Who is Persephone?

We think of Persephone as the maiden.  We think of her as the maiden who was abducted into the underworld, whose mother wandered in grief, unable to find her disappeared daughter.

Once Persephone went down she was maiden no longer.  Possibly the ancient version of this story was that she was not abducted but she went down on her own terms because she was drawn to the mystery of what lies below.  In a dominator world this power of the feminine to descend on account of her own will is the single most inadmissible thing.  And so the story was changed. 

 The willing descent of the maiden into the underworld was changed to a rape and her power was lost.  It is up to the mothers and grandmothers to retrieve that power.  When Persephone arrived in the underworld, eager to learn its secrets her teacher was Hecate.  At the bottom of the descent there she stood, stirring her cauldron - surrounded by the symbols and tools of her powerful magic, the magic of transformation. 

Persephone in our times lives at the edge. We connect to her in secret because we instinctively feel her power and the threat it presents to the dominators. She is the part of us that knows and sees and feels the other world.  She is the part of us that mediates between the worlds.   

She confuses us when we fall into the belief that if we see, if we know, we must do something about what we see.  But the power of this kind of seeing is in the seeing itself.  In the underworld doing gets in the way of seeing, being present, knowing.  In the underworld the quality of thinking is a liability not an asset.  In the underworld the books are made of rock and stone, of moisture and wind; Of light and shadow.  In the underworld the greatest secret is the most obvious thing in the world, yet no one sees it.   

We are not here to steward nature, we are not here to appreciate nature.  We are Nature itself.  There is no difference.

Parents must find a way to trust their daughters and their sons. To do that they must trust themselves. Elders must be willing to experience the nooks and crannies of their long marginalized selves. 

We have felt at a loss for our children and the people we love and the ones we don’t even know, who are denied and neglected, abandoned and scorned.  We have seen the dark shadow of ecological disaster and we have long sensed the coming crises which is no longer in the future.   

We have more than this though.  The power of Persephone allows us to see and sense the possibilities.  We know within our own lives and the lives of those who touch us, the incredible power and wisdom of nature to regenerate, to heal, to live on.