Persephone and death

The enduring appeal of a teenage goddess

It actually snowed this weekend in my neck of the woods, an event about as rare as finding a four-leaf clover.

But, as luck would have it, the white stuff put me in mind of weather and a recent conversation I had with a friend.

My friend had read a draft of the introduction to THE INVENTION OF GREEK MYTHOLOGY, and at one point she said, “It really struck me—although I already knew this—when you said that the story of Persephone is not about the seasons.”

Part of the reason my friend latched on to Persephone is because she is a Myers-Briggs INFJ type, and Persephone is the goddess for that type.

But many women—especially young women, but not always—powerfully identify with Persephone. In fact, there’s a Twitter account I follow called @incorrectgreekgods that has quirky, humorous mini-dialogues between the Olympians. Many of them are between Persephone and her husband Hades, the king of the underworld and the god of death.

incorrect greek gods @incorrectgreeks

Persephone: *asleep resting in Hades' chest* Hades: you're so cute when you're asleep Persephone: i could kill someone right now Hades, smiling: i know, babe, and i love you for that

There’s something irresistibly modern in a gothy way about a young woman who’s the daughter of the goddess of the harvest spending several months of the year in a gloomy cavern with an older, mysterious, dark, no doubt brooding god who’s fixated on death.

What’s more, this goddess does herself become the queen of the underworld and wields a sizable amount of power as the mistress of that domain.

The contradictions are plain but they are also somehow complementary.

This is a much richer vein of meaning than you’ll find in supposing that the story of Persephone’s descent to the underworld heralds the onset of winter and her rising again signals that it’s spring. First of all, it doesn’t tally with how seasons in Greece work, and second, no one in the ancient world ever interpreted it that way.

Plus, as I was reminded walking today past tropical plants that had died from the cold, Demeter doesn’t make winter. She has no control over the weather. In fact, there is no Jack Frost type of god in ancient Greece. There’s no winter fetish, no Heat Miser, no Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.

The myth of Persephone is only tangentially concerned with nature, if at all. As the eminent scholar Walter Burkert pointed out in his book Greek Religion some decades ago, the story of Persephone is the story of every bride in ancient Greece.

It is the story of an encounter with death. Multiple encounters, really.

First, the ancient Greek bride was, like Persephone, almost always a teenager, and closer to childhood than her twenties. For a number of reasons, ancient fathers preferred to marry off their daughters as soon as they were able to bear children. Menarche happened later for ancient girls than modern because nutrition is much better today, but it was pretty normal for a bride to be fifteen years old when she married in ancient Greece.

This would have been a serious matter, the most serious women were likely to encounter in their lives. There was no preparation for life with a man, no dating, no friendships with boys or co-educational schools. 

You seldom knew the man you married before the wedding night, and he would often be twice your age, since men could not marry until coming into property and often spent their twenties waiting for fathers to turn over the household or some part of it to them.

So Hades as an older, mysterious man absolutely tallies.

What’s more, the bride went from living in the women’s quarters of her father’s home to her new husband’s home in a matter of days. There would be a big to-do about the event—a wedding, feasts, days-long celebrations accompanied by rites and rituals.

But then you’d be gone from mom’s care forever, into a new world. That type of transition is mirrored in the snatching of Persephone from the meadow where she is picking flowers with friends as she calls desperately for her mother.

The sexual part of the new relationship was probably strange and scary enough, but there was another danger: childbirth. In the ancient world, many women and their babies died of the complications of the process, and getting pregnant in one’s teens didn’t help matters.

In fact, the Greeks would say “she has married Hades” when a young woman died in childbirth.

The whole vibe, if I can call it that, around marriage in the ancient world was death-oriented in both a literal and figurative way. The death of childhood, the encounter with death in one’s biologically-ordained role in life. It is a bit like the dilemma of Belle in Beauty and the Beast, without the guarantee of a happy ending.

But there were perks, too, represented by Persephone’s queenship.

Women aspired to be married in ancient Greece because it usually gave them authority over the day-to-day workings of their household. If they were anything but the lowest class of people, they would have servants and slaves to direct, an entrepreneurial business of textile weaving to build up, and, presently, children to raise.

The husband was not concerned with the inner, private side of the household. He dealt with the farm, politics, the community.

So if the young woman survived the transition from girlhood to womanhood, she could reasonably expect a reasonably tolerable life.

Nowadays, the transition to adulthood is much longer and more cushioned for both genders. There is the ability to become used to the opposite sex, to find out what one prefers in a partner. There is agency.

But I suspect for many young women the character of Persephone is still a big draw because the transition to womanhood, despite the bumpers and cushions, is still a serious one—dare I say an archetypal one. You can’t get away from the fact that death still stalks girls as they grow up, both literally and figuratively.

Childbirth is much safer now, although not perfectly safe, but violence against women continues to be an issue. On the one hand women have more choice of a partner, but on the other this freedom also makes them vulnerable to the “choice” of a man to hurt them.

For young men, it used to be that growing up meant facing death as a warrior. In the US, that’s no longer the case. You have to volunteer even to join the armed forces, and even then, not every role in that body includes exposure to enemy harm.

Women still face death every day.

So as long as that is true, Persephone will continue to be popular. Seasons come and seasons go, but Persephone—as a goddess and therefore immortal and unchanging— will always be the one who has gone before them.

And the one who is also still with them.