Demeter
Dêmêtêr /dÉ™'miË. more...
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tÉš/ (Greek: ΔημήτηÏ, "mother-earth" or perhaps "distribution-mother", perhaps from the noun of the Indo-European mother-earth *dheghom *mater) is the Greek goddess of grain and agriculture, the pure nourisher of youth and the green earth, the health-giving cycle of life and death, and preserver of marriage and the sacred law. She is invoked as the "bringer of seasons" in the Homeric hymn, a subtle sign that she was worshiped long before the Olympians arrived. The Homeric Hymn to Demeter has been dated to sometime around the Seventh Century BC. She and her daughter Persephone were the central figures of the Eleusinian Mysteries that also predated the Olympian pantheon.
The Roman equivalent is Ceres.
Demeter is easily confused with Gaia or Rhea, and with Cybele. The goddess's epithets reveal the span of her functions in Greek life. Demeter and Kore ("the maiden") are usually invoked as to theo ('"The Two Goddesses"), and they appear in that form in Linear B graffiti at Mycenaean Pylos in pre-classical times. A connection with the goddess-cults of Minoan Crete is quite possible.
According to the Athenian rhetorician Isocrates, the greatest gifts which Demeter gave were cereal (thus the Latin name for Ceres; also known as corn to the British) which made man different from wild animals, and the Mysteries which give man higher hopes in this life and the afterlife.
Titles and functions
In various contexts, Demeter is invoked with many epithets:
Potnia ("mistress" in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter);
Chloe ("the green shoot", Pausanias 1.22.3, for her powers of fertility and eternal youth);
Anesidora ("sending up gifts" from the earth Pausanias 1.31.4, as Demeter);
Malophoros ("apple-bearer" or "sheep-bearer", Pausanias 1.44.3);
Kidaria (Pausanias 8.13.3),;
Chthonia ("in the ground", Pausanias 3.14.5);
Erinys ("implacable", Pausanias 8.25.50);
Lusia ("bathing", Pausanias 8.25.8);
Thermasia ("warmth", Pausanias 2.34.6);
Kabeiraia, a pre-Greek name of uncertain meaning;
Thesmophoros ("giver of customs" or even "legislator", a role that links her to the even more ancient goddess Themis. This title was connected with the Thesmophoria, a festival of secret women-only rituals in Athens connected with marriage customs.);
Theocritus remembered an earlier role of Demeter:
- For the Greeks Demeter was still a poppy goddess
- Bearing sheaves and poppies in both hands. — Idyll vii.157
In a clay statuette from Gazi (Heraklion Museum, Kereny 1976 fig 15), the Minoan poppy goddess wears the seed capsules, sources of nourishment and narcosis, in her diadem. "It seems probable that the Great Mother Goddess, who bore the names Rhea and Demeter, brought the poppy with her from her Cretan cult to Eleusis, and it is certain that in the Cretan cult sphere, opium was prepared from poppies" (Kerenyi 1976, p 24).
Read more at Wikipedia.org
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