Hymn to Persephone

Hymn to Persephone

A Collage in Four Acts

Paintings by
Carla Cleveland

Hymn to Persephone by Carla Cleveland
Copyright © 2018 by Carla Cleveland. All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any written, electronic, recording, or photo-
copying without written permission of the publisher or author. The exception would be in
the case of brief quotations embodied in the critical articles or reviews and pages where
permission is specifically granted by the publisher or author.
Although every precaution has been taken to verify the accuracy of the information con-
tained herein, the author and publisher assume no responsibility for any errors or omis-
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contained within.
Books may be purchased by contacting the author at: [email protected]

Cover Design: Carla Cleveland.
Interior Design: Carla Cleveland

Artwork: Carla Cleveland
Publisher: Center for the Study of Art & Community

Editor: Carrie Wicks
Library of Congress Catalog Number: 2017942667
ISBN: 978-0-692-88129-3 1.) Art 2.) Mythology 3.) Psychology

First Edition Printed in USA

My thanks to Bill
for his two cents



Introduction: Myth as Mirror

Once upon a time, the path to the underworld was opened. Persephone was the first who
took this path into the darkness as booty and bride of the subterranean god.
Károly Kerényi
Eleusis: Archetypal Image of
Mother and Daughter

The hymn begins, ever so softly, at first light. Birdsong punctuates the soft warm air and
the rainbow scatters pink and gold across the meadow. The breeze carries the sound of
young voices whose laughter and joyful melodies greet the day.
Abruptly, the sky darkens. The wind rises. The earth trembles. The approaching sound of
horses, whipped to a frenzy and running at full speed, strikes fear in the heart. And when
the terror has receded, one of their number has vanished.
So begins the story of Demeter and Persephone. It is both ancient and ageless, and comes
to us from the distant past, a past delineated by fluid boundaries and mysterious comings
and goings. It has become one of the most familiar tales in all of Greek mythology. While
it first appeared in written form around the seventh century BC, recorded by the bard
known to us as Homer, it had existed in the oral tradition for centuries, handed down
from one generation to another.
For those who may be unfamiliar with the story, here is a brief summary. The myth tells
the story of the agricultural goddess, Demeter, and her daughter, Persephone, also known
simply as “the maiden.” One day, while picking flowers in the meadow with her friends,
Persephone is violently abducted by Hades, the god of the dead. He carries her down to
the underworld to rule alongside of him in his dark kingdom. Demeter’s heart is broken.
But her grief at the loss of her daughter turns to wrath when she discovers that this cruel
trick has been prearranged between Hades and their brother Zeus, the ruler of all Olym-
pus. She seeks revenge, cursing the crops and laying waste the land. Zeus finally comes to
understand that this devastation must be stopped or mankind will be destroyed. He sends
swift-footed Hermes to persuade Hades to allow Persephone to return to her mother.
Only then does Demeter restore order to nature. Sly Hades, however, offers Persephone
a pomegranate as a parting gift. For each seed that she eats, she must return to Hades for
one month of every year.
This version of the story is, most probably, a patriarchal adaptation of one with far more
ancient roots, one which weaves together both history and myth. The sky god, Zeus, was
brought to the Greek peninsula by tribes who invaded from the north. Upon arrival, these
northerners encountered a well-established matriarchal society, where the goddess ruled.

I

Demeter and Persephone, who are sometimes considered two aspects of the same god-
dess, can be traced back, like many of their sister goddesses, to the island of Crete, to the
Middle East or even North Africa, the land of Isis in ancient Egypt. Travelling backward in
time, all goddesses eventually become one - the giver of life and death.
History, as we know, is written by the victors, and the northern warlike tribes prevailed in
the struggle for control of the Greek peninsula. The power of the goddess faded into the
past, overridden by newly ascendant masculine forces.
What did Homer’s epic poem mean to those who heard it some 2,600 years ago? At
the most basic level, it was, of course, an agricultural story, bound to the endless wheel of
the seasons of the year; Persephone rises from the depths of the underworld each spring
with the sprouting of the tender green shoots of grain and the blossoming of the trees.
Then she returns underground each autumn as the leaves fall and the fields wither.
When Persephone was freed from Hades, Demeter, in her joy, established mystery rites in
the town of Eleusis, not far from Athens. Here was revealed, to all who participated in the
annual ceremonies, not only the secret knowledge of agriculture, but of life itslef: birth,
death, and the ever-repeated journey of the soul between the material and the spiritual.
The full scope of the rites was never revealed. They remain a deep well of secrets to this
day. Participants were sworn to guard their tongues on pain of death. Silence was kept.
Even without this veil of secrecy, it would probably be almost impossible for us to under-
stand these rites in the same way that the ancient Greeks did. Our way of looking at the
world today is radically different. But ancient myths can also mirror our own contem-
porary concerns. As we look into them, we find ourselves reflected back. Wisdom, like
Persephone herself, does not maintain a fixed image.
While the sanctuary at Eleusis was finally closed in the fourth century AD, (new empires
and new gods were afoot), it was never completely forgotten. In the nineteenth century,
investigation into the lost histories of the past became a new calling. Since that time,
archaeologists, religious scholars, mythologists, feminists, and psychologists have
offered many interpretations and insights into ancient Greek life and cosmology. Their
conclusions probably reveal as much about our own contemporary outlook as that of the
ancients.
The story of Demeter and Persephone has been analyzed and examined from many angles.
Poets and novelists have also taken it as their own. In our own time, one can even catch
sight of certain parallels between this ancient story and the ideas and questions posed by
quantum physics. How can something be in two places at once? How is it that the observ-
er affects the outcome? How can all things be interconnected?

