Miscellaneous Myths; Hades and Persephone

Okay, let's not kid ourselves here. Relationships in Greek mythology are almost unilaterally really bad. Zeus and Hera get some flack for Zeus' non-stop adultering with extremely unwilling mortals, and Hera subsequently punishing the innocent mortals involved, but that's got nothing on the story of their actual marriage, which I will not be recounting here because it is so far from consensual there is no way for me to be funny about it. And far from consensual is a recurring theme in the mythos. Zeus, Poseidon, and Apollo especially tend to default to kidnapping when a pre-mortal catches their eye, sometimes combined with their whole divine shapeshifting dealio to trick or coerce those mortals into banging them. If the mortal is lucky, they survive the process and gain some superpowers or kick off a lineage of heroes. If they're not, they usually die horribly. Some of Apollo's famous lovers die tragically after a fulfilling personal relationship with him, but most of them die tragically trying to outrun him. That is straight up f***ed, and everybody knows it. Check almost any Olympian god's list of lovers, and you'll usually find at least one character who super didn't want to be on that list. Yes, even your favorite. Yes, even Olympian soft boy Dionysus. And I will be the first to admit that I gloss over a lot of this stuff in my videos. And I do that because it makes me incredibly uncomfortable. Can you blame me? It's not like I'm the only one. I grew up with a freaking picture book that told me Zeus was a cool guy who had a lot of cool kids that did cool stuff. I watched a Disney movie about these people. I don't have an easy time reconciling the fact that these shining, heroic figures that inspired so many incredible stories were characterized as absolutely garbage in several very key ways. And when I do talk about that stuff, it feels disingenuous to talk about anything else as if that first thing isn't very much a deal-breaker for finding the characters heroic or compelling. Basically every modern retelling or reimagining of Greek mythology heavily sanitizes the stories in one way or another. The Greek pantheon gets given the same treatment as most beloved problematic celebrities. We love it for the stories it gave us, and we pretend not to notice the part where it won't stop assaulting underage fans because that behavior doesn't fit the image we have of it. And that's because we, as a collective audience, are primed to think of gods as good guys. And good guys don't do that kind of thing. That'd make them bad guys. And that is exactly why only one Greek god gets consistently held responsible for these problematic behaviors. None other than Hades, lord of the dead and unjustified Satan analog. Because of our social biases, most of which come from a pop culture understanding of Christianity, which is the same source for our gods are necessarily good thing, a modern audience starts off primed to hate this guy. Lord of the underworld? We all know what that means! Cartoon Lucifer, king of hell, token evil divinity, blatant bad guy, easy peasy. And he kidnapped his wife? What an asshole! No wonder nobody hangs out with this guy. Man, what a jerk. Anyway, I just love Apollo. He's the hottest thing since hotness. And isn't it tragic how many of his true loves die? Wonder why that keeps happening. When retelling or reinterpreting ancient stories in a modern context, we almost always end up cherry-picking the parts that make the most sense to our modern worldview and sensibilities, and working around the parts that suffer from the worst of the culture clash. Ancient Greece was pretty cool about a lot of stuff, but women, for example, were not on that list. So from a modern perspective, when we look back at these original tellings, it's very difficult to see Zeus doing his thing and conclude anything other than that the king of the gods is an omnipotent serial rapist who leaves a trail of shattered lives and bastard children in his wake, and this pantheon is a ******* nightmare. But that is not the perspective a contemporary Athenian would have had, it's not the impact the contemporary storytellers would have wanted to produce, and it is not the image most modern writers want to attach to their sky-father-king-of-the-gods hero character. The idea that gods are supposed to be good is comparatively new. For the ancient Greeks, gods were reflections of what was true, rather than what was ideal or morally right. Ancient Greece was terrible to women, so that was reflected in the gods. But to us, and our pervasive pop-culture Christianity, deities and divinity-adjacent figures are thought of more like paragons, idealized representations of goodness and virtue. So when we try and apply that moralized perspective to the Greek gods, we get some serious cognitive dissonance. So the adaptations usually end up buffing it out. Sure, in all but the most squeaky-clean versions, Zeus is usually still cheating on Hera, which from our societal perspective is typically seen as a much more forgivable crime, especially if you also rewrite Hera to be as deliberately unlikable as possible, but most of Zeus' trysts get rewritten as affairs of the heart, because those are almost universally seen as significantly less bad than the non-consensual alternative, a distinction that did not exist in ancient Greece. Among other things, ancient Greek art used a lot of stock poses to signify major story