Persephone

“ All that is above must come down to you at last, O rulers of the most lasting world. But before her time has Eurydice been brought here. I have desired strength to endure her loss, but I cannot endure it. And I come before you, Aidoneus and Persephone, brought here by Love."
When Orpheus said the name of Love, Persephone, the queen of the dead, bowed her young head, and bearded Aidoneus, the king, bowed his head also. Persephone remembered how Demeter, her mother, had sought her all through the world, and she remembered the touch of her mother's tears upon her face. ”

“ For to the rich-wrought tremblings of his lute
He raised his rare-heard voice and stilled the word
On Pluto’s lips, and then all Hades heard:—{9}
Persephone! Persephone!
Give back my lost delight to me!
By thy great love for thy great lord,
By each sweet thought for him adored,
By love that thrills and love that fills
Thy heart as with a thousand rills
Of joy, break down his frozen breast
And lull his vengeful mood to rest,
Till mighty Pluto joyfully
Shall, from his very love for thee,
Give back my soul’s delight to me—
Eurydice! Eurydice!
Persephone! Persephone! ”

“ Joy gave her wings, and as swiftly as Hermes himself, Persephone flew up into the sunshine.
Apollo saw her and rose higher and higher into the sky. A gentle breeze came rustling from the southeast, and whispered something to everything he met.
Suddenly the flowers sprang up; the birds flocked together and sang; the trees put on bright green leaves.
Everything, great and small, began to say in his [Pg 53] own language, “Be happy for Persephone has come! Persephone has come!”
Demeter saw these changes and was puzzled. “Can the earth be ungrateful? Does she so soon forget Persephone?” she cried. ”

“ A feast would be set before her, and she would be urged to eat, but no crumb or drop must pass her lips, for whosoever eats or drinks with Persephone may never again return from her palace to the green world of sunshine above. But if she were steadfast and neither ate nor drank, nor spoke one word, Persephone would give her in the box the beauty that Aphrodite desired. Then on her return she must give the second piece of bread to Cerberus, that he might let her pass, and to Charon the other piece of money, that he might ferry her over in safety. ”

“ When the sun is warming the bare brown earth, and the pale primroses look up through the snowy blackthorns at a kind, blue sky, almost can we hear the soft wind murmur a name as it gently sways the daffodils and breathes through the honey sweetness of the gold-powdered catkins on the grey willows by the river—“Persephone! Persephone!” ”

“ Others shall thrill with joy like unto mine;
Vague things shall move them and strange voices steal
Through sad, bud-scented April eves to them.
Round them shall fall a glory not of earth,
As now o’er these Sicilian meadows fall
Dim memories that come I know not whence.
In lands I know not of some sorrowing girl
Shall faintly breathe: “I am Persephone
On such a day!” and through the world shall run
The immemorial rapture and the pangs,
And pale-eyed ghosts shall creep out to the light
And drink the sun, like wine, and live once more. ”

“ She made him think of those immortals of whom he had read in Greek and Latin and in marbles; they who moved through earth compassionate, yet aloof from love. As she stood before him in the gloom, clothed in her tunic of white wool, and with the birds of night about her, he thought of Persephone, of Nausicaa, of the nymphs looking on whom a man grew mad—of all old-world tales of beings who were on earth, not of it. ”

“ It is not the sea from which she is rising. It can be none other than the maid, Persephone, who spent half the year with her dark lord, Hades, under the earth, and half with her mother, Demeter, above, and when she came brought the spring and the flowers back with her. The rendering of the silken garments half revealing the fine anatomy beneath is so skilful and advanced that we are surprised to notice that the eyes are still archaically rendered. ”

“ Gradually, the office of Persephone is developed, defines itself; functions distinct from those of Demeter are attributed to her. Hitherto, always at the side of Demeter and sharing her worship, she now appears detached from her, going and coming, on her mysterious business. A third part of the year she abides in darkness; she comes up in the spring; and every autumn, when the countryman sows his seed in the earth, she descends thither again, and the world of the dead lies open, spring and autumn, to let her in and out. ”

