I have some sources here if you’re interested. The post itself is a bit one-sided but some of the sources are very interesting. annachibi.tumblr.com/post/73585426166/sources-for-prepatriarchal-persephone
So this ask is perfect because I’ve been having Regrets about not expanding on some stuff in my original post, but it’d been reblogged a few times and I didn’t want to edit, nah mean.
other elements were introduced to the myth as time went on
You’re totally right: myths and beliefs evolved constantly. Bronze Age beliefs were different than Archaic beliefs were different than Classical beliefs. Plus every time, say, some small Greek tribe bumped up against some small near Eastern tribe, they interacted and were influenced and you had all these little mystery cults popping up all over the place. I wrote Greek religion’s “complicated” in my original post to awkwardly paper over that, but you were totally right to smack the piñata. There’s no one unified Greek “canon” mythology, just some versions of stories that stuck around and were more popular than others, which is something we all gotta keep in mind.
For the second part: I mean, I wanna disclaim by saying that this really is more yelling into the void than anything else. In the grand scheme of things to be yellin into the void about, there are totally more important things. I’m not hitting speed dial for Barack. But everyone has stuff they’re passionate about and seriously, I hear the Kill Bill sirens every time I see that post on my dash.
There’s no way to sugarcoat it: the post on “pre-patriarchal Persephone” is not based in widespread academic consensus in Classics, and its sources are not legitimate. Acceptable sources are peer-reviewed and written by Classics PhDs. The sources for this post are literally a book on trends in 19th century mythography by an English PhD (which looks super interesting, by the way, but was clearly not at all intended to support this kind of thing); a book written by an author with an MA in English and American Literature which a reviewer describes as an “illustrated retelling … that will be enjoyed whenever women come together for ritual”; a book which is encouraging me to “Ask yourself the following seasonal question: ‘What wisdom am I bringing with me from the dark of winter?’”; and some internet person named Jan with an unsourced “case text” and her own unsupported analysis. And motherearthpages.com.
These sources aren’t convincing to me. The whole post seems to be an attempt to mold incomplete ancient data to suit modern social justice sensibilities. It’s one thing to use ancient deities to inform your spiritual beliefs or to empower modern feminism—not my thing, but if it’s anyone else’s, more power to you. It’s entirely another to present your findings as something historically plausible, something that deserves cachet like it’s actual academic research.
Like, it’s not just the misinformation. It’s the authoritative, almost dismissive tone of the post. It’s not just that it’s likely wrong—it’s that it’s so tailor-made for the tastes of the Tumblr community, so attractively wrong, that over 5,000 people have been duped and are innocently spreading its wrongness. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the source for original anon ask was informed by this post. It’s the first thing I thought of and I felt mad on anon’s behalf, that they were sent on a wild academic goose chase for something that has no basis in actual scholarship. There’s a lot of interesting stuff being said about Persephone and her origins, but the people we should trust to say it have PhDs in Classics. And maybe more importantly, other classicists who agree with their findings too.
Anyways, I hope I didn’t totally blow my lid here, that pressure cooker’s been rattling on the table for a while now. (I’m not actually Mad in any meaningful way, obviously, haha. This is the internet and I love everyone who’s into classics. Just, you know. Let me explain my passions.) And if I’ve said something wrong, or if any of my classics bros do have good sources for that stuff, please let me know and I’ll post ASAP.
All that aside, there’s so much cool and interesting women’s studies stuff in antiquity that is legit. Like check out the Thesmorphoria. There’s jealously guarded secrets and sacred feminine spaces and reaffirmation of the mother-daughter bond and tossin pigs into pits and beating men for intruding and all this other stuff we barely know about because that’s how well-guarded the secrets were. The mystery cults are full of this kind of stuff for the Fix—we don’t need to rewrite history to find ancient women doing awesome stuff, even in the swampy patriarchal marsh that was classical antiquity.
I am so happy to see this post!
While I like the concept of the whole “pre-patriarchal Persephone” idea, the author of this is correct. Completely. And here’s why…
*warning: I don’t have a PhD in Classics, but I’ve been intensely studying Persephone and her mythology for almost two years, and have been reading the original myths at their source for the majority of my life. I also interpret the myth from the perspective of a feminist. and one who has a very deep respect for the Chthonic Gods.*
First and foremost, I cannot overstate the importance of CONTEXT.
I’ve talked about this before, and still maintain that unless you are viewing this hieros logos (sacred story) through the eyes of its Bronze Age audience, then you’re not really seeing anything at all. So before we continue, let’s just get the rudimentary stuff out of the way first: Persephone was not raped. She was carried away in the traditional manner to be married. That said, let’s get going…
The Minoans were the only “pre-patriarchal” Aegean civilization that we know of.
There is strong evidence that the Etruscans were a little more even keel with gender relations than the Greeks, but they were contemporaries of the Greeks, not the Archaic “pre-patriarchal” that I am going to talk about here. Also, we cannot decode any Etruscan writing, either. I’ll get to that point in a minute.
I believed, as many who spent their teen years studying paganism once believed, that the whole world was once this magical utopia where women and men were equal and women were the holders and protectors of civilization united under the Mother Earth Goddess until those evil Christians/Hebrews/Romans/Greeks/Assyrians/Indo European invaders came in with their Sky Gods and fucked everything up and turned all of civilization and everything they conquered into a patriarchal witch-burning slave camp.
