Persephone and the Descent to Hades
National Museum of Magna Græcia / CC BY-SA
Persephone is a youthful spring goddess wandering in fields of Narcissus and Asphodel when Hades, the god of the Underworld, comes to take her as his bride. And while her disappearance inspires her mother, the goddess of grains, to instigate a world-wide famine, it is Persephone who is changed forever by consuming the Pomegranate seed, later becoming an equal to Hades and ruling beside him as a Queen in her own right.
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You're listening to A Temple Wild: Episode 4: Persephone and the Descent to Hades
Hello and welcome to A Temple Wild, where we rediscover the myths of the ancient Greeks through the plants and landscapes that shaped them.
My name is Ekstasy and today we'll be exploring the myth of Persephone, the young goddess who is abducted by Hades, the god of the Underworld, to be his bride.
As it is springtime here in Greece, it may seem like a rather strange time of year to be discussing a descent to the Underworld, an event that is most often associated with autumn and the dying away of the earth's bounty. Especially since Persephone's story is most notably associated with the Pomegranate, a fruit that does not come to ripeness until October. But her story actually begins right now: in springtime, when the wildflowers are blooming and the earth is awakening from the long, cold winter.
Persephone is first a youthful spring maiden, innocent and childlike, wandering in fields of Narcissus and Asphodel, when Hades, the god of the Underworld, comes to take her as his bride. And while her disappearance inspires her mother, goddess of grains, to instigate a world-wide famine, in the end, it is Persephone who is changed forever by the experience, later becoming an equal to Hades and ruling beside him as a Queen in her own right.
Like many people, I love this story. But because of its popularity, I find that some folks tend to have very strong opinions about what her story teaches us.
Some focus on her abduction, what was later to be called "The Rape of Persephone." They focus on her powerlessness in the face of an arranged marriage, and they comment primarily on what the story tells us about the role of girls and women in ancient Greece, and how it connects to gender today.
Others focus on the bond between Persephone and her mother, Demetra, who scours the surface of the earth looking for her daughter and threatens the very survival of humanity with her grief and rage over her daughter being taken.
Still others insist that it is simply an Origin Story for the Seasons, a way of explaining the earth's barrenness in winter and its ripeness in spring and summer.
But what is most interesting to me is Persephone's transformation and her resulting dual nature: she is both an innocent young maiden and a powerful Queen of the Dead. She is likened to the life-giving force that "shoots forth" in spring (much like the Narcissus and Asphodel flowers with which she is associated) and she is intimately tied to the ripening and decay of the Pomegranate in autumn (a food that is considered a Fruit of the Dead).
And although it is her mother, Demetra, goddess of agriculture, who is most commonly associated with wheat, barley, and other cereals, many depictions show Persephone holding a sheaf of grain. Indeed, the very origin of her name is "one who strikes or cuts the sheaf of grain," and this points to her importance in the harvest aspect of the Agrarian Cycle, even though she is most referred to by her youthful epithets, the most common being Kore, meaning maiden or young girl, and Despina, meaning misses or mistress.
So today I want to look at this dual nature - of springtime youth and harvest Queen - but more specifically, at the moment when that transformation happens, the pause in her story that we don't actually hear that much about: when she first enters the Realm of the Dead and comes face to face with the Unseen. What happened to her in the Underworld? How did the descent itself give her power? And what can we learn from her story?
And of course we will do this with the help of the plants: specifically, the Narcissus, Asphodel and Pomegranate.
Different versions locate Persephone's abduction in different areas, usually somewhere local to the teller of the story. Some of those include places in Italy, Crete, or Attica, or even on a mythical "plain of Nysa" somewhere in Boeotia, probably as a means of emphasizing that she was on the borderlands, the very edges of the known world, when she was swept away to the dark realms.
As for the location of her ascent from the Underworld and her reunion with her mother, some claim it occurred near Eleusis, where the Mystery Cult of Demetra and Persephone was centered. Called the Eleusinian Mysteries, there was a yearly festival celebrated there that involved a series of secret rites honoring the grain harvest and the goddesses' intimate connection to the birth-death cycle.
But of course we must mention that most important place of all: the domain of Hades - Hades being both the name of the god of the Underworld, as well as the name of the place itself. And while we'll discuss the domain of Hades later on in the episode, I think it's important to remember that a great deal of her journey takes place in the Realm of the Dead.
The Story
Persephone was a young goddess, daughter of the great thunder-god Zeus and the grain-giving goddess Demeter. Beautiful and innocent in her youth, she enjoyed spending her days in the company of other virgin goddesses, surrounded by a retinue of nymphs.
