Who is this? and what is here? Through the ether I can hear you echo Tennyson as you brood on my enigmatic reference to DEMETER in the Weather Eye of yesterday. Maybe it goes further, and the atmosphere is even more Arthurian: ". . . And in the lighted palace near/Died the sound of Royal cheer/And they cross's themselves for fear,/All the knights at Camelot. "
Demeter, you may recall from yesterday, is the somewhat contrived acronym used by the European Weather Centre in Reading, Berkshire, for a project called "Development of a European Multi-model Ensemble system for seasonal to inTERannual prediction". It is milestone in "seasonal forecasting", an attempt to predict the weather pattern for several months into the future. But why, the question arises, should they go to such strange lengths to arrive at this particular acronym, Demeter?
The answer lies in Greek mythology. Demeter to the ancient Greeks was the goddess of fertility, and following a casual dalliance with Zeus, the chief of all the gods, Demeter was delivered of a daughter whom she called Persephone. Demeter and Persephone between them are responsible, we are told, for what has been called "the penalty of Adam, the season's difference"; they caused the very seasons that figure in the European Centre's plans. It all goes back to the nasty abduction of Persephone as a young girl: she was carried off by Pluto, the god of Hades, a well known reprobate and scoundrel. She was gathering flowers near Mount Etna in Sicily when she spied a narcissus of incomparable beauty, and as she bent down to pick it up, the Earth opened and she was snatched away into the underworld.
Demeter, it seems, went looking for her daughter, and in her distraction she neglected her responsibilities. The Earth, therefore, produced no crops, the trees and fields lay bare, flowers withered and fruit rotted on the branches; people began to die of hunger, and the gods were alarmed lest all humanity be wiped out.
Eventually, Zeus agreed to engineer Persephone's release from Hades, provided she had eaten nothing during her stay. But it so happened that Persephone had eaten a pomegranate seed in the Elysian Fields, and it was therefore impossible for Zeus to do more than to arrange for her to spend eight months of each year with her mother, and four with Pluto.
Demeter still mourns her absent daughter during her annual sojourn in the underworld - and so we have a winter every year.