We should much misconceive the religious spirit of the Greek rite if we
undertook to develop it all out an origin in sympathetic magic: which, of
course, I do not understand Mr. Frazer to do. Greek scholars, again, are
apt to view these researches into savage or barbaric origins with great
distaste and disfavour. This is not a scientific frame of mind. In the
absence of such researches other purely fanciful origins have been
invented by scholars, ancient or modern. It is necessary to return to
the pedestrian facts, if merely in order to demonstrate the futility of
the fancies. The result is in no way discreditable to Greece. Beginning,
like other peoples, with the vague unrealised conception of the Corn
Mother (an idea which could not occur before the agricultural stage of
civilisation), the Greeks refined and elevated the idea into the Demeter
of the Hymn, and of the Cnidian statue. To do this was the result of
their unique gifts as a race. Meanwhile the other notion of a Ruler of
Souls, in Greece attached to Persephone, is found among peoples not yet
agricultural: nomads living on grubs, roots, seeds of wild grasses, and
the products of the chase. Almost all men's ideas are as old as mankind,
so far as we know mankind.

Conceptions originally "half-conscious," and purely popular, as of a
Spirit of Vegetation, incarnate, as it were, in each year's growth, were
next handled by conscious poets, like the author of our Hymn, and then
are "realised as abstract symbols, because intensely characteristic
examples of moral, or spiritual conditions." {72} Thus Demeter and
Persephone, no longer pigs or Grain-Mothers, "lend themselves to the
elevation and the correction of the sentiments of sorrow and awe, by the
presentment to the senses and imagination of an ideal expression of them.
Demeter cannot but seem the type of divine grief. Persephone is the
Goddess of Death, yet with a promise of life to come."