PERSEPHONE — THE FLOWER THAT OPENED THE EARTH
Persephone is the goddess of spring and the queen of the dead, and the Greeks saw no contradiction in that.
She begins as a girl picking flowers in a meadow when the ground opens. She ends on a throne beneath the earth, and her mother stops the world’s harvest until she is returned. Part of her never comes back up. Every year the Greeks watched their fields go bare and then green again, and this was the story they told to explain it.
The fullest early telling is the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, composed some time around the seventh or sixth century BC. This is the story as it tells it.
THE GIRL IN THE MEADOW
Persephone, also called Kore, “the maiden”, was the daughter of Demeter, the goddess of grain, and Zeus. In the hymn she is out in a meadow with the daughters of Oceanus, gathering flowers: roses, crocuses, violets, irises and hyacinths. It is an ordinary scene, which is the point. Nothing in it warns her.
THE FLOWER
Then she sees a narcissus. The hymn says Gaia, the Earth, grew it as a lure, by the will of Zeus, to please Hades. It carried a hundred blooms, and its scent was so sweet that the whole sky and the sea were said to laugh at it.
Persephone reached for it. The wide earth opened, and Hades, Zeus’s brother and the ruler of the dead, rose out of the crack in a golden chariot drawn by immortal horses. He seized her and drove her down. She cried out to her father, but only two heard her: Hecate, in her cave, and Helios, the sun, who sees everything that happens beneath his light.
THE MOTHER
Demeter heard the cry echo off the mountains. She tore the veil from her head and searched for nine days with a torch in each hand, neither eating nor bathing. On the tenth day Hecate told her she had heard the scream but seen nothing, and together they went to Helios. He told her the truth: Hades had taken Persephone, and Zeus had agreed.
Demeter left Olympus in grief and anger and went among mortals disguised as an old woman. She came to Eleusis and was taken in as a nurse in the house of King Celeus. Then she did the one thing that mattered. She held back the harvest. Not a seed would come up out of the ground, and the year turned into a famine. Humans would have starved, and the gods would have lost every offering made to them.
THE BARGAIN
Zeus gave way. He sent Hermes down to Hades to bring Persephone back to her mother. Hades agreed, but before she left he handed her a pomegranate seed, and she ate it. In the Greek understanding, anyone who has eaten in the land of the dead cannot leave it for good.
Zeus settled it. In the hymn, Persephone spends a third of the year in the dark beneath the earth and the rest above with her mother and the gods. Later writers made it half. When she comes up, the fields bloom. When she goes back down, they go bare.
THE QUEEN BELOW
Persephone does not stay a captive in the Greek imagination. She becomes the queen of the dead, sitting beside Hades. In the Odyssey, Odysseus fears that she might send up the head of the Gorgon against him when he visits the underworld. In the tradition of Orpheus, it is Hades and Persephone together who are moved by his singing and let Eurydice walk back toward the light.
She is both things at once: the girl who was taken and the power that rules where she was taken to. The myth never asks her to choose.
WHY THE MYTH LASTED
At Eleusis, the place where Demeter had stopped, a festival grew up around this story. The Eleusinian Mysteries were held there for close to two thousand years. What happened inside was kept secret, but the hymn tells us the promise: whoever has seen these rites is fortunate, and will not share the same fate after death as someone who has not.
That is the other reason the myth lasted. The seasons were one answer. The other was the thought that a person could go down into the dark and come back, the way Persephone did every year.
THE NEOLITHIC CONNECTION
Greek Legends keeps returning to the road down. Persephone’s story is the oldest version of it, and it is now a tee. The Flower Was the Trap puts the narcissus alone on the chest. On the back the same flower rises from a crack in the earth, the split below it filled with ochre-gold, the roots hanging down both sides of the chasm.
The descent shows up elsewhere in the collection too. The Silence Behind Him follows Orpheus into the fields of the dead, and our Orpheus and Eurydice post tells how his song won a hearing from the queen of the dead. Antigone is about what the living owe those who have gone below.
— Neolithic Store