But Hades, Zeus' brother and the ruler of the Underworld, desired a partner and a wife, and so he went to his brother to negotiate for Persephone. Zeus gave his blessing to the union, but Hades knew that Persephone's mother, Demetra, would never consent to the marriage, and so he conspired with Gaia, the great Earth goddess, to create a field of Narcissus flowers in order to lure Persephone away from the watchful eye of her retinue, so that he could steal her to his subterranean realm.
And so one day, while wandering with her retinue, Persephone saw the field of Narcissus laid out before her by Gaia. Intoxicated by their fragrance and drawn to their beautiful white petals and golden corona, she wandered away from her company to pick the flowers.
Just then, catching her finally alone, Hades arrived, driving a chariot of four black horses, and plucked the goddess from the meadow, dragging her down to the depths without leaving a trace.
When Persephone did not return from her wanderings, her mother became distraught. Where had her daughter gone? Was she lost? Had she been taken?
Demetra began to wander the earth, asking everyone she came upon if they had seen where her daughter had gone. But no one could tell her, for the only witnesses had been Helios, the sun in the sky, and Hekate, that mysterious goddess of Crossroads.
Demetra was devastated at the disappearance of her daughter. She tore her hair and her gown, wailing and wandering in grief. Finally, taking pity on the goddess, Hekate came to her and told her where Persephone had gone.
Upon hearing that her daughter had been taken to the Underworld, of all places, she begged Zeus to intervene and return their daughter to the living world. At first, he would not budge; an agreement had been made and his brother was in need of a wife. Who better for Persephone than steadfast Hades?
But Demetra was enraged at being separated from her daughter, and in her despair she refused to let the wheat grow or the crops to flourish. As goddess of agriculture, grain, and plenty, she withheld her power and all the earth suffered, but none more than humanity, who experienced a great famine.
Zeus, hearing the hungry cries of the humans, as well as the complaints of the other gods to whom no human was making sacrifices anymore, Zeus finally relented and agreed to let Persephone return to the land of the living, but only as long as she had not eaten any food that grows in the Underworld.
But Demetra, being a goddess of fertility, could not travel to the Underworld herself. So Hekate, key-holder of the Realms and goddess of Crossroads, descended to the Underworld to retrieve Persephone by the light of her torches.
But while in the Underworld, Persephone had eaten a single seed from a Pomegranate tree that grew in Hades’s subterranean orchard. And so Persephone was bound to be Hades wife, to rule beside him as Queen of the Dead, and only allowed to spend part of the year above ground with her mother.
Like an early springtime bulb that shoots forth new growth, Persephone returns to the surface each Spring to be with her mother, but then must return and retreat to the Underworld again when the Pomegranate ripens in early Autumn. And Demeter, being a goddess of grains and overseeing the fertility of the land, mourns her daughter’s absence each winter, turning the earth barren so that nothing grows until Persephone’s return to the surface in the Spring, in a never-ending cycle of the Seasons.
Awakening
When Persephone begins her story, she is springtime personified. She is eager and new, comfortable in her youth. She is wandering with her retinue, holding company with other virgin goddesses, carefree, innocent, and maybe even a bit naive.
But when she sees the meadow of Narcissus flowers, intoxicating in their color and scent, she is lured away from the safety of her retinue by their beauty.
The Narcissus, which you may remember from our very first podcast episode, is a perennial bulb in the amaryllis and daffodil family with six white tepals around a golden corona that looks like a crown. In Greece, this is the Narcissus poeticus or N. tazetta.
The flower blooms in late winter and very early spring, one of the first shoots to return, sometimes even amidst the frost. It prefers damp meadows and the banks of streams and rivers, where it can lean close to watch its own reflection in the waters, just like the youth Narcissus, from whom it takes its name.
As a flower, it symbolizes awakening: the thawing of our hearts and our bodies to the full spectrum of feeling. It reminds us that, while it is tempting to remain numb and self-protected by winter, there is great beauty and love to be found in the vulnerability of self-awareness and springtime blossoming.
And so this is the beginning of Persephone's rite of passage: her descent into the depths of herself. She is lured away from her naïveté and her youthful numbness into a field of intoxicating flowers, where she is confronted and overtaken by Hades.
Now it's easy here to imagine that this is a metaphor for Persephone awakening to her sexuality. Afterall, this is a story about an arranged marriage, an abduction, and some even call this story the "Rape of Persephone," which implies that it is based around a sexual violation and the loss of her virginity.
