Harvest
Demeter
ΔημήτηρRoman: Ceres
Stopped the harvest to get her daughter back, and very nearly starved out the gods.
Votive marble panel — c. 170 CE
- 3
- epithets
- 3
- cult sites
- 1
- offspring
- 1
- union
- 1
- recorded birth
Vitals
- Kind
- Olympian
- Generation
- 2
- Domains
- grain, the cultivated earth, the Mysteries
- Accent
- Harvest — grain, the worked earth, the season
- Sacred symbols
- the ear of wheat, the torch, the poppy, the winnowing fan
- Principal cult sites
- Eleusis, Thesmophoria festivals across Greece, Enna in Sicily
What they were called
Θεσμοφόρος
law-bringer
ξανθή
golden-haired, the colour of ripe grain
Ἀχαία
the grieving one
Lineage
See in the tree
Notable myths
The Year Nothing Grew
After Persephone was taken, Demeter sat in her temple at Eleusis and made the most terrible year for humankind: the ground would not send up a single seed, oxen dragged ploughs across the fields for nothing, and the whole race would have died of famine. The gods would have lost their offerings with them. Zeus sent Iris, then every god in turn with gifts, and she refused all of them until her daughter was brought back.
Homeric Hymns, Hymn to Demeter 302-333
The Child in the Fire
Taken in at Eleusis as a nurse, Demeter fed the infant Demophon no food but breathed on him and buried him in the embers each night, meaning to burn the mortality out of him. His mother watched, saw her child in the fire and cried out. Demeter took him out, said the woman had ruined it, threw off her disguise and filled the room with light, and demanded a temple.
Homeric Hymns, Hymn to Demeter 231-274
The account
Demeter is grain, and the Homeric Hymn to her is about what happens when she withholds it. Hades took Persephone with Zeus's agreement and without telling her mother. Demeter searched nine days with torches, learned the truth from Helios, and left Olympos altogether. Disguised as an old woman she came to Eleusis, sat by the well, was taken in as a nurse, and began secretly making the queen's infant son immortal by holding him in the fire at night; when the mother saw and screamed she dropped the whole pretence, showed herself as a goddess, and ordered a temple built. Then she sat in it and let nothing grow. The earth produced no seed, humans began to die, and the gods stopped receiving sacrifice — which is what finally moved Zeus. The settlement returns Persephone for two-thirds of the year. The Mysteries she founded at Eleusis ran for close to two thousand years, and the initiates kept the secret so well that we still do not know what it was.
Ancient sources
- Hesiod, Theogony 453-458
- Homeric Hymns, Hymn to Demeter 302-333
- Homeric Hymns, Hymn to Demeter 231-274
Where a line reference is not given, the work is cited without one rather than guessed at.
Image credit
- Title
- Votive marble panel dedicated by the priestess Claudia Ageta to the goddess Demeter Around 170 AD (51233583388)
- Artist
- TimeTravelRome
- Date
- Unknown
- Licence
- CC BY 2.0
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