“ Treated as it is in the Homeric hymn, and still more in this statue, the image of Persephone may be regarded as the result of many efforts to lift the old Chthonian gloom, still lingering on in heavier souls, concerning the grave, to connect it with impressions of dignity and beauty, and a certain sweetness even; it is meant to make men in love, or at least at peace, with death. The Persephone of Praxiteles' school, then, is Aphrodite-Persephone, Venus-Libitina. ”

“ Who art alone the life and death of much-enduring mortals.
Persephone! For thou dost ever nourish and slay all things.
Hear, blessed goddess, and send up fruits from the earth
Granting us in abundance peace and gentle-handed health
And a life of happiness, such as leads old age untroubled
To thy realm, O queen, and to dread Pluto.” By the side of this we may perhaps put the Hymn to Dionysos in the same collection. It is probably later than the other in date, the syncretism which equates Persephone with Aphrodite, Cybele, and Isis pointing to a post-Alexandrian origin. ”

“ Go now, Persephone, to your dark-robed mother, go, and feel kindly in your heart towards me: be not so exceedingly cast down; for I shall be no unfitting husband for you among the deathless gods, that am own brother to father Zeus. And while you are here, you shall rule all that lives and moves and shall have the greatest rights among the deathless gods: those who defraud you and do not appease your power with offerings, reverently performing rites and paying fit gifts, shall be punished for evermore. ”

“ The mysteries of the Greeks were connected with the worship of those gods alone. That a love of immortality first found a support in a belief in these deities appears from the fable of Persephone, the daughter of Demeter. Every year at the time of harvest, Persephone was supposed to be carried from the world above to the dark dominions of the invisible King of Shadows, and to return every spring in youthful beauty to the arms of her mother. It was thus that the ancient Greeks described the disappearance and return of vegetable life in the alternations of the seasons. ”

“ Three profound ethical conceptions, three impressive sacred figures, have now defined themselves for the Greek imagination, condensed from all the traditions which have now been traced, from the hymns of the poets, from the instinctive and unformulated mysticism of primitive minds. Demeter is become the divine sorrowing mother. Kore, the goddess of summer, is become Persephone, the goddess of death, still associated with the forms and odours of flowers and fruit, yet as one risen from the dead also, presenting one side of her ambiguous nature to men's gloomier fancies. ”

“ In the preceding pages an attempt has been made to shew that in the Corn-mother and Harvest-maiden of Northern Europe we have the prototypes of Demeter and Persephone. But an essential feature is still wanting to complete the resemblance. A leading incident in the Greek myth is the death and resurrection of Persephone; it is this incident which, coupled with the nature of the goddess as a deity of vegetation, links the myth with the cults of Adonis, Attis, Osiris, and Dionysus; and it is in virtue of this incident that the myth finds a place in our discussion of the Dying God. ”

“ PRAYER TO PERSEPHONE Be to her, Persephone, All the things I might not be; Take her head upon your knee. She that was so proud and wild, Flippant, arrogant and free, She that had no need of me, Is a little lonely child Lost in Hell,—Persephone, Take her head upon your knee; Say to her, "My dear, my dear, It is not so dreadful here." ”

“ Demeter would not join the Olympians. Then, one after the other, the gods and goddesses of Olympus came to her; none were able to make her cease from grieving for Persephone, or to go again into the company of the immortal gods.
And so it came about that Zeus was compelled to send a messenger down to the Underworld to bring Persephone back to the mother who grieved so much for the loss of her. Hermes was the messenger whom Zeus sent. Through the darkened places of the earth Hermes went, and he came to that dark throne where the lord Aidoneus sat, with Persephone beside him. ”

“ Persephone is the goddess of death, yet with a promise of life to come. Those three phases, then, which are more or less discernible in all mythical development, and constitute a natural order in it, based on the necessary conditions of human apprehension, are fixed more plainly, perhaps, than in any other passage of Greek mythology in the story of Demeter. And as the Homeric hymn is the central expression of its literary or poetical phase, so the marble remains, of which I shall have to speak by and bye, are the central extant illustration of what I have called its ethical phase. ”

