religion, was more than a fertiliser of the fields: Kore, the Maiden, was
more than the buried pig, or the seed sown to await its resurrection; or
the harvest idol, fashioned of corn-stalks: more even than a symbol of
the winter sleep and vernal awakening of the year and the life of nature.
She became the "dread Persephone" of the Odyssey,

"A Queen over death and the dead."

In her winter retreat below the earth she was the bride of the Lord of
Many Guests, and the ruler "of the souls of men outworn." In this office
Odysseus in Homer knows her, though neither Iliad nor Odyssey recognises
_Kore_ as the maiden Spring, the daughter and companion of Demeter as
Goddess of Grain. Christianity, even, did not quite dethrone Persephone.
She lives in two forms: first, as the harvest effigy made of corn-stalks
bound together, the last gleanings; secondly, as "the Fairy Queen
Proserpina," who carried Thomas the Rhymer from beneath the Eildon Tree
to that land which lies beyond the stream of slain men's blood.

"For a' the bluid that's shed on earth
Flows through the streams of that countrie."

[Silver denarius of C. Vibius Pansa (about 90 B.C.). Obv. Head of
Apollo. Rev. Demeter searching for Persephone: lang56.jpg]

Thus tenacious of life has been the myth of Mother and Maiden, a natural
flower of the human heart, found, unborrowed, by the Spaniards in the
maize-fields of Peru. Clearly the myth is a thing composed of many
elements, glad and sad as the waving fields of yellow grain, or as the
Chthonian darkness under earth where the seed awaits new life in the new
year. The creed is practical as the folk-lore of sympathetic magic,