beats, and there was literally no distinction between the stock pose for kidnapping and for marriage. Same result, same concept. What registers as an unforgivable crime to our eyes wasn't even recognized in the culture it came from. This specific culture clash is pretty significant, which is why this is the part that mostly gets ignored, sanitized, or otherwise rewritten for modern audiences. I mean, unless you're Hades. Because **** him, right? We already hate that guy on principle. There's no need to clean up his image so a modern audience will like him. In fact, maybe it's better if we make him deliberately worse, just so people know who they should be rooting against. So, with that lengthy and spicy preamble out of the way, let's talk about Hades and Persephone. Now, these two show up off and on throughout the mythology, but their best-known myth, the story of how they got married, is recounted in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, written sometime around the mid-600s BCE. This is pretty much the only detailed source we have for this myth, although references to Persephone's abduction pop up in broad terms in the Theogony and the general folklore. The hymn begins with Persephone chilling in a flower field when the ground splits open, Hades erupts from the earth in a chariot, grabs her, and dives back underground. The narrator helpfully informs us that this abduction was sponsored and ordered by Zeus, Persephone's father, because Hades was in love with Persephone but Zeus didn't think Demeter would approve, so he told him, Nah, just kidnap her, never fails for me. Demeter, of course, panics when she realizes Persephone's gone and tears off in a fury looking for her. Nobody has any idea where she might be until Demeter runs into Hecate, the Chthonic goddess of magic, who tells her she didn't see anything, but she heard Persephone being abducted. The goddesses continue searching together and eventually seek out Helios, Titan of the Sun, who, from his lofty vantage point, conveniently saw everything. He tells Demeter that Persephone was taken by Hades, but the blame is all on Zeus, who approved the kidnapping and gave Persephone to Hades as his wife. So this isn't really a kidnapping so much as it is an arranged marriage. Demeter is furious, but Helios tells her, Hey, she could do a lot worse for a son-in-law. Hades is a pretty cool dude, and as king of the underworld, his divine domain is nothing to sneeze at. As firstborn son of Kronos, the world was his by birthright, and even if there's a bit of a delay, everyone becomes his subject eventually. Hades is basically the best husband Persephone could ever hope for, but that's pretty cold comfort for Demeter, who evidently didn't want Persephone getting married at all. She takes a bit of personal time off and disguises herself as an old woman, and ends up getting a part-time job as a nurse to the royal family of Eleusis. Fun fact, a major cult center of Demeter and Persephone that we'll talk about more later. Demeter cares for the baby prince Demophon in her own unique way, by setting him on fire. Don't freak out, it's totally cool. She's just burning away his mortality little by little, making him more and more godlike as he grows. But one unlucky night, his mother Metanira spots Demeter setting her baby on fire and freaks out, disrupting the ritual and pissing off Demeter something fierce, which at this point is becoming a running theme. Demeter reveals her true identity and orders them to build her a temple as an apology, and when they do, Demeter takes up residence in her fancy new chateau. But she's still really pissed off and sad about Persephone, so she sits back and has a nice little sulk about it for a while. It's okay, sometimes you just gotta get it out of your system. One little problem, though. Demeter is responsible for all plant growth. Grain, fruit, vegetables, the works. Livid at the loss of her daughter, Demeter stops the plants from growing, shrouding the world in eternal winter, and straight up killing quite a lot of people. Now, I think we can all agree that people are very important. After all, without people, we wouldn't have any divine sacrifices! So the Ice Age and the mass casualties draw the attention of Zeus, who notices Demeter seems really upset for some strange reason. He sends Iris, goddess of the rainbow, to summon Demeter, but she ain't budging. Zeus realizes this might be a problem, and sends the other gods to try and convince Demeter to stop, with offerings, gifts, anything. But none of those things are Persephone, so Demeter is unmoved. Desperate to escape the consequences of his actions, Zeus sends Hermes to Hades to see if he can convince him to let Persephone return to the surface. Hermes scoots down to the underworld and finds the couple… well, this part of the text is a little bit garbled, but basically, Hades and Persephone are hanging out, and Persephone seems kinda bummed out and missing her mom. Hermes explains the whole Demeter-murdering-everyone situation, and Hades is like, oh balls, that doesn't sound good, yeah, no Persephone, absolutely go and talk to her. He also takes a minute to ask Persephone not to be sad. As his wife, she'll be a queen of queens, ruler of the dead and highest among the goddesses, and meanwhile, he will work to be the best husband he can be for her. Overjoyed, Persephone prepares to leave for the surface and see her mom again. But before we pat Hades on the back