Demeter
Goddess of the Harvest
dih-MEE-ter
Goddess of grain and the growing year, whose grief for a stolen daughter is the reason winter exists.
The Story
Demeter gave agriculture to mortals and holds the whole cultivated world in her keeping. When Hades took Persephone, she searched the earth with torches, refused to let a single seed rise, and brought humanity to the edge of starvation, which is what finally moved Olympus to negotiate.
The settlement returns her daughter for part of the year and keeps her below for the rest, and the earth answers accordingly. At Eleusis she left something else behind: initiation rites promising the dead a better portion, kept secret so successfully that we still don't know what happened inside.
Did You Know?
- Revealing what happened at the Eleusinian Mysteries carried the death penalty. Alcibiades was condemned in absentia for performing them at a party, and in a thousand years of initiates nobody wrote down the secret.
- Initiates broke their fast with kykeon, barley, water, and pennyroyal. Several modern scholars have wondered aloud about ergot in the barley.
- Cereal comes from Ceres, her Roman name, by way of the grain itself.