II

There have been many voices who have spoken for “the maiden” across the centuries.
Sometimes they appear contradictory, but perhaps that should only serve to broaden our
thinking and transform our notion of duality. In some sense, each of us is Persephone. We
all lead a double life, one in the outer everyday world and one in our own subjective, inte-
rior world, the one created by our imaginations and populated with our hopes and fears.
A bout of depression can surely thrust us into an underworld as powerful as the one ruled
by Hades.
Demeter is traditionally the focus of the tale, for once Persephone goes “underground,”
she virtually disappears from the story. Not satisfied with this invisible silence, I have tried
to present a fuller reading of the story, and give “the maiden“ her due. The quotations
that appear on the following pages have been drawn from many sources, from the days of
Homer to the present. They represent just a few of the paths I have traveled in pursuit of
Persephone’s story. The accompanying paintings are mine. They are not necessarily tradi-
tional illustrations, but rather a pairing of color and content, created over many years in a
variety of styles. They form a motley scrapbook hereby dedicated to the goddess of contin-
uous transformation.

III



In those days it was still felt that thought was alive out in the fields
when the young corn throve, that hope actually lay extended over
the meadows, penetrating the miracles of Nature like the song of
the lark.

Rudolf Steiner
Wonders of the World: Trials of
the Soul and Revelations of
the Spirit

I: THE MAIDEN
…the ground is cool and moist, with lovely
flowers growing.
Ovid
Metamorphoses

2



One summer she goes into the field as usual
stopping for a bit at the pool where she often
looks at herself, to see
if she detects any changes. She sees
the same person, the horrible mantle
of daughterliness still clinging to her.
The sun seems, in the water, very close.
That’s my uncle spying again, she thinks —
everything in nature is in some way her relative.
I am never alone, she thinks,
turning the thought into a prayer…
…There are places like this everywhere,
places you enter as a young girl,
from which you never return.
Louise GlÜck
Averno

4



On the green plain she spied a beautiful little flower, and bent
gracefully to see it more closely…
Clarissa Pinkola Estés
from the foreward to
Art and Upheaval: Artists on
the World’s Frontlines

(its brightness
was wonderful!)
It astonished everyone
who saw it,
immortal gods
and mortal men alike.
From its root
it pushed up
a hundred heads
and a fragrance
from its top
making
all the vast sky above
smile
and all the earth,
and all the salt swelling
of the sea.
And she
was astonished too,
she stretched out
both her hands
to pick
this delightful thing....

6



…But the earth, The Homeric Hymns:
wide with roads, The Charles Boer Translation

opened up!
in the Nysian Plain,

and out came
He Who Receives So Many,

with his immortal horses,
that son of Cronos.
And he grabbed her,
resisting,
and he took her
in his gold chariot,
weeping.
She screamed
in a shrill voice
calling for
Zeus
her supreme and powerful
father.




8



10



In late autumn a young girl set fire to a field
of wheat. The autumn
had been very dry; the field
went up like tinder.
Afterward there was nothing left.
You walk through it, you see nothing.
There’s nothing to pick up, to smell.
The horses don’t understand it —
One match was all it took.
But at the right time — it had to be the right time.
The field parched, dry —
the deadness in place already
so to speak.
Louise GlÜck
Averno

12



Is the danger of beauty so great that it is better to live without it?
(the standard model) Or to fall into her arms fire to fire? There is
no discovery without risk and what you risk reveals what you val-
ue. Inside the horror of Nagasaki and Hiroshima lies the beauty of
Einstein’s E=MC squared.
Jeanette Winterson
Gut Symmetries

14



There are cemeteries that are lonely,
graves full of bones that do not make a sound,
the heart moving through a tunnel,
in it darkness, darkness, darkness,
like a shipwreck we die going into ourselves,
as though we were drowning inside our hearts,
as though we lived falling out of the skin into the soul.
Pablo Neruda
Nothing But Death

16



...the rape of Persephone has been in progress since most early
times, and down to our own day; the old clairvoyant culture has
vanished. In truth, however, nothing in the world is lost: things
only change. The old form of knowing sank down into the king-
dom of Hades, within the human soul. Persephone, taken down to
Hades is our ancient heritage, raped by modern knowledge.

