"Persephone" 2016 |
(2005)Persephone's Feast Day
When all the names are gone,fallen like fraying leaves before the coming of frost;when there is nothing left for memory to feed uponNovember incubates an unborn rhythm,a silent heartbeat.
Perhaps all the wastes of love and timeferment their healing, underground, herein these Nigrado depths,becoming at last Albedo,the medicine.
Now, there is no valorin this rooting among decomposing fragmentsof so many lives.
I offer now bread, red fruit, red wine: to life.To the voiceless, the lost, the hungry, and the fallen,to every transparent lover wanderingthese grey Bardos in their solitude.
Come to the table all.Here is a rich conversationharvested from the last living gardena dappled pear, an apple, a pomegranate.a butterfly in its chrysalis, winged, moist,
the slow rebirth of colordeep in the depths of this dream.
The great Wheel will turn again.The wheat has new life in it yet.The blessing will still be given.
Halloween, Samhain, is a liminal time of year, when the "veils between the worlds" are thin. Persephone is a "liminal Goddess", a myth that comes to mind at that threshold time just before winter.
Before she was Persephone, she was Kore, the young daughter of Demeter, and in the Greek myth, while gathering flowers she was seized by Hades, god of the Underworld, and taken into the realm of death, the below world of Hades. Demeter, in her rage and grief, causes the world to die - no plants bear fruit, no bees pollinate, no flowers bloom. At last an agreement is made in which Persephone can be returned to her mother........but because the youthful Goddess has eaten 6 pomogranate seeds, she must return to the underworld for part of the year to be the wife of Hades. Kore thus becomes Persephone, the dual and integral Goddess of both life and of death.
This myth partakes of a very ancient and fundamental mythos based upon the cycles of nature, in which there is a generative underground realm where the souls of people and animals and vegetation go after death, returning in the spring to new life. Our most early and ancient ancestors observed that the natural world dies down, seemingly into the Earth, in the fall ("falls") and then arises from the body of the Earth ("springs") in the spring. Hence, all things must return to the great womb/tomb of the Earth Mother, incubated in some mysterious "below realm" to be reborn at the next turning of the year. It has been suggested that this concept goes as far back as the time of cave paintings, the caves themselves representing the womb of the Great Mother.
The tale of Persephone is probably derived from the earlier Sumerian myth of the Descent of Inanna, wherein the Great Goddess Inanna descends into the underworld realm to encounter her Dark Sister, Ereshigal, who like Hades, or the Noric Hella, presides as Queen of Death. In this myth, which preceeded the patriarchal Greeks, and it is the husband of Inanna, Dumuzi, rather than the goddess herself, who must travel for part of the year into the Underworld realm to become the husband of Ereshigal as well as the husband of Inanna.
"Persephone did what Inanna did. Persephone's myth is about moving into a new state of being. All the soul riches, the knowledge, the art, everything was running down the drain into Hades and it stayed there. It stopped circulating. This was the myth of the descent of Inanna as well; everything went down to Ereshkigal, the keeper of the Underworld, and got stuck there in the universal unconscious. Ereshkigal, the mind of the underworld, was on strike - she refused to process. We can look at both of these stories, the stories of Persephone and Inanna, and see that these two Goddesses are pathfinders. Pathfinders to the unconscious, to the other worlds. Persephone, Kore who becomes Persephone, creates something new that was not thought of before her journey. And that's a very important myth for our time. And it's also why the Eleusinian Mystery, which was about Persephone and Demeter, was the defining experience of mature spirituality in the Mediterranean basin for 2,500 years."
......Elizabeth Fuller, The Independent Eye
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In 2003 I spent a month at Byrdcliffe artists colony in Woodstock, New York. I was working on some masks about Persephone, and moved by the book, wanted to contact Jennifer Barker to thank her, and ask if she might possibly give me an interview. Although I found references in the internet to her living in Vermont and occasionally offering workshops specifically on women and the Persephone archetype, I could not find any way to contact her.
At Byrdcliffe during my residency they had a masked ball, and I happened to strike up a conversation with an artist who lived in the area. We agreed to meet for lunch to continue the conversation the following week. Over coffee I told her about my fascination with the Woolgers book, how it looked like the Woolgers were originally from the area, but I was unsuccessful in locating the woman who wrote so profoundly about Persephone. My lunch companion said "Oh, you mean Jennifer? She and Roger got divorced and she moved to Vermont. I can give you her number if you like."
