ABSTRACT
From the early days of the study of Greek religion the connection between agriculture, seasonality, fertility and females has been a favourite theme of scholarship. Though these elements may constitute a significant matrix, their integration, and hence the precise meaning of that matrix, is seriously problematic. For this reason it is difficult to say anything sensible about what the significance of the relationships between these elements might be.2 Moreover, we all suffer now from a legacy of over-the-top Frazerian and other nineteenth-and early twentieth-century approaches to religion. These studies, set in an evolutionary framework and drawing on the social science of the period, perceived Greek religion, especially early Greek cult, as located towards the lower end of the developmental scale. The religion of classical Greece could therefore be ‘mined’ for the archaic customs which were held to be vestiges of an earlier and more primitive era (as, for example, in Nilsson’s3 and, more recently, Burkert’s4 work). Hence a concern with origins, roots and beginnings characterised this mode of scholarship. And so the cosmological ties between the cycles of farming and females, ‘obvious’ as they are to those of us steeped in that heritage of scholarly tradition, were (and often still are) eagerly held up as an explanation, indeed, as the explanation, for many Greek rites.5
