Persephone

But it is hard to find definite traces of any personal goddess.

The Olympian Demeter and Persephone dwindle away as we look closer, and we are left with the shadow Thesmophoros, she who carries thesmoi, not a substantive personal goddess but merely a personification of the ritual itself, an imaginary charm-bearer generated by so much charm-bearing, just as Milikios in the Diasia was generated from the ritual of appeasement.

Now the Diasia were dominated by a sacred snake.

Is there any similar divine animal in the Thesmophoria? Alas, yes.

Both here and still more markedly in the mysteries of Demeter and Persephone at Eleusis, we regularly find the most lovely of all goddesses, Demeter and Persephone, habitually, I will not say represented by, but dangerously associated with, a sacred sow.

A pig is the one animal in Greek religion that actually had sacrifice made to it.

The third feast, the Anthesteria, belongs in classical times to the Olympian Dionysus, and is said to be the oldest of his feasts.

Athena is an ideal, an ideal and a mystery.

Forever? Well, you con-

But it's you, not Persephone.

No, but that's fine.

'Cause she could be mean to you.

The periods when we are not blooming, when our identities feel uncertain, when the life we understood has been interrupted, when we have been separated from the person we used to be but have not yet met the person who we are becoming.

There may be no myth that captures this experience more powerfully than the story of Persephone, and it is frequently presented as a simple explanation for the seasons.

Persephone descends into the Underworld, her mother grieves, the earth becomes barren, and when Persephone returns, life begins again.

But the myth contains much more than a seasonal cycle.

It is a story of abduction and grief, a story of a mother whose sorrow becomes powerful enough to stop the world, a story of a daughter forced across a threshold she did not choose, and it is the story of someone who returns from darkness but does not return unchanged.

Today, we are exploring the myth of Persephone, descent, darkness, and becoming, and what her journey can teach us about identity, transformation, grief, feminine power, and returning from difficult seasons as someone new.

But first, in my Savory Reader Stack this week, I have two books that pair beautifully with today's exploration of Persephone.

The first is The Homeric Hymns, translated by Diane J. Rayor.

Sekhmet is more than anger.

Persephone is more than the good girl that becomes the queen.

Hekate is more than a dark moon mood board.

Isis is more than a generalized mother goddess label.

To whom, to where, and when? Sorry, my cat knocked off the phone.

Now, let us enter one of the most familiar goddess stories in the Western world.

Demeter and Persephone.

Many people know a version in which Persephone is taken to the underworld by Hades and Demeter grieves and the earth becomes barren and that compromise creates the seasons.

all bound together in a single figure soon after his own birth he traveled to delphi where a monstrous serpent called the python had long guarded a sacred spring rising from the mountainside and slew the creature there in single combat claiming the whole site for himself from that day forward From that moment on, Delphi became home to Apollo's Oracle, where a priestess seated above the very spring would speak his prophecies aloud to any mortal who dared make the long and difficult journey to ask him a question.

Demeter, goddess of the harvest and the fertile earth, had a daughter named Persephone, whom she loved above every other thing in creation.

one quiet day as persephone gathered flowers in an open meadow far from her mother's watchful eye the ground split open suddenly beneath her feet and hades lord of the silent underworld rose up from below and took her down into his own realm to become his queen Zeus had known of Hades' intention from the very start and had permitted it to happen, but he had told Demeter absolutely nothing about the arrangement beforehand.

When Demeter learned that her daughter had vanished, her grief consumed her entirely, swallowing every other thought she had.

Famine spread rapidly across the entire world of mortals, threatening to starve humanity out of existence entirely, and even the gods themselves grew afraid of what might happen next if Demeter's sorrow went on unanswered for much longer.

During this long search, she wandered in disguise as an old woman and came at last to the house of Seleus, king of Eleusis, where she nursed the king's own infant son and, in quiet gratitude for the kindness shown to her there, would later teach the people of Eleusis the sacred rites that became known ever after as the Eleusinian Mysteries.

At last, Zeus intervened directly himself and sent word down to the underworld, demanding Persephone's immediate return to the world above.

But before she left his side, Hades gave her a single pomegranate, and she ate one seed from it before departing.

It allowed them to stay in pietas, or peace with the gods by doing so.

In a mystery cult, we see almost a personal relationship develop where these ancient practitioners would have felt personally protected by Dionysus, personally watched over by Demeter and Persephone at the Eleusinian Mysteries, or in this case that Isis was in fact looking out for her initiates for the mysteries of Isis.

And because you're in their secret mystery cult, the idea was that the god and or goddess for the mystery cult, that they would actually pay more special attention to you.

You are the preferred devotee in a sense.

And many people, many high ranking officials, leaders, and even emperors would join mystery cults.

For many, it became a status.

Like for example, many Roman emperors actually were said to have been initiated, not into the cult of Isis, but into the cult of Eleusis, the Eleusinian mysteries, which were to Demeter and Persephone, which I can do a whole episode on.

But we know a few Roman authors who were believed to be initiated into the cult of Isis.

It's incredibly dark.

It's based on the story of Demeter, the goddess of harvest and Persephone, queen of the underworld taken by Hades.

Yeah.

And it's basically an ancient Greek myth created around the storyline of the Epstein files, including actual information from the Epstein files.