Cerium's name descends through the asteroid to Roman religion, for Ceres, the newly found celestial body, was itself named after Ceres, the goddess of grain, agriculture and the fruitful earth, whose grief for her lost daughter Proserpina was said to bring the barren season of winter. The naming of cerium so soon after the asteroid's discovery reflects a brief moment when new heavenly bodies and new elements were being found together and their names exchanged; cerium, palladium and, later, the transuranium elements all took their names from this celestial fashion. The link is one of astronomical nomenclature rather than any inherited symbolism, but it seats cerium, through Ceres, among the oldest agricultural deities of the classical world.
Ceres corresponds to the Greek Demeter, and her cult lay at the heart of the Eleusinian Mysteries, among the most celebrated religious rites of the ancient Mediterranean world, held annually near Athens for close to two thousand years and centred on the goddess's grief and her daughter's return from the underworld as an allegory of the grain's yearly death and rebirth. Cerium's naming, however playful in its astronomical origin, thus reaches back through Ceres and Demeter to one of antiquity's longest-running and most secretive religious traditions, whose initiates were sworn never to reveal what they witnessed.