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Liber X · Greek Mythology

Liber X · Greek Mythology · Chapter IV: The Olympian Gods

Demeter and Persephone: The Myth of the Mother and Daughter

The myth of Demeter and Persephone: the abduction by Hades, Demeter's search and grief at Eleusis, the pomegranate seeds, the seasons and later variants.

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Demeter was the Greek goddess of grain and agriculture, and Persephone, also called Kore ("the Maiden"), was her daughter by Zeus. Their central myth, told most fully in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, relates how Hades carried Persephone off to the underworld, how Demeter searched for her and in her grief withheld the harvest, and how the gods arranged that Persephone should spend part of each year below the earth as queen of the dead and the rest above with her mother. The story explained the cycle of the crops and founded the Eleusinian Mysteries.

Demeter and Kore: Goddesses of Grain and the Underworld§

Demeter was a daughter of Kronos and Rhea and so a sister of Zeus, Hera, Poseidon and Hades, one of the children swallowed by their father (see the Titans and the Titanomachy). Her name is often explained as "Earth Mother" or "Grain Mother", though the first element is disputed. She was the giver of cereal crops and of the settled, law-bound life that farming made possible; her epithet Thesmophoros, "bringer of laws" or "of ordinances", named the women's festival of the Thesmophoria (see Greek sacrifice, festivals and temples), held across the Greek world in autumn.

Persephone, whose name has no agreed etymology, had two faces. As Kore she was the young daughter gathering flowers; as Persephone, wife of Hades, she was the dread queen of the dead, invoked with her husband in curses and prayers. In the Odyssey it is "dread Persephone" who sends up the shades of famous women to Odysseus. In art and cult the two goddesses were so closely paired that Athenians called them simply "the Two Goddesses". Hesiod's Theogony (c. 700 BCE) already records that Hades carried off Persephone from her mother, with the consent of Zeus.

The Abduction of Persephone in the Homeric Hymn§

The Homeric Hymn to Demeter opens, in Hugh Evelyn-White's 1914 translation: "I begin to sing of rich-haired Demeter, awful goddess, of her and her trim-ankled daughter whom Aidoneus rapt away." Persephone was playing with the daughters of Ocean in a soft meadow, picking roses, crocuses, violets, irises and hyacinths, when she reached for a marvellous narcissus with a hundred heads, which Earth had made to grow as a lure by the will of Zeus. The ground opened at the plain of Nysa, and the lord of the dead burst out in a golden chariot and carried her away screaming. Only Hecate in her cave and Helios, the Sun, heard her cry.

For nine days Demeter wandered the earth with burning torches in her hands, refusing ambrosia and nectar and never bathing. On the tenth day she met Hecate, who had heard but not seen the abductor, and together they went to Helios, who sees everything. He told her the truth: Zeus had given her daughter to his brother Hades as a wife, and Hades, ruler of a third of the world, was no unworthy son-in-law. This was no comfort. Demeter, furious with Zeus, abandoned Olympus and went among the cities of mortals disguised as an old woman. The role of Hecate as the torch-bearing companion of the search is explored further in Hecate, goddess of crossroads and magic.

Demeter at Eleusis: The Nursing of Demophon§

The goddess sat down by the Maiden's Well at Eleusis, about twenty kilometres west of Athens, where the daughters of King Celeus found her and brought her home to nurse their baby brother Demophon. She sat in silence and would not eat or drink until the serving woman Iambe made her laugh with jests; she refused wine and asked instead for a drink of barley meal and water flavoured with pennyroyal, the kykeon. Both details mirror what initiates did at the Eleusinian festival, which began with fasting and was broken with this drink. (On the much-debated question of what the kykeon contained, see entheogens and sacred plants.)

Demeter raised the child as a god, anointing him with ambrosia and secretly holding him in the fire each night to burn away his mortality. One night his mother Metaneira saw this and cried out in terror, and the angry goddess threw the child down and revealed herself in her divine form, tall and radiant, filling the house with light and fragrance. She ordered the people of Eleusis to build her a temple and altar, where she would teach them her rites. The motif of a goddess who tries to make a child immortal by fire and is interrupted by a frightened parent also appears in Egyptian and other traditions; Plutarch tells a similar story of Isis at Byblos.

The Withheld Harvest and the Pomegranate Seeds§

Seated in her new temple, Demeter mourned and caused a terrible year in which no seed sprouted from the earth. The human race would have perished of famine, and the gods would have lost their sacrifices, had Zeus not intervened. He sent Iris and then each of the gods in turn with gifts and honours, but Demeter refused to set foot on Olympus or to let the grain grow until she saw her daughter. At last Zeus sent Hermes to the underworld to bring Persephone back.

