Week 4 Story: Persephone

Persephone sits on the throne of the Underworld six months of the year. This is an immutable fact, and the evidence can be seen in the most basic patterns of nature, the seasons themselves. Persephone goes to fulfill her role as queen of the Underworld, and the cold sets in, plants withering away in the fields. Persephone returns, and she brings with her the warmth, flowers blooming in her wake. This is a simple truth that mortals have long known and understood, although many have forgotten.

The thing the mortals have always gotten wrong is how this arrangement came about.

Marriage by capture was common for the humans at the time, and so they reasoned that this must be how Persephone first arrived to the realm of death. They could not conceive of a girl setting out for such a place of her own free will.

But one day, while picking flowers in the fields near her home, Persephone came across a deep crack in the earth from which asphodels grew, and she heard voices floating up from deep underground. Overcome with curiosity, Persephone climbed down to see what was at the bottom.

The world at the bottom would later fill Orpheus and Odysseus with dread, but Persephone was a goddess, and it took more than the the spirits of the dead to frighten her. She wandered among the dead, and the cypress trees and asphodel along the River Styx burst into knew life at her presence.

Hades didn't know what to make of this young goddess who had appeared in his kingdom. He considered sending her back to the world above, but then he came to enjoy her company. She made those of his subjects who had been virtuous in life happy, and she proved better than him at coming up with punishments for those who had been wicked. So he offered her a place ruling beside him.

When Persephone learned how devastated her mother was with her absence, and how the world had been left in cold and darknesses, she was filled with grief. She knew she had to go back, but she didn't want to leave the underworld. So she and Hades came up with a solution. A handful of pomegranate seeds ensured that her mother would have to let her spend part of each year in her new kingdom, and she was careful not to eat so many that she would be unable to return to her mother each spring.

Since that day, Persephone has split each year evenly between bringing spring and flowers to the people of earth, and ruling as Queen of the Dead.

                                                           


Author's Note: In Ovid's Metomorphses, Persephone is kidnapped and tricked into eating the pomegranate seeds that trap her in the underworld for part of each year. I wanted to rewrite the story to give Persephone an active role and agency in her life

Image: Persephone, Queen of the Underworld 

Week 4 Reading Notes: Ovid's Metamorphoses II Part A

The first four parts of Ovid's Metamorphoses II are focused on the story of Persephone, but they don't really treat her as the main character. In fact, she's barely a character at all. How she feels and what she thinks is never really explored, and the whole story is just about other people reacting to her kidnapping for plot reasons. I think it would be interesting to tell the story with more of Persephone's point of view, and maybe also take the plot in a less kidnappy direction.

                                                 
                                                           (Persephone, by Rossetti)