It seems they were friends, and just like that I had a contact, and a personal introduction! When something like this happens, it is not only encouragement to continue the Vision Quest, but it is also about being given a key to your own inner life work. I did end up calling Jennifer Barker and making arrangements to go to Vermont for an interview, but as it turned out I had to return before I could make the trip. I still very much regret that lost opportunity.
REFLECTIONS ON PERSEPHONEAt Byrdcliffe during my residency they had a masked ball, and I happened to strike up a conversation with an artist who lived in the area. We agreed to meet for lunch to continue the conversation the following week. Over coffee I told her about my fascination with the Woolgers book, how it looked like the Woolgers were originally from the area, but I was unsuccessful in locating the woman who wrote so profoundly about Persephone. My lunch companion said "Oh, you mean Jennifer? She and Roger got divorced and she moved to Vermont. I can give you her number if you like."
It seems they were friends, and just like that I had a contact, and a personal introduction! When something like this happens, it is not only encouragement to continue the Vision Quest, but it is also about being given a key to your own inner life work. I did end up calling Jennifer Barker and making arrangements to go to Vermont for an interview, but as it turned out I had to return before I could make the trip. I still very much regret that lost opportunity.
Excerpts
from THE GODDESS WITHIN, by Jennifer Barker and Roger Woolger
“In the
true life of the spirit there is both light and dark, joy and woe, and the
unconscious has both a higher and a lower aspect. To fulfill her greater destiny, Persephone
cannot have one without embracing the other. Her deepest challenge is to unite the dark
and the light sides of the Goddess in herself."
At the
heart of the great myth lies Hades, who is none other than Death
personified. When Persephone the maiden
marries Hades, it is tantamount to saying that the maiden in her dies. It is a figurative death, required by the
greater wisdom of the psyche, a sacrifice that is also, as we have seen, an
initiation. Willingly or unwillingly,
the Persephone woman has been called to renounce her innocent maidenly self and
spend a large portion of her life going in and out of the underworld. Most often she will do this in the role of a
helper or guide to others. Because she
has been there herself, looked at the most terrible sides of human suffering,
and survived, she is now a beacon.
The
return to the Mother, to Demeter is no longer the return of a maiden, but of a
mature goddess, who now knows sexuality, death, and separation. The return is a reminder that the two
goddesses are in fact one, that together they represent the wholeness of being
of the Great Mother, who can endlessly be separated from herself, endlessly
die, and endlessly be reborn, as woman, as earth, as cosmos.
This is
an awe-inspiring aspect of the primordial figure of the Great Mother that we
have mostly lost today: namely, that she contains within her all opposites. She is both youth and age, both maiden and
mother, both warrior and tender of the hearth, and most significantly, both
life and death.
Greek
culture has been justly celebrated for its quality of brilliance and light, its
establishment of the supremacy of reason, logic, and philosophy, it's lucid
vision of the outer, physical world. If
there is a god who epitomizes this consciousness, it is Apollo, sublime god of
light, reason and harmony. Yet so much
emphasis upon the light could not exist without a dark shadow being cast. So, among the gods, as with the goddesses,
there are splits and polarities. The
darker brother of Apollo is thus Dionysus, lord of ecstasy, madness, divine
drunkenness, and sacrificial death, the very antithesis of Apollonian clarity. Likewise, Zeus, imperiously sitting high upon
his heavenly Olympian throne, must have a dark brother to oversee the lower
depths - the mysterious and barely mentioned Hades.
Once we
realize this, we can begin to see that Persephone and her mother, Demeter,
represent the two major opposite aspects of the primordial Great Mother that
the Greek psyche was struggling to maintain.
Their myth represents, among other things, an attempt to see the whole
momentous relationship of the higher and the lower, the light and the dark worlds,
as part of a dynamic relationship, a cycle of life and death in which all
beings participate.
If it
were left to the male gods alone, there would be no such cycle, for masculine
consciousness, lacking the inner mysteries of the body, of the menstrual cycle,
of pregnancy and birth, has no cyclical awareness built into it. Which is another way of saying that masculine
consciousness knows nothing of the mystery of the life force.
Masculine,
Apollonian consciousness always tends toward mutually exclusive
polarities: something is either this or
that, it is either day or night, but not both.
This is the whole basis of Aristotle's logic, one of the supreme
achievements of Greek culture - at least according to the official patriarchal
view of Western history.
Feminine
or matriarchal consciousness, symbolized by the moon, lacks the extremes of
mutually exclusive polarities - dark versus light, good versus evil - those
dualities Western culture, especially Christianity, has grown so fond of. Instead there is the model of the far subtler
light of the moon in her infinite variations of light, shade, and darkness,
forever changing, forever renewing herself…………The awesome side of Persephone as
queen of death eventually became more frightening the more it was suppressed. And it is, of course, in its suppressed form
that it returns to torment the imagination of medieval Christianity in its
paranoid fear of witches.