But before the Greeks were the Mycenaeans who were no less a patriarchal civilization than their eventual Classical era descendants. The gods we would most closely recognize as Persephone, Demeter, and Hades were conceived of during their civilization.
Going back another 700 years before that, we had the Minoans who were a matriarchal, likely matrilineal, culture. Unfortunately, the Minoan civilization on Crete was so disconnected from the later civilizations by virtue of space and time and quite possibly natural disaster, that their language is indecipherable. It looks beautiful. Lots of heiroglyphics in the shape of fruits and flowers and fishhooks and shields. Sadly, we cannot read Minoan, we cannot decipher their language and we lack a Rosetta Stone by which to translate their writings. (How I wish we could!) All we know about the Minoan civilization we have discovered through archeology. Beyond that, all we have are suppositions and conjecture.
Note: I am using the Minoans and the Minoans ONLY as they are the civilization for whose existence we have indelible, incontestable proof. We have little to no information about Neolithic Aegean cultures, and anyone supposing that they would automatically be female dominated or oriented is pulling information out of their ass to suit their own needs and desires, however noble or ignoble they may be.
We have lots of pictures. They are on all the pottery, they are on the wall murals and they exist as colorful statues and idols. There is a goddess who bears snakes that we think is the lady of the labyrinth and the underworld, who would be an amalgamation of Ariadne and Persephone. There is a harvest goddess that seems to resemble Rhea and Demeter. But there are unfamiliar goddesses like a bee goddess and harvest goddesses riding together on a chariot, and a mistress of animals. Octopuses are also a pervasive motif on Minoan pottery, and we don’t truly know the meaning of them either.
We also have piles of skulls. Before we start getting all warm and fuzzy about the goddess worshiping Minoans, please also note that the ancient Minoans, as far as we can tell, performed human sacrifice. At least three separate sites have been found that support this as well as some evidence of ritual cannibalism.
If there were clear cut evidence that Persephone was a goddess from the pre-patriarchal civilization predating the Greeks, I would be on it like white on rice. I LOVE the imagined idea that Persephone was an all-powerful figure independent of Hades and Demeter. There is some evidence, conjectural and archaeological from explication of the Homeric Hymn that was an independent underworld goddess before the Eleusinian Mysteries. Heck… I write Persephone as a powerful goddess in RoM, and with good reason.
And here’s why: even without pre-patriarchal imaginings and grandiose leaps of logic, Persephone was extraordinarily powerful. I would go so far as to say that placing her in a pre-patriarchal context, devoid of her greatest challenges and triumphs REDUCES her agency as a goddess and a feminist figure.
In Persephone’s time, women did five things. They were born, they were married, they loomed, they had children, and they died. All were done in their father’s or their husband’s house, which they did not leave for the duration of their lives (unless for very specific festivals, usually those of Dionysos).
But Persephone was a woman who, after being sold to her husband like livestock by her father, made Hades plead with her to stay in the Underworld with him and would give her the title not of consort, but Queen (Homeric Hymn to Demeter, ln. 360-9). Persephone only accepted his offer of marriage (by accepting the stealthily offered pomegranate seeds) after Hades gave her full timai (honor) and a place as ruler of the Underworld (HHtD, ln. 370-4).
Persephone ruled the Underworld visibly as Queen, sought out by heroes throughout the Greek mythos. She was dread Persephone (Iliad, IX, ln. 547, ln. 569; Iliad, X, ln. 473), august Persephone (Odyssey, XXI, ln. 635) and the Iron Queen (Odyssey, book XXI, ln. 241). She was Praxidike, the Exacter of Justice (Orphic Hymn 29, ln. 5). In other words, even though Persephone was a goddess in a man’s world, worshiped in a patriarchal culture, she was EXTREMELY FUCKING POWERFUL.
So to put her in an imaginary pre-patriarchal religion, surrounded by all number of other goddesses is to reduce her power in that context. To frame her in this context reduces her individual power just as much as saying that she was the damsel in distress raped child-bride of Hades. It lacks context, it lacks any sort of further study, and it lacks imagination. It lacks story and it lacks the immensity of her triumphs over the daily struggle of a woman living in the Bronze Age.
It honestly baffles me that the Tumblr community would want to take away her real story. All the great feminists throughout history, every woman who ever struggled, who fought, who suffered and died to be recognized as a person with every bit as much rights as a man… they were not born into idyllic circumstances. They were born into the fire, they were forged by fire and they learned how to rise above and control the fire.
Likewise, if we take away all context from an important archetypal figure like Persephone, then we remove the thing that makes her rise to power and equality with her husband that much more enthralling. We take away Persephone, herself.
Hi! Re: the Persephone choosing to go to the underworld thing, you’re right in that there are no surviving pre-Hellenic myths that say that, but there is evidence to suggest that that was a thing and that other elements were introduced to the myth as time went on. However, this is mostly the territory of feminist and neopagan researchers and writers, and any reconstructions are usually based on their ideas. It’s hard to say objectively what the older myths were since there’s so little left.
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