But let us pause for a moment and consider the meaning of Hades' name: the "Unseen." He is the Hidden one, the ruler of the Dead. And let us also remember that Hades is not only the name of the god, but also the name of the place that he rules: the "Unseen Realm." This is a place laden with the effects of human mortality, of mourning, and of death.
So for a beautiful, naive, and innocent youth, like Persephone, what does it actually mean to come face-to-face with the Unseen forces of death?
This part of her story brings to mind those personal and collective moments when we, also, come face-to-face with the Unseen: the death of a loved one, the end of an important relationship, the termination of a career, a life-changing accident or illness, a natural disaster, a pandemic, experiences that confound our sense of reality and shake our identity at its roots.
Perhaps we are mindlessly going about our daily lives, content in our routine, until we are suddenly plucked from a field of awakening, and it breaks us open, tears us away from our numbness, and thrusts us onto a dark and Unseen path. Up is down, and down is up, and what we thought we knew of ourselves and the world is shattered.
After her abduction, most of the next part of Persephone's story focuses on her mother: Demeter's searching, Demeter's sadness, Demeter's anger, Demeter's turning the earth to famine in protest over her daughter's disappearance.
But what is Persephone feeling?
While her mother frantically scours the surface of the earth, is Persephone scared of the darkness? Is she angry at being plucked from the illusion of safety that was her life aboveground? Is she somehow relieved to not be under the watchful eye of her mother? Is she bored by the unchanging landscape of the Underworld?
Similarly, when we are thrust into descent the emotions we experience can be conflicting and confusing: Are we terrified? Saddened by loss? Excited by the potential of change? Is it all of those things at once? Unfortunately, most of us lack the rites of passage to help us process and navigate those times of change.
Like Demeter, who only wants to protect her daughter and keep her innocent and untouched by the changing forces of the world, we try to get through discomfort as quickly as possible, just wanting to get life "back to normal."
But what does Persephone do, down there in the Underworld? What can she actually teach us about navigating our own dark and Unseen realms?
We cannot really know for certain what every day was like for her, while her mother was searching the surface of the earth, but what we do know is that her experience wholly transformed her. Persephone is taken away as an innocent youth to a subterranean realm - a place of roots, darkness, and death - and she returns to the surface as a powerful ruler of the dead, an equal partner to the Unseen.
Persephone allowed herself to be fully transformed by the experience of descent. She could have fought it, she could have returned to her mother unchanged and denied, even to herself, that anything had even happened. But she didn't, she couldn't, all thanks to the seed of that blood-red fruit: the Pomegranate.
Seed of Transformation
The Pomegranate is a spiny, deciduous shrub or tree, with red-orange tubular flowers that transform into large red fruits that can contain anywhere up to 1400 seeds. Ripening as it does in Autumn, just before Winter's death, the Pomegranate is a powerful symbol of mortality: it's multitude of blood-red seeds symbolize life-giving fertility, as well as the inevitability of death.
Now you could argue that Persephone was tricked into eating the Pomegranate seed. Or you could say that she just didn't know that eating the fruit that grows in the realm of the dead would oblige her to return to the Underworld each year.
But in one version that I have heard, she is actually given a choice by Hades: to return to the surface, to remain her mother's daughter, unchanged and youthful. Or, to stay in the Underworld and accept her place beside him as an equal ruler.
And let us imagine for a moment what it was like for her to make that choice: to let the Unseen undo the person that she was. To let the darkness transform her so that she could become something new and powerful.
In the end, she chooses to eat a seed of a fruit that grows in Hades. She consumes it, takes it into herself. The Unseen becomes part of her and she now holds contradiction in her very nature: she is springtime, youthfulness, and fresh, new life, as well as a powerful ruler and a consumer of the Fruit of the Dead.
Like the fruit that must die in order for new life to spring forth from its seed, Persephone is the life-giving force of death. She now literally holds life and death within herself. And it is that very contradictory nature that allows her to cross the threshold between the living and the dead twice a year.
Now for those of us raised in a culture that is afraid of death and decay, this can seem terrifying. Why willingly eat the seed? Why let go of youth's eternal beauty and growth?
But our fear comes from our separation from the land. Many of us live in cultures that fail to acknowledge the importance of quietude and rest, the wisdom that comes from elderhood, and the cyclical passage of the Seasons. Instead, we are obsessed with ascension, with ideas of eternal growth and unceasing productivity, with escaping the body and the organic processes of death and decay.
But I think we know, instinctively, that power comes from rest. Like a Narcissus bulb contracted in winter, we are asked to wait in that subterranean realm of dark soil and cold roots. Like the Pomegranate seed, we must incubate in the dark.