too hard, he does get worried that Persephone might never come back to him, so he sneaks her a few pomegranate seeds to bind her to the underworld. How that works, exactly, isn't really explained, mostly because this part of the only manuscript that preserves this hymn is actually torn. Gotta love those primary sources. Anyway, when the signal fuzzes back into focus, Hermes and Persephone are explaining to Demeter that Persephone can't permanently leave the underworld, presumably because of the whole pomegranate situation, so she'll have to split her time between Demeter and Hades. Demeter's just happy to have her back, and stops the whole killing-everybody thing, producing spring for the first time. Zeus, finally having the audacity to show his face, confirms that Persephone will need to spend roughly one-third of the year in the underworld. The exact fraction varies from telling to telling, but broadly, when she's not around, Demeter gets all bummed again and stops letting the plants grow as a fun callback to that time she nearly killed the entire planet, explaining the seasonal cycle very handily. With our status quo firmly established, the hymn ends. Now, there's a few surprising things about this story. For one thing, the hymn itself goes out of its way to absolve Hades of all responsibility except for the pomegranate bit. Everything else is on Zeus as father of the bride and authorizer-slash-orderer of the kidnapping. Hades as wicked villainous kidnapper is a later interpretation, unsupported by the original framing. And perhaps more surprisingly, Persephone's role in the coming of spring is fully incidental. It's Demeter bringing the world back to life. Which means, functionally, Persephone isn't the goddess of spring. Spring is Demeter's job. The only thing Persephone is explicitly the goddess of is the underworld. And if we go looking through the rest of the mythology, we only find more evidence for this. The Theogony refers to the couple as Stalwart Hades and Dread Persephone. The Iliad does the same thing. Hades gets a few anecdotes but is mostly referred to obliquely when the text calls the underworld the House of Hades. Meanwhile, Persephone gets name-dropped as Dread Persephone on the regular. In the Odyssey, when Odysseus travels to the underworld and is tormented by ghosts, he assumes Persephone must be responsible for their actions. None of this lines up tonally with innocent flower goddess dragged into the underworld. Persephone is a straight-up queen of the dead, and if we dig a little deeper, things start looking even weirder. First of all, when we do our standard dive into Mycenaean records, we find that we have no actual evidence that Hades predates Ancient Greece. And that's weird, because we have plenty of evidence that Demeter and Persephone do. Both of them are referenced in Mycenaean Linear B texts under various titles, And, uh, remember that. We'll come back to it later. Zeus and Poseidon also have clear Mycenaean counterparts, but not Hades. And that wouldn't be super weird if it weren't for the fact that the story of Persephone's descent into the underworld also seems to predate Ancient Greece. And, by extension, Hades. Now, just because we cannot find his name in Linear B does not strictly mean that Hades didn't exist in some form. But we do know that in the Mycenaean inscriptions we have, the role of king of the underworld was filled by Poseidon, which would have made Hades' role redundant. And Poseidon is frequently referred to collectively with the wanaso with the epithet wanax, meaning the king, implying that Mycenaean Poseidon, Demeter, and Persephone were worshipped together in some form of trio capacity. So even if the kidnapper figure wasn't Hades back in the Mycenaean days, Demeter and Persephone were still mixed up with the king of the dead. Anyway, the Homeric Hymn is the main written account we have of the abduction myth, but it was also ritually reenacted every year at the Eleusinian Mysteries, an initiation rite for the cult of Demeter and Persephone at Eleusis. We don't know what exactly they entailed, because the whole thing with mystery cults is that they kept their exact rites secret, but the theory is that it was originally derived from an agrarian Mycenaean religious ritual that predates the Greek Dark Age. The central theme of the mystery seemed to be the three-part journey of Persephone, her descent into the underworld, staying in the underworld while Demeter looked for her, and her ascending out of the underworld to reunite with Demeter. Hades had a part in the mystery as it was practiced in ancient Greece, but if it's as old as the theory believes, Hades might not have existed when it started in the Mycenaean Age. And he's not as central to the narrative structure as Persephone and Demeter. He's basically just a walking inciting incident to get Persephone into the underworld in the first place. He might not have been strictly necessary in the Mycenaean version, which is good because as near as we can interpolate, he can't have been in it, or at least not as the character we recognize later. And on top of that, the whole descent into and ascent out of the underworld thing is a very common story structure in Indo-European mythology, as we've talked about with Ishtar, and that base story format does not require an abduction. And that's not the only instance in the mythology where Hades takes a back seat. Persephone and Demeter are central to a very ancient