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This article is about the Greek goddess. For other uses, see Persephone (disambiguation).
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Proserpine by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1874) (Tate Gallery, London)
In Greek mythology, Persephone was the Queen of the Underworld, consort of Hades, the Kore or young maiden, and the daughter of Demeter— and Zeus, in the Olympian version.

Persephone (Greek: Περσεφόνη, Persephónē) is her name in the Ionic Greek of epic literature. The Homeric form of her name is Persephoneia. In other dialects she was known under various other names: Persephassa, Persephatta, or simply Kore (Greek: κόρη, "girl, maiden" [1]) (when worshipped in the context of Demeter and Kore).

The Romans first heard of her from the Aeolian and Dorian cities of Magna Graecia, who use the dialectal variant Proserpina. Hence, in Roman mythology she was called Proserpina, and as a revived Roman Proserpina she became an emblematic figure of the Renaissance.

In Greek art, Persephone/Kore is invariably portrayed robed. She may be carrying a sheaf of grain and smiling demurely with the "Archaic smile" of the Kore of Antenor.

The figure of Persephone is well-known today. Her story has great emotional power: an innocent maiden, a mother's grief at the abduction, and the return of her daughter. It is also cited frequently as a paradigm of myths that explain natural processes, with the descent and return of the goddess bringing about the change of seasons.

In a text ascribed to Empedocles describing a correspondence between four gods and the classical elements, the name Nestis for water apparently refers to Persephone.[2] "Now hear the fourfold roots of everything: Enlivining Hera, Hades, shining Zeus. And Nestis, moistening mortal springs with tears".

Of the four gods of Empedocles's elements it is the name of Persephone alone that is taboo, for the Greeks knew another face of Persephone as well. She was also the terrible Queen of the dead, whose name was not safe to speak aloud, who was named simply "The Maiden". In The Odyssey, when Odysseus goes to the Underworld, he refers to her as the Iron Queen. Her central myth, for all of its emotional familiarity, was also the tacit context of the secret initiatory mystery rites of regeneration at Eleusis, which promised immortality to their awe-struck participants — an immortality in her world beneath the soil, feasting with the heroes beneath her dread gaze (Kerenyi 1960, 1967).

The abduction myth

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Seated goddess, probably Persephone, Severe Style ca 480-60, found at Tarentum, Magna Graecia (Pergamon Museum, Berlin)
In the Olympian pantheon, Persephone is given a father: according to Hesiod's Theogony, Persephone was the daughter produced by the union of Zeus and Demeter. "And he [Zeus] came to the bed of bountiful Demeter, who bore white-armed Persephone, stolen by Hades from her mother's side".

Unlike every other offspring of an Olympian pairing, Persephone has no stable position at Olympus. Persephone used to live far away from the other gods, a goddess within Nature before the days of planting seeds and nurturing plants. In the Olympian telling [1], the gods Hermes, Ares, Apollo and Hephaestus, had all wooed Persephone, but Demeter rejected all their gifts and hid her daughter away from the company of the gods. Thus, Persephone lived a peaceful life before she became the goddess of the underworld, which, according to Olympian mythographers, did not occur until Hades abducted her and brought her into the underworld. She was innocently picking flowers with some nymphs—and Athena and Artemis, the Homeric hymn says—, or Leucippe, or Oceanids— in a field in Enna when Hades came to abduct her, bursting up through a cleft in the earth; the nymphs were changed by Demeter into the Sirens for not having interfered. Life came to a standstill as the devastated Demeter (goddess of the Earth) searched everywhere for her lost daughter. Helios, the sun, who sees everything, eventually told her what had happened.

