These abstractions, Tyche, Ananke and the like, were popular with the Orphics. Their very lack of personality favoured a growing philosophic monotheism. The design in fig. 65 is carved in low relief on one of the columns of the Hall of the Mystae of Dionysos, recently excavated at Melos[709]. Tyche holds a child—presumably the local Ploutos of Melos—in her arms. Above her is inscribed, ‘May Agathe Tyche of Melos be gracious to Alexandros, the founder of the holy Mystae.’ Tyche, Fortune, might be, to the uninitiated, the Patron, the Good Luck of any and every city, but to the mystic she had another and a deeper meaning; she, like the Agathos Daimon, was the inner Fate of his life and soul. In her house, as will later be seen (Chap. XI.), he lodged, observing rules of purity and abstinence before he was initiated into the underworld mysteries of Trophonios, before he drank of the waters of Lethe and Mnemosyne. It is one of the countless instances in which the Orphics went back behind the Olympian divinities and mysticized the earlier figures of the Mother or the Daughter. DEMETER AND KORE. So long as and wherever man lived for the most part by hunting, the figure of the ‘Lady of the Wild Things’ would content his imagination. But, when he became an agriculturist, the Mother-goddess must perforce be, not only Kourotrophos of all living things, but also the Corn-mother, Demeter. The derivation of the name Demeter has been often discussed[710]. The most popular etymology is that which makes her Δαμήτηρ, Earth-mother, Δᾶ, which occurs in such interjections[711] as φεῦ δᾶ, οἰοῖ δᾶ, being regarded as the equivalent of Γᾶ. From the point of view of meaning this etymology is nowise satisfactory. Demeter is _not_ the Earth-Mother, not the goddess of the earth in general, but of the fruits of the civilized, cultured earth, the _tilth_; not the ‘Lady of the Wild Things,’ but She-who-bears-fruits, _Karpophoros_. Mannhardt was the first to point out another etymology, more consonant with this notion. The author of the _Etymologicon Magnum_[712], after stringing together a whole series of senseless conjectures, at last stumbles on what looks like the truth. ‘Deo,’ he says, ‘may be derived from τὰς δηάς, for barley grains are called by the Cretans δηαί.’ The Cretan word δηαί is near akin to the ordinary Greek ζειά, the word used for a coarse wheat or spelt; the fruitful field in Homer[713] bears the epithet ζείδωρος, ‘spelt-yielding.’ Demeter, it will later be seen (p. 565), probably came from Crete, and brought her name with her; she is the Earth, but only in this limited sense, as ‘Grain-Mother.’