Goddesses of Lughnasadh - Demeter, Greek Goddess of the Harvest, Grain & Motherhood
Demeter is the Greek Goddess of the Earth, the harvest, grain, agriculture and motherhood. As the ultimate 'Earth Mother' - derived from Greek δᾶ (da) meaning "earth" and μήτηρ (meter) meaning "mother" she presides over fertility - particularly fertility of the Earth - birth, harvest, fruitfulness, prosperity, decay, death and rebirth.
She was the daughter of Cronus , the sister of Zeus, and the mother of Persephone. Her equivalent in the Roman pantheon is Ceres, also Goddess of grain, the harvest and motherhood.
It was believed that Demeter made the crops grow each year; thus the first loaf of bread made from the annual harvest was offered to her (making her an ideal Goddess to work with during Lughnasadh, the first of the harvest festivals and the festival honouring grain) and she was intimately associated with the seasons.
HER MYTH
The central mythology about Demeter centres on the loss of her daughter, Persephone, to Pluto, God of the Underworld. The myth goes as follows:
One day when Demeter is out in the fields with her daughter Kore (the maiden form of Persephone), Pluto glimpses Kore, falls in love with her and abducts her into the Underworld to be his bride.
Demeter notices her daughter is missing and goes to the ends of the Earth to find her, eventually only discovering from Hekate that Persephone is with Pluto in the Underworld. She tries to go to Zeus, God of the Heavens and her brother, but he won’t intervene. Demeter is struck with unassailable grief and completely withdraws from all her duties on the Earth. So that the earth might reflect her sorrow, she plunges the Earth into a perpetual winter for the first time - no crops can grow, nothing can be harvested and as such, humans are unable to survive.
Zeus pleads with her to banish this 'winter' and return sustenance to the Earth once more. She refuses until her daughter is returned to her so Zeus promises to ask Pluto to return Persephone to her so she agrees to release the hold of winter on Persephone's return..
When Zeus tries to order Pluto to return Persephone of course he's not super keen on releasing his new bride to her mother for the rest of time, however he strikes a fateful deal with Zeus.
Before Persephone leaves to return to her mother, Pluto offers her a pomegranate. In eating the seeds of the pomegranate she is betrothed to him for eternity - the seeds of the pomegranate being symbolic of the indissolubility of marriage and ensures that she is bound to return to sit on her throne beside him in the Underworld for half the year but she can leave the Underworld and spend the other half of the year with her mother on Earth.
So when Persephone returns to the Earth and is reunited with her mother, Demeter regenerates all growth on the land, heralding the beginning of Spring and Summer and the harvest season on the Earth. When Persephone has to return to her husband and her throne in the Underworld each year, Demeter continues to plunge the Earth into late Autumn & Winter each year at their separation. And so it was that the seasons were created.
DEMETER’S MEDICINE
ATTUNING TO THE CYCLES OF NATURE
Demeter can be called upon to restore balance and a connection to cycles - in the same way that the Earth balances itself through the seasons - planting in Spring, growing in Summer, harvesting in Autumn to prepare for Winter and resting in Winter, so we too can learn to balance our energies in tune with the Earth and her seasons.
She is the Goddess of harvest but in a sustainable way - something we can all learn to do not only in our own lives with our output and our energy but also coming into a sustainable balance with the Earth's resources.
As she is besieged with grief by the abduction of her daughter, she was physically unable to continue to reign over an ever-producing harvest, an ever-yielding Earth so she pulled her energy back into herself and withdrew plunging the earth into its first winter.
Demeter's medicine calls for us to honour our selves and our bodies. She reminds us to balance our yin - our caring, nurturing, inward, grounding nature, with our yang - our production, our yield, our output, our outward nature. Despite what our Western, patriarchal culture conditions, her wisdom is that we cannot always be endlessly growing, endlessly producing, endlessly harvesting, just as the Earth cannot sustain non-stop cycles of growth, generation and mining without serious damage and devastation..
NURTURING & EMOTIONAL ACCEPTANCE
Demeter's archetype is that of the Nurturer, the Earth Goddess, the eternal Mother, the carer, the provider of nourishment. We can see the Demeter archetype at play in the person who stays up late batch-cooking for her neighbour who's recently bereaved. Or the grounded, community-minded elder who establishes and tends to a communal garden in the local playground. Or that maternal friend who can gather people round a table like no-one's business - the quintessential feeder whether of literal food or emotional sustenance. She's yin energy embodied and everyone feels automatically more grounded in her presence.
As Demeter knows how to surrender entirely to her grief - forfeiting all her duties to the point that the earth is plunged into a barren, bleak wasteland - she is a Goddess you can turn to when you are in the depths of despair, when a sudden bereavement hits you sideways or an emotional shock threatens to submerge you. In fact, as Kris Waldherr says in the Goddess Inspiration Oracle:
“The main ritual associated with Demeter was the Thesmophoria, which allowed women to work through pain. It allowed them to honour their grief and recognise it’s goddesslike divinity.”
She is a Goddess who understands the importance of honouring grief and accepting and purging all emotions. Hang anything else! Sometimes all that's called for, when nothing else is helping, is to surrender to the surge of strong or painful emotions and to really cry and fully process something through. If repressed, our emotions can get trapped in the body and eventually lead to dis-ease.
