The Lily-Faced Maiden
Each autumn for more than a thousand years, pilgrims from across the Greek and Roman world walked the Sacred Way to Eleusis to witness secret rites that promised a better fate in the world below. At the heart of those rites was the story of a maiden seized from a flowering meadow by the lord of the dead, a grieving mother whose sorrow brought the world to the brink of famine, and a single pomegranate seed that set the seasons turning. This episode brings you the story of Persephone, from the Homeric Hymn to Demeter and Ovid’s retellings to the Eleusinian Mysteries, and how her descent went on to inspire modern Pagan celebrations of the autumnal equinox and the Broadway hit Hadestown.
Content note: This episode centers on a story of abduction and forced marriage. Listener discretion is advised.
Researched, written, and produced by Corinne Wieben with original music by Purple Planet.
Cover image: Proserpine by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1874). Tate Images. Public Domain.
Music
Purple Planet - Midnight Bell
Purple Planet - Atmospheric Piano Backing
Purple Planet - Introspection
Purple Planet - Renunciation
Purple Planet - Sense of Loss
Purple Planet - Shadowlands
Sources
Primary
Hesiod. “Theogony.” In The Homeric Hymns and Homerica, edited and translated by Hugh G. Evelyn-White. London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1914.
“Homeric Hymn to Demeter.” In The Successors of Homer, edited and translated by W. C. Lawton, 154–179. New York: Macmillan, 1898.
The Mystical Initiations; or, Hymns of Orpheus, edited and translated by Thomas Taylor. London: T. Payne & Son, 1787.
Ovid. Fasti, edited and translated by James G. Frazer. London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1931.
Ovid. Metamorphoses, edited and translated by Brookes More. Boston: Cornhill Publishing Co., 1922.
Virgil. Bucolics, Aeneid, and Georgics of Vergil, edited and translated by J. B. Greenough. Boston: Ginn & Co., 1900.
Secondary
Bowden, Hugh. Mystery Cults of the Ancient World. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010.
Foley, Helene P., ed. The Homeric Hymn to Demeter: Translation, Commentary, and Interpretive Essays. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994.
Hutton, Ronald. The Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.
Hutton, Ronald. The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Lincoln, Bruce. “The Rape of Persephone: A Greek Scenario of Women’s Initiation.” Harvard Theological Review 72:3/4 (1979): 223–235.
Mylonas, George E. Eleusis and the Eleusinian Mysteries. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961.
Spretnak, Charlene. Lost Goddesses of Early Greece: A Collection of Pre-Hellenic Myths. Berkeley: Moon Books, 1978.
