What Is the Story of Persephone? The Myth Behind the Seasons

The fullest ancient version is the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, composed around 600 BCE. Persephone, called Kore, the maiden, is picking flowers with the daughters of Ocean when she reaches for a narcissus that Earth has grown as a lure. The ground splits, Hades rises in his golden chariot, and she is gone, with only Hecate and the sun god having seen it. Zeus, her father, had agreed to the marriage without telling her mother.

Demeter hears her daughter's cry and searches for nine days without eating, sleeping or washing, carrying torches. When the sun tells her what happened and who allowed it, she leaves Olympus in fury and wanders the earth disguised as an old woman. At Eleusis, near Athens, she is taken in by the royal household and tries to make the queen's infant son immortal by holding him in the fire each night; when the mother screams, Demeter drops the child, reveals herself, and orders a temple built in her honour.

From her temple Demeter withholds the harvest. The seed stays in the ground, the oxen plough for nothing, and humanity begins to starve; the gods, deprived of sacrifices, begin to notice. Zeus sends one god after another to persuade her and she refuses them all. At last he sends Hermes to Hades to bring Persephone back.

Hades agrees, but before she leaves he gives her a pomegranate seed to eat, and she eats it. Whoever tastes the food of the dead belongs to them. The compromise Zeus arranges is that Persephone will spend one third of the year below the earth with her husband and two thirds above with her mother. Demeter accepts, restores the crops, and teaches her rites to the princes of Eleusis. The Greek year had three seasons, and the third of it that Persephone spent in the underworld was the dry, dead summer in some tellings and winter in the version that travelled north.

The obvious reading is the seasons: the earth grieves when the maiden is below and flowers when she returns. Scholars have long noticed that it also encodes the agricultural year of Greece, where grain was stored underground in jars through the summer and sown in autumn, so that the seed itself went down and came up as Persephone does. And it is a story about marriage as the Greeks practised it, in which a girl left her mother's house for a husband chosen by her father and returned only as a visitor.

Persephone's own view is barely recorded. In the Hymn she is dragged away screaming and comes back joyful, and the poem is more interested in the mother than the daughter. Later writers noticed that she becomes a queen. In the Odyssey she is the dread Persephone who rules the dead alongside Hades, and by the Roman period, as Proserpina, she is a figure of some authority, judging souls and occasionally sending them back.

The Hymn ends by describing rites that the poet is forbidden to reveal, and that prohibition held for a thousand years. The Eleusinian Mysteries were celebrated every September at Eleusis from at least the seventh century BCE until the sanctuary was destroyed in 396 CE. Anyone who spoke Greek and had not committed murder could be initiated, slaves and women included, after a procession from Athens, a fast, a drink of barley and mint, and a night in the great hall whose contents no initiate ever described in writing. Pausanias, the travel writer, stopped his account at the gate and said a dream had warned him.

What the initiates were promised is clear even if the ceremony is not: a happier fate in the afterlife. The Hymn says that whoever has seen the rites is blessed, and whoever has not will have no share of good things in the dark below. The story of the daughter who went down and came back was, for the people who took part, the model of what might happen to them. Its elements, as the Greeks used them:

• •The abduction: the gods' arrangements made without the women they concern
• •The search and the famine: a mother's grief with the power to stop the world
• •The pomegranate: the bond that ties the eater to the dead
• •The division of the year: the origin of the seasons and of the sowing cycle
• •The rites at Eleusis: a secret promise of a better afterlife

The story has been retold constantly, and each age takes the part it needs. Renaissance and Baroque painters liked the abduction; Bernini's marble Hades grips a Proserpina whose flesh dents under his fingers. The Victorians, and Tennyson, took the grieving mother. Twentieth-century poets, Rilke among them, took the queen of the dead. Recent retellings tend to give Persephone the voice the Hymn denied her and to ask whether the girl in the meadow chose the pomegranate. The myth has room for all of them, which is what a myth is for.

The Homeric Hymn to Demeter, the fullest telling of the myth, very nearly vanished. It survives in a single medieval manuscript, found in Moscow in 1777 and now held in Leiden. Before that discovery, scholars knew the story mainly from later versions such as Ovid's. The Hymn matters twice over, because it gives the myth in an early form and because it was written by someone who knew about the rites at Eleusis and deliberately stopped short of describing them.

For the Mysteries themselves, historians piece together fragments. Excavations at Eleusis have uncovered the great initiation hall, the Telesterion, whose shape and tiered steps suggest a crowd watching something shown in the centre. Painted vases and carved reliefs show processions, torches and the two goddesses. Christian writers who attacked the cult later made claims about its secrets, but they were hostile witnesses and their accounts may be unreliable. Some modern writers have proposed that the ritual drink contained a mind-altering substance from a fungus that grows on grain. The idea is intriguing but unproven, and many scholars remain sceptical.

Most later painters and poets met the story not through the Greek hymn but through the Roman poet Ovid, who told it twice, most fully in Book 5 of his Metamorphoses, completed in the early years of the first century CE. His version moves the abduction to Sicily, near the town of Enna, and gives it a new cause. Venus, eager to extend the power of love even to the underworld, and unwilling to see Ceres' daughter stay unmarried, sends Cupid to shoot the king of the dead with an arrow, so that his sudden desire is something done to him by another god.

Ovid adds witnesses and transformations, as suits a poem about changes of shape. The water nymph Cyane tries to block the chariot and, overcome by grief, dissolves into the pool that bears her name. The food changes too. Proserpina picks a pomegranate while wandering in a garden of the underworld and eats seven seeds, and the only one who sees her, Ascalaphus, reports it, for which Ceres turns him into a screech owl, a bird of ill omen. Jupiter then divides the year equally, six months with her husband and six with her mother, rather than into the thirds of the Greek hymn.

The pomegranate that binds Persephone to the underworld became a favourite image for later artists. Dante Gabriel Rossetti painted Proserpine, using the Roman name for the goddess, in several versions, the best known completed in 1874. It shows her in a dim corridor holding a bitten pomegranate, its red flesh exposed, her expression withdrawn and melancholy.

The model was Jane Morris, the wife of Rossetti's friend William Morris, and many viewers have read the painting as a comment on her own situation, divided between two lives. Rossetti also wrote a sonnet to accompany it. The work shows how an ancient story about the seasons could be retold as a modern portrait of longing and confinement.

Persephone was taken by Hades to the underworld, her mother Demeter stopped the crops until she was returned, and the pomegranate seed she ate binds her to spend part of every year below, which the Greeks used to explain the seasons and the sowing cycle. The story was also the heart of the Eleusinian Mysteries, a secret rite that for a thousand years promised its initiates a better death.