Rudolf Steiner
Wonders of the World

18



Only an unparalleled impoverishment of symbolism could have en-
abled us to rediscover the gods as psychic factors, that is, as arche-
types of the unconscious…. Since the stars have fallen from heaven
and our highest symbols have paled, a secret life holds sway in the
unconscious…. Heaven has become for us the cosmic space of the
physicists, and the divine empyrean a fair memory of things that
once were. But “the heart glows,” and a secret unrest gnaws at the
roots of our being.
Carl Jung
Archetypes of the Collective
Unconscious

The advent of “science” marks the beginning of the ascent of left
hemispheric thinking into the dominant mode of western cogni-
tion and the descent of right hemispheric thinking into the under-
ground status from which it did not emerge until Freud’s discovery
of the “unconscious” which he, of course, labeled dark, mysterious,
irrational.
Gary Zukav
Dancing Wu Li Masters

20



The river’s tent is broken: the last fingers
of leaf

Clutch and sink into the wet bank. The wind
Crosses the brown land, unheard. The nymphs are
departed.
T. S. Eliot
The Waste Land

22



gods that are forced underground will resurface in the strangest
places.
Patricia Storace
Dinner with Persephone

24



No one knows what really happened in the Eleusinian Mysteries....
We do know that the mysteries were dedicated to Demter, goddess
of life and death. Participants were told about the immortality of
the soul; those who died reappeared in a better place. Not so long
ago, only two thousand years, not far from Greece, another story
was brewing — one of sacrifice and renewal, blood and harvest, the
death of a king giving life to everyone.... The goddesses slunk away,
disappeared. Nymphs turned into saints, itching under the collar.
Priests put on skirts, and women shut the door on their longings.

Catherine Temma Davidson
The Priest Fainted

26



II: THE WRATH OF DEMETER
Compulsively, in grief, Demeter circles the earth.
Louise GlÜck
Averno
Rain- rotten died the wheat, the barley
spears
Were hollow husked, the leaf fell, and
the Sun
Pale at my grief, drew down before his
time.

Alfred Lord Tennyson
Demeter and Persephone

28



…far away from all the happy gods,
she stayed there,

wasting away with longing
for her daughter.

Homeric Hymns

Then I, Earth-Goddess, cursed the Gods of
heaven. I would not mingle with their feasts; to me
Their nectar smack’d of hemlock on the lips.
Alfred Lord Tennyson
Demeter and Persephone

30



When a god grieves it means
destroying others (as in war)
while at the same time petitioning
to reverse agreements (as in war also):
if Zeus will get her back,
winter will end.
Winter will end, spring will return.
The small pestering breezes…
the idiot yellow flowers—
Louise GlÜck
Averno

32



And when Zeus heard this,
in his deep voice, and seeing far,
he dispatched Argeiphontes
with his golden wand to Erebos
to exhort Hades with soft words
and to bring back the gentle Persephone
from the dark mist into the light again
among the gods so that her mother,
seeing her with her own eyes,
would abandon her anger.
Homeric Hymns

34



III: QUEEN OF THE DEAD
Persephone never saw Hades coming. She was jerked out of her
nice, sweet life and plunged into a dark underworld. On one level,
she was abducted into her own depths, forced into a deep and pain-
ful confrontation with herself. Yet the time she spent in the under-
world is precisely what transforms her from a naive, untested girl
into a mature and conscious young woman.
Sue Monk Kidd
Traveling with Pomegranates

36



The visible world is no longer a reality and the unseen world is no
longer a dream.
Arthur Symons
The Symbolist Movement in
Literature

38



The Queen of the Dead, whose name it was not safe to speak aloud,
named simply “the maiden.”
Clearly, this is not the Persephone we know from Greece’s patriar-
chal male fantasy of an abducted rape victim, but the Persephone of
a much more ancient, pre-Hades time, a time when she was the true
and only sovereign of the Underworld’s wealth and riches.
Anonymous

40