maiden. daughter. wife. queen.
flowers. earth. chasms. rebirth.
The founding myth of my creative life is Persephone. And, like all good mythic or allegorical characters, there are hundreds of versions of her.
Daughter of Demeter and Zeus. Wife of Hades. Queen of the underworld.
She is a duel deity that embodies intriguing opposites. While she rules over the dead, she is also the daughter of an earthbound goddess of fertility.
The young goddess is kidnapped by Hades and held in the underworld for six months of the year. During the time of her katabasis, or descent, her mother remains above the ground in a state of constant grief, causing the winter months. Her return to the earthbound land of the living heralds the coming of spring.
This mother-daughter myth appears in many books on my own bookshelf. I found them in the middle-grade novel Percy Jackson and The Last Olympian (2009). In Neil Gaiman’s Coraline (2002) she is a protagonist held between the worlds of fantasy and reality. I thought back to the scene in Philip Pullman’s The Amber Spyglass (2000) where Lyra guides the souls from the world of the dead into the light. Helen Oyeyemi’s The Opposite House (2007) explores Persephone’s displacement through the lens of migration and maternal identity.
I love Shane Jones’s novella Light Boxes (2009), where Persephone is the child in a village caught in a permanent winter at the hands of its despotic leader ‘February’. I also love the Lore Olympus series, which explores the complex relationship between Hades and Persephone through the difficult-to-excuse nature of her abduction through to her becoming a Queen on her own terms.
Celebrated in ritual spaces and times secreted away from society as part of the Eleusinian Mysteries, Persephone personifies and celebrates the transitions between the seasons and between our world and the underworld.
In one of of her many exquisite poetic explorations of the entangled meaning(s) surrounding Persephone, Louise Glück writes the following:
As is well known, the return of the beloved
does not correct
the loss of the beloved: Persephone
returns home
stained with red juice like
a character in Hawthorne—
I am not certain I will
keep this word: is earth
"home" to Persephone? Is she at home, conceivably,
in the bed of the god? Is she
at home nowhere? Is she
a born wanderer, in other words
an existential
replica of her own mother, less
hamstrung by ideas of causality?
The myth of Persephone is an inherently liminal one. She has always stuck me as a changeling goddess, shifting our expectations of specific societal and religious roles. She moves between spaces and calls into question the nature of thresholds and binaries.
It is this that draws me to her.
In choosing Persephone as the central character of my own fictional work, I am engaging in the process of mythopoeia: the construction of literary and artistic representations of traditional myths. The term mythopoeia originates in J.R.R. Tolkien’s poem ‘Mythopoeia’, where the author makes the case for using myths to creatively express and examine deeper truths about the world around us. In doing so, we add to the ‘the intricately knotted and ramified history of the branches on the Tree of Tales’.
Alan Garner also emphasises that myth is not merely something to be recorded and preserved in the written word. It should be used as part of a continuous practice of creativity itself:
The element common to all the books is my present-day activity within myth. The difference between that activity and what are usually called “retellings” is that the retellings are stuffed trophies on the wall, whereas I have to bring them back alive.
Myths should be used as a means of interrogating things within the framework of modern life and lived experience. Its key components should be used as part of a practice that is both interpretive and reflective.
My Persephone is a bereaved teenager and her descent is into the mires of her own grief. Her underworld looks very similar to the landscapes of her childhood, but comes apart at the seams where rocks and trees move into the uncanny. She has taught me much about the nature of seasonal liminality. And she continues to teach me about myself.
I see my work with her as part of a tree with many branches that contribute to the evolving myth of the goddess and her mother.
Myths mean different things to different people. I cannot escape writing about Persephone and feel her hold on me as I come to the end of this draft of my novella in a way that tells me we’re not quite done yet.
Love,
Kirsty x
If you enjoy reading about Persephone, you might like this short (strange) short monologue I wrote:
“She moves between spaces and calls into question the nature of thresholds and binaries.”
There is such wisdom and transformational power in this phrase.
I share your fascination with the Persephone myth and really enjoyed this essay. Thank you Kirsty!