Friday, October 28, 2011

dates and times

contemporaneous to the writing of the old testament there is evidence of the writing down of the demeter/persephone/hades myth. so the stories were alive enough to be written down during the same few hundred years time, in the vicinity of @ 1500 BCE

i have always easily grasped hades' perspective as glad to have a spark of youthful grace and beauty to spend time with while otherwise engaged in the pursuits necessary to keep hell running smoothly. and demeter's shock and grief at the sudden disappearance of her daughter is staple stuff on every tv prime time night; so, clearly we almost all of us understand her plight and the emotions that she expresses.

but persephone. it never occurred to me to wonder what she was feeling. how she was thinking.
we have a hint: that persephone kept herself calm while she was being abducted and flown through the air (before plunging into the earth) by singing to the world. and the world, in sympathy, carried the vibration of her song to her mother.

persephone is a singer and a brave soul.

and, initially surprisingly, you never hear of her complaining while she's in hell. even when she comes up to the surface again, when the deal is cut so that persephone is able to return for half the year to help her mother make the world beautiful with new growth, persephone never complains, objects or even gossips about what it's like in hell.

i think she likes it there.

i think hades, like most introverts and geeks, is a sensitive guy and, like the elemental gods, is well practiced in sexual intimacies. i think she doesn't actually mind it in hell and maybe even thinks of her time with her mother above ground, traveling all around making sure the plants are growing and the people are eating, as work, duty, something owed. but playtime is in hell.

another possibility is that persephone is merely a cypher, used by both her mother and her lover and none of her life is expressing anything that she wants to do or believes in.

but i don't think the daughter of zeus and demeter could possibly have turned out w/o a personality or purpose of her own. her story, though, has not yet been of interest to the story tellers.

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