Persephone

Persephone opens the liknon mystikon on a pinax from Locri

In Greek mythology, Persephone (usually pronounced /pərˈsɛfəniː/ in modern English; also called Kore^[1]) was the Queen of the Underworld, the korē (or young maiden), and 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 great joy after her daughter is returned. 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 Persephoneia (Περσεφονεία^[2], Persephonēia). In other dialects she was known under various other names: Persephassa (Περσεφάσσα), Persephatta (Περσεφάττα), or simply [Kore] (Κόρη, Korē, "girl, maiden" ^[3]) (when worshipped in the context of "Demeter and Kore"). Plato calls her Pherepapha (Φερέπαφα) in his Cratylus, "because she is 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 such 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 their peplos to be blessed.^[4]

In a Classical period text ascribed to Empedocles, c. 490–430 BC,^[5] 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."^[6]

Of the four deities of Empedocles's elements, it is the name of Persephone alone that is taboo—Nestis is a euphemistic cult title^[7]—for she was also the terrible Queen of the Dead, whose name was not safe to speak aloud, who was euphemistically named simply as "Kore" or "the Maiden", a vestige of her archaic role as the deity ruling the underworld.

Queen of the Underworld

Seated goddess, probably Persephone on her throne in the underworld, Severe style ca 480-60, found at Tarentum, Magna Graecia (Pergamon Museum, Berlin)

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.^[8] Her central myth, for all its emotional familiarity, was also the tacit context of the secret initiatory mystery rites of regeneration at Eleusis,^[9] 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.

Abduction myth

The story of her abduction is traditionally referred to as the Rape of Persephone. 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,^[10] 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, did not occur until Hades abducted her and brought her into it. 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. Later, 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.

The Return of Persephone by Frederic Leighton (1891)

Finally, Zeus, pressed by the cries of the hungry people and by the other deities who also heard their anguish, forced Hades to return Persephone. However, it was a rule of the Fates that whoever consumed food or drink in the Underworld was doomed to spend eternity there. Before Persephone was released to Hermes, who had been sent to retrieve her, Hades tricked her into eating pomegranate seeds, (six, seven, eight, or perhaps four according to the telling)^[11] which forced her to return to the underworld for the winter 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 some 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.^[12]

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 is so busy looking for Persephone that she neglects the earth, or her duties as the Earth which she represents, and in 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 is no previous mention of her.

Iron Queen

Persephone, by Carl Max Kruse

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' 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".

In modern scholarship

Lady of Auxerre—this early Archaic ("Daedalic") image from Crete may represent a version of the Minoan goddess that Karl Kerenyi identified with Kore or Persephone. The statue postdates the end of Minoan culture by 700 years.

Pre-Mycenaean Greece

There are significant parallels between the cult of Persephone and similar systems—some of them older—in Near East.^[13] Some modern scholars have argued that the cult of Persephone was a continuation of Neolithic or Minoan Great Goddess-worship.This theory is based on a lot of relegious objects found in Creta which have their analogues in classical Greece and some surnames of Persephone.Among the relegious objects are the poppy goddess who probably as Demeter brought the poppy to Eleusis,^[14] and the snake goddess who probably can be identified as Aphrodite (Astarte) as an aspect of the Great Goddess. Some surnames of Persephone are potnia (mistress) and Despoina (miss).^[15] 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 argued that Persephone was the nameless "mistress of the labyrinth",(potnia from PIE "pota" meaning ruler) identified in the Mycenaean Greek tablets at Knossos. ^[16] from the Bronze Age Minoan civilization on Crete that flourished from 2000 BC.John Chadwick^[17] and Karl Kerenyi assert that the potniai (mistresses) identified in the Mycenaean tablets at Pylos were associated by the classical Greeks with Demeter and Persephone.

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

• Hades
  • Macaria The Goddess of blessed death.
  • Plutus (While most sources cited him as the child of Demeter, he was also thought to be the child of Hades and Persephone)
• Zeus (In Orphic tellings)
  • Zagreus (In some stories, said to be the first name for Dionysus under the name Zeus Katachthonios, meaning 'underworld Zeus'; sometimes cited as child of Zeus and Demeter or Hades and Persephone)
  • Melinoe (Some sources cited her as the daughter of Hades)

In popular culture

The figure of Persephone, as Queen of the Underworld or as abducted maiden, is one of the most quickly grasped in a popular allusion.

See also

• Proserpina
• Anthesphoria, festival honoring Proserpina, and Persephone
• Eleusinian Mysteries
• Despoina

References

Notes

Bibliography

• Walter Burkert, Greek Religion 1985
• Lewis Richard Farnell, The Cults of the Greek States, Volume 3 (1906) (Chapters on: Demeter and Kore-Persephone; Cult-Monuments of Demeter-Kore; Ideal Types of Demeter-Kore).
• Karl Kerenyi, Eleusis: Archetypal Image of Mother and Daughter, 1960, in English 1967
• Günther Zuntz, Persephone: Three Essays on Religion and Thought in Magna Graecia, 1973

External links

• Kore Photographs
• Flickr users' photos tagged with Persephone