Demeter and PersephoneQuintessential Mother and Daughter

Demeter Persephone

Takes care of grain // takes care of child Kore: the “Girl”

(the earth’s fertility // women’s fertility, daughter and bride

Cf. Thesmophoria) queen of the underworld

(symbolically “dead” to her

mother)

Demeter, Triptolemus, and Persephone

Bas-relief (Eleusis 5th c. BCE)

The Rape of PersephoneVergina, Tomb, ca 350 BC

(Marriage as a form of abduction/rape)

Hades and Persephone

Bernini (1621)

The Rape of PersephoneBryson Burroughs

The Homeric Hymn to Demeter is connected to The Eleusinian Mysteries (located in Eleusis, near Athens)

The Eleusinian Mysteries

Initiation into the Mysteries (at least by the classical period 480-332 BCE) was open to all,

including women, slaves and non-Greeks

Persephone/Proserpina eats pomegranate seeds (a food not normally eaten by the gods) in the underworld and gets a taste of mortality.

Eating the food of the underworld (a symbolization of her consummated marriage) binds her to her new condition as wife.

Both the pomegranate and the wife bleed.

What does Demeter finally agree to eat in her grief over her daughter’s loss?

KYKEON: a drink made of barley meal (i.e., cultivated grain), water, and herbs.

In other words, Demeter agrees to eat human food, because in the depth of her grief she comes to experience a part of their mortal condition: pain and loss. She too, like her daughter, literally gets a taste of mortality.

Demeter and Persephone’s Gift of Immortality: Offering a bridge between the 3 (normally separate) realms

Demeter - on Mount Olympos

Rites of Eleusinian Mysteries - on Earth

Persephone - in the Underworld

Triptolemos is Demeter’s first initiate:

She teaches him both agriculture

and the “secret rites” that lead to

Immortality.

Persephone and Triptolemos (riding a divine chariot to spread knowledge of agriculture throughout the earth)