From Wikicommons
I have been writing about Persephone for decades. In 1982 I wrote a short thesis for an MA (Prelim) in Classics on the Homeric Hymns to Demeter and Aphrodite. The story of Persephone is the catalyst for the Homeric Hymn to Demeter when Persephone is abducted by Hades, god of the Underworld.
But this is a story turned on its head. Persephone was originally the Queen of the Underworld and Hades is a patriarchal home invader. He has stormed her realm, taken over, called himself king of the Underworld. Persephone, in this process of shift from gynocentric to androcentic, was raped and stripped of all her earlier powers. It’s a very sad story.
One of the things that strikes me as odd is that the patriarchal mythographers turned it into a story of child abduction and rape, as if that would be an okay way to represent the tale. Perhaps it is because they wanted to erase the idea of Persephone as a powerful woman: Goddess of the Underworld is someone to reckon with. So instead they infantilise her, make it look as if it was her idea, after all she was wandering around on a hillside full of hyacinths with no protection other than a few girlfriends when Hades swept her off her feet and onto his horse.
In my collection The Butterfly Effect (2005), I refer to the Persephone story in two poems, one called ‘The Dead’, one of several poems that are reveries on my mother’s death. Later in the collection a poem called ‘Greek’ which is about Virginia Woolf and HD where I write about Virginia:
She said, I defied them
I have a friend, a poet
who can read Greek
In secret I learned from her
It helped her unravel the birdsong
She heard them as they sang
witness to her Victorian violations
Their song the same as on the day
when Persephone was raped
and Zeus couldn’t care less.
In my book Cow (2011), I go further, expressing directly the grief felt by both Demeter and Persephone. Each tells the other what she experienced: mother to daughter: daughter to mother. It is clear that Demeter was aware of Hades character, whereas Persephone thought of him as her charming uncle.
By the time I am writing Lupa and Lamb (2014) Demeter has become an anti-rape activist and an ecofeminist and she slams the liberal feminist Empress Livia for ignoring her. While Demeter drank ‘only barley water’, Livia was sharing in ‘cakes coffee tea and drinks’. Demeter goes on to complain about having a soap factory built over her shrine at Eleusis. Eleusis was so sacred that no one talked about what happened there for at least 2000 years. By this time, Demeter is one angry woman who has clearly developed a radical feminist analysis of her predicament. And Persephone is picking up one her radicalism.
In my most recent book, Dark Matters (2017), I revisit the story. This time I see it through the lens of warfare. Persephone is the stolen child, the child who is kidnapped during war and disappeared. Her best friend Kyane, cries so much she melts into liquid. But Persephone herself becomes an activist, no longer the child victim, she is prepared to take her own life in hand. This comes through in a conversation between Rapunzel and Persephone following a conscioussness-raising session.
I suspect that I will continue to write about Persephone and Demeter as it is such a rich and multi-dimensional story. My original research has itself expanded and taken on new dimensions. This is what thinking about mythology can do for you.
Meet Mago Contributor Susan Hawthorne