Take me to you, imprison mee, for I
Except you’enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste except you ravish mee.
- John Donne

THE RAPE OF PERSEPHONE

The Greek myth of Demeter and Persephone tells the story of feminine initiation through rape. The maiden Persephone, also called Kore, is gathering flowers with her friend when she suddenly notices a narcissus of striking beauty. She runs to pick the flower, but as she bends down the earth opens and Hades appears. He seizes her and drags her down into the depths of the earth. Kore’s mother, Demeter, hears her daughter’s despairing cry for help, and for nine days looks all over the world. Finally, on Hecate’s advice, she goes to consult Helios, the sun, who has seen the abduction from his chariot in the heavens. Helios tells Demeter that the narcissus was planted by Zeus, who planned her daughter’s abduction by his brother Hades, so that she might become Hades’ “flowering bride.”

In her inconsolable grief Demeter withdraws from Olympus and takes refuge among the cities of men. She comes to Eleusis and has a temple built for her where she retires into her sorrow. As she withdraws, so the earth dries up and withers, the sap of growth departs and the land lies dying. The gods, seeing that without crops the entire human race will perish and there will be no one to worship them, come to Demeter to entreat her to come out and restore the earth. But she will not permit the earth to bear fruit again until she sees her daughter. Finally Zeus commands Hermes to descend into the underworld and tell Hades that he must return Kore, who since her arrival in the underworld has taken the name Persephone, to her mother. Before returning, Persephone, yielding to Hades’ temptation, eats a few pomegranate seeds, a symbol of marriage and fertility. Having tasted the fruit of her womanhood, Persephone must henceforth spend a third of each year with him.

This myth enacts the archetype of the maiden’s initiation into womanhood, the dark rite of passage that is a transformation to a greater wholeness. When Kore returns from the underworld she is reunited with her mother into the single figure of Demeter-Kore, who is then symbolically joined by Hecate, the figure of intuitive feminine wisdom. Thus through her abduction, the innocent maiden becomes mother, maiden, and sybil all in one, embodying the three-fold nature of woman made whole.

Helen Luke, commenting on this myth, says that in seeing the narcissus, Kore is caught in the intoxicating moment of seeing herself as a person for the first time, glimpsing her own feminine beauty separate from her mother. Inevitably, Luke says, rape must follow, for

...the moment of breakthrough for a woman is always, symbolically, a rape, a necessity, something which takes over with overmastering power and brooks no resistance…. Any breakthrough of new consciousness, though it may have been maturing for months or years out of sight, comes through a building up of tensions which reaches a breaking point. If the man or woman stands firm with courage, the breakdown becomes a breakthrough into a surge of new life…. The Lord of the Underworld is he who arises bursting forth from the unconscious with all the tremendous powers of instinct. He comes with his immortal horses, and sweeps the maiden from the surface life of her childish paradise into the depths, into the kingdom of the dead. For a woman’s total giving of her heart, of herself, in her experience of her instincts is a kind of death.(1)

New consciousness bursts through from where it has been germinating in the depths. We are carried into transformation, caught by an instinctive drive that pulls us away from the ego into the vaster dimension of the Self. Identifying with the ego, we feel the fear of the unknown and the grief for what is lost, the security of old patterns. These patterns often have to be broken by force, by the shock of the numinous power that belongs to the beyond. Otherwise we would remain forever caught in what has become familiar.

When we are ready, the instinctual energy of the divine invades our carefully constructed identities and ego-patterns. Kore, intoxicated by the narcissus, is inwardly ready to be ravished. She has come to the end of maidenhood, and needs to be taken into the darkness of initiation, the unknowing of transformation. Like children, we are afraid of the dark, but only in the darkness, in the unknown, is there the pomegranate seed of rebirth.

© 1996 The Golden Sufi Center

FOOTNOTES

Chapter 3: Love and Violation
1. “Mother and Daughter Mysteries,” Woman Earth and Spirit, pp. 56-7.