Everything about Persephone totally explained
In
Greek mythology,
Persephone (
Kore or
Cora) was the embodiment of the Earth's fertility at the same time that she was the Queen of the
Underworld, the
korē (or young maiden), and the
parthenogenic daughter of
Demeter—and, in later Classical myths, a daughter of Demeter and
Zeus. In the Olympian version she also becomes the consort of
Hades when he becomes the deity that governs the underworld.
The figure of Persephone is well-known today. Her story has great emotional power: an innocent
maiden, a mother's grief over her abduction, and subsequent joy after the return of her daughter. It is also cited frequently as a paradigm of myths that explain natural processes, with the descent and return of the goddess bringing about the change of
seasons.
In Greek art, Persephone is invariably portrayed robed. She may be carrying a sheaf of grain and smiling demurely with the "
Archaic smile" of the Kore of Antenor.
Her name
"Persephone" (
Greek: Περσεφόνη,
Persephonē) is her name in the
Ionic Greek of
epic literature. The Homeric form of her name is
Persephonea (Περσεφονηία,
Persephonēia). In other dialects she was known under various other names:
Persephassa (Περσεφασσα),
Persephatta (Περσεφαττα), or simply [
Core] (Κόρη,
Korē, "girl, maiden" ) (when worshipped in the context of "Demeter and Core").
Plato calls her
Pherepapha (Φερέπαφα) in his
Cratylus, "because she's wise and touches that which is in motion."
The
Romans first heard of her from the
Aeolian and
Dorian cities of
Magna Graecia, who used the dialectal variant
Proserpine (Προσερπινη,
Proserpinē). Hence, in
Roman mythology she was called
Proserpina, and as a revived Roman Proserpina, she became an emblematic figure of the
Renaissance. At
Locri, perhaps uniquely, Persephone was the protector of marriage, a role usually assumed by
Hera; in the iconography of
votive plaques at Locri, her abduction and marriage to Hades served as an emblem of the marital state; children at Locri were dedicated to Proserpina, and maidens about to be wed brought her their
peplos to be blessed.
In a Classical period text ascribed to
Empedocles, c. 490–430 BC, describing a correspondence between four deities and the
classical elements, the name
Nestis for water apparently refers to Persephone.
"Now hear the fourfold roots of everything: enlivening Hera, Hades, shining Zeus. And Nestis, moistening mortal springs with tears".
Of the four deities of Empedocles's elements, it's the name of Persephone alone that's
taboo— Nestis is a euphemistic cult title— for the Greeks knew another face of Persephone as well. She was also the terrible [Queenof the Dead], whose name wasn't safe to speak aloud, who was
euphemistically named, simply as,
Kore, "The Maiden", a vestige of her archaic role as the deity ruling the underworld.
The Queen of the Underworld
There is an archaic role for Persephone as the dread queen of the Underworld, whose very name it was forbidden to speak. In the
Odyssey, commonly dated circa 800 to 600 BC, when
Odysseus goes to the Underworld, he refers to her as the
Iron Queen. Her central myth, for all its emotional familiarity, also was the tacit context of the secret initiatory mystery rites of regeneration at
Eleusis, which promised immortality to their awe-struck participants—an immortality in her world beneath the soil, feasting with the heroes who dined beneath her dread gaze (Kerenyi 1960, 1967).
Persephone symbolizes new life alike to the secret garden
The Abduction Myth
In the later Olympian pantheon of Classical Greece, Persephone is given a father: according to
Hesiod's
Theogony, Persephone was the daughter produced by the union of
Demeter and
Zeus. "And he [Zeus] came to the bed of bountiful Demeter, who bore white-armed Persephone, stolen by Hades from her mother's side".
Unlike every other offspring of an Olympian pairing of deities, Persephone has no stable position at Olympus. Persephone used to live far away from the other deities, a goddess within Nature herself before the days of planting seeds and nurturing plants. In the Olympian telling, the gods
Hermes,
Ares,
Apollo, and
Hephaestus, had all wooed Persephone, but Demeter rejected all their gifts and hid her daughter away from the company of the Olympian deities. Thus, Persephone lived a peaceful life before she became the
goddess of the underworld, which, according to Olympian mythographers, didn't occur until
Hades abducted her and brought her into the underworld. She was innocently picking flowers with some
nymphs—,
Athena, and
Artemis, the
Homeric hymn says—, or
Leucippe, or
Oceanids— in a field in
Enna when Hades came to abduct her, bursting through a cleft in the earth; the nymphs were changed by Demeter into the
Sirens for not having interfered. Life came to a standstill as the devastated
Demeter, goddess of the
Earth, searched everywhere for her lost daughter.
Helios, the sun, who sees everything, eventually told Demeter what had happened.
Finally, Zeus, pressured by the cries of the hungry people and by the other deities who also heard their anguish, couldn't put up with the dying earth and forced Hades to return Persephone. But before she was released to
Hermes, who had been sent to retrieve her, Hades tricked her into eating
pomegranate seeds, (three, one or four,or even seven according to the telling) which forced her to return to the underworld for a season each year. In some versions,
Ascalaphus informed the other deities that Persephone had eaten the pomegranate seeds. When Demeter and her daughter were united, the Earth flourished with vegetation and color, but for four months each year, when Persephone returned to the underworld, the earth once again became a barren realm. This is an
origin story to explain the seasons.
In an earlier version,
Hecate rescued Persephone. On an Attic
red-figured bell krater of ca 440 BCE in the
Metropolitan Museum of Art, Persephone is rising as if up stairs from a cleft in the earth, while Hermes stands aside; Hecate. holding two torches, looks back as she leads her to the enthroned Demeter.
In the earliest known version the
dreaded goddess, Persephone, was herself Queen of the Underworld (Burkert or Kerenyi).
