Baden culture grain maiden

This is a very, very interesting ceramic vessel made by people of the Copper Metalworking and Grain Farming "Baden culture" which flourished in Central and Southeast Europe (Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, Serbia, Romania, Austria), c 3600–2800 BC...

The vessel body is shaped like a young female body with bare breasts. And the vessel handles are shaped like growing sheaves of grain...The first time I saw this vessel, I stared at it for good 10 mins trying to figure out what it reminded me of...

I eventually gave up and dismissed it as a case of deja vu. That was few years ago, and I almost forgot about this artefact. And then, the other day, I was finishing my post about the Abduction of Persephone. I was looking at this, the last image in the article and suddenly...

This is the Roman, Augustan period "bas relief of Ceres (Demeter) or Proserpine (Persephone) rising from the ground with sheaves of wheat and poppies"...Persephone has come back from "The Underworld". She is Demeter now, goddess of grain, bringer of wealth...

So is the neolithic Baden culture pot depicting the same mythological scene?

Now remember the European tradition about the "Sprit of grain"? Which is preserved every year in "The last sheaf" from which a "Corn dolly" is made, in order to preserve this spirit from harvest to sowing?

I talked about this in my post "Corn dolly"...Who is this "Spirit of grain"? Is this Persephone again? Well the corn dolly is made in a shape of a woman. Her skirt is made from ears of wheat, which contain seeds...The seeds from the corn dolly's skirt are the first seeds sown during next sowing...The corn dolly is killed and buried only to be reborn, sprout and grow into new wheat...

What is interesting is that according to archaeologist, the agriculture practiced by the first European farmers was based around spring sown grains...I talked about this in my post "To kill a witch"...

In which case Persephone, the spirit of grain, would have gone to "The Underworld" (grain sown) beginning of February (beginning of spring), and would have came out of "The Underworld" (grain sprouting) end of February, beginning of March...

This also means that the seeds are sown at the exact moment when the Old Hag, Winter Earth dies and the Young Maiden, Spring Earth is born...

In which case, originally, during the time of the first farmers in Continental Europe, Spirit of Grain and Spirit of Spring were one and the same...Which is exactly what the Greeks claimed...

Is this how old the legend of Persephone is? 

Possibly...

But wait, wait....What about all the references to autumn in the depiction of the Persephone's abduction from the Homeric hymn to Demeter? I mean you wrote the whole article about it "Abduction of Persephone". Was that all rubbish? (I can hear you say)

Well...As I said in that article, I believe that that version of the story with the end of autumn beginning of winter references originated in Crete...And in Crete, the climate is very similar to the climate in the Fertile Crescent, where the agriculture was invented...There the sowing was done after the first rains, at the end of autumn beginning of winter...So it is possible that the original version of the story is the one where Persephone goes to the underworld at the end of autumn beginning of winter...And then that story was brought to Crete, where because the climate was very similar to the one in Fertile Crescent  the story was preserved unchanged. The story was also brought to the Balkans, where the first farmers had to learn how to grow grain in continental European climate...And there, because of that, the story was changed to fit the new climate...

But also, as I said in my post "Abduction of Persephone", maybe her time spent underground represents winter in Europe, the infertile, dead time of the year, and not the time it takes grain to sprout after sowing...

Anyway, it is an interesting thing to think about...