Persephone

• 1. Introduction

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  Persephone, daughter of Zeus and Demeter, holds two thrones in ancient Greek mythology: one in the sunlit world of the living, and one in the darkness beneath the earth. She is the goddess of spring, whose return from below signals flowers and grain; she is also the dread queen of the underworld, whose name was considered too dangerous to speak aloud in certain traditions.

  How does a single deity embody both the freshness of new growth and the finality of death? How did her story shape some of the most secretive religious rites the ancient world ever produced? And why, across Sicily, Athens, Rome, and a city on the Italian coast, did she mean something different to each community that worshipped her?

• 2. A Name Too Dangerous to Speak

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  Plato, writing in his dialogue the Cratylus, calls her Pherepapha, meaning "because she is wise and touches that which is in motion." That unusual gloss hints at how ancient authors kept searching for ways to name a goddess whose name itself carried weight.

  The sheer number of variant forms, including Persephassa, Persephatta, Persephoneia, and Perrōphátta on fifth-century Attic vases, tells its own story. Linguists note that so many competing forms suggest the Greeks were struggling to pronounce a word that was not originally their own. The name may have a Pre-Greek origin.

  Rudolf Wachter has proposed that the first element of her name reflects a very rare term found in the Rig Veda and the Avesta, meaning sheaf of corn or ear of grain. The second element traces back to a Proto-Indo-European root meaning to strike or beat. Combined, the name would read as "she who beats the ears of corn", a thresher of grain. For the daughter of Demeter, goddess of the harvest, that etymology feels almost too apt.

  A popular folk interpretation went in a darker direction: phonon in Greek means death, giving rise to the reading "she who brings death." Both the agrarian and the lethal readings of her name coexisted, which reflects the double life she always led.

  In the text of Empedocles, writing around 490-430 BC, she appears under the cult title Nestis, meaning "the Fasting One." Of the four deities Empedocles linked to the classical elements, she alone required a euphemism. Her real name was taboo.

• 3. Flowers, Pomegranate Seeds, and Seasons

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  The Homeric Hymn to Demeter tells the abduction story in considerable detail. Persephone was gathering flowers in a field alongside the Oceanids and the goddesses Pallas Athena and Artemis when Hades burst through a cleft in the earth and carried her away. The shepherd Eumolpus and the swineherd Eubuleus witnessed a girl in a black chariot driven by an invisible driver vanishing into the violently opened ground. Eubuleus was feeding his pigs at the opening to the underworld, and his swine were swallowed by the earth along with her. That detail became an etiology, an origin story, for the ritual use of pigs in both the Thesmophoria and at Eleusis.

  Demeter, plunged into despair, searched the whole earth with Hecate's torches. She forbade the earth to produce. Helios, the Sun who sees everything, eventually disclosed what had happened. Zeus, pressed by the cries of hungry people and the distress of the other gods, ordered Hades to release her.

  Hades complied, but first he tricked her into eating pomegranate seeds. Hermes came to retrieve her, yet because she had tasted food in the underworld, she was bound to return there for a portion of every year. In the older accounts she spends one third of the year below; in later versions by Ovid and Hyginus the period stretches to half the year.

  Ascalaphus, the custodian of Hades' orchard, told the other gods what she had eaten. For that act of disclosure, Persephone herself, in one version, changed him into an eagle owl by sprinkling him with water from the river Phlegethon.

  The Greeks read the seasons into this story directly. Spring and summer were the months Persephone spent with Demeter, who caused crops to grow. Autumn and winter were Demeter's grief.

• 4. The Eleusinian Mysteries

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  At Eleusis, a city northwest of Athens, Persephone and Demeter stood at the center of one of the ancient world's most closely guarded religious institutions. The Eleusinian Mysteries promised initiates a happy afterlife, a better fate than the miserable existence that awaited the uninitiated in Hades. Exactly what was seen and experienced inside the rites was kept secret by those who took part.

  Inscriptions at Eleusis refer to "the Goddesses" accompanied by the agricultural god Triptolemos, and to "the God and the Goddess" accompanied by Eubuleus, who, in this tradition, led the way back from the underworld. Demeter and Persephone were sometimes called simply "the older" and "the younger" at Eleusis; on occasion they shared the collective name "Demeters."

  Walter Burkert, in his 1985 book on Greek Religion, described Persephone as an old chthonic deity of agricultural communities, one who received souls of the dead into the earth while also holding power over the fertility of the soil. He pointed to a plate from the Old Palace period at Phaistos in Crete as possibly the earliest depiction of a figure identifiable with her: a goddess growing out of the ground, flanked by dancing girls, her body stylized to resemble a vegetable because of the snake lines running along her sides.

  Karl Kerenyi argued that the cult of Persephone was the continuation of the worship of a Minoan Great Goddess, and that some religious practices, particularly the mysteries, may have been transferred from a Cretan priesthood to Eleusis. Burkert noted that Demeter was said to have brought the poppy from Crete.

