Among the Pawnees, not a mother and daughter, but two primal beings,
brothers, named Manabozho and Chibiabos, are the chief characters. The
Manitos (spirits or gods) drown Chibiabos. Manabozho mourns and smears
his face with black, as Demeter wears black raiment. He laments
Chibiabos ceaselessly till the Manitos propitiate him with gifts and
ceremonies. They offer to him a cup, like the beverage prepared for
Demeter, in the Hymn, by Iambe. He drinks it, is glad, washes off the
black stain of mourning, and is himself again, while Earth again is
joyous. The Manitos restore Chibiabos to life; but, having once died, he
may not enter the temple, or "Medicine Lodge." He is sent to reign over
the souls of the departed as does Persephone. Manabozho makes offerings
to Mesukkumikokwi, the "Earth Mother" of the Pawnees. The story is
enacted in the sacred dances of the Pawnees. {69}

The Pawnee ideas have fallen, with singularly accurate coincidence, into
the same lines as those of early Greece. Some moderns, such as M.
Foucart, have revived the opinion of Herodotus, that the Mysteries were
brought from Greece to Egypt. But, as the Pawnee example shows, similar
natural phenomena may anywhere beget similar myths and rites. In Greece
the _donnee_ was a nature myth, and a ritual in which it was enacted.
That ritual was a form of sympathetic magic, and the myth explained the
performances. The refinement and charm of the legend (on which Homer, as
we saw, does not touch) is due to the unique genius of Greece. Demeter
became the deity most familiar to the people, nearest to their hearts and
endowed with most temples; every farm possessing her rural shrine. But
the Chthonian, or funereal, aspect of Chibiabos, or of Persephone, is due
to a mood very distinct from that which sacrifices pigs as embodiments of
the Corn Spirit, if that be the real origin of the practice.