Persephone - Origins of The Cult

Origins of The Cult

The myth of the abduction of the vegetation goddess is probably Pre-Greek. The place of the abduction is different in each local cult. The Homeric hymn mentions the Nysion (or Mysion), probably a mythical place which didn’t exist in the map. The locations of this mythical place may simply be conventions to show that a magically distant chthonic land of myth was intended in the remote past. Demeter found and met her daughter in Eleusis, and this is the mythical disguise of what happened in the mysteries.

Persephone is an old chthonic deity of the agricultural communities, who received the souls of the dead into the earth, and acquired powers on the fertility of the soil under which she reigned. The earliest depiction of a goddess who may be identified with Persephone growing out of the ground, is on a plate from the Old-Palace period in Phaistos. The goddess has a vegetable-like appearance, and she is surrounded by dancing girls between blossoming flowers. The association with the flower-picking Persephone and her companions is compelling. On the Minoan ring of Isopata, four women are performing a dance between flowers in a field, and a smaller figure, the goddess herself appears floating in the air.

In the Homeric poems Persephone is the real ruler of the underworld, the terrible "Queen of the Shades", and Hades doesn't have authorities on the souls of the dead. In some forms Hades appears with his chthonic horses. The myth of the rape of Kore was deriven from the idea that Hades catches the souls of the dead like his booty, and then carries them with his horses into his kingdom. This idea is vague in Homer, but appears in later Greek depictions, and in Greek folklore. "Charos" appears with his horse and carries the dead into the underworld.

The cults of Persephone and Demeter in the Eleusinian mysteries and in the Thesmophoria were based on very old agrarian cults. An earlier agrarian procession leaded by a priest, is depicted on a Minoan vase from the end of the New-Palace period. Ancient cults like age-old cults of the dead, worship of animal headed gods, and rituals for the new crop, had their position in Greek religion because they were connected with daily or seasonal tasks and concecrated by immemorial practices. The powers of animal nature fostered a belief in nymphs, and in gods with human forms and the heads or tails of animals. In the Arcadian cults, it seems that Demeter and Persephone were the first from a series of daemons with the same nature. Terracotta figures with animal-headed gods or daemons and a procession of women with animal masks have been discovered at the temple of Despoina at Lycosura. These cults seem to go back to the Mycenean period. The cult center of Mycenea dated from the 13th century BC, contained numerous big idols with faces painted in a terrifying mask-like manner, and a fresco represented a priestess or goddess with ears of corn in her hand.

A lot of ancient beliefs were based on initiation in jealously guided mysteries (secret rites) because they offered prospects after death more enjoyable than the final end at the gloomy space of the Greek Hades. It seems that such religious practices were introduced from Minoan Crete, Similar practices appear also in the Orient. However the idea of immortality which appears in the syncretistic religions of Near East did not exist in the Eleusinian mysteries at the very beginning.