Demeter - Titles and Functions

Titles and Functions

Demeter's epithets show her many religious functions. She was the "Corn-Mother" who blesses the harvesters. Some cults interpreted her as "Mother-Earth". Demeter may be linked to goddess-cults of Minoan Crete, and embody aspects of a pre-Hellenic Great Goddess. Her other epithets include:

• Aganippe ("the Mare who destroys mercifully", "Night-Mare")

• Potnia ("mistress") in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter. Hera especially, but also Artemis and Athena, are addressed as "potnia" as well.

• Despoina ("mistress of the house"), a Greek word similar to the Mycenean potnia. This title was also applied to Persephone, Aphrodite and Hecate.

• Thesmophoros ("giver of customs" or even "legislator"), a role that links her to the even more ancient goddess Themis, derived from thesmos, the unwritten law. This title was connected with the Thesmophoria, a festival of secret women-only rituals in Athens connected with marriage customs.

• Erinys ("implacable"), with a function similar with the function of the avenging Dike (Justice), goddess of moral justice based on custom rules who represents the divine retribution, and the Erinyes, female ancient chthonic deities of vengeance and implacable agents of retribution.

• Chloe ("the green shoot"), that invokes her powers of ever-returning fertility, as does Chthonia.

• Chthonia ("in the ground"), chthonic Demeter in Sparta.

• Anesidora ("sending up gifts from the earth") applied to Demeter in Pausanias 1.31.4, also appears inscribed on an Attic ceramic a name for Pandora on her jar.

• Europa ("broad face or eyes") at Lebadaea of Boeotia. She was the nurse of Trophonios to whom a chthonic cult and oracle was dedicated. Europa was a Phoenecian princess who Zeus abducted, transformed in a white bull, and carried her to Creta.

• Kidaria in the mysteries of Pheneos in Arcadia where the priest put on the mask of Demeter kept in a secret place. It seems that the cult was connected with the underworld and with an agrarian magic.

Demeter might also be invoked in the guises of:

• Malophoros ("apple-bearer" or "sheep-bearer", Pausanias 1.44.3)
• Lusia ("bathing", Pausanias 8.25.8)
• Thermasia ("warmth", Pausanias 2.34.6)
• Achaea, the name by which she was worshipped at Athens by the Gephyraeans who had emigrated from Boeotia.

• Poppy goddess:

Theocritus, wrote of an earlier role of Demeter as a poppy goddess:

For the Greeks Demeter was still a poppy goddess

Bearing sheaves and poppies in both hands. — Idyll vii.157

In a clay statuette from Gazi (Heraklion Museum, Kereny 1976 fig 15), the Minoan poppy goddess wears the seed capsules, sources of nourishment and narcosis, in her diadem. "It seems probable that the Great Mother Goddess, who bore the names Rhea and Demeter, brought the poppy with her from her Cretan cult to Eleusis, and it is certain that in the Cretan cult sphere, opium was prepared from poppies" (Kerenyi 1976, p 24).