Welcome Back, Persephone

If you, like us, live anywhere near the Midwestern United States, you've been gleeful with all this crazy good weather. It's March! Usually we're still buried in snow over here in Michigan. It's been eighty degrees this week, and all the cherry and magnolia trees are blossoming.

With the arrival of spring, naturally my thoughts have turned to Persephone, goddess of spring. The Greeks would have perceived that the world of the living was welcoming her back joyfully with the blooming flowering trees, crocuses and daffodils that are starting to emerge, and the grass that is finally becoming green.

I like to think of Persephone and her mother, Demeter, as the two sides of the natural world. Demeter, goddess of agriculture, is all about orderly, disciplined farming—domesticated plants all in a neat row—and she loved homey tasks, simple living, and the everyday mundaneness of peasant lives. She’s utilitarian, in a sense—practical. Persephone, on the other, is all about the wilder nature, flowers (which have no purpose except to look beautiful and brighten up the world) and vines and everything that might make a lovely overgrown garden. She seems to be more about being than doing, if that makes any sense.

There’s a lot of duality in the personality of Persephone. She and her mother make up the two aspects of nature, while she and her husband are also yin and yang—life and death. And there’s also a little bit of duality just with herself: she is Kore, the innocent maiden, the nurturer of life; yet she is also the dreaded Queen of the Underworld, wife and consort of Hades, beautiful and powerful. She’s more multifaceted than she might seem at first glance from the stories—and perhaps she was just too complex to be boxed into her mother’s overly simplistic lifestyle. She does appreciate the quiet life, as she is her mother’s daughter, yet she is also Zeus’s daughter—she has the capacity for pride and majesty and stubbornness just as he does.

She is one of the few goddesses who is portrayed in a mostly positive light. Her compassion was as renowned as her beauty—though sometimes this was exploited by the unscrupulous.

For example, Sisyphus (pronounced SIS-uh-fus) was a mortal man who wanted to cheat death. He ordered his wife that, when he died, she should not give him a proper burial, so that he could not cross over into the next realm via the River Styx. Then, his ghost visited Queen Persephone and wove a sob story for her: “oh woe is me, my cruel wife isn’t giving me a proper burial so I cannot rest!” Persephone, of course, felt sorry for him. Sisyphus begged her to let him go back to the world above to chastise his wife and make her bury him—and poor Persephone, too trusting, let him.

Of course, then Sisyphus was like, “Suckers! No way am I coming back!” He stayed in the world of the living, just as he had planned, incredulous at his own cleverness.

Persephone, now humiliated, broke down and told her husband what happened. Hades was irate—not with his dear wife, but with the mortal who dared to think he could evade him. He dragged Sisyphus back to the Underworld and punished him most severely. In the Fields of Punishment, he was to be eternally rolling an enormous boulder up a mountain, laboring all day in the hot sun. And as soon as he reached the top, the boulder would come crashing down to the bottom, and he would have to start all over again.

Notice how the punishment always fits the crime in the Underworld: Sisyphus was arrogant and ambitious and thought he had the cunning to accomplish something both impossible and against the most ancient of rules. Therefore, he had to spend eternity trying to do something and having his work constantly being undone—as a reminder that the gods are, in fact, more powerful than humans, and that one cannot outwit them.