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The Return of Persephone by Frederic Leighton (1891).
Finally, Zeus, pressured by the cries of the hungry people and by the other gods who also heard their anguish, could not put up with the dying earth and forced Hades to return Persephone. But before she was released to Hermes, who had been sent to retrieve her, Hades tricked her into eating three pomegranate seeds, (or six, or four according to some versions of the myth) which forced her to return to the underworld for one month each year for every seed that she ate. In some versions, Ascalaphus informed the other gods that Persephone had eaten the pomegranate seeds. When Demeter and her daughter were together, the Earth flourished with vegetation and color, but for four months each year, when Persephone returned to the underworld, the earth once again became a barren realm of darkness. This is an origin story to explain the seasons.

In an alternate version, Hecate rescued Persephone. In the earliest version the dread goddess Persephone was herself Queen of the Underworld (Burkert, Kerenyi).

In some versions, Demeter forbids the earth to produce, in others she is so busy looking for Persephone that she neglects the earth, and in some the depth of her despair causes nothing to grow.

The number of pomegranate seeds varies in different versions of the story, corresponding with the number of months considered as winter months.

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Persephone and Triptolemos, tondo of a red-figure cup the Aberdeen Painter, Louvre


This myth can also be interpreted as an allegory of ancient Greek marriage rituals. The Greeks felt that marriage was a sort of abduction of the bride by the groom from the bride's family, and this myth may have explained the origins of the marriage ritual. The more popular etiological explanation of the seasons may have been a later interpretation.

Persephone, as Queen of Hades, only showed mercy once, because the music of Orpheus was so hauntingly sad. She allowed Orpheus to bring his wife Eurydice back to the land of the living as long as she walked behind him and he never tried to look at her face until they reached the surface. Orpheus agreed but failed, looking back at the very end to make sure his wife was following, and lost Eurydice forever.

Persephone also figures in the story of Adonis, the Syrian consort of Aphrodite. When Adonis was born, Aphrodite took him under her wing, seducing him with the help of Helene, her friend, and was entranced by his unearthly beauty. She gave him to Persephone to watch over, but Persephone was also amazed at his beauty and refused to give him back. The argument between the two goddesses was settled either by Zeus or Calliope, with Adonis spending four months with Aphrodite, four months with Persephone and four months of the years on his own.

When Hades pursued a nymph named Mintho, Persephone turned her into a mint plant.

Persephone was the object of Pirithous's affections. Pirithous and Theseus, his friend, pledged to marry daughters of Zeus. Theseus chose Helen and together they kidnapped her and decided to hold onto her until she was old enough to marry. Pirithous chose Persephone. They left Helen with Theseus' mother, Aethra, and traveled to the underworld, domain of Persephone and her husband, Hades. Hades pretended to offer them hospitality and set a feast; as soon as the pair sat down, snakes coiled around their feet and held them there. From Edith Hamilton's Mythology, it is stated as being a "Chair of Forgetfulness" that they sit upon. It should also be noted that Heracles was able to save Theseus from this fate when he was in the Underworld, but Hades forced Pirithous to remain seated forever.

Persephone and her mother Demeter were often referred to as aspects of the same goddess, and were called "the Demeters" or simply "the goddesses." The story of Persephone's abduction was part of the initiation rites in the Eleusinian Mysteries.

Modern scholarship on Persephone

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Persephone before the Greeks?

Some modern scholars have argued that Persephone's cult was a continuation of Neolithic or Minoan goddess-worship. Among classicists, this thesis has been argued by Gunther Zuntz (Zuntz 1973) and cautiously included by Walter Burkert in his definitive Greek Religion.

More daringly, the mythologist Karl Kerenyi has identified Persephone with the nameless "mistress of the labyrinth" at Knossos.

On the other hand, the hypothesis of a universal cult of the Earth Mother has come under increasing criticism in recent years. For more on both sides of the controversy, see Mother Goddess.

Life-death-rebirth

Inspired by James Frazer, Jane Ellen Harrison and modern mythologers, some scholars have labeled Persephone a life-death-rebirth deity.

