Other names: Persephonia, Phersephone, Persephassa, Phersephatta, Persephone Soteira and Persephone Despoena, Proserpine, Proserpina.
Persephone means either "Dazzling Brilliance" or "Destroyer of Light"
Also Called:
Kore, the
Maiden, the
Mistress, the
Iron Queen, the
Pale Queen, etc.
Persephone's story is a bittersweet one, and is recounted as The Rape of Persephone. The story goes:
Hades, the lonely, brooding god of the Underworld gains
a wife in Persephone, daughter of the harvest goddess, Demeter. In a fit of longing, Hades espies Persephone and abducts her to his Underworld lair. Demeter, the mother of Persephone, searches the world over for her missing daughter and in so doing, forgets her duties and abandons the world to winter or drought. Persephone is eventually found but not before she has eaten a few pomegranate seeds from the Underworld. It is divine law however that those who have partaken of the food of the Underworld may never leave, even if they are immortal. A compromise is reached where Persephone must spend a part of the year in the Underworld with her new husband Hades in which the world becomes barren during Demeter's suffering, but Persephone is returned in the other part of the year and all the world rejoices with Demeter with the coming of spring.
In this myth, Hades, Persephone and Demeter are used to explain the seasonal changes of the year, a myth common to many other mythologies. Likewise, this myth links two cthonic gods together in Demeter and Hades and may be indicative of an intermixing or adaptation between older pre-Greek gods and younger gods. In many myths thereafter, Persephone is commonly depicted as the compassionate queen ruling beside her dark, brooding husband-king.
Dead Can Dance recorded the song Persephone (The Gathering of Flowers) for the album Within the Realm of a Dying Sun.