Hades smiled and obeyed, but before she left he secretly gave her a pomegranate seed to eat. Mother and daughter were joyfully reunited, until Demeter learned of the seed and realised what it meant: whoever has eaten the food of the dead must return to them. Through the mediation of Rhea, the gods agreed that Persephone would spend one third of the year below with her husband and two thirds above with her mother and the immortals. Demeter let the fields bear again, and before returning to Olympus she showed the princes of Eleusis, Triptolemus, Diocles, Eumolpus and Celeus, the conduct of her rites. The hymn ends with a blessing that was central to the Eleusinian promise: "Happy is he among men upon earth who has seen these mysteries."

Those mysteries, their organisation and what initiates experienced in the hall of initiation at Eleusis are described in Greek religion and the mysteries. Demeter was also believed to have sent Triptolemus across the world in a winged chariot to teach the growing of grain.

Variant Versions: Ovid, Sicily and the Orphic Tradition§

The myth was told in many forms. The Sicilians claimed the abduction for their island, and Ovid, in Book 5 of the Metamorphoses (8 CE) and Book 4 of the Fasti, places it near Enna by the lake of Pergus. In his version the nymph Cyane tries to stop Hades and dissolves into her own spring in grief; the river nymph Arethusa tells Ceres where her daughter is; and Ascalaphus reveals that Proserpina has eaten seven pomegranate seeds, for which he is turned into an owl. Ovid divides the year equally, six months below and six above. Apollodorus records that Demeter punished Ascalaphus by placing a heavy rock on him in the underworld. Claudian's unfinished Rape of Proserpine (c. 400 CE) is the last great ancient retelling.

Orphic poets told the story differently again. In their version, reported by Clement of Alexandria and others, Demeter was received at Eleusis by Baubo, who made her laugh with an obscene gesture, and a swineherd named Eubouleus witnessed the abduction when his pigs were swallowed into the earth along with Persephone. Orphic theogonies also made Persephone the mother, by Zeus, of the first Dionysus, the child torn apart by the Titans; see Orphism and the Orphic gold tablets.

Demeter has other, darker myths that are not part of the abduction story. In Arcadia, as Pausanias reports, she was pursued by Poseidon, turned herself into a mare and bore him a divine horse and a daughter whose name was secret; she was then worshipped as Demeter Erinys, the Angry One, and at Phigalia as the Black Demeter with a horse's head. Her love for the mortal Iasion in a thrice-ploughed field, mentioned in the Odyssey and the Theogony, produced Ploutos, Wealth, the god of abundant harvests.

Interpreting the Myth: Seasons, Grief and Marriage§

The most familiar reading makes the story an explanation of the seasons: Persephone's absence is winter, her return spring. Some scholars, notably Martin Nilsson, objected that in the Greek climate the barren time is the dry high summer, when grain was stored in underground jars until the autumn sowing, so that the Maiden's descent might reflect the seed's time below the earth. The hymn itself does not say when in the year she departs, and the myth need not map neatly onto any calendar.

Many readers have also seen in it the experience of Greek marriage, in which a young girl was given by her father to a husband and left her mother's household, sometimes against her will, and the mother's grief at the loss. Others stress the bond between death and fertility, in which the seed must go into the earth before the harvest can rise, a theme the mysteries turned into a hope for the human soul. Since the Renaissance the story has inspired sculptors and painters from Gian Lorenzo Bernini, whose Rape of Proserpina (1621–22) shows Pluto's fingers pressing into marble flesh, to Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Proserpine (1874), holding the fatal pomegranate. For the queen's realm below, see Hades and the Greek underworld.

Frequently asked questions§

Why did Persephone eat the pomegranate seeds?§

In the Homeric Hymn Hades secretly gives her the seed before she leaves, and later she says she was compelled. A widespread belief held that anyone who ate the food of the dead was bound to their world, so the seed ensured that she would return to Hades each year.

How long does Persephone stay in the underworld?§

The Homeric Hymn to Demeter says one third of the year. Ovid and many later writers say half the year, six months below and six above, which is the version most often repeated today.

Was Persephone the queen of the underworld?§

Yes. As wife of Hades she ruled the dead beside him, and Greek sources present her as a formidable queen rather than only a captive. Heroes such as Heracles, Orpheus and Odysseus all encounter her power when they visit the underworld.

Sources and further reading§