Consorts/children

  • Heracles
  • Zagreus (Some say that Heracles is the father of Zagreus by Persephone but it is usually said that Zeus is his father)
  • Zeus
  • Zagreus (according to one tradition. See Orphic mysteries) (although sometimes thought of as son of Demeter and not Persephone)
  • Hades
  • Adonis (according to one tradition, though this is sometimes thought of as a misinterpretation of Aidoneus, an alternate name of Hades)
  • Hermes (according to one tradition)

The 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica account of the myth

"As she was gathering flowers with her playmates in a meadow, the earth opened and Pluto, god of the dead, appeared and carried her off to be his queen in the world below. ... Torch in hand, her sorrowing mother sought her through the wide world, and finding her not she forbade the earth to put forth its increase. So all that year not a blade of corn grew on the earth, and men would have died of hunger if Zeus had not persuaded Pluto to let Proserpine go. But before he let her go Pluto made her eat the seed of a pomegranate, and thus she could not stay away from him for ever. So it was arranged that she should spend two-thirds (according to later authors, one-half) of every year with her mother and the heavenly gods, and should pass the rest of the year with Pluto beneath the earth. ... As wife of Pluto, she sent spectres, ruled the ghosts, and carried into effect the curses of men."

Persephone in astronomy

Persephone is the name of a Main belt asteroid with a diameter of 49.1km, discovered by Max Wolf in 1895 in Heidelberg, .

See also

Notes

1. ^ H.G. Liddell-R. Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon
2. ^ Peter Kingsley, in Ancient Philosophy, Mystery, and Magic: Empedocles and Pythagorean Tradition (Oxford University Press, 1995) identifies Nestis as a cult title of Persephone.

References

  • Karl Kerenyi (Eleusis: Archetypal Image of Mother and Daughter, 1960, in English 1967)
  • Günther Zuntz, Persephone: Three Essays on Religion and Thought in Magna Graecia, 1973
  • Walter Burkert, Greek Religion 1985
  • Lewis Richard Farnell, The Cults of the Greek States, Volume 3 (1906) (Chapters on: Demeter and Kore-Persephone; Cult-Monuments of Demeter-Kore; Ideal Types of Demeter-Kore).

External links

Greek deities series
Primordial deities | Titans | Aquatic deities | Chthonic deities
Twelve Olympians
Zeus | Hera | Poseidon | Hades | Hestia | Demeter | Aphrodite
Athena | Apollo | Artemis | Ares | Hephaestus | Hermes | Dionysus
Chthonic deities
Hades | Persephone | Gaia | Demeter | Hecate | Iacchus | Trophonius | Triptolemus | Erinyes
Persephone is a Greek goddess.

Persephone may also refer to:
  • 399 Persephone, an asteroid
  • Persephone Books, an indepenent publisher of mostly women's writing in London
  • Hypothetical trans-Neptunian planet
  • The Persephone, an electronic instrument

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underworld is a general term used to describe the various realms of Greek mythology which were believed to lie beneath the earth or beyond the horizon.

These include:

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Hades (from Greek Άδης, Hadēs, originally Άιδης, Haidēs or Άΐδης
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MINOS (or Main Injector Neutrino Oscillation Search) is a particle physics experiment designed to study the phenomena of neutrino oscillations, first discovered by Super-Kamiokande experiment in 1998.
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Aeacus (Greek Αίακος, "bewailing" or "earth borne") was mythological king in the island of Aegina in the Saronic Gulf.

