46 Facts About Persephone

Persephone became the queen of the underworld after her abduction by her uncle Hades, the king of the underworld, who would later take her into marriage.

In Classical Greek art, Persephone is invariably portrayed robed, often carrying a sheaf of grain.

The city of Epizephyrian Locris, in modern Calabria, was famous for its cult of Persephone, where she is a goddess of marriage and childbirth in this region.

Persephone was identified by the Romans as the Italic goddess Libera, who was conflated with Proserpina.

Persephone is her name in the Ionic Greek of epic literature.

The epithets of Persephone reveal her double function as chthonic and vegetation goddess.

Plutarch writes that Persephone was identified with the spring season, and Cicero calls her the seed of the fruits of the fields.

Zeus, it is said, permitted Hades, who was in love with the beautiful Persephone, to abduct her as her mother Demeter was not likely to allow her daughter to go down to Hades.

Persephone was gathering flowers, along with the Oceanids, and the goddesses Pallas Athena and Artemis, as the Homeric Hymn says, in a field when Hades came to abduct her, bursting through a cleft in the earth.

The Cretans thought that their own island had been the scene of the abduction, and the Eleusinians mentioned the Nysian plain in Boeotia, and said that Persephone had descended with Hades into the lower world at the entrance of the western Oceanus.

When Hades was informed of Zeus' command to return Persephone, he complied with the request, but he first tricked her into eating pomegranate seeds.

In some versions, Ascalaphus informed the other deities that Persephone had eaten the pomegranate seeds.

Regardless of how she had eaten pomegranate seeds and how many, the ancient Greeks told the myth of Persephone to explain the origin of the four seasons.

The ancient Greeks believed that spring and summer occurred during the months Persephone stayed with Demeter, who would make flowers bloom and crops grow bountiful.

Persephone pursued the unwilling Rhea, only for her to change into a serpent.

Persephone was born so deformed that Rhea ran away from her frightened, and did not breastfeed Persephone.

Zeus then mates with Persephone, who gives birth to Dionysus.

Persephone later stays in her mother's house, guarded by the Curetes.

The goose flew to a hollow cave and hid under a stone; when Persephone took up the stone in order to retrieve the bird, water flowed from that spot, and hence the river received the name Hercyna.

The abduction of Persephone is an etiological myth providing an explanation for the changing of the seasons.

Since Persephone had consumed pomegranate seeds in the underworld, she was forced to spend four months, or in other versions six months for six seeds, with Hades.

When Persephone's time is over and she would be reunited with her mother, Demeter's joyousness would cause the vegetation of the earth to bloom and blossom which signifies the Spring and Summer seasons.

Adonis was an exceedingly beautiful mortal man with whom Persephone fell in love.

Persephone told the other gods that Persephone had eaten pomegranate seeds in the Underworld.

Furious, Persephone herself changed him into an eagle owl by sprinkling him with water of the river Phlegethon.

Persephone was not slow to notice and, in jealousy, she trampled the nymph, killing her and turning her into a mint plant.

Alternatively, Persephone tore Minthe to pieces for sleeping with Hades, and it was he who turned his former lover into the sweet-smelling plant.

When Minthe claims that Hades will return to her because she is lovelier and more queenly than Persephone, Demeter kills Minthe over the insult done to her daughter.

Demeter and Persephone, once restored to her mother, cared for Triptolemus, and helped him complete his mission of educating the whole world in the art of agriculture.

Persephone, witnessing that, snatched the still living Euthemia and brought her to the Underworld.

Persephone allowed the shade of Tiresias to retain his mental prowess and powers of clairvoyance after death.

Persephone convinced Hades to allow the hero Protesilaus to return to the world of the living for a limited period of time to see his wife.

Sisyphus, the wily king of Corinth, managed to avoid staying dead, after Thanatos had gone to collect him, by appealing to and tricking Persephone into letting him go; thus Sisyphus returned to the light of the sun in the surface above.

Persephone was worshipped along with her mother Demeter and in the same mysteries.

The location of Persephone's abduction is different in each local cult.

Walter Burkert believed that elements of the Persephone myth had origins in the Minoan religion.

Persephone was conflated with Despoina, "the mistress", a chthonic divinity in West-Arcadia.

Nysion, the place of the abduction of Persephone was probably a mythical place which did not exist on the map, a magically distant chthonic land of myth which was intended in the remote past.

For most Greeks, the marriage of Persephone was a marriage with death, and could not serve as a role for human marriage; the Locrians, not fearing death, painted her destiny in a uniquely positive light.

The importance of the regionally powerful Epizephyrian Locrian Persephone influenced the representation of the goddess in Magna Graecia.

The place where the ruins of the Sanctuary of Persephone were brought to light is located at the foot of the Mannella hill, near the walls of the polis of Epizephyrian Locris.

Archaeological finds suggest that worship of Demeter and Persephone was widespread in Sicily and Greek Italy.

Evidence from both the Orphic Hymns and the Orphic Gold Leaves demonstrate that Persephone was one of the most important deities worshiped in Orphism.

In Orphism, Persephone is believed to be the mother of the first Dionysus.

Scholar Timothy Gantz noted that Hades was often considered an alternate, cthonic form of Zeus, and suggested that it is likely Zagreus was originally the son of Hades and Persephone, who was later merged with the Orphic Dionysus, the son of Zeus and Persephone, owing to the identification of the two fathers as the same being.

Persephone focuses on the dual nature of Persephone as both maiden and queen of the underworld, symbolizing the Jungian themes of life, death, and rebirth, and the complexity of the human psyche.