For anyone who’s ever journeyed through grief, depression, anxiety, chronic pain, addiction, or other maladies of the soul, the story of Persephone is powerful medicine.
In Greek mythology, Persephone was the daughter of Zeus, the King of the Gods. Raised by the most dysfunctional parents in all mythology, (and that’s saying something), Zeus grew up to be a dangerous sociopath. Then again, some gods are just like that. As historian Lord Acton wrote wrote, “Power tends to corrupt. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Demeter on the other hand, a classic earth goddess, was all about the fertility of the soil, the ripening of the grain, and the abundance of the harvest. Cereal comes from her Roman name Ceres—let’s raise a bowl. She personifies sustenance, loving-kindness, abundance, and healing. Zeus, not so much.
One day their daughter Persephone was out picking flowers and minding her own business when her uncle Hades, King of the Underworld, grabbed her and took her down to his realm. You never have to look far in Greek mythology to find cruel and toxic masculinity—maybe the ancient Greeks were more willing to look at what we so studiously deny. In despair and driven by primal longing, Demeter set out to find her lost daughter.
Meanwhile, Hades bound Persephone to him as Queen of the Underworld. Demeter pleaded with her father Zeus for help and he acquiesced—in his usual inimical way. Zeus ruled that Persephone would stay with her husband Hades for half the year, then return to be with her mother in the upper world for the other half of the year. Hence the seasons were born.
How To Read Myths
There are many ways to interpret and draw wisdom from these ancient tales. You can keep it simple: this is just a children’s story that explains the origin of winter and summer. Or, using tools like the psychological theory of myth, deeper currents rise into view.
In the psychological theory of myth, mythic images, characters, and narratives are understood as externalizations and personifications of the energies of our inner life. Ancient story tellers, the thinking goes, created these wild and dramatic stories in order to give character and form to the mysterious conflicts within us—this organ wants this, that organ wants that. Myth-making then becomes a kind of ancient therapy—a way of managing the mess.
In his youth as an altar boy Joseph Campbell recounts how the nuns taught him that there was an angel on one shoulder and a devil on the other, and the quality of his life depended on which one he listened to. This is a perfect example of how externalizing and personifying inner conflicts leads to the creation of angels, demons, gods, and devils. Keeping them all inside is too much for anyone to bear. So the myths allow us to stage these internal dramas as external theater. Understood at that level—as images—these narratives might help us cope with or even resolve our inner conflicts. But concretizing these images as literal facts robs them of their therapeutic power.
The psychological theory of myth isn’t the only way to analyze world mythology, but it is nevertheless profoundly revealing.
Let’s reexamine the story of Persephone and Demeter through this lens.
Persephone, Demeter, and Hades as Projections
Persephone is our innocence, that part of ourselves that loves beauty, is drawn to pleasure, and luxuriates in the childlike simplicity of utter trust. She represents the perennial emergence of hope out of the depths of despair.
Hades is our rapacious, egocentric, and amoral energy, willing to break any rule to get what we want. He represents the pirate in us all.
Demeter is our Great Mother energy—nurturing, loving, protecting—who will stop at nothing to restore justice, feed the hungry, and reunite the scattered lost in loving oneness. She represents the tireless longing for reintegration in all of us.
(You can see how hard it would be to keep these disparate energies bottled up together. The stories burst out of our psyches and into our art the way steam screams out of a boiling kettle).
The Wider Wisdom of Persephone
We are all Persephone. We fall in love with beauty. We forget that there are malevolent forces in play, and sometimes we get snatched away to dark places. Those naive forays into drugs and alcohol in our early years turn into snares that bind some of us in shadows—sometimes for decades, sometimes forever. Narrow, fearful, and dangerous energies in the body politic drag our entire country toward authoritarian fascism, dehumanizing all of us and denuding the world of its saving graces: reason, clarity, humility, truthfulness, and simple kindness.
But above all, Persephone represents rebirth. No matter how bad it gets, there is always a fresh start in the works. As the 30th psalm says, there may be weeping tonight, but joy comes in the morning.
What stories like Persephone’s show is that there are more than one kind of season and more than one kind of underworld. Sure, the earth tilts on its axis as it journeys around the sun, and so there is summer and winter. But at every level this same dynamic is in play. Collectively we pass through periods of calm then storm, stasis then upheaval, withering then growth. And in our inner life, these rising and falling tides hold sway. As John Denver sang, “some days are diamonds, some days are stones.”
And then there’s this. Toxic substances and rotten politics aside, even under the best of circumstances we sometimes succumb to internal psychological imbalance, until, at its worst, even suicide seems reasonable.
As French existentialist philosopher Albert Camus wrote at the beginning of his essential work The Myth of Sisyphus, “There is only one serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.” Even Persephone must’ve felt like giving up sometimes. Far from a maudlin fascination with death, Camus’s question actually leads us through the most clear-eyed affirmation of life in the philosophical canon. When you ask yourself, “Why should I not kill myself right now?” you are compelled to articulate the reasons for staying alive. In other words, contemplating suicide turns out to be the ultimate act of values clarification. Yes life is absurd, Camus writes, but “I draw from the absurd three consequences, which are my revolt, my freedom, and my passion.”
The Deeper Truth
By coming to know these characters, narratives, and shadowy aspects of ourselves, something important starts to take shape. Just as we identify with Persephone’s vulnerability, and reluctantly recognize our inner-Hades, so too we begin to realize that our rescuer—Demeter—is also within us. We are the disease, and we are also the medicine. We are the victim, and we are also the perpetrator. But most importantly, we are the chaos, and we are also the healer who restores balance, wholeness, justice, and ultimately, integration.
The call is coming from inside the house.
Just as Demeter sought tirelessly for her lost daughter, there is something in us reaching for reunion, longing for love, pushing through pain, and building beauty out of the broken pieces. Even when we feel like giving up. Especially when we feel like giving up.
In the end, when we make peace with our shadow and learn how to live in the face of these contradictions, instead of in exile from them, we return to the boundlessness from which we originally came. It is through our revolt, our freedom, and our passion that we rise into the fullness of our own lives.
This is the return to the ancient-future that our soul is longing for. This is what gave Persephone her faithful surrender. This is what kept Demeter searching. Deep beneath all the layers we remember our oneness, and we walk the pilgrim road home, no matter how many detours or defeats. As the saying goes, when you’re going through hell, keep on going.
I loved your writing and understandings of Persephone and will be referring to it for its lessons, especially for my inner life. Thank you.
Beautiful.
I had an astrologer tell me once I was born at the exact time the micro planet Persephone came into our solar system, and this would define my life. In and out of the underworld indeed!