It is important to note that primarily the two forms of the Earth or Corn-goddess are not Mother and _Daughter_, but Mother and Maiden, Demeter and Kore. They are, in fact, merely the older and younger form of the same person, hence their easy confusion. The figures of the Mother and _Daughter_ are mythological rather than theological, i.e. they arise from the story-telling instinct: ‘Demeter of the beauteous hair, goddess divine, I sing, She and the slender-ancled maid, her daughter, whom the king Aïdoneus seized, by Zeus’ decree. He found her, as she played Far from her mother’s side, who reaps the corn with golden blade[716].’ The corn is reaped and the earth desolate in winter-time. Aetiology is ready with a human love-story. The maiden, the young fruit of the earth, was caught by a lover, kept for a season, and in the spring-time returns to her mother; the mother is comforted, and the earth blossoms again[717]: ‘Thus she spake, and then did Demeter the garlanded yield And straightway let spring up the fruit of the loamy field, And all the breadth of the earth, with leaves and blossoming things Was heavy. Then she went forth to the law-delivering kings And taught them, Triptolemos first.’ Mythology might work its will, but primitive art never clearly distinguished between the Mother and the Maid, never lost hold of the truth that they were one goddess. On the Boeotian plate[718] in fig. 67 is figured the Corn-goddess, but whether as Mother or Maid it is difficult, I incline to think impossible, to decide. She is a great goddess, enthroned and heavily draped, wearing a high polos on her head. She holds ears of corn, a pomegranate, a torch; before her is an omphalos-like altar, on it what looks like a pomegranate—is she Demeter or Persephone? I incline to think she is both in one; the artist has not differentiated her. [Illustration: FIG. 67.] The dead, according to Plutarch’s[719] statement, were called by the Athenians ‘Demeter’s people.’ The ancient ‘Lady of the Wild Things,’ with her guardian lions, keeps ward over the dead in the tombs of Asia Minor, and every grave became her sanctuary. But in Greece proper, and especially at Eleusis, where the Mother and the Maid take mythological, differentiated form as Demeter and her daughter Persephone, their individual functions tend more and more to specialize. Demeter becomes more and more agricultural, more and more the actual corn. As Plutarch[720] observes—with full consciousness of the anomalous blend of the human and the physical—a poet can say of the reapers: ‘What time men shear to earth Demeter’s limbs.’ The Mother takes the physical side, the Daughter the spiritual—the Mother is more and more of the upper air, the Daughter of the underworld.