  The cults at Eleusis had roots in the Mycenaean period, with tablets dated 1400-1200 BC mentioning "the two queens and the king." John Chadwick believed these were precursors of Demeter, Persephone, and Poseidon.

• 5. Queen of the Dead

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  In Homer's Odyssey, Odysseus encounters "the dread Persephone" in Tartarus. He sacrifices a ram to her and to the ghosts of the dead, who drink the blood of the sacrificed animal. She appears there always beside Hades, sharing control over the dead.

  As wife of Pluto, she sent spectres, ruled the ghosts, and carried curses into effect. The lake of Avernus, one of the ancient entrances to the infernal regions, was sacred to her.

  Her power over the dead was not merely punitive. She allowed the shade of Tiresias to retain his mental prowess and gift of clairvoyance after death. She persuaded Hades to let the hero Protesilaus return briefly to the world of the living to see his wife. When Orpheus descended into the underworld seeking his dead wife Eurydice, his music so entranced Persephone that she convinced Hades to release her. The wily king Sisyphus managed to trick Persephone into letting him return to the surface above, escaping death for a time.

  In the tradition linking her to the old chthonic divinity Despoina, whose real name could not be revealed to the uninitiated, her authority was absolute. Groves sacred to her stood at the western edge of the earth; the underworld itself was called the "house of Persephone."

  The nymph Minthe declared her intention to replace Persephone as queen of the underworld. Persephone responded by trampling her and turning her into a mint plant. In an alternate telling, Persephone tore Minthe to pieces, and Hades then transformed his former lover into the sweet-smelling herb.

• 6. Locri: Marriage, Not Mourning

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  At Epizephyrian Locris, a city on the Ionian Sea coast in Calabria in what is now southern Italy, Persephone was worshipped in a way found almost nowhere else in the Greek world. Here she was protector of marriage and childbirth, a role normally belonging to Hera. In the public worship of Locris, Hera appears to have played no role at all.

  Children of the town were dedicated to Proserpina. Maidens about to be married brought their peplos to be blessed by her. The temple at Epizephyrian Locris was described by Diodorus Siculus as the most illustrious in Italy.

  During the fifth century BC, craftsmen produced votive pinakes, terracotta tablets painted in bright colors with scenes from her myth and cult. More than 5,000, mostly fragmentary, are now held in the National Museum of Magna Graecia in Reggio Calabria and in the museum of Locri. Some show her abduction by Hades; others show her seated next to a beardless, youthful husband. That iconography of a young couple was intended to read as a model for the transition from girlhood to marriage, terrifying but also a passage into status and position.

  The Italian archaeologist Paolo Orsi, working between 1908 and 1911, conducted a meticulous series of excavations that identified the site of the Persephoneion, the ancient temple dedicated to Persephone, at the foot of the Mannella hill near the walls of Epizephyrian Locris. Archaeological evidence dates the use of the sanctuary to a period spanning the seventh century BC to the third century BC.

  In Rome, a related goddess called Libera was officially identified with Proserpina in 205 BC. The Romans, who had first learned of her from the Aeolian and Dorian cities of Magna Graecia, derived her Latin name Proserpina from proserpere, "to shoot forth," and she became an emblem of the Renaissance under that reading.

• 7. Orphism and the Gold Leaves

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  In the Orphic religious tradition, mourners buried small gold leaves with their dead, inscribed with verses intended to guide the deceased toward a favorable afterlife. Persephone appears frequently in these texts alongside Demeter and Euklês, a name that may be another form of Plouton. The ideal destination the leaves describe is the "sacred meadows and groves of Persephone." Other leaves cast her as shelter: one line reads "I dived under the kolpos of the Lady, the Chthonian Queen," an image evoking a child hiding under a mother's apron.

  Orphic cosmology gave Persephone a role no other tradition assigned her. In Orphic myth, Zeus came to her in her bedchamber in the underworld and fathered the first Dionysus, sometimes called Zagreus. The infant was later dismembered by the Titans before being reborn as the second Dionysus, who then ascended to the heavens with his second mother, Semele.

  The poet Aeschylus considered Zagreus either an alternate name for Hades or his son, presumably born to Persephone. The scholar Timothy Gantz noted that Hades was often seen as a chthonic form of Zeus, and suggested that Zagreus was probably first the son of Hades and Persephone, only later merged with the Orphic Dionysus. The association may have been recorded by the poet Callimachus as early as the third century BC, though that source is now lost.

  The Orphic Hymns also name the Eumenides as daughters of Persephone and Hades, and Melinoë as a daughter of Persephone by Zeus disguised as Hades. Persephone's epithet Praxidike appears in the Orphic Hymn to Persephone, which addresses her as "subterranean queen" and "the Eumenides' source."