Arcadian mystery cult that doesn't seem to factor in Hades at all. In Arcadia, Demeter and Persephone are collectively referred to as Despoinae, meaning the mistresses, which you may note is quite similar to the Linear B Huanaso two queens title. In Arcadia, Persephone was also individually called Despoina, the mistress. And this gets a bit confusing, because Despoina is sometimes described as distinctly separate from Persephone, and by sometimes, I mean exclusively by Pausinius in the 200s AD, fully 800 years after the Homeric hymns, and apparently by nobody else. Other than him, basically everyone seems to recognize that Despoina is Persephone, but it's hard to say for certain, both because mystery cults keep their secrets, and because Despoina's whole deal was that her true name was forbidden. Only those initiated in her mysteries were allowed to know or speak it. So it might have been Persephone, but we're not allowed to know. The Arcadian mystery cult of the Despoinae is theorized to straight-up predate the Greek-speaking immigrants to the region, so Demeter and Persephone might have originally been the Greekified version of a very ancient duo of spooky eldritch goddesses. Also, fun fact, in Arcadia, Despoina is seen as a child of Demeter and Poseidon rather than Zeus, and more confusingly, everyone involved in that particular story is shaped like a horse. Demeter turns into a horse to outrun Poseidon, Poseidon turns into a horse to chase her down, they have a beautiful horse baby, who later grows into Despoina, aka Persephone. That is too many horses, put those back. But it also does parallel that weird connection we noted between Poseidon and the queens in the Mycenaean version, hmm. There's also more confusion about Persephone's name specifically, because in some parts of the mythology, usually when discussing the time before her abduction, she's referred to as Kore, meaning maiden. Now, unlike Persephone, Kore does occasionally get specifically referenced as a nature goddess. But the other weird thing about that is that Kore is a really vague title. Maiden is the classy translation. It's equally valid to say it just means girl. And that sounds a hell of a lot like a vague pseudonym you use when you can't say their name, like in the case of Despoina, and more notably, Hades. See, underworld gods were scary as hell, pun intended, and it was generally believed that calling them by name was a really good way to get their attention, which was a scary bad thing. So rather than saying Hades' name outright, he'd mostly get called by epithets or euphemisms, like the one with many names, or the one who receives many guests, which has the bonus benefit of sounding raw as hell. So we've got Persephone, which is as near as we can tell her actual name. But we've also got two extremely vague but very distinct titles, Kore and Despoina, that seem to have been pseudonyms originally arising from people specifically playing it safe and trying not to get her attention. Pre-Socratic philosopher Empedocles actually calls her Nestis, which supposedly means the fasting one. All these vague nicknames and pseudonyms lend some pretty significant credence to the idea that Persephone's oldest version, whatever it was, was really, really scary. Like, don't speak her name, you might get her attention scary. And the fact that Persephone has potentially over a thousand years of secret mystery history while the first concrete confirmation we have of Hades' existence is the Iliad, is actually kind of reflected in how they're characterized in the actual mythos. Because Hades doesn't actually do much. He rules the underworld and shows up whenever someone visits, but he doesn't, like, go out and do stuff. He's pretty passive most of the time. Even in his own core myth, he takes a backseat to the core mother-daughter drama. Persephone and Demeter have so much going on, we literally can't tell how many other goddesses and chthonic rituals might be caught up in their personal mythology. But Hades is exactly what it says on the box. He feels simpler. Now, this might be because the underworld kind of creeped the ancient Greeks out, so they avoided talking, thinking, or writing about it in case they attracted its attention. But while that would explain Hades' broadly inoffensive and generally lawful characterization, it wouldn't really explain why Persephone, also a dread underworld deity, is disproportionately so much more complicated than him. Now, it's impossible to be sure about almost anything about this, but my guess, and this is just me theorizing, is that Persephone as Dread Queen of the Underworld is probably her oldest characterization, and all her other names and versions came from the deliberate vagueness people used when talking about her because of how scary she was. The flowery Kore spring goddess stuff seems to have been a later retcon to give her some pre-underworld lore that wasn't reflected in how she was actually worshipped. And if I can get a little wilder in my speculation, I think Hades might have started off as an offshoot of Mycenaean Poseidon. Now, as we've discussed, Mycenaean Poseidon was king of the underworld, and he had an unclear but definitely extant connection to Demeter and Persephone. In fact, in some Minoan and Mycenaean cults, there was a very widespread duality between the paired figures of a god of the underworld and a goddess of nature. And in the Mycenaean version, that god of the underworld role