But we are not without our guides. Even when we are navigating through transitions, especially when the threshold is dark and the new reality that awaits us is unknown or uncertain, we can turn to those who bear a torch to help us through the Unseen.
Navigating the Dark
In the Odyssey, Homer described the realm of the dead as an “asphodel meadow,” and many poets (both ancient and modern) interpreted this to mean that the afterlife of the ancient Greeks was actually a beautiful, lush place full of springtime flowers.
But this paradisiacal, flowery afterlife seems at odds with Homer’s other depictions of Hades’ realm: a dark and gloomy place where regular mortals wander, wailing, lost, and aimless.
Most contemporary sources try to justify this connection between Hades and the Asphodel by saying that it is the Asphodel’s “ghostly” appearance and “grey-green” leaves, as well as its tendency to grow in disturbed or even rocky areas, that solidify its link to the Underworld.
But anyone who has met the Asphodel in person knows that it is anything but ashy or grey. Some Asphodelus spp. are white, yes, but they are far from “ghostly,” with a gorgeous flower spike of star-like flowers reaching up to the sky. They look to me more like candles or torches, a field of flames against the blue.
And while Asphodel can grow in disturbed and stony ground, I’ve also seen them in lush green areas, usually along the borders of fields or paths, blooming wildly with other bright, springtime flowers for company.
So what are we to make of this contradiction? On one hand, Homer’s Underworld is depicted as a dark, gloomy, and desolate place for regular mortals - and probably quite a terrifying place for the young Persephone to find herself after a life of wandering on the surface of the world.
And on the other hand, the Underworld is associated with springtime flowers blooming in lush fields, very similar to the meadow where Persephone found herself plucked by the god of the Unseen Realm.
Linguist and historian Steve Reece makes an interesting argument in his article Homer’s Asphodel Meadow that “the solution lies rather in a very ancient (i.e., pre-Homeric) association of the asphodel with the afterlife—though not necessarily with the underworld—an association that may go back to the indigenous culture from which the Greeks borrowed both the flower and its name” (p395).
He continues, “like most cultures throughout human history, both ancient and modern, the Greeks held complex and sometimes contradictory views about the afterlife…This complexity was probably a result of the syncretism of several different cultural traditions” (p397).
I actually see this complexity as an essential aspect of the Asphodel’s nature and integral to Persephone's story. The Asphodel holds contradiction in its nature: it is associated with the Realm of the Dead, but is also an early springtime bulb just like the Narcissus. (Interestingly, in English, the word daffodil is even derived from the word asphodel, and sometimes the Narcissus is referred to as an Asphodel). The Asphodel stands on the threshold between cultural traditions, between winter and spring, between fertile and rocky soil, between the realms of life and death, just like Persephone.
Some stories say that after Persephone’s abduction, it was Hekate, that liminal goddess of Crossroads and Gateways, who took up her torches and went seeking the young goddess in the Underworld. And it was Hekate (a goddess who literally holds the key to the other realms in her hand) who would later open the gate to the Underworld each spring and autumn in order to let Persephone cross the threshold from the land of the living to the land of the dead, and back again, with the Seasons.
And so it is not surprising that Pausanius says that on Rhodes, statues of Kore-Persephone and Artemis in her form as Hekate were both crowned with Asphodel.
To gaze upon a field of blooming Asphodels is like looking upon a field of white or yellow torches, their tall spires like a flame of stars. And even the branching Asphodel looks to me like a candelabra and I imagine Hekate taking up an Asphodel against the subterranean dark, lighting the way for Persephone as she crosses the threshold.
Similarly, when going through life transitions where the outcome is unknown, the Asphodel can be called upon as a guide and companion through the dark.
If we have found ourselves, like Persephone, plucked from one reality and forced into another, we can take the opportunity to savour the rite of passage, as scary as it might be. Taking up the light-bearing Asphodel, we can traverse through dark corners of our own psyche with bravery, fully engaged on the path as we walk from one reality to another, even if we are not completely sure where we will end up.
Holding its shape in our mind’s eye, gazing upon an image of the flower, or visiting the plant growing in the wild or garden, we can wrap our hand around the spike and imagine ourselves taking up a torch to illuminate our path across the border-lands and into the unknown.
Whether before your altar or the living plant, sit with your eyes closed and repeat the following devotion, imagining yourself traversing through dark and unknown territories:
Asphodel, torch of Hekate,
guide and guard me as I journey
across the Boundaries and into the Depths
to face the Darkness of the Unknown.
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