Persephone

The narcissus had a hundred heads growing from one root, and its scent went out over the salt sea and the wide sky. That was the point of it. Gaia raised the flower in a soft meadow as bait, a favour done for the god who receives many guests, and the girl gathering roses and crocus and violets with the daughters of Ocean reached for it with both hands. The ground opened. A chariot came up through it with immortal horses at the pole, and a lord of many names took her by the wrist and pulled her down while she screamed for her father. Her father had arranged the whole thing.

Only two heard her. Hecate caught the cry from inside her cave, and Helios saw it from the chariot he drives over everything, and it was Helios who eventually told Demeter what her brother had done with her daughter and whose plan it had been. The Homeric Hymn to Demeter, composed somewhere in the seventh or sixth century before the common era and preserved for us in a single medieval manuscript, tells this as a story about a mother. Grain stopped. Ploughs went through the fields for nothing. The gods were about to lose their sacrifices along with the human race that made them, and Zeus, who had given the girl away in the first place, sent Hermes down to fetch her back.

Hades let her go. He was under no visible compulsion to fight about it, and the hymn gives him something close to courtesy: he tells her she will rule everything that walks and breathes, and that she will have honours among the immortals proportionate to that. Then, as she is climbing into the chariot, he gives her something to eat. One seed of a pomegranate, sweet as honey, and the eating of it is done quickly and quietly and settles the rest of her existence. Food taken in the house of the dead belongs to the house of the dead. A third of every year would be hers to spend below, and the other two thirds above with her mother, and when Rhea came down through the air to bring the news the earth ran green with leaves and flowers in a single day.

The story disagrees with itself about the arithmetic. Ovid, writing centuries later, has her eat seven seeds and split the year in half. Apollodorus keeps the third but adds a witness, Ascalaphus, who saw her swallow it and told, and who was punished for the telling. Nobody asks her.

What makes her strange is that the maiden is not the oldest version of her. The earliest Greek poetry to name Persephone has no meadow and no flowers in it at all. In the Odyssey she is dread Persephone, holy Persephone, the queen whose halls Odysseus must reach and whose permission structures the whole encounter. She scatters the crowding ghosts of women when she has had enough of them. Odysseus, standing in the dark with a trench of blood at his feet, breaks and runs because it occurs to him that she might send up the Gorgon’s head, and the fear is entirely reasonable. This is not a girl who was recently picking violets. She is the terror at the bottom of things, and the abduction narrative sits on top of that older figure rather than replacing her.

Her name may be older than Greek. It survives in an unusual number of shapes, Persephassa and Persephatta and Pherephatta and more, and Plato in the Cratylus tries to make sense of yet another variant with an etymology nobody has since accepted. The spread of forms is generally taken as a sign that Greek speakers were wrestling with a word that did not begin in their language. What she was called before that is not recoverable.

Cult tells a different story again, and it is worth noticing how little of it matches the poem. At Eleusis, where the sanctuary had been drawing initiates since the Mycenaean period, the descent and the search and the return were staged annually for people who were forbidden on pain of death to describe what they had seen, and what they were promised was a better condition after death. At Locri Epizephyrii in the toe of Italy, the sanctuary at Contrada Mannella produced tens of thousands of small painted terracotta plaques from the late sixth to the fourth centuries. They were left by girls approaching marriage. On them Persephone appears enthroned beside a young, beardless Hades, receiving offerings, presiding, consenting. The Locrians were not interested in a victim. They were interested in a bride who had become a queen, and they handed their daughters over to her as the model of what marriage was supposed to do to a woman.

In the Orphic material she is more formidable still. The thin gold leaves folded into graves address her directly, coach the dead on what to say in her presence, and describe the destination as her meadows and her groves. Orphic tradition also makes her the mother of Dionysus in his first form, Zagreus, torn apart by the Titans, which puts her at the origin of the god of the returning dead rather than merely adjacent to him.

She uses her position. Orpheus got Eurydice back because Persephone was moved and said yes. Sisyphus got out of the underworld by talking his way past her, which is a story that only works if her word is the one that matters down there. When Aphrodite left the infant Adonis in her keeping she looked at him and refused to give him back, and the case had to be arbitrated. Minthe and Leuce, two of her husband’s other interests, ended as a herb and a white poplar. Theseus and Pirithous came down with the specific intention of carrying her off, and neither of them walked out of that room under his own power.

Her powers follow from what happened to her rather than from any weapon. She commands the shades, sends them up and calls them back, and dispenses the punishments of the dead; the whole promise of the Mysteries rests on her being willing to let something return. Her limits follow from the same place. She rules a kingdom she was carried into, on terms fixed by her father and sealed by a mouthful of fruit, and the one absolute constraint on her is the seed. Whatever else she can do with the dead, she cannot undo the fact that she ate.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Persephone in Greek mythology?

Persephone is the daughter of Demeter and Zeus who was carried off by Hades and became queen of the underworld. She is also called Kore, meaning “the Maiden,” and she divides her year between the world below and the world above. In the oldest surviving Greek poetry, the Odyssey, she appears purely as the dread queen of the dead rather than as a girl in a meadow.

Why did Persephone have to stay in the underworld?

Because she ate in the underworld. As Hermes was bringing her back, Hades gave her a pomegranate seed, and food taken in the house of the dead binds the eater to it. In the Homeric Hymn to Demeter this means she spends one third of every year below and two thirds with her mother, though Ovid gives seven seeds and half the year instead.

What is the difference between Persephone and Kore?

They are the same goddess under two names used for two aspects. Kore, “the Maiden,” is the name that stresses her relationship to her mother Demeter and is the more usual formal title in many state cults. Persephone is the name that stresses her position as the wife of Hades and the ruler of the dead.

Was Persephone worshipped as a victim or as a queen?

Overwhelmingly as a queen. At the sanctuary at Locri Epizephyrii in southern Italy, girls approaching marriage left tens of thousands of painted terracotta plaques showing Persephone enthroned beside a youthful Hades, consenting and presiding. Her cult treated the abduction as the beginning of a sacred marriage rather than as an atrocity to be mourned.

What role does Persephone play in the Eleusinian Mysteries?

Her descent, her mother’s search and her return were the story enacted every year at Eleusis for initiates sworn to secrecy. The Mysteries offered a better condition after death, and that promise depended on Persephone, the goddess who had come back from the underworld and who decides what the underworld releases. Orphic gold tablets buried with the dead were written to be spoken in her presence.

Related Entries

Demeter, Hades, Zeus, Hecate, Helios, Hermes, Rhea, Dionysus, Adonis, Leuce, Orpheus, Sisyphus, Theseus, Cerberus, Charon, Thanatos, Tartarus, Lampades, Erinyes (Furies)