleased the Athenians to think that Persephonê was stolen away from Kolonos, or even from the spot where she met her mother, there were other versions which localised this incident on some Nysaian plain, as in the Homeric hymn, in the Sicilian Enna, or near the well of Arethousa.

Dêmêtêr and Iasiôn, As we might expect, the myth of Demeter is intertwined with Dêmêtêr the legends of many other beings, both human and divine. Like Heraklês and Zeus, she has, in many lands, many loves and many children. As the wife of Poseidon she is the mother of Despoina and Orîôn.[2] The earth must love the beautifully tinted skies of morning; and thus Dêmêtêr loves Iasiôn,[3] the son of Zeus and Hemera, the heaven and the day, or of Minos and the nymph Pyronea,[4] and becomes the mother of Ploutôn or Ploutos, the god

  1. ↑ Grote, History of Greece, i. 55.
  2. ↑ Max Müller, Lectures, second series, 517; Apollod. iii. 6, 8.
  3. ↑ Iasiôn is the father of Korybas, and must perhaps thus take his place along with his descendants the Korybantes as belonging to the world rather of Semitic than of Aryan mythology; but it does not therefore follow of necessity that his name is not Aryan. As he is said to have introduced the worship of Kybele into Asia, this may mean that the worship of the mother of the gods was not Phrygian in origin.—Brown, Great Dionysiak Alyth, i. 129.
  4. ↑ The name Minos, it has been already said, is, like Menu, the same word as man the measurer or thinker, But Minos himself is the husband of Pasipha{{subst:e^}} the light-giver, and the father of Ariadne who guides Tlieseus to the den of the Minotauros. It is scarcely necessary to give all the names which occur in the story of Iasiôn or other myths of
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