Revisioning Persephone: A Story of Initiation & Independence

(This post was first shared on Roots of She as What Did You FInd in the Darkness? as part of my Goddess Series last year. I’m sharing it today to give you an idea of the riches that exploring Persephone’s Story can yield. If you want to connect to this beautiful goddess, then I highly recommend that you check out Persephone’s Goddess Guide – just launched yesterday and only £15! Oh, and there’s a prize draw for early-bird buyers. Buy before midnight next Monday and you’ll be entered into a draw for a Trinity Goddess Guidance reading.) 

Persephone is, perhaps, one of the most well-known goddesses of the ancient past. When I speak of her to the women who come to my goddess playshops, they all nod their heads knowingly.

“Ah yes, the daughter of Demeter.”
“The one who was abducted into the Underworld.”
“Isn’t she something to do with the seasons?”

Yes, I tell them. She is the daughter of Demeter who was abducted into the Underworld. And yes, Demeter’s grief for her daughter’s absence is what the ancient Greek’s attributed the change of seasons to.

And yet, there is so much more to her story that we don’t speak of. When her story is retold we focus on the time before her abduction, a time of blissful naivety. And then we tell of the earth cleaving open and swallowing her up whole. And then we don’t speak of her again until the very end of the story. Instead we stay above ground with Demeter as she mourns her daughter’s loss. We discover what happens to the mother when she is separated from her daughter.

It becomes not the story of the maiden, but the story of the grieving mother.

What I invite the women at the playshops, and what I invite you to do here, is to take a deep centering breath and follow Persephone beneath ground. Because I think you’ll find that once you go there, that it looks familiar. After all, we’ve all been there at some point in our lives when we made that break from childhood into adulthood. And that break is very rarely managed without spending some time in the darkened shadows of the Underworld…

So what happens to Persephone following her abduction? The version that I tell (and there are many many versions to choose from), sees Persephone wandering around in the dark labyrinthine pathways of the Underworld. There is no light to see by and no sense of comfortable familiarity to give her strength. She stumbles along mile after mile after mile, lost and disorientated.

And then, after a while, she begins to make sense of her surroundings. She gains a deep and abiding sense of direction. She develops a grounded and absolute knowledge concerning her own identity. She finds herself in the darkness. It is with this new found sense of self that she steps into her role as Queen of the Underworld and takes her place to reign beside her husband Hades. She becomes sovereign.

When she is “rescued” by Hermes, the messenger god sent by Zeus under petition from Demeter, she steps above ground a different being from the one who departed so many months before.

She has made the transition from girl to woman.

So, you see, Persephone’s story isn’t the same as Demeter’s story, rather Persephone’s story is one of initiation into adulthood, into a strong independent sense of self, into sovereignty. Now, when she takes leave of the land above ground to descend below, she becomes the guide for lost souls. Familiar with this dark space and the twisting, turning passageways below the realm of conscious thought, she takes care of the lost and helps them find their way back to themselves again.

I’d like for you to reflect for a moment or two on how you experienced your initiation into adulthood. And instead of focusing on what is lost from that experience, which is something so many of us find the most natural aspect to focus on, I want you to focus on what you gained. What did you find in the darkness and how are you using that today to help others?

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