Demeter & Persephone

Right before I found out I was pregnant, I was reading a lot about Demeter and Persephone. I’ve been writing a novel about mothers and daughters – among other things – and was fascinated by a myth in which the love between the two can literally bring the world to a halt. My mom has always loved Demeter & Persephone, too, and I’d call her up after every chapter and we’d chatter for an hour about what it meant.

In one of my favorite books, How to Suppress Women’s Writing, Joanna Russ talks about how you can suppress a story even if it gets published – by undercutting it, discrediting or downplaying it - and argues that the stakes of who gets to tell stories and have them taken seriously couldn’t be higher, because they are how we establish and enshrine who is human, whose experiences are sacred enough to be literature. Demeter and Persephone affirmed my belief that the dynamics of mothers and daughters are not just important, but epic, spiritual, with universal lessons to be learned from them. 

I took notes as I read. I look at the notes a lot, because it’s one of the only records I have of who I was right before I found out I was pregnant, and I wonder about her. How different she seems. A woman from a different world. 

“HYMN OF DEMETER,” she wrote, and underneath it, “who is revered and welcomed, who is ignored, who is driven out/met with hatred.” And underneath that, in green ink, “something you love taken from you suddenly, without warning.”

She drew a picture of something archeologists discovered in the old palace of Phaistos – a depiction of “an armless and legless deity growing out of the ground, and her head turns to a large flower.” And underneath that drawing she wrote, the idea that buried seeds bloom, what looks like death may be rebirth. 

On the next page of the notebook, from what must have been a few weeks later, there is a list of baby names.

It might be a kind of torture, going back through memories like that. But I wonder. In ancient Greece, there were massive cults devoted to Demeter and Persephone, who performed secret rituals to honor them, and the rituals always followed the same cycle: descent and separation (Persephone kidnapped and taken to the underworld), the search (Demeter tearing the world apart to find her daughter), ascent and reunion (mother and daughter find each other again). They acted it out every year, over and over again. Torn apart and reunited. Torn apart and reunited. 

Demeter stopped the entire world from growing. She was ready to let every person alive starve to save her daughter. There is a power here we are talking about that does not fit inside any conception of time, or sanity. There is only the feeling that you would burn up the whole world for the thing you love.

In those days – those days before I knew, those days I was a different woman – I copied down a lot of lines from the Hymn of Demeter, but there was one I liked so much, I pasted it at the top of my novel manuscript, trying it out as an epigraph. Perfect, I remember thinking. It’s an early line – the one in which Persephone is swallowed up into the underworld.

And the earth, full of roads leading every which way, 

opened up under her.