Persephone

Persephone is the daughter of Zeus and Demeter, and in her virginal aspect she is simply called Kore, the Maiden. The Homeric Hymn to Demeter recounts that she was gathering flowers in the plain of Nisa with the daughters of Ocean when she bent down to pick a narcissus that the Earth had made sprout as a trap: the ground opened and Hades emerged with his chariot to take her away, with the consent of Zeus, who had promised his brother the girl without telling her mother. Demeter searched for her for nine days with lit torches, without eating or washing, until Helios revealed what had happened to her. The location of the abduction in Enna, in Sicily, is a later tradition, spread especially by the Latin poets.

Faced with Demeter's refusal to let the grain grow, Zeus ordered the girl to be returned. But Hades gave her some pomegranate seeds to eat before releasing her, and whoever tastes the food of the underworld remains bound to it: therefore Persephone must return every year to her husband. The sources disagree on the number of seeds and the resulting distribution, between a third of the year and half. The popular equation between her absence and winter owes much to the rereading of the Roman poets; in Mediterranean Greece the dead time of the field is the dry summer, when the grain is already stored. Her emblems are the pomegranate, the torch, the narcissus and the ear of wheat.

Next to Hades she rules the dead, and she does so with her own authority: it is she who grants Orpheus to take Eurydice with him, and before whom Psyche must present herself in the myth of Apuleyo. In the Mysteries of Eleusis, celebrated for almost two millennia, mother and daughter were the two goddesses, and the central revelation was offered to the initiates as a promise about the destiny after death; the secret was kept so well that even today it is unknown what it consisted of. The Orphic gold lamellae found in tombs in Italy and Crete instruct the deceased on what to say to the queen to be admitted among her own. This double nature, the Maiden who returns and the Sovereign who judges, explains that her figure survived Antiquity as an image of the cycle between life and death.