was filled by Poseidon, and the goddess of nature seems to have been Demeter, although there is some debate over that. The parallels keep popping up. But after the Greek Dark Age, Poseidon was definitely not the king of the underworld anymore, and that connection to the Despoini was mostly lost, and Hades got it instead. So this might be another Hermes situation, where Hermes started off as a specialized epithet for Pan before getting carved off into his own god. If Poseidon's king of the underworld duties got peeled off during the Dark Age and formed a new god filling an ancient role, that'd account for the discrepancy and why Hades is curiously absent from the pre-Dark Age sources, and barely factors into the Homeric stories either. It'd also potentially indicate that in the pre-Dark Age roots of the abduction story, Poseidon filled some variation of the role that later belonged to Hades. This is 100% my own crack theory, though. I cannot find anyone else making this connection, and there is no ironclad textual evidence to support this. We are fully in the thumbtacks and string zone here. But if there's one thing that we can definitely take away from this, it's that this is a uniquely snarled part of the mythos. There's a ton of moving parts, epithets, and pseudonyms making everything confusing. This is not helped by the fact that there's also a lot of widely accepted misinformation about the story in general, and Persephone specifically. On one side, there's the misinterpretation that Persephone's abduction was a horrifyingly violent assault, which stems from the fact that the ancient word for kidnap has taken on much more unpleasant connotations over the centuries, which was not its original application in the story. And on the other end of the misconception spectrum, there's the fairly modern idea that in the original version of the myth, Persephone willingly walked into the underworld and the kidnapping thing was a later retcon to strip away Persephone's agency and girl power. I trace this telling all the way back to the archaic era of 1978, when author Charlene Spretnak wrote Lost Goddesses of Early Greece, a collection of pre-Hellenic myths, which was intended to make the mythology more palatable for her young daughter since she didn't want to expose her to all the kidnapping and sexual assault. This book attempted to interpolate what a theoretical pre-patriarchal no-kidnapping version of the myth might have looked like, but it has no sources because there are no pre-Hellenic pre-kidnapping sources for this story. We just don't have them. They don't exist. So this is fanfic. And that's fine. People have been writing Greek mythology fanfic since before there was Greek mythology, but it is definitely not the original version because we straight up do not know the original version. At this point, we'll probably never know the original version. This book was then later adapted by Marjorie Graham, without crediting Spretnak, by the way, into a beautifully illustrated retelling that advertised itself as the much older pre-patriarchal version of the myth and what is thought to be the goddess-worshipping bronze age version of the tale, which is the nice way of saying that this is completely unsourced and I hate it. See, this is how misinformation spreads, people. This is cytogenesis in action. Cite your sources or admit you don't have any. But myth conceptions aside, at its core, the story of Hades and Persephone is surprisingly compelling. They are 100% the most functional canon relationship in Greek mythology. Among other things, Persephone is in the extremely rare position of sharing equal power and authority with her husband. They also never cheat on each other, and whenever someone tries to intrude on their relationship by kidnapping or seducing one of them, the other one does something really nasty to the intruder. This is all just canon. We don't even need to sweep any indiscretions under the rug. It's just there. And that's why this story is so incredibly popular with modern writers. There are at this point dozens of reimaginings of their relationship, and while some of them lean into the Hades is Satan angle for some easy villainy, most of them focus on the strange and contradictory beauty of the ultimate pastel goth love story. Their relationship started with an arranged marriage kidnapping in a near-apocalypse and seamlessly transitioned into the most functional love story in the entire mythos. That is a fascinating scenario for writers to explore, from Lore Olympus reframing the controversial parts of their love story as a matter of unreliable narrators, to supergiant games as Hades painting Hades and Persephone as deceiving the other gods with the story of the original myth, to Hadestown playing up how strained and tragic their love has become over the years, there's tons of complexities to explore. This story has the worst rep out of any Greek myth because of the whole Hades is bad guy bias we start with, but when we pull back the curtain of societal preconceptions and look at the real story as the ancient Greeks told it, we find a very strange and surprisingly loving relationship between two very different people. It's beautiful. And it's basically the only relationship in Greek mythology that is actively less horrifying when you read the original version. But all justifications and recontextualization aside, don't kidnap your loved ones. Not even if their dad tells you to. We know better now.