tradition. In some local cults the feasts were dedicated to Demeter. Origins The myth of a goddess being abducted and taken to the underworld is probably Pre-Greek in origin. Samuel Noah Kramer, the renowned scholar of ancient Sumer, has posited that the Greek story of the abduction of Persephone may be derived from an ancient Sumerian story in which Ereshkigal, the ancient Sumerian goddess of the underworld, is abducted by Kur, the primeval dragon of Sumerian mythology, and forced to become ruler of the underworld against her own will. The location of Persephone's abduction is different in each local cult. The Homeric Hymn to Demeter mentions the "plain of Nysa". The locations of this probably mythical place may simply be conventions to show that a magically distant chthonic land of myth was intended in the remote past. Demeter found and met her daughter in Eleusis, and this is the mythical disguise of what happened in the mysteries. In his 1985 book on Greek Religion, Walter Burkert claimed that Persephone is an old chthonic deity of the agricultural communities, who received the souls of the dead into the earth, and acquired powers over the fertility of the soil, over which she reigned. The earliest depiction of a goddess Burkert claims may be identified with Persephone growing out of the ground, is on a plate from the Old-Palace period in Phaistos. According to Burkert, the figure looks like a vegetable because she has snake lines on other side of her. On either side of the vegetable person there is a dancing girl. A similar representation, where the goddess appears to come down from the sky, is depicted on the Minoan ring of Isopata. The cults of Persephone and Demeter in the Eleusinian mysteries and in the Thesmophoria were based on old agrarian cults. The beliefs of these cults were closely-guarded secrets, kept hidden because they were believed to offer believers a better place in the afterlife than in miserable Hades. There is evidence that some practices were derived from the religious practices of the Mycenaean age. Kerenyi asserts that these religious practices were introduced from Minoan Crete. The idea of immortality which appears in the syncretistic religions of the Near East did not exist in the Eleusinian mysteries at the very beginning. In the Near East and Minoan Crete Walter Burkert believed that elements of the Persephone myth had origins in the