“I love autumn", Emily said to me. "It wins you over with its mute appeal to sympathy for its decay.” - Two By Two
Persephone, the abducted daughter of Demeter, is the Goddess Queen of the Underworld. She became the wife of Hades and is the goddess of Spring that we await every year. She fulfills a duty of helping those who pass to go up the stairs her mother lights for them. When she was stolen, she was a simple naive little girl who became torn between her mother and her beloved husband. The painful loss of daughter has often been seen and heard in the myths. An ordeal I have never had to experience other than separation by choice or through tough love. Even having a daughter marry is a separation of sorts. Then, as well, there is the loss of our childhood.
Persephone would not et when she was first abducted. Hades could not get her to eat one bite. Finally, she succumbed to the beauty of a handful of pomegranate seeds, though, but she only ate 6. Her fate was sealed by those 6 seeds and it was destined that she would spend half her life with her mother and half her life with her husband. Each time she leaves Demeter, the earth is shorn of its spring and summer beauty and fall and winter comes to symbolize Demeter’s sorrow, again and again forever.
Persephone is also the Goddess of Mercy. She was given the infant Adonis to raise and protect for a time and when time came to give him back, she refused. So, again, there was separation. It was decreed that Adonis would spend 1/3 of his time with Persephone and one third with whomever he chose.
Persephone stayed with Hades and was faithful to him and she made sure he was faithful to her. She would thwart his temptations, Minthe and Leuce into a mint plant and to a white popular tree. Her absence causes decay. Her presence in her half time on earth, things rejuvenate, transform, are reborn. She was not something bartered by either her husband or her mother, she made choices. Who she became was not because she was abducted or whether she had chosen for herself who to live with and how long. She taught that all things come and all things end, only to return again. She reminds us life and death are only part of a cycle. We age. We die. We rise. We are child again.
Her season is spring when she returns again and again. She is associated with the torch, reeds, river, springs, waterfalls. The animals associated with her are the monkeys, the birds that can speak, the ram and the bat. Of course, the pomegranate is her plant. Amethyst, crystal, black onyx, tourmaline and the colors green, black, magenta, yellow, blue and purple. Place these things on your altar or near you somewhere.
http://thisenchantedpixie.org/2013/09/22/the-story-of-persephone-and-the-pomegranate-seeds/
©Carol Desjarlais 10.30.21
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