Cook, Arthur B.: Zeus: a study in ancient religion (Band 1): Zeus god of the bright sky (Cambridge, 1914)

The Ram and the Sun in Phrygia 397

two distinct and clearly correlated personalities1,' ' pre-Homeric
offshoots of Gaia2.' He further notes the significant fact that
Demeter was often worshipped without her daughter, Kore rarely
without her mother3. It is therefore permissible to suggest that
there was a time when the Phrygian cult recognised one goddess
not two, the earth-mother rather than the corn-mother and corn-
daughter. Whatever the origin of the corn-daughter4, she may
well have been later than the earliest form of the said cult.

I am therefore emboldened to hazard the provisional guess
that ab initio the Phrygians worshipped a fertilising sky-father and
a fertilised earth-mother; that originally and for long the goddess
was of more importance than the god, being duplicated for the
sake of fuller recognition ; but that ultimately their positions came

1 Farnell Cults of Gk. States iii. 114.

2 Id. ib. iii. 119.

3 Id. ib. iii. 117.

4 Dr F. B. Jevons in his able book An Introduction to the History of Religion London
1896 p. 364 f. suggested that in the primitive rites of Eleusis a sheaf of ripe corn was
dressed up as an old woman (cp. h. Dem. 101 yptfi iraKaiyeve'C iva\lynios of Demeter)
and preserved from harvest to seed-time as the Corn-mother, and that the green blade
or young plant when it appeared above ground was known as the Corn-maiden. He
argued ib. p. 239 that rites appropriate to Kore were celebrated in the spring, rites
appropriate to Demeter later in the year. Dr J. G. Frazer Golden Bough2- ii. 216 f.
advocates a similar view : ' It is probable, therefore, that Demeter and Proserpine, those
stately and beautiful figures of Greek mythology, grew out of the same simple beliefs
and practices which still prevail among our modern peasantry, and that they were
represented by rude dolls made out of the yellow sheaves on many a harvest-field long
before their breathing images were wrought in bronze and marble by the master hands of
Phidias and Praxiteles. A reminiscence of that olden time—a scent, so to say, of
the harvest-field—lingered to the last in the title of the Maiden (Ko7-e) by which
Proserpine was commonly known. Thus if the prototype of Demeter is the Corn-mother
of Germany, the prototype of Proserpine is the harvest-Maiden, which, autumn after
autumn, is still made from the last sheaf on the Braes of Balquhidder. Indeed if we
knew more about the peasant-farmers of ancient Greece we should probably find that even
in classical times they continued annually to fashion their Corn-mothers (Demeters) and
Maidens (Proserpines) out of the ripe corn on the harvest-fields.'

These opinions gain much in probability from a discovery made by my friend
Dr W. H. D. Rouse, who obtained in Lesbos an actual Corn-maiden of strikingly human
shape. By his kind permission I have had a drawing (pi. xxviii) made from the original,
now deposited by the Folk-Lore Society in the ethnographical collection at Cambridge.
Dr Rouse in Folk-lore 1896 vii. 147 pi. 1 writes: 'The first ears are plaited into a
curious shape; they call it ipada, or "mat," and no one could (or would) tell me any
more about it. But its shape strikes me as very odd, and it bears no small resemblance

to a human figure in a cloak, with arms outstretched____In some of them the neck is

adorned with a necklace of beads. I saw these in all parts of Lesbos, always with the
same shape; and also on the mainland of Greece, where they called it airapi ("corn").
Is it fanciful to imagine that this is really a corn-baby ? It ought, however, to be made
of the last sheaf, not the first.' The scruple here expressed by Dr Rouse is surely of
little import. If Kore was the young corn as distinguished from the old corn, her puppet
might well be made of the first ears.