aristoteliancomplacency:classicalcivilisation:luxlustravi:oftaggrivated:sonneillonv:kata-chthonia:I’
aristoteliancomplacency:classicalcivilisation:luxlustravi:oftaggrivated:sonneillonv:kata-chthonia: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.JESUS CHRIST THANK YOUI don’t often reblog posts of people getting owned, but when I do…man the ancient greeks didn’t dare to speak persephone’s name she was that powerful and venerated (they called her Kore, “the maiden”), hades didn’t get that honourehhhhhhhhhhhhh. She was - in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter - still abducted against *her* will. No one even so much as told her mother. In fact, in that translation you linked: And he found the Lord inside his palace,seated on a funeral couch, along with his duly acquired bedmate,the one who was much under duress, yearning for her mother, and suffering from the unbearable thingsinflicted on her by the will of the blessed onesThe only reason she’s released is that her mother is causing too much trouble to the world to be allowed to continue, and then Hades offers her the proper sacrifices and benefits due to his spouse… and compels her to eat the pomegranate seeds (it um. It may be significant that the word used for seed in the Homeric Hymn can also be translated as testicle). The sheer violence of the abduction in this case is emphasised by the verb harpazein, which is usually reserved for acts like pillage and thievery. There is no way to describe Persephone as not having been taken against her will or raped (because marital rape is still rape), and I find trying to describe her as a willing participant really bizarre. That it was a legitimate marriage rite and that her father consented (or that it seems to have been resolved as happily as was possible) doesn’t change her lack of consent, when you take the Hymn at a straight level of being a story. Going up a level of interpretation, the myth has also been interpreted as a myth of women’s initiations into adulthood, as well as being obviously and directly related to the Eleusinian Mysteries. Her byname Koré is essentially synonymous with parthenos, and the Hymn makes it pretty clear that she’s thalere, or nubile - i.e. ready to be married. She’s in a liminal state, between childhood and marriage, and ready to step from one to the other. It also makes it very clear that part of the conflict of the hymn is a clash between Zeus and Demeter over what the proper fate of their daughter is - and by the time that Demeter is in a position to intervene, it’s too late. She’s already been initiated into adulthood by rape, a “pattern found in a number of male-centered, misogynistically inclined cultures, and strongly suggested in numerous Greek myths”(1). If we exclude the period of the Homeric Hymn where Hekate appears, which it’s strongly suggested for a long time is a later insert, she isn’t Persephone until the moment she is brought back to Earth and initiated, only Kore. Thereafter, she always bears this new name, except when Zeus refers to the amount of time each year she spends with Hades in the underworld, i.e. as an initiate. That she can switch back and forth between the two is probably a reflection of the annual cycle of mysteries. I think Ann Suter’s argument that it’s a hieros gamos is really interesting (and not one I’ve heard before), if a bit speculative, but you’ve simplified it if you’re trying to use the Homeric Hymn as evidence without getting into how complex it is - and yeah, I’m avoiding getting into the extremely knotty questions of how they pre-date the mysteries, whether part of the rape/marriage is to control formerly powerful goddesses and their cults under new gods, how much of this is lots of formerly different goddesses smushed together into one myth-arc, what the deal is with dread Persephone (more of a Roman thing, but), and so on, because I could be here all day. Trying to resolve all of these figures into one cohesive goddess is a mistake.1. The Rape of Persephone: A Greek Scenario of Women’s Initiation, Bruce Lincoln, The Harvard Theological Review, Vol. 7, No. ¾ (Jul. - Oct., 1979), pp. 223-235)@classicalcivilisation you are my kind of people. (But ‘dread Persephone’ is just as much a Greek thing as a Roman thing? I actually don’t know much about her treatment in Roman sources, but ‘dread’ is a very common epithet for her in Greek material…) -- source link
#rape#persephone