He was son of Zeus and Aegina, a daughter of the river-god Asopus.
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In Greek myths, Rhadamanthus (Ῥαδάμανθυς; also transliterated as Rhadamanthys or Rhadamanthos) was a wise king, the son of Zeus and Europa.
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Charon (in Greek, Χάρων — the bright[1]) was the ferryman of Hades. He was the son of Erebus and Nyx, and twin brother of Thanatos.
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Cerberus or Kerberos (Greek Κέρβερος, Kerberos, "demon of the pit") was the hound of Hades, a monstrous three-headed dog with a snake for a tail (sometimes said to have 50 or 100 heads) called a hellhound.
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Acheron is a river located in the Epirus region of northwest Greece. Acheron translates as the "river of woe" and it was believed to be a branch of the underworld river Styx over which in ancient Greek mythology Charon ferried the newly dead souls across into Hades.
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Cocytus, meaning "the river of wailing" (from the Greek κωκυτός, "lamentation"), is a river in the underworld in Greek mythology.
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Tartarus, or Tartaros (Greek Τάρταρος, deep place). It is either a deep, gloomy place, a pit or abyss used as a dungeon of torment and suffering that resides within Hades or the entire underworld with Hades being the hellish
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Lethe (λήθη; lêthê) literally means "forgetfulness" or "concealment". It is related to the Greek word for "truth": a-lethe-ia (αλήθεια), meaning "un-forgetfulness" or "un-concealment".
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Elysium (Greek: Ἠλύσια πεδία) was a section of the Underworld (the spelling Elysium is a Latinization of the Greek word Elysion).
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River Styx" (Στυξ) is a river which formed the boundary between Earth and the Underworld, Hades. It circles Hades nine times. The rivers Styx, Phlegethon, Acheron and Cocytus all converge at the center of Hades on a great marsh.
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In Greek mythology, the river Phlegethon ("lake of fire") was one of the five rivers of the underworld, along with the rivers Styx, Lethe, Cocytus, and Acheron. It flowed with fire that burned but did not consume fuel.

It was parallel to the river Styx.
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The Asphodel Meadows is a section of the Ancient Greek underworld where indifferent and ordinary souls were sent to live after death. Hades, the Greek name for the underworld (also the name of the god Pluto) is divided into two main sections: Erebus and Tartarus.
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    In Greek mythology Erebus (Έρεβος Erebos, "Deep blackness/darkness or shadow " from Ancient Greek Ἔρεβος
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    In Greek mythology, Ixion was king of the Lapiths, the most ancient tribe of Thessaly, and a son of Ares or Antion or the notorious evildoer Phlegyas, whose name connotes "fiery".
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    Sisyphus (Σίσυφος) (IPA: /ˈsɪsɨfəs/) was a king punished in the Tartarus by being cursed to roll a huge boulder up a hill throughout eternity.
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    Tantalus (Greek Τάνταλος) was a son of Zeus [1] and the nymph Plouto ("riches")[2] Thus he was a king in the primordial world, the father of a son Broteas whose very name signifies "mortals" (brotoi)
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    Titans (Greek: Τιτάν Titan; plural: Τιτάνες Titanes
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    Greek mythology is the body of stories belonging to the Ancient Greeks concerning their gods and heroes, the nature of the world and the origins and significance of their own cult and ritual practices.
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    Greek religion can refer to several things, including
    • Religion in ancient Greece
    • Hellenistic religion
    • Platonic idealism
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    Greek mythology is the body of stories belonging to the Ancient Greeks concerning their gods and heroes, the nature of the world and the origins and significance of their own cult and ritual practices.
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    underworld is a general term used to describe the various realms of Greek mythology which were believed to lie beneath the earth or beyond the horizon.

    These include:

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    Hades (from Greek Άδης, Hadēs, originally Άιδης, Haidēs or Άΐδης
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    Dêmêtêr /də'miː.tɚ/ (Greek: Δημήτηρ
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    Zeus (in Greek: nominative: Ζεύς Zeús, genitive: Διός Diós
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    Greek}}} 
    Writing system: Greek alphabet 
    Official status
    Official language of:  Greece
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    recognised as minority language in parts of:
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    Ionic Greek was a sub-dialect of the Attic-Ionic dialectal group of Ancient Greek (see Greek dialects).

    Ionic (or Ionian) dialect appears to have spread originally from the Greek mainland across the Aegean at the time of the Dorian invasions, around the 11th Century B.C.
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