Mother of the Dead: Persephone Journeys with Us in Our Grief
- Hannah Irish
- May 16
- 4 min read
Persephone as Underworld Goddess
Some scholars argue that, since there are many artistic representations of Persephone’s descent into the underworld without the rape, the rape was added after the rise of patriarchy, as a representation of patriarchal invasion (Downing 106). Vases and relics from the early period of the Eleusinian cult, which celebrated the mysteries associated with Demeter and Persephone, depict Hades as Persephone’s beloved consort, not her abductor. There are even images of Demeter blessing Hades’ union with her daughter.
The Eleusinian Mysteries transformed initiates through a ritualized death and rebirth, and Persephone was intimately present with them.
These earlier artifacts make clear that, long before the mythological tradition tells of a maiden goddess on earth who is abducted into the underworld, only to return for part of each year, Persephone was an underworld goddess. A non-Indo-European name, Christine Downing writes that Persephone “must always have had ‘an ominous ring,’ would have always suggested an association with death. Persephone must always, even in pre-Greek cult, have been an underworld deity” (10). Underworld goddesses, death goddesses, are also, always, goddesses of resurrection, of rebirth, of life. As Downing puts it, “a death goddess will also be a source of fruitfulness” (11). The Great Goddess tends the life cycle, including death.
Persephone and the Eleusinian Mysteries
Persephone’s connection to the entire life-cycle is evident in the Eleusinian Mysteries. The place name itself, Eleusis, likely references a positive image of the underworld. Downing suggests it means something like, “place of happy arrival,” and recognizes the allusion to Elysian, “the realm of the blessed” (49). The temple complex at Eleusis, unlike most Greek temple sites, is built around a subterranean chamber, evidencing its relationship to chthonic tradition, which is common of Demeter’s temples that “evoke ‘the interior, life-giving, death-bringing forces of the earth’” (Vincent Scully qtd in Downing, 49). Scholars believe the temple was designed specifically to “encourage a visionary experience,” and that the ritual’s emphasis was on the “mysteries’ power to assuage the fear of death” (Downing 50).
So how do we move from an image of Persephone as a maiden goddess of spring, to a “generic” underworld goddess, to the Mother of the Dead? Little is known about the content and structure of the Eleusinian Mysteries, but what is known is revealing. Unlike most Greek religious cults, participation in the mysteries was not open to the public, only to those who were ritually initiated and vowed to keep the ritual a secret (Downing 51). However, the cult itself was the most inclusive of the Greek cults, open to all Greek-speakers who were “free of bloodguilt” (52). The mysteries differed from many other rituals in that “it was felt that to have seen the mystery once was sufficient,” though the celebration conferred a different status on repeat participants (52). Participation in the ritual also did not create ongoing bonds between the initiates, nor did it imply further ritual or ethical obligations.
While certain aspects of the preparatory phases of the ritual are documented, we don’t know what happened in the ritual itself. The initiates were outwardly unchanged when they returned to their ordinary lives. Inwardly, though, they were transformed, as Pindar exclaimed, “‘Happy is he who, having seen these rites, goes below the hollow earth; for he knows the end of life and he knows its god-sent beginning’” (qtd in Downing, 52).
Testimony attributed to Aristotle tells us that the focus of the secret part of the rite was “on something seen and done that had a transformative psychological effect,” that the initiates aren’t taught anything, but they “suffer, feel certain emotions, are put in a certain frame of mind” (Downing 52-53). Whatever happened, it “satisfied the most sincere yearnings and the deepest longings of the human heart” (George E. Melons qtd in Downing, 53).
Transformative Death
Does this not sound like the individual, transformative experience of death? Could it be that the mysteries subjected the initiates to a ritualized death? Does it not also resonate with the experience of loss through the death of a loved one, which is itself an individual, transformative initiation that cannot be adequately described to or understood by those who have not experienced it themselves?
And while an individual experience, it is also an all-inclusive human experience, as the Eleusinian cult was inclusive. If the Eleusinian Mystery was a ritualized death, and if Persephone was its presiding goddess, then is she not the mother goddess of the initiates, the Mother of the Dead?
“‘Happy is he who, having seen these rites, goes below the hollow earth; for he knows the end of life and he knows its god-sent beginning’”
If the aim of ritual “is to summon the divine, to create an experience of its presence, to wit, an epiphany,” (Downing 78) and Persephone came when called (66), then, according to Walter Otto, “What was involved in the Mysteries was an epiphany: ‘the real presence of the supernatural’” (qtd in Downing, 66). Otto describes the mysteries thus:
The queen of the underworld is present. And Demeter . . . . not only as majestic figures demanding reverence, but as . . . creating and suffering powers of the living moment which also encompasses death. Without death there can be no life . . . . The mystai are witnesses of this event, which in essence is . . . divine presence, realized myth. . . . The Eleusinian [mystai] lived the miracle of intimacy with the goddesses . . . [and were] received into the sphere of their acts and sufferings, into the immediate reality of their sublime beings. [The] vision was no mere looking on. It was sublimation to a higher existence, a transformation of [their] being. . . . And is that not a rebirth?” (qtd in Downing, 66)
The Eleusinian Mysteries transformed initiates through a ritualized death and rebirth, and Persephone was intimately present with them. Can she be present with us, today, in our own journeys through grief and transformation, and our inevitable rebirth?
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Works Cited
Downing, Christine. The Long Journey Home: Re-visioning the Myth of Demeter and Persephone for Our Time. Edited by Christine Downing. Shambhala, 1994.