protected. A discovery even more fortunate, in 1857, led Sir
Charles Newton to a little _sacellum_, or family chapel, near Cnidos. On
a platform of rock, beneath a cliff, and looking to the Mediterranean,
were the ruins of the ancient shrine: the votive offerings; the lamps
long without oil or flame; the Curses, or Dirae, inscribed on thin sheets
of lead, and directed against thieves or rivals. The head of the statue,
itself already known, was also discovered. Votive offerings, cheap
curses, objects of folk-lore rite and of sympathetic magic,--these are
connected with the popular, the peasant aspect of the religion of
Demeter. She it is to whom pigs are sacrificed: who makes the fields
fertile with scattered fragments of their flesh; and her rustic effigy,
at Theocritus's feast of the harvest home, stands smiling, with corn and
poppies in her hands.

[Mourning Demeter. Marble statue from Knidos. In the British Museum:
lang54.jpg]

But the Cnidian shrine had once another treasure, the beautiful
melancholy statue of the seated Demeter of the uplifted eyes; the
mourning mother: the weary seeker for the lost maiden: her child
Persephone. Far from the ruins above the sea, beneath the scorched
seaward wall of rock: far from the aromatic fragrance of the
rock-nourished flowers, from the bees, and the playful lizards, Demeter
now occupies her place in the great halls of the British Museum. Like
the Hymn, this melancholy and tender work of art is imperfect, but the
sentiment is thereby rather increased than impaired. The ancients buried
things broken with the dead, that the shadows of tool, or weapon, or vase
might be set free, to serve the shadows of their masters in the land of
the souls. Broken as they, too, are, the Hymn and the statue are "free
among the dead," and eloquent of the higher religion that, in Greece,
attached itself to the lost Maiden and the sorrowing Mother. Demeter, in
religion, was more than a fertiliser of the fields: Kore, the Maiden, was
more than the buried pig, or the seed sown to await its resurrection; or
the harvest idol, fashioned of corn-stalks: more even than a symbol of
the winter sleep and vernal awakening of the year and the life of nature.
She became the "dread Persephone" of the Odyssey,

"A Queen over death and the dead."

In her winter retreat below the earth she was the bride of the Lord of
Many Guests, and the ruler "of the souls of men outworn." In this office
Odysse