hiphopocliedes:therkalexander:I’m not sure whether I should laugh or cry.Is OP aware that oh so many

hiphopocliedes:therkalexander:I’m not sure whether I should laugh or cry.Is OP aware that oh so many books exist on this subject?And that almost universally the ones authored by people with doctorates in classicism and mythology disagree with OP?Including the… epic hymn that first told this story? You know what’s in that original source material… right?Abducted, yes.Demeter mourned? Definitely.Rape, no.So here’s some info on Ancient Greek wedding traditions which (oh my stars and garters!!) included abducting the bride. With the father’s permission, which Hades got before he took her away.Here’s a whole book on the subject of Ancient Greek wedding custom and its conflation with funeral rites. (Which sounds a bit like Hades and Persephone to anyone who’s ever dabbled in things like explication and context)Here’s a link to another book that talks about Persephone’s rise to power as a result of her willingly eating the pomegranate seeds.Oh shit!!Here’s a whole bunch of myths and hymns that talk about her Queen of the Underworld badassery!!Holy pug tacos Batman!!Here’s another book about the myth focusing on the seasonal religious and liminal rites. WHICH TAKE PLACE IN THE DRY SUMMER (not the fucking winter), which you know if you read a book.Way to go, OP!All these fucking books!  What could anyone possibly do with them all?!?!?!?! Do you eat books to absorb their powers instead of read them?A better guess would be that you got into a moral panic over the name of a certain Renaissance statue and maybe after reading three pages of Edith Hamilton or the first paragraph of a Wikipedia article. And then used that to castigate and demean not only the people who actually take their limited time to create gorgeous art but also to denigrate modern day worshippers of Persephone and Hades?Maybe next time, you stringy piece of over-boiled okra, you might want to take your own advice and pick up a book, instead of reducing the feared and respected Queen of the Underworld who held power equal to or in many interpretations GREATER than her husband into a meaningless pastiche of female disenfranchisement that you seemingly plucked from your own ass.this is almost totally wrongFirst up, if you click on the “oh so many books exist on this subject” link you get taken to an amazon search for hades and persephone, the first things that come up are “HOT PARANORMAL ROMANCE”, then a collection of “short erotic stories”, and it continues like that.It’s really dishonest to say that scholars “almost universally” disagree with OP, when what you mean is, scholars disagree with the use of the term “rape”, bc yeah, in the context it means abduction, and yeah, in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter (the first, so i guess “original” source for this myth) it doesn’t explicitly state that persephone gets sexually assaulted by Hades, but extrapolating that to think of it as a story of romance and female empowerment (which it actually is in a way, but not in the way this post makes out at all), really totally ignores what’s in the Homeric HymnNow, in ancient greek wedding customs, there was a ritualised (aka acted, fake, not real) abduction of the bride, where the groom had to get consent of the father, obviously, because the abduction wasn’t real, and it was a normal wedding. Compare that to the myth, where Zeus basically tells Hades ‘yeah dude abduct my daughter and marry her it’s fine i don’t care’ without either Persephone or Demeter (her mother) knowing it’s gonna happen at all. A pretty standard interpretation of this myth is that Demeter is shown to be overreacting, because hey, hysterical mothers always overreact when their daughters are married off without their say so. Ancient Greek culture was misogynistic, and the moral of the stories they told themselves reflected this. So to say that, because the ancient greeks did a play-acting version of bride abduction, and that the men in ancient greece thought it was fine, then this myth of someone actually really being abducted was the same as one of those ritualised weddings is a deliberate misinterpretation.The similarity between wedding rites and funeral rites “[sounding] a bit like Hades and Persephone” isn’t even worth mentioning, that’s just bad scholarship, lots of things can remind you of other things, that doesn’t mean anything lolNext, I’ve read the book linked to by Suter, and yeah, it does argue that persephone willingly ate the seeds, but whta she’s saying is that she thinks that there MIGHT have been a prehistoric hypothetical version of the myth, never written down, from before the indo-european pantheon of patriarchal gods were introduced, where a local cult centred around Demeter and Persephone believed this, despite the Homeric Hymn saying the oppositeSpecifically, she interprets Persephone saying this to her mother Demeter:“When [Zeus told me to leave the underworld to come and see you]I sprang up for joy, but he, stealthily,put into my hand the berry of the pomegranate, that honey-sweet food,and he compelled me by force to eat of it.”and “He took me away under the earth in his golden chariot.It was very much against my will. I cried with a piercing voice.These things, grieving, I tell you, and they are all true.”As her protesting too much, because in the original version, which later greek priests couldn’t change when rewriting Zeus into the story because the dialogue was considered holy, she was trying to convince her mother of this despite the fact that she ran away deliberately. This is one scholars interpretation, and while it’s convincing, it refers to a hypothetical reconstruction of a prehistoric matriarchal fertility cult which differed heavily from the greek myth we all know.To get an idea of what you have to ignore to think that this take applies to the homeric hymn, this is what it says immediately after that:“In this way did the two of them spend the whole day, having a like-minded rage,and they gladdened greatly each other’s heart and rage, hugging each other, and their rage ceased having pain (or distress).”So, yeah, persephone and demeter both felt rage and anguish (θυμός and άχος, the translations are mine but they’re totally standard translations of those words) at Hades’abduction.The rest of this post is nonspecific enough that it’s hard to address it (it doesn’t matter that Persephone was a badass later on, doesn’t change the fact that she was abducted and forced into marriage as a girl, neither does the specific season she was associated with???)So uh, yeah, snidely telling someone to “pick up a book” doesn’t wash if the books you read on the subject are modern romance novels, and if you willingly misinterpret ancient texts AND modern scholars to get a view totally opposite from mainstream academia. and it’s not even just academia, you can read no academic texts and just look at the homeric hymn and it’s so obvious, stated again and again, that persephone was abducted, and that it made her and her mother miserable and angry. In the end, Demeter manages to twist zeus’ arm into letting persephone come back for 6 months out of the year, if you want to read female empowerment into the story, that’s where it goes, she stood up to the king of the gods and won by being more powerful than him (incidentally, that’s a core of Suter’s argument). TL;DR this is totally misleading and wilfully ignorant, Hades abducted Persephone against her will, the ancient texts make that very clear. And even if you see some modern nonfiction book making the argument that it was a romantic relationship despite all available evidence contradicting that, it’s important to remember that literally anyone can write a book, that doesn’t mean whats in the book is true, it just means that someone published it -- source link
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