Demeter

Written by Mark Cartwright

Once the temple was completed, Demeter withdrew from the world and lived inside it; at the same time, she created a great drought to convince the other gods to release Persephone from Hades. As the drought claimed ever more victims, crops withered (illustrating Persephone’s mastery over agriculture), and there was so little food that mortals could not even offer their sacrifices to the gods, Zeus finally persuaded Hades to release his ill-gotten bride. Before giving her up though, the wily Hades put a pomegranate kernel in the girl’s mouth, knowing its divine taste would compel her to return to him. In other versions of the myth, Persephone could have been released if she had not eaten anything in the underworld during her captivity, but at the last moment, Hades gave her a pomegranate seed. Finally, as a compromise, it was decided that Persephone would be released but that she would have to return to Hades for one-third of the year (or in other accounts one half). In gratitude for the return of her daughter, Demeter was said to have sent the prince Demophon to teach humanity the cultivation of grain and other tricks useful for agriculture.

The story of Demeter and Persephone was perhaps symbolic of the changing seasons and the perennial change from life to death, to life once more, or, in other words, the changes from summer to winter and the return of life in spring. An alternative view of more modern historians is that the disappearance of Persphone is symbolic of the practice of burying seeds in the summer so that they did not dry out before they could be sown in the autumn. The cycle became one of the rituals of the sacred Eleusinian Mysteries; indeed the symbols of the cult were ears of grain and a torch — symbolic of Demeter’s search for Persephone and a reminder that the rituals at Eleusis were carried out at night.

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