#demeter and persephone

[maggie44paint]

mother's little flower

[melody-013]

Does anyone else think that spring/summer rain is happy cries of Lady Demeter cause she has her daugther with her now?

There has been a lot of rain this week and it made me think that and now I cant stop smiling when I think of it!

[bcowlick]

Everything Demeter does is so valid.

Made a man eat himself? Well, he shouldn't had cut that tree in the first place. I would also kill a man if he dared to cut down a over 10,000+ year old tree. That thing is sacred and anyone who cuts down one of them gentle giants deserves the curses of mother nature.

Put the world thru winter? Go off queen. Go take a vacation from your duties while also sticking it up to your daughter's kidnapper (+ your two other dumbass brothers)

Make love with some random at someone's else wedding? Doing it in the middle of a field? Such a hopeless romantic. She's so poetic fr

Cooking a baby to make him inmortal? She's so good with children!! Mother of the year!!!

Creating the wheelchair? Based. An ally to folks with dissabilities

Demeter is the best and i won't take any slander of her in my house

[gracebriarwoodwrites]

Each spring, my daughter returns from the underworld ice-cold and frost-hard. The only light in her is the cheap reflection of gold, shining against the shadow of death. I show her the sun again, but it’s hard for her to thaw— she freezes the new buds in the night many times before she finally lets them bloom.

She can’t bear, at first, to let the sun kiss her cheeks, knowing she must lose the spring again. But she learns, and she laughs, as the days lengthen and shorten.

And then my daughter returns to the darkness, and winter comes again.

[egocentrismx]

DEMETER from stories from styx by @imcasperfox <3

[faer1etale]

I feel like Hades/Persephone based novels that remove the kidnapping aspect of the story don't work, because the narrative is entirely dependent of the kidnapping, the story is about a mother losing her child, it's a tale to comfort women who had their daughters taken away from them through arranged/forced marriages, death, or other circumstances. It's a tale about a mother and daughter bond, yes it's also an allegory for the seasons changing but it's not JUST that. You have to understand bride-kidnapping is still a thing, and to sanitize that part of mythology is to erase the many girls who were and still are forced into marriage and have their autonomy stripped away. There are many other couples in the greek mythos that you can slot your "overprotective mother-in-law defies true love" narrative onto, just not this one, because it isn't a love story, it's an arranged marriage, it's about women. The kidnapping itself isn't even the most disturbing part of the myth, it's the fact that Persephone was forced to eating pomegrante seeds to be bounded to the underworld unwillingly. Is that not a direct breach of her consent?? This isn't a post to "slander" Hades, but just wanted to get showerthoughts outta my system, and also this isn't to discourage anybody from reimagining myths, just please know the cultural context and how meaningful it was to the people during the time it was written.

Also, if you come across anything you'd like to add onto or correct me about then please do! I'm always willing to learn! :3

[unfinishedname]

The next time I see someone romanticize the myth of Persephone I’m going to lose it. So just to try and hammer it into people, here’s a counter to every argument I’ve seen.

1. No, there is no Ancient Greek source depicting it as anything but an unwilling abduction. She is a victim of kidnapping (and implicitly in the Homeric hymn marital rape) and there is little to no wiggle room.

2. She did not eventually fall in love with him. Why do people think it’s feminist to imply a woman needs to reciprocate her abuser’s feelings in order to gain autonomy?? There is no literary source for this. The only thing that reminds one of this is an Orphic hymn where she curses Minthe for sleeping with Hades, which a) is not usually treated as a canonical source of Greek mythology, just the traditions within orphism b) is not proof she was in love with him. If you were abducted and abused and then on top of that your abuser humiliates you and defiles your bed what would you do??

3. Demeter wasn’t a helicopter mother she was a woman and a parent defending and protecting her daughter and her right to autonomy.

4. This is like the weirdest one but people claiming that abduction was normal in Ancient Greece, and thus Hades was not rapist nor a kidnapper but a man of his time. ?? So no, abduction wasn’t a part of the marriage ceremony in Ancient Greece. according to some sources, in ancient Sparta they staged abductions after the wedding preparations were finished, which the bride was aware and ready for. But it was an act, not an actual abduction.

5. “But myths change over time it’s okay!!” Persephone and Demeter belongs to the body of mythology of the ancient Greeks. Ancient Greece, which does not longer exist. Any retelling told after the fact has no validity.

6. “But why does it matter??” Mythology does not exist in a vacuum. Myths like Persephone’s are reflections of their time. In Ancient Greece, marriage represented a death sentence for women and girls, and mothers were expected to never see their daughters again after the wedding. This is probably why the myth emerged, because Demeter is a woman who says no, I will not lead my daughter to the slaughter, I will not let her go, I will not go quietly. She fights against the men who took her daughter away from her, who robbed Persephone of her agency and freedom, and she wins. She gets her daughter back, and Persephone gets to walk in the sun again. Erasing this in favor of some grand sexual awakening away from the chafing claws of motherhood is not only dumb, but disrespectful to the women and girls of Ancient Greece who are the faces of this myth.

The story isn’t about Persephone transcending girlhood and becoming a woman. It’s about her being sold and bought by the men around her and saved by the women around her. It is an empowerment myth, except their power doesn’t hinge on men’s whims. And in all likely hood mothers and daughters took comfort in this story. It does matter, because it is a part of a cultural narrative.