“ Mankind was threatened with utter annihilation, and all the gods were deprived of sacrifices and offerings. Zeus endeavoured to appease the anger of the gods, but in vain. Finally he summoned Hermes to go to Pluto and order him to restore Persephone to her mother. Pluto yielded, but before Persephone left she took from the hand of Pluto four pomegranate pips which he offered her as sustenance on her journey. Persephone, returning from the land of shadows, found her mother in the temple at Eleusis which had recently been erected. ”

“ Now there was in Epirus a savage king who had a very fair daughter. He had named this daughter Persephone, naming her thus to show that she was held as fast by him as that other Persephone was held who ruled in the Underworld. No man might [pg 222] see her, and no man might wed her. But Peirithous had seen the daughter of this king, and he desired above all things to take her from her father and make her his wife. He begged Theseus to help him enter that king’s palace and carry off the maiden. ”

“ According to the rumour of theologists, who delivered to us the most holy Eleusinian Mysteries, Persephone abides on high, in those dwellings of her mother which she prepared for her in inaccessible places, exempt from the sensible world. But she likewise dwells with Pluto, administering terrestrial concerns, governing the recesses of the earth and imparting soul to beings which are of themselves inanimate and dead. ”

“ For, under such a supposition, there would be no connection whatever between the contents of the book and the title is chosen for it. There is no special reference whatsoever to Persephone or any corresponding goddess in the treatise as we find it at present. The only female deity who figures prominently in it is Isis. ”

“ Persephone to be sure was left [Pg 92] alone, or more strictly speaking was accommodated to the Latin tongue by being changed to Proserpina. It is of course impossible that the Romans of B.C. 249 were entirely ignorant of Pluto and Persephone until the Sibylline books bade them be brought in. Here again the traders from Southern Italy had been their teachers; and the name Tarentum of the altar where the sacrifice was to be made may possibly indicate the town of Tarentum as the source of the cult. ”

“ The cause of these wanderings, according to the fable, was that two goddesses loved Adonis, Aphrodite, or more properly Astarte, and Persephone. Aphrodite, the Syrian Baalti, loved him so tenderly that the jealousy of Ares was aroused, and he sent a wild boar to gore him in the chase. When Adonis descended to the realm of darkness, Persephone was inflamed with passion for the comely youth. ”

“ In the Adonis legend there is evidence of some overlapping. Persephone, or Proserpine, who here corresponds to the Allatu of the Babylonian variant, figures in another well-known myth as the prototype of Tammuz. When she is carried off to the netherworld [Pg 133] by Pluto, her mother, Ceres, will not suffer the corn to grow while her daughter remains a prisoner. Like Ishtar in search of her spouse, the mother-goddess seeks her child with weeping and lamentation. ”

“ It is certainly to be found, with a difference, in the Return of Persephone, exhibited with [Pg 60] the Perseus, which becomes in the artist's hands a profound allegory of the return of Spring, with all kind of symbolical meanings in the three figures of Proserpine, Ceres, and Hermes, that are seen meeting before the mouth of Hades. The Spirit of the Summit, one of the latest of these embodiments of the relation of Man to Nature, may be read to mean Man's finer spirit of aspiration, and the mountainous imagination of Art itself. ”

“ Not Hecate, but Pallas and Artemis, in full armour, swift-footed, vindicators of chastity, accompany her in her search for Persephone, who is already expressly, korê arrêtos+—"the maiden whom none may name." When she rests from her long wanderings, it is into the stony thickets of Mount Ida, deep with snow, that she throws herself, in her profound grief. When Zeus desires to end her pain, the Muses and the "solemn" Graces are sent to dance and sing before her. ”

“ There was no disputing the obvious facts that Hēlios was the Sun, and Selēnē the Moon; and as for Jove, all the nonsense of pseudo-history could not quite do away the idea that he was really Heaven, for language continued to declare this in such expressions as ‘sub Jove frigido.’ The explanation of the rape of Persephone, as a nature-myth of the seasons and the fruits of the earth, does not depend alone on analogy of incident, but has the very names to prove its reality, Zeus, Hēlios, Dēmētēr—Heaven, and Sun, and Mother Earth. ”