In some versions, Demeter forbids the earth to produce, in others she's so busy looking for Persephone that she neglects the earth, or her duties as the Earth which she represents, and in some the depth of her despair causes nothing to grow.
This myth also can be interpreted as an allegory of ancient Greek marriage rituals. The Classical Greeks felt that
marriage was a sort of abduction of the bride by the groom from the bride's family, and this myth may have explained the origins of the marriage ritual. The more popular
etiological explanation of the seasons may have been a later interpretation.
The tenth-century
Byzantine encyclopedia
Suda,
s.v. "
Macaria", introduces a goddess of a blessed
afterlife assured to
Orphic mystery initiates. This Macaria is asserted to be the daughter of
Hades, and Persephone, though there's no previous mention of her.
Persephone, the Iron Queen
In one version of the myth, Persephone, as Queen of Hades, only mercifully relinquished a subject once; because the music of
Orpheus was so hauntingly sad, she allowed Orpheus to bring his wife
Eurydice back to the land of the living, as long as she walked behind him and he never tried to look at her face until they reached the surface. Orpheus agreed, but failed, looking back at the very end to make sure his wife was following, and he lost Eurydice forever.
Persephone also figures in the story of
Adonis, the Syrian consort of
Aphrodite. When Adonis was born, Aphrodite took him under her wing, seducing him with the help of
Helene, her friend, and was entranced by his unearthly beauty. She gave him to Persephone to watch over, but Persephone also was amazed at his beauty and refused to give him back. The argument between the two goddesses was settled, either by
Calliope, or by
Zeus, (depending on the antiquity of the myth), with Adonis spending four months with
Aphrodite, four months with Persephone and four months of the year on his own. This later myth placed a god into the position of a goddess in the cycle of the seasons.
When Hades pursued a nymph named
Minthe, Persephone turned her into a
mint plant.
Persephone was the object of
Pirithous's affections. In a late myth, Pirithous and
Theseus, his friend, pledged to marry daughters of
Zeus. Theseus chose
Helen and together they kidnapped her and decided to hold onto her until she was old enough to marry. Pirithous chose Persephone. They left Helen with Theseus' mother,
Aethra, and traveled to the underworld, domain of Persephone and her husband,
Hades. Hades pretended to offer them hospitality and set a feast; as soon as the pair sat down, snakes coiled around their feet and held them there. Edith Hamilton called it a "Chair of Forgetfulness" that they sat upon. It also should be noted that
Heracles was able to save Theseus from this fate when he was in the Underworld, but Hades forced Pirithous to remain seated forever.
Persephone and her mother Demeter were often referred to as aspects of the same Earth goddess, and were called "the Demeters" or simply "the goddesses."
Persephone in modern scholarship
Persephone before the Greeks?
Some modern scholars have argued that the
cult of Persephone was a continuation of
Neolithic or
Minoan goddess-worship. Among classicists, this thesis has been argued by Gunther Zuntz (Zuntz 1973) and cautiously included by
Walter Burkert in his definitive
Greek Religion.
More daringly, the mythologist
Karl Kerenyi has identified Persephone with the nameless "mistress of the
labyrinth" at
Knossos from the Bronze Age
Minoan civilization on
Crete that flourished from 1700 BC.
On the other hand, the hypothesis of an Aegean cult of the Earth Mother has come under some criticism in recent years. For more on both sides of the controversy, see
Mother Goddess.
Life-death-rebirth
Inspired by
James Frazer,
Jane Ellen Harrison, and modern mythologers, some scholars have labeled Persephone a
life-death-rebirth deity.
Consorts and children assigned in Classical myths
- Heracles
- Zagreus (Some say that Heracles is the father of Zagreus by Persephone but it's usually said that Zeus is his father)
- Zeus
- Zagreus (according to one tradition. See Orphic mysteries) (although sometimes thought of as son of Demeter and not Persephone)
- Hades
- Adonis (according to one tradition, though this is sometimes thought of as a misinterpretation of Aidoneus, an alternate name of Hades)
- Hermes (according to one tradition)
The 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica account of the myth
"As she was gathering flowers with her playmates in a meadow, the earth opened and Pluto, god of the dead, appeared and carried her off to be his queen in the world below. ... Torch in hand, her sorrowing mother sought her through the wide world, and finding her not she forbade the earth to put forth its increase. So all that year not a blade of corn grew on the earth, and men would have died of hunger if Zeus hadn't persuaded Pluto to let Persephone go. But before he let her go Pluto made her eat the seed of a pomegranate, and thus she couldn't stay away from him for ever. So it was arranged that she should spend two-thirds (according to later authors,
one-half) of every year with her mother and the heavenly gods, and should pass the rest of the year with Pluto beneath the earth. ... As wife of Pluto, she sent
spectres, ruled the ghosts, and carried into effect the
curses of men."
Persephone in astronomy
Persephone is the name of a
Main belt asteroid with a diameter of 49.1km, discovered by
Max Wolf in
1895 in Heidelberg.
Further Information
Get more info on 'Persephone'.
|
External Link Exchanges
Do you know how hard it is to get a link from a large encyclopaedia? Well we're different and will prove it. To get a link from us just add the following HTML to your site on a relevant page:
<a href="http://persephone.totallyexplained.com">Persephone Totally Explained</a>
Then simply click through this link from your web page. Our crawlers will verify your link, extract the title of your web page and instantly add a link back to it. If you like you can remove the words Totally Explained and embed the link in article text.
As long as your link remains in place, we'll keep our link to you right here. Please play fair - our crawlers are watching. Your site must be closely related to this one's topic. Any kind of spamming, dubious practises or removing the link will result in your link from us being dropped and, potentially, your whole site being banned. |