Say it with me, sexual power is not the only power women can hold!!!

[gingermintpepper]

So, now that Blood of Zeus has also been given its chance to tell the Demeter/Persephone story (and also, similarly, fundamentally misunderstood the themes of the Hymn to Demeter) can we finally, finally talk about Mother Love?

Because I can scream until I'm blue in the face about how modern, popular interpretations of the myth have become so focused on being 'empowering' to women by fixating on giving power to Persephone in her marriage with Hades and, in turn, disparaging Demeter, another woman, - the mother who grieves her lost daughter - that they've some how spun all the way around and gotten back to being misogynistic and reductive, but I feel like talking nebulously about the fact that it's Demeter and Persephone's story and not Hades and Persephone's story never gets the point across hard enough. So:

Anyone who was upset about Demeter's demonisation in Blood of Zeus S2? Read Mother Love. Anyone who is ever upset that retellings of the Homeric Hymn to Demeter constantly demonise, belittle, accuse and insult Demeter and her grief while making excuses to redeem and forgive her daughter's captor? Read Mother Love. Anyone who likes Hades and Persephone as a romantic tale but yearn for complexity outside of arbitrary romantic antagonists impeding the happiness of the couple? Read Mother Love!! Everyone who has even a passing interest in this tale whether it is for the romance, the mother-daughter connections, the themes of grief and loss and eventual comfort and compromise, the wrath of the mother transgressed, the justice that is served due to a mother's insistence in an unjust society, READ MOTHER LOVE!!!

Because it pains me that such a perfect retelling of Demeter and Persephone's story exists, that it focuses on the mother-daughter relationship by comparing it with the poet's own relationship with her mother and it is nearly obscure in the greek mythology community.

[linesofapollo]

sooo i went on trip for a couple days and was too tired to draw the whole time. also i forgot my sketchbook. in my defense. it's like a full kilo. so. ANYWAY im art-blocky right now but i started doodling and drawing a green lady and now its Demeter in my head and i imagine she's talking to some passionate godling/demigod/mortal with a green thumb. also she calls everyone younger than her "child" and tells everyone older/same age as her "you should know better." underrated goddess imo need to learn more about her

[kiapet2]

I've seen a lot of metas and thinkpieces on the recent trend of villainizing Demeter in retellings of the Persephone and Hades story, and how that's actually pretty reductive and sexist. And while I definitely agree with that and think it needs to be said, I do wonder how much of the shift in characterization is due to the fact that most people sharing the story in this day and age don't know what it's like to have a child torn away from you by an arranged marriage... but everyone knows someone with an overbearing mother-in-law.

[brimo5]

Finally, at Argos in 272 Pyrrhus is said to have met his death at the hands of a woman who hit him with a roof tile. The slayer was no ordinary mortal, but the goddess herself, disguised as an Argive woman (Pausanias 1.13.8; Plutarch Pyrrhus 34; Strabo 8.6.18). Demeter's retribution would have been appropriate for Pyrrhus because he was known to have violated a sanctuary of Persephone (Dionysius of Halicarnassus 20.9). (Practitioners of the Divine: Greek Priests and Religious Figures from Homer to Heliodorus,3)

Never forget that Demeter is her daughter's mother.

[cimeriansparrow]

Based on your view of the myth of Persephone I can tell what your relationship is with your mother

[ij16]

Demeter and Persephone

Is it obvious that I can't draw children

No Background:

[aspiringwarriorlibrarian]

I don't see why people feel the need to demonize Demeter into a smothering matriarch who didn't want Persephone to be happy to make Hades seem more sympathetic when there's a villain right there: Zeus, the fuck ass who plotted to sell Persephone to his brother without even informing Demeter about it because "silly women and their feelings, she doesn't belong to you anyway" and demanded she just give in. Especially since the Hymn to Demeter is full of women and ripe for feminist retelling: Gaia, who betrays Persephone for her favor to Hades, Hekate, who hears Persephone cry out and joins Demeter in the search, the four mortal girls who comfort her in her distress and their mother Metaneira who takes her in, wise Iambe who lifts her heart with jokes and poems, Iris and Rhea, Zeus' messengers.

More Hymn to Demeter retellings where Demeter is a woman desperate to find her daughter after her abusive husband steals her and the women who help her, where Demeter breaks Zeus' patriarchal power with her own, where she's willing to break the whole world rather than let it be one where daughters are property of fathers to be traded and sold as they see fit. Demeter is not the villain here. Zeus is.

[teawiththegods]

“We mothers stand still so our daughters can look back to see how far they've come.”

- The Barbie Movie

[ive-given-up-the-bug-diet]

Screaming weeping and crying as I rewatch Overly Sarcastic Productions' video about Hades and Persephone, a 20 minute long video that almost entirely focuses on the relationship between Persephone and Demeter as well as the ties they have to the underworld in their own right outside of Hades, only to look in the comment section and it's 99%:

"Hades and Persephone are like the Gomez and Morticia of Greek mythology"

"Hades and Persephone as a pastel-goth couple but imagine Hades is the pastel and Persephone is the goth!"

Like I get the appeal of Hades and Persephone's perceived dynamic in modern pop culture, but the video could not more clearly be primarily about Persephone and Demeter what is wrong with you people