Persephone

She was out in a meadow with her friends, picking flowers: roses, crocuses, violets, irises, hyacinths. Then she saw a narcissus with a hundred blooms on one stem. The Earth had grown it there on purpose, as a trap. It smelled so sweet that, in the old song, the whole sky laughed.

Persephone reached for it with both hands. The ground opened under her. Hades came up out of it with his immortal horses. He pulled her into his golden chariot and drove her down under the earth.

She screamed for her father. Only two heard her: Hekate, in her cave, and the Sun, up in the sky.

Homeric Hymn to Demeter 4–20, 22–26.

Her mother heard the echo in the mountains. Demeter, the goddess of grain, looked for her daughter for nine days, with burning torches in her hands. She didn’t eat and she didn’t wash. On the tenth morning Hekate came down the road with a torch of her own, and the two of them went to ask the Sun. He told them the truth. Zeus had given the girl to his brother Hades, against her will and against her mother’s.

Homeric Hymn to Demeter 38–63, 74–87.

So Demeter walked away from the gods. She made herself look like an old woman and sat down by a well in a town called Eleusis. She wouldn’t smile. In the house that took her in, a woman called Iambe kept making jokes until she did.

Then the fields stopped growing. For a whole year Demeter kept the seed hidden in the ground. Oxen pulled the ploughs, and the barley didn’t come up. The gods came to her one after another with beautiful gifts, and one after another she sent them away. She wanted one thing: to see her daughter with her own eyes.

Homeric Hymn to Demeter 90–104, 192–205, 305–333.

So Zeus sent Hermes down to fetch her. He found Persephone sitting beside Hades, unhappy and missing her mother. When she heard she could go, she jumped up for joy. Before she left, Hades slipped a pomegranate seed into her mouth.

Homeric Hymn to Demeter 334–374, 411–413.

Hermes drove the chariot up to Eleusis. Demeter saw it coming and ran, the Hymn says, like one of Dionysos’ wild dancers running down a wooded mountain. Persephone jumped down and ran too, and threw her arms around her mother’s neck.

Then came the question a mother asks first: did you eat anything down there?

She had: one seed. So a deal was made. Persephone would spend a third of the year below, and the rest above, with her mother and the gods. And when the earth was full of spring flowers, Demeter told her, she would come up again, “to be a wonder for gods and mortal men.”

Homeric Hymn to Demeter 384–389, 393–413 (the question), 398–403 and 445–447 (the third of the year, the spring). Quoted from Evelyn-White, 1914.

Mother and daughter held each other for a long time, and Persephone told her everything. Hekate came to meet them too. She held Persephone again and again, and from that day, the Hymn says, she was her companion. Then Demeter let the fields grow, and the whole wide earth filled with leaves and flowers. Before she went home to the gods, she taught the people of Eleusis her rites, and asked them to keep them secret.

Look at how the deal is made. The way back up is agreed before she goes down again. She has a date to come home, and a friend with a torch who goes with her.

Homeric Hymn to Demeter 434–440, 470–479.

The Hymn gives her a third of the year below. The witches’ calendar draws the year in two halves, and on 31 October, at Samhain, the dark half begins. Samhain is the Irish word for November. In the north the nights are long now, and Persephone is going down again. She’ll be back in spring. In the south it’s the other way round, and spring is already here.

The dark half of the year: the modern witches’ calendar, northern dates (Ronald Hutton, The Stations of the Sun, 1996).