Goddess of the Month

WHO IS PERSEPHONE? PERSEPHONE is the Queen of the Underworld, wife of the god Hades. She is also the Goddess of Spring, who was worshipped alongside her mother Demeter in the Eleusinian Mysteries. The first festivals celebrating the sorrows and later joys of Demeter and Persephone were exclusively for women held in pre-Hellenic Greece; that is in the Pelasgian period, when the civilizations of Crete and Troy were at their zenith before the time of the warrior-gods Zeus and Apollo who reduced the power of the Great Goddess. The women fasted for nine days in memory of the nine days of sorrow that Demeter roamed the earth holding a staff-like torch in search of Persephone. She meets Hekate, and together they go to Phoebus, the sun god, who had seen the young Goddess abducted and told them where She was. Afterwards Demeter, filled with wrath and grief, left the world of the gods, and sat as an old woman, heavily veiled, for days at the Well of the Virgin. Next She became a servant in a kingly household in Eleusis, the city that became Her largest sanctuary in Greece. She then cursed all the Earth so it bore no fruit for man or the gods for a whole year. Then the gods of Olympus, including Zeus, each pleaded with Her in vain, but She would not relent. Zeus finally succeeded in gaining Persephone's release; but while in the underworld She had eaten a seed of a pomegranate and as a consequence would have to spend one third of the year with Hades. She was embraced by both her mother and Hekate and returned to Olympus glorious, and, as if by magic, the Earth bloomed again with flowers and vegetation. Some of Her other names include: Proserpine - Roman Kore - Maiden (Greek) Persephassa - Ionic Persepatta - Attic Persephone-Isis - Greek Italic colonies such as Herculaneum Pherepapha - She who is wise and touches that which is in motion (from Plato)