The name Demeter means not Earth-Mother, but Grain-Mother. So long as man was a hunter only, the Lady-of-the-Wild-Things and the Earth-Mother who, unbidden, sent up flowers in the spring and fruit in autumn, these were adequate to express his needs. But there came a time when man settled down to plough the earth, to sow seeds and reap grain, and then he needed a Grain-Mother, Demeter.
It is Shakespeare, not Homer, who cries:
The "awful monster" is the Gorgon, and the monster's head the gorgoneion. This takes us straight to another aspect of the Mother. Demeter herself, mild and beneficent though she was, had her darker side. The Athenians called the Dead Demetreioi, Demeter's People. Not only did she bring all things to life, but, when they died, she received them back into her bosom. "Dust we are and unto dust we shall return"; and Æschylus says:
A ghost is to primitive man always a terrifying thing, a bogey, and so the Earth-Mother, as guardian of the Dead, becomes a gorgon. On a Rhodian plate in the British Museum the Great Mother is figured grasping in her hands two birds, with human body and feet, but she is winged, and, in place of her head, she had a gorgon-mask, a gorgoneion with great tusks. There is no such thing as a gorgon, so there can be no real gorgon's head, but there are such things as ritual masks, ugly faces made to scare men and demons. Our museums of anthropology are full of them, and they are still in frequent use among savage tribes. The gorgoneion has pendent tongue, glaring eyes, protruding tusks. It is the