From Manual of Mythology, by Alexander S. Murray; Revised Edition, Philadelphia: David McKay, Publisher, 1895; pp. 81-84.
[81]
Fig. 10. — Pluto and Proserpina.
(See Fig. 10), or Persephoneia, also called Kora by the Greeks, and by the Romans Libera, was a daughter of Zeus 82 and Demeter, and the wife of Aïdes (Hades), the marriage being childless. Struck with the charms of her virgin beauty, Hades had obtained the sanction of his brother Zeus to carry her off by force. While she was wandering in a flowery meadow not far from Ætna in Sicily, plucking and gathering the narcissus, the god, as the myth relates, suddenly rose from a dark hole in the earth near by, seized the lovely flower-gatherer, and made off with her to the under-world in a chariot drawn by four swift horses, Hermes (Mercury) leading the way. Persephone resisted, begged and implored gods and men to help her; but Zeus approving the transaction let it pass. In vain Demeter searched for her daughter, traversing every land, or, as other myths say, pursuing the escaped Hades with her yoke of winged serpents, till she learned what had taken place from the all-seeing and all-hearing god of the sun.
“What ails her that she comes not home?
Demeter seeks her far and wide,
And gloomy-browed doth ceaseless roam
From many a morn till eventide.
‘My life, immortal though it be,
Is naught!’ she cried, ‘for want of thee,
Persephone! Persephone!’ ”
IGELOW
Then she entreated with tears the gods to give her daughter back, and this they promised to do provided she had not as yet tasted of anything in the under-world. But by the time that Hermes, who had been sent by Zeus to ascertain this, reached the under-world, she had eaten the half of a pomegranate which Hades had given her as an expression of love. For this reason the return of Persephone to the upper world for good became impossible. She must remain the wife of Hades. An arrangement was, however, come to, by which she was to be allowed to stay with her mother during half the year on earth and among the gods of Olympus, while the 83 other half of the year was to be spent with her husband below.
In this myth of Persephone-Kora, whose father was Zeus, the god of the heavens, which by their warmth and rain produce fertility, and whose mother was Demeter, the maternal goddess of the fertile earth, we see that she was conceived as a divine personification of the process of vegetation — in summer appearing beside her mother in the light of the upper world, but in the autumn disappearing, and in winter passing her time, like the seed, under the earth with the god of the lower world. The decay observed throughout nature in autumn, the suspension of vegetation in winter, impressed the ancients, as it impresses us and strikes modern poets, as a moral of the transitoriness of all earthly life; and hence the carrying off of Persephone appeared to be simply a symbol of death. But the myth at the same time suggests hope, and proclaims the belief that out of death springs a new life, but apparently not a productive life, and that men carried off by the god of the under-world will not for ever remain in the unsubstantial region of the shades. This at least appears to have been the sense in which the myth of Persephone and her mother was presented to those initiated into the Eleusinian Mysteries, which, as we have remarked before, held out assuring hopes of the imperishableness of human existence, and of an eternal real life to follow after death.
As queen of the shades Persephone had control over the various dreaded beings whose occupation, like that of the us, was to beguile men to their death, or like that of the >us, to avenge murder and all base crimes. She shared the honors paid to her husband in Greece, lower Italy, and especially in the island of Sicily. Temples of great beauty were erected for her in the Greek Locri, and at Cyzicus on the Propontis. The principal festivals held in her honor 84 in Greece occurred in the autumn or in spring, the visitors at the former appearing dressed in mourning to commemorate her being carried off by Hades (Pluto), while at the spring festival all wore holiday garments to commemorate her return.
There remains, however, the important phase of her character in which she returns to the upper world and is associated with her mother Demeter. But this it will be more convenient to consider in the next chapter. The attributes of Persephone were ears of corn and poppies. Her attribute as the wife of Hades was a pomegranate; her sacrifice consisted of cows and pigs. In works of art she has a more youthful appearance, but otherwise closely resembles her mother Demeter. The Roman Proserpina, though the name is clearly the same as Persephone, appears to have had no hold on the religious belief of the Roman nation, their goddess of the shades being Libitina, or Lubentina.
[For my favorite use of this myth, see The Infernal Marriage, by Benjamin Disraeli on Elfinspell.com. — Elf.Ed.]