Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [130]
On one level the message is obvious enough. The story explains the change of seasons and the yearly harvest of grain. It also demonstrates the ritual efficacy of grief, libations, and sacrifices for the dead. It states that eating and drinking while in the underworld is what keeps the dead there, which is where they belong and should be. Those who bring the proper sacrifices and libations for the dead, allowing them to eat, never have troublesome ghosts around to torment them. It enforces that notion by telling the story of its polar opposite-a live person who wants to leave but cannot because she has eaten while there.
In its current literary form, the story explains the change of seasons by referring to marriage customs of the Hellenic world. Since marriages were arranged and daughters of the aristocracy were married quite young, they faced a parallel situation to Persephone, being forced to live with their husband’s family. If, as was often true, the husband lived at some distance, it was quite normal for them to see their own mothers only at long intervals.22
Even once the social custom had been forgotten, the emotions within were rendered so effectively as to still touch readers. Both gods and humans know what it is to suffer the loss of loved ones. The motherly feelings which Demeter shows for her daughter are described in great detail. Repetition of the terminology “whether for deathless gods or mortal men” throughout the hymn emphasizes that although the story concerns the gods, the same grief for those underground unites us with Demeter. In this way, the imagined heavenly realm is made directly relevant to the human predicament. Even though they are both gods, and hence immortal, Demeter’s loss of her daughter is poignant because it is the same grief humans feel at death, to whose kingdom Persephone is abducted.
In the ancient world, the story was not only charming but tremendously portentious. It not only told the story of the annual wheat crop, especially important to the farm lands in the areas around Athens and the small city of Eleusis on the other side of the Gulf. It was also the basis of a very significant, secret religious rite at Eleusis, the so-called Eleusinian mysteries, to which first the most noble Athenians and then the aristocracy of the Hellenistic-Roman world sought admission. The imagery of the cult was dominated by notes of immortalization and rebirth.23
Linked with the story is a subplot of how Demeter is prevented from making the mortal child Demophoön (other versions call him Triptolemus, a grain god) immortal because the mother Metaneira interrupted her while she was immersing the boy in a purifying fire. The mother seeing the child immersed in the fire and, falsely concluding that Demeter was killing her son, screamed her protest until the rite was prevented. This story may have important parallels to the Near Eastern cults in which a child was passed through fire, presumably as a human sacrifice. Of course, Israelite thought was outraged by such practices. If there was any hint of human sacrifice in the story, Homer ignores it. He only relates the possibility of immortalization.24 This myth also may obliquely refer to the immolation of a corpse on the funeral pyre, one of the alternative ancient Greek customs for laying the dead to rest, so perhaps both originally linked proper burial with proper planting of crops, with similar results.
The Greek story of Demophoön’s failed magic-fire rite of immortalization also supports a religious cult. It presumably took place