Ceres Mythology

In Hesiod's Theogony Demeter is the daughter of Cronus and Rhea and the sister of Zeus. Her name is usually read as 'earth mother', although the meaning of the first syllable is disputed. Her cult follows the sowing and the reaping of grain.

Ceres is the goddess of grain and of the Roman plebs. Her name shares a root with the Latin verb crescere, to grow, and the word cereal comes from it. A temple to her was founded on the Aventine in 493 BC together with Liber and Libera.

The Homeric Hymn to Demeter says the ground opened while the girl was picking a narcissus and that Hades came up in his golden chariot and took her. Zeus had consented to the marriage beforehand, so Demeter loses both her daughter and her brother's good faith. Only Hecate and Helios hear the cry. Persephone in the family tree →

The hymn says Demeter roamed the earth for nine days with two burning torches. In that time she neither tasted ambrosia nor washed. On the tenth day Hecate joins her and the two go to Helios to ask what happened.

Hecate heard the cry from her cave but did not see who took the girl. She joins Demeter in the search and stays beside Persephone once the bargain is struck. The hymn calls her the girl's attendant before and behind, which places her on the road between the world above and the world below.

Demeter comes to Eleusis in the shape of an old woman and sits by the Parthenion well. The daughters of king Celeus take her to the palace, where the goddess becomes nurse to the son of queen Metaneira. The jokes of Iambe make her smile for the first time since the loss.

Demeter holds the child in the fire at night to make him immortal. Metaneira sees this and cries out, so the goddess stops, returns to her own shape and orders a temple to be built at Eleusis. The hymn uses this scene to show how human fear can ruin a gift.

Demeter shuts herself in her temple and orders the earth to let no seed sprout. Oxen drag the plough in vain, people begin to starve and the gods lose their offerings. This is what forces Zeus to negotiate.

When Hermes comes to fetch Persephone, Hades quietly gives her a pomegranate seed. Whoever eats in the world below is bound to it, so the girl must spend part of the year there. The Homeric Hymn speaks of one seed, while later writers count three or four.

When Persephone comes up the earth turns green again, and when she goes down it is bare. For the Greeks this story is the cause of the farming year rather than a moral lesson. In a Mediterranean climate the seed also waits out the summer in underground granaries, which belongs to the same cycle.

Demeter gives the Eleusinian prince Triptolemus grains of wheat and a chariot drawn by winged serpents. He travels the world in it and teaches people how to sow. Attic vases show him seated between Demeter and Persephone, holding an ear of grain.

The Greater Mysteries began each year with a procession from Athens to Eleusis in the month of Boedromion. Initiates fasted, drank the barley drink called kykeon and were shown something in the inner hall. What they saw is unknown, since the oath of silence held; Hippolytus reports that a reaped ear of grain was shown in silence.

The Thesmophoria was a three day festival of Demeter kept by married women apart from men. The women brought up the remains of piglets thrown into pits earlier in the year and mixed them with seed corn. The goddess's title Thesmophoros, the law bringer, comes from this festival.

In Rome the Cerealia ran from 12 to 19 April with games and processions in white. Ovid writes in the Fasti that foxes with torches tied to their tails were released in the Circus Maximus. The plebs treated the festival as their own.

Demeter feeds her child and stops the world when she loses her. The myth defines motherhood through the anger of loss as much as through tenderness. Twentieth century asteroid literature reads Ceres through both faces.

The nine days describe the time when grief stops all ordinary work. The goddess does not eat, does not wash and answers no god. The story ends in a bargain rather than a full return.

Pausanias writes that in Arcadia Demeter was worshipped with the title Erinys, the angry one. Poseidon approached her in the form of a stallion, the goddess turned into a mare, and afterwards she withdrew to a cave at Phigalia dressed in black. This local story preserves the darkest layer of the nurturing goddess.

Virgo is drawn as a woman holding an ear of grain, and the name of its brightest star, Spica, is Latin for that ear. The Catasterismi attributed to Eratosthenes identify the figure sometimes with Demeter and sometimes with Dike, the goddess of justice. The two identifications are separate traditions and do not replace one another. Fixed star calculator →

In On Isis and Osiris Plutarch compares the search of Isis with that of Demeter. Both goddesses look for what they have lost and affect nature while they mourn. In Hellenistic Alexandria the two cults mingled.

Eleanor Bach published an ephemeris of the four asteroids in 1973, which made Ceres regularly calculable in a chart for the first time. Demetra George's Asteroid Goddesses of 1986 set out the interpretive frame still used today. These readings have no link to the classical system of dignities and cannot be added to it.