Demeter also is a Goddess who honours her emotions to the point that when Zeus approaches her to demand she return growth to the land she stands her ground and refuses until Persephone is returned. She teaches us to honour our own emotional needs and boundaries and not to be pressured into giving more than we are capable of when we're at our limit.
HARVEST & ABUNDANCE
As Goddess of the Harvest, Demeter also reigns over fruitfulness, abundance and prosperity. Whilst these days we might not be turning over huge agricultural crops ourselves and needing to leave sacrifices to the Goddess of Agriculture to bless our fields (well maybe you are!) but that doesn't mean we can't tap into her energy to harvest whatever it is we need in these modern times - nourishing food, money, a home, material success, the completion of a creative project. If it's anything in the physical realm you need to manifest, Demeter's got your back. This is her gift to us still in this modern day.
CALL ON DEMETER FOR:
Honouring the seasons and natural rhythms of the Earth as optimum times for certain activities - autumn to harvest, winter to hibernate and rest, spring to plant seeds of intentions or new projects and summer to grow and flourish. Honour your body and emotions and tune into when you need to withdraw your energy (in the same way nature withdraws its output during winter) to sustain and balance your energy year-round.
Letting go of attachments/ handling loss, honouring your grief, navigating life after loss (either after bereavement or big life transition such as retirement or if struggling with 'empty nest syndrome'), rediscovering your new life, your 'Spring' season after the 'loss' or stillness of winter
Self-Nurturance - learning to mother or re-mother yourself (particularly after an abusive childhood/relationship), letting go of patterns of self-sacrifice/over-giving, the need to be needed or draining people, setting healthy boundaries, learning to self-prioritise, self-care & self-nourish so you care for others from a full cup
Fertility & Motherhood - conceiving and growing a child, transitioning into motherhood/ parenthood - navigating a healthy balance of own needs and life roles with needs of child/children without self-sacrificing
Working in the Care industry such as care workers, counsellors/therapists, healers, kindergarten teachers, teaching assistants, nurses etc - knowing how to set healthy energy boundaries whilst doing this work and ensuring you have adequate emotional support for the toll this type of work can take, particularly when dealing with trauma.
Abundance/ Prosperity - shifting from scarcity to abundance mindset, seeing the fruits of your labours, harvesting from 'crops' (whether literal or metaphysical seeds planted, such as seeing the fruits from a creative or business project) and manifesting more financial or material abundance in your life
CERES (Demeter) ASTEROID 1
The asteroid Ceres (the Roman equivalent of Demeter) is asteroid number 1 as it was the first Goddess asteroid to be discovered in 1801 (Pallas Athena was 2nd, Juno third and Vesta fourth). It’s one of the largest asteroids in the solar system - being reclassified as a dwarf planet along with Eris in 2006 - and is located between Mars & Jupiter.
In your birth chart Ceres can indicate a lot about nurturance, motherhood and also attachment style. Ceres is ‘The Mother Archetype’ so depending on where this is placed in your chart (which house, which sign and other planets/conjunctions near it) can speak to how you were nurtured and your mother's attachment style to you as a child (and the mother-daughter dynamic in particular) and in turn how you nurture and care for yourself and others including your own children.
→ To find out where Demeter is in your natal chart and see how this archetype (or any of the other Goddess archetypes) might be at play in your life you can book a Goddess birth chart reading here
ACTIVATE DEMETER ENERGY BY:
Mothering yourself! Self-care rituals, inner child healing work, learning your emotional needs and boundaries
Caring for or offering nourishment to someone or something else - whether a friend in need, offering to babysit, volunteering for a charity that cares for vulnerable children or animals, adopting or fostering children
Nourishment - cooking a delicious meal or baking a treat for friends, family, neighbours or community, running a supper club, bringing people around a table for connection with food
Grounding - connecting with the negative ions of the earth by walking barefoot or lying with skin in direct contact with mud or earth. Benefits of 'Earthing' can be found here
Connect with/Care for Nature - gardening, cleaning up pollution, planting and harvesting food, planting herbs in pots, running an allotment, biodynamic agriculture, permaculture, environmentalist activities or Sacred Earth activism, climate change awareness, community gardens, hedgerow herbalism or foraging
ASSOCIATIONS:
General Symbols: Cornucopia, sheaves of wheat, autumn harvest, torch, bread, and honey.
Animals: Cats and dogs (all domestic pets), lions, snakes, cranes, and lizards.
Plants: Poppies, sunflower, cypress, sheaves of wheat, foxglove, daisy, columbine, ash, oak trees and acorns.
Colours: Earth colours - Green, dark brown, copper also gold and peach hues
Crystals: Cat's Eye (good luck & self worth), Emerald (stone of everlasting love), Sardonyx (protection, strength, good fortune), Carnelian (grounding, stabilising, increases fertility), Amber (has strong earth connections and useful for grounding)
Essential Oils - Orange blossom, myrrh, olibanum, civet, patchouli, violet, cloves, and cinnamon.
Tarot card - Queen of Pentacles
Astrology signs - Capricorn, Taurus
REFERENCES:
Goddess Power Oracle - Colette Baron-Reid
Goddess Power Cards - Sacred Feminine Oracle - Zinnia Gupte
Ancient Feminine Wisdom of Goddesses & Heroines - Kay Steventon & Brian Clark