Chapter 9 looks exclusively at the Olympian fertility goddess Demeter, whose mystery cult, located at the city of Eleusis, played an enormous, if enigmatic, role in the religions of ancient Greece and Rome.

After this chapter, you should:

• Be able to recount the myth of Demeter and her daughter Persephonê, and recognize its etiological significance.
• Be able to discuss the procedures such as they are known of the Eleusinian mysteries.
• Know the mythic patterns of the fertility goddess and her dying male consort as exemplified in the Near Eastern myths of Inanna and Dumuzi, Cybelê and Attis, Isis and Osiris, and the Greek myth of Aphrodite and Adonis.