Few could walk my path, for it is soft as a petal, yet cruel as death.
I have not been completely honest with everyone, including myself–I have tried to bypass and pretend, to keep my smiling mask in place. I wanted to be perfect like everyone perceived me to be; that the bad things, the whispers, the rumors, did not scar me. I did not want anyone to see the vines of thorns constricting me. Be better, you are fine, keep going, don’t stop all things that whispered in the back of my head while I tried to slog through a mess. I thought that if I just ran a little faster, smiled a little wider, or posed just right then maybe I would believe the lies I was telling everyone else. That is when Persephone found me. She saw me crouched over the shattered pieces of my mask trying to put all the pieces back into the original form before anyone noticed. She knelt down with me and pulled my hands away from the shards before I could cut myself. Together we looked over what I would call my brokenness, my lack of perfection. She told me that this is just a phase–that by virtue of a woman’s natural cycle, we each have the capacity to morph and flow through life in such cycles. It is when we pressure ourselves and perceive pressure from others that we try to control the flow, that is when we fall. Life is a cycle where we go from the time of our safe meadows to uncharted underworlds, and then back again. We cannot bypass an underworld by sprinting to a new meadow. Persephone’s story and wisdom can guide us through this.
An Ode to Persephone
When we think of Persephone there are a few things that might ping in your memory. She is the wife of Hades, daughter of Demeter, maiden of spring, queen of the underworld. All of these qualifiers are true, but when we look at the myths her story is not truly her own. She is revered by some, pitied by others, and misunderstood by even more. *I need to pause briefly here to put a trigger warning for mentions of abduction, rape, and sexual assault*
One day Persephone was picking flowers with her friends. She was dazzled by a narcissus flower and reached out for it when suddenly, Hades erupted from the earth, snatching her away and taking her deep to the Underworld. Persephone screamed and “…cried with a piercing voice,” (“Homeric Hymn” line 20). This version, as the “Homeric Hymn to Demeter” tells us is the most common and agreed upon story of Persephone, however this is not even her story.
When Hades takes his bride to the Underworld, Persephone’s mother, wreaks havoc on Earth refusing to allow any crops to grow and killing many mortals. The entire mid-section of the hymn details Demeter’s journey to find her daughter, but leaving out the crux of what happens to Persephone below. Writers have filled in the blanks on these events based on the nature of her entrance to the Underworld (i.e. assault, coercion, rape). A.E. Stalling’s poem, “Hades Welcomes His Bride” offers a dark and chilling account of what she endured. However, we cannot truly know what Persephone went through as she never tells her side of the story. Instead, her agency is further reduced until she is a victim, a helpless maiden. I do not aim to discount her suffering, rather I hope to empower her to share her story and her tools for self-empowerment in darkness. As the author Ellie Mackin Roberts writes in her (2020) novel Heroines of Olympus, “In her journey from barren, aggrieved and grieving maiden to ruler over the dead, Persephone was an emotionally complex goddess who is often reduced to the title of Hades’s wife or Demeter’s daughter” (p. 181). From her journey into her own sovereignty, we can glean some guidance–no matter who tries to tell your story or take your power, so long as you know your story you will never lose yourself in the Underworld.
This is merely an introduction to Persephone and the stories she has to tell. As I process more with her I will share with you all.
The Affliction of Being Female 