#i can't help noticing that the 'toy' or 'plaything' here resembles the toys of dionysus in orphic myth

[autumncrowcus]

The beginning of the [Homeric] Hymn [to Demeter] reverberates with ritual force and mystery. Each image of beauty and life is also an image of death. The golden wheat Demeter holds is synonymous in Greek with the sickle that harvests it (chrusaoras). The narcissus in its hundred-headedness gleams wet with fertility, yet Hades, who mirrors the narcissus' multiplicity through his name, Polydektes, "receiver of many," is the god of death in the under- world. This narcissus is the seducer of the Kore, and will lead to her death and fertilization through her own plucking of it. It is honored in its holiness by all mortals and immortals. Even the sea, the earth and sky smile in the sweetness of its scent. But the smiling, gaping mouth presages the gaping earth that will swallow the Kore. The word for gape in Greek is chazdo, reminding us of the word chaos, or chaos, from the same root. The narcissus is itself called athurma, which, although adequately translated "toy," or "plaything," also implies an object of magical transformation."

                Thus the opening imagery of the poem suggests that all the powers of nature acquiesce in the descent of the Kore as part of a magical and fertile cycle of transformation. The female powers are implicated in this as well. For we learn that this "toy" or athurma itself is given "as a deception" or dolon by none other than Gaia, the Kores grandmother. When we put this together with the description of the Kores face as a "bud about to bloom" (kalukopis) and with the description of her playmates, the daughters of Okeanos, as blossoms; when we learn that the word korai (plural of kore) means the "shoots of plants," there can be little question that the Kore is also identified imagistically with the narcissus. As she reaches out with both hands, "amazed," thambas, a word having connotations of being struck with ritual ecstasy, to take the athurma, one cannot help but wonder if the Kore is not in some sense involved in an act of self-plucking. We can certainly infer that she is caught up in a transformative act of death and rebirth, and that, speaking ritually and metaphorically, she draws to herself her own destiny.

                Further ritual implications of the imagery are embedded in the mythemes. For one, the maidens are in a leimon or "meadow." In Greek myth, it is difficult to be in a meadow without encountering doom. Meadows are places where death happens. But the word leimon also means female genitalia. To read through the images then, as the "bloom" is plucked from the "meadow" the virgin is deflowered and the genitalia open to disclose the yawning chasm which is the original place of birth and death, the womb of mother earth from which we all come and to which we all return. And, as we know, although Polydektes may be identified with the narcissus through the equation of multiplicity, in the Hymn, Gaia herself, not the "Receiver of Many." sends the narcissus.

                At the same time, the poem tells us that Gaia’s dolon, or "deception," was grown "at the will of Zeus," Dios bouleisi. Is this not a clear mark of patriarchal domination? Yes, on the explicit, narrative level of the text. But implicitly there may well be a linguistic pun here that would resonate in the thematic repertoire of the oral poet, between the words Dios bouleisi and Eubouleus, who turns up in an Orphic version of this myth as the swineherd who falls into the chasm with his pigs together with the Kore.'" Swineherds are intimately related to sows and boars, both of which were sacrificed to Demeter and Persephone. Further, in the Thesmophoria, the other major Demeter festival of the year and an exclusively womens rite honoring fertility, pigs themselves are thrown into the earth at the time of female menses and then dug up again along with snake idols." Again it would seem that the ritual mystery is orchestrated not by males but by females, who understand fully the nature of the cycles of birth, decay and rebirth.

-From "Ritual Death, Patriarchal Violence, and Female Relationships in the Hymns to Demeter and Inanna" by Marcia W. D-S. Dobson