The
mature Persephone who has returned from her journey lives somehow beyond the
ordinary world, but she remains nevertheless intimately familiar with
it.......In her completed form she unites the beginning and the end of the life
cycle, birth and death in herself; so,
as an old woman she still retains her youthfulness, and as a young initiate she
cheerfully carries the wisdom of years.”
PERSEPHONE'S
WOUND: THE ETERNAL SACRIFICIAL VICTIM
“When a
woman is over identified with Persephone she will invariably be attracted to
situations in which she or others get hurt.
She may have accidents or strange illnesses that render her dependant
upon welfare. She may find herself
unavoidably taking care of ailing or dying parents. She may attract to her charming but
ultimately brutal and intimidating men she cannot escape from. None of these events are her doing. They appear out of the blue; relentless,
crushing, unexplained. When we look at
these stories more closely, we find one common pattern: she is powerless and usually passive. These things happen to her. Yet she seems, on examination, strangely
drawn to them, as if they were indeed her fate.
We are led to suspect that the Persephone woman has a secret attachment
to a deeply human and intractable theme:
the wretchedness of the innocent victim!
Only
Hades can claim the victim. Only a
genuine encounter that brings the death of all ego, all attachment to
innocence, can put to rest the misplaced pride of the victim once and for
all. This is Persephone's challenge, her
moment of truth.”
PERSEPHONE
UN DESCENDED
“In her
darkness and dividedness, the young Persephone woman yearns for the spirit to
rescue her and deliver her from her inner confusion. So when she learns of metaphysics and occult
practices, she will frequently seek solace in the higher authorities of spirit
guides, ascended masters, astrology, karma, and so forth. This is part of the motivation that lead her
to become a healer or channeler herself.
However, there is often a huge element of compensation in the way of the
spirit, of channeled guides and masters, since it is all upward, into the
light. Unless she fully honors her dual
nature, one that mediates between both the light and the darkness, between the
living and the dead, she can become unaccountably arrested in her development.
Her true
savior is not Zeus, but paradoxically, his dark brother Hades. The wisdom of this extraordinary myth is that
the source of Persephone's transformation comes from beneath, from the lower
depths of soul, not from the higher reaches of spirit. The spirit in its Olympian form cannot
initiate Persephone.”
To be
fully effective as a healer, Persephone must first, like all healers, heal
herself. But for Persephone this is not
so easy. Ironically her very capacity
for empathy and psychic understanding is her greatest obstacle to the
process. Unless she finds outside
help......all she will do is attract to her mirrors of her own unresolved
victimization.
Why? Because she does not know how to remain
detached and separate from those whose suffering she feels so acutely; she
lacks ego boundaries. In her openness to
the unconscious in herself and others, she is constantly fusing with the
personalities and sufferings of those who are drawn to her. Without the objectivity of a strong ego, she
gets hopelessly bogged down in he morass of her patients' sufferings.
THE
TWILIGHT OF THE GODS?
Understanding
the meaning of Persephone's descent and her connection to the spirit realm is
especially urgent today. Thousands of
women (and men) are currently discovering mediumistic talent or so-called
channeling. In addition to this, no one
could fail to notice the minor epidemic of enthusiasm for metaphysics. Cold it
be, as the late Joseph Campbell, the unparalleled authority on myth and
religion observed, that the emergence of Persephone consciousness that we are
currently seeing is actually part of a "twilight of the gods"? In one of his last essays, written shortly
before his death, Campbell raised the possibility that the old gods are dying
and new ones are breaking forth from the collective unconscious to take their
place as humanity approaches a whole new era.
If this
is so, from a Jungian standpoint this would mean that the very structures and
energies of the deep unconscious, which symbolically we perceive as
"gods" and "goddesses" are undergoing a profound shift. So, the type of persona who is most sensitive
to such shifts, the seer or mediumistic type we are calling the “Persephone
woman“, is going to be right at the center of this momentous eruption of new
psychic and spiritual powers…..But to live for much of one's waking life
"among the dead" can put enormous psychic strain upon any woman (or
man) with a mediumistic temperament, especially when her experiences are
misunderstood or feared, as is frequently the case. More than any of the other goddess types, the
Persephone woman can experience deep alienation, sometimes bordering on
breakdown, if her true nature and vocation are not recognized.
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