So Demeter and Persephone were joyfully reunited, but when Demeter learned about the pomegranate seeds, she feared that she had been defeated after all.

To save the situation, Zeus proposed a compromise. Persephone should spend a

third of each year with her husband in the Underworld, and the other two-thirds with her mother on Earth.

Rhea persuaded her daughter Demeter to accept the arrangement, and Demeter lifted the curse of barrenness from the Earth. So flowers, fruit and crops appeared again with the Spring return of Kore, ‘a wondrous sight for gods and men'.

At Eleusis, Demeter gave to Triptolemus, Celeus' eldest son, the first grain of corn and taught him the art of ploughing and harvesting. Triptolemus

roamed Greece spreading this knowledge - Demeter frustrating at least three attempts by kings to murder him, the last by Celeus himself, who was compelled to yield his throne to Triptolemus. (In later versions, Triptolemus was

identified with Demophoon.) The name may be cognate with tripolos, the ‘thrice-ploughed furrow' in which the grain was sown and where Demeter, in another story, obviously related to a crop-fertility rite, lay with her lover Iasion (perhaps her original consort).

Demeter thus represents both the fertile Earth and the ripened grain of harvest; while Persephone/Kore represents both the young vegetation of Spring and the Underworld in which the seed is buried during the barren Winter

months.

Demeter was probably of Cretan origin (some mythographers identified her with Rhea, her mother in the Homeric version.) Her worship spread to the Romans via Greek colonists in Sicily; she and her daughter were known in Latin as

Ceres (whence our word ‘cereal') and Proserpina, but their myth was the same.

Persephone, during her annual sojourns with Hades, was no prisoner but acknowledged Queen of the Underworld. By Olympian standards, Hades was a remarkably faithful husband; she had cause to complain of his infidelity only

twice - once with the nymph Minthe, whom Persephone trod mercilessly underfoot

and who became the plant mint, sacred to Hades; and once with Leuce, daughter of Oceanus, who died a natural death and became the white poplar, tree of the Elysian Fields. It is said, however, that Persephone herself was one of the many lovers of Hermes, the psychopompos who conducted souls to her realm.

Demeter means literally ‘Earth-Mother', and primordially she seems to have been Goddess of both the Earth's aspects - it's fertile surface and its dark Underworld. Later the two became distinct, at least in name: as Demeter of field and orchard, and Persephone of the hidden depths. Yet as mother and daughter they were still essentially one, as are flower and fruit. In her Underworld aspect, she was generally known as Persephone, and in her role as the new young vegetation which springs from those depths (like her narcissus from its buried bulb) she was more usually Kore, the Maiden.

Sacred to Demeter were the horse, the bee, the poppy, the snake and the torch; pigs were sacrificed to her, and her sickle was made by Hephaestos himself. The willow was sacred to Persephone.