Mother of Us All

This sermon was preached by Rev. Dan Harper at First Unitarian Church in New Bedford. As usual, the sermon below is a reading text. The actual sermon as preached contained ad libs, interjections, and other improvisation. Sermon copyright (c) 2008 Daniel Harper.

Readings

The first reading is by James Lovelock, the person who developed the “Gaia hypothesis” that the Earth taken as a whole acts as if it is a living being:

“…Had it been known then that life and the environment are closely coupled, Darwin would have seen that evolution involved not just the organisms, but the whole planetary surface. We might then have looked upon the Earth as if it were alive, and known that we cannot pollute the air or use the Earth’s skin — its forest and ocean ecosystems — as a mere source of products to feed ourselves and furnish our homes. We would have felt instinctively that those ecosystems must be left untouched because they were part of the living Earth.

“So what should we do? First, we have to keep in mind the awesome pace of change and realise how little time is left to act; and then each community and nation must find the best use of the resources they have to sustain civilisation for as long as they can. Civilisation is energy-intensive and we cannot turn it off without crashing, so we need the security of a powered descent….

“Unfortunately our nation is now so urbanised as to be like a large city and we have only a small acreage of agriculture and forestry. We are dependent on the trading world for sustenance; climate change will deny us regular supplies of food and fuel from overseas.

“We could grow enough to feed ourselves on the diet of the Second World War, but the notion that there is land to spare to grow biofuels, or be the site of wind farms, is ludicrous. We will do our best to survive, but sadly I cannot see the United States or the emerging economies of China and India cutting back in time, and they are the main source of emissions. The worst will happen and survivors will have to adapt to a hell of a climate.

“Perhaps the saddest thing is that Gaia will lose as much or more than we do. Not only will wildlife and whole ecosystems go extinct, but in human civilisation the planet has a precious resource. We are not merely a disease; we are, through our intelligence and communication, the nervous system of the planet. Through us, Gaia has seen herself from space, and begins to know her place in the universe.

“We should be the heart and mind of the Earth, not its malady. So let us be brave and cease thinking of human needs and rights alone, and see that we have harmed the living Earth and need to make our peace with Gaia. We must do it while we are still strong enough to negotiate, and not a broken rabble led by brutal war lords. Most of all, we should remember that we are a part of it, and it is indeed our home.”

[This opinion piece by Dr. Lovelock is from The Independent (London), 16 January 2006.]

The second reading is from Homeric Hymn no. 30 to Gaia. Please excuse the gender-specific language of this old translation from ancient Greek:

To Gaia, the Mother of All.

I will sing of well-founded Gaia (Earth), mother of all, eldest of all beings. She feeds all the creatures that are in the worlds, all that go upon the goodly land, and all that are in the paths of the seas, and all that fly: all these are fed of her store. Through you, O queen, men are blessed in their children and blessed in their harvests, and to you it belongs to give means of life to mortal men and to take it away. Happy is the man whom you delight to honour! He has all things abundantly: his fruitful land is laden with corn, his pastures are covered with cattle, and his house is filled with good things. Such men rule orderly in their cities of fair women: great riches and wealth follow them: their sons exult with everfresh delight, and their daughters in flower-laden bands play and skip merrily over the soft flowers of the field. Thus is it with those whom you honour O holy goddess, bountiful, wife of starry Heaven; freely bestow upon me for this my song substance that cheers the heart!

[Homeric Hymns, ed. & trans. Hugh G. Evelyn-White, Loeb Classics (Cambridge, Mass.: Havard Press, 1914.)

Sermon

This is the fourth and final sermon in series of sermons on Greek goddesses. You may recall that when I began this series, I said that the ancient Greek goddesses are examples of female god images from our own Western culture — these are goddesses who are an integral part of our Western cultural inheritance. For this final sermon on Greek goddesses, I would like to speak with you about Gaia, or Mother Earth. And while the previous goddesses I spoke about — Artemis, Athena, Demeter, and Persephone — are no longer all that familiar to us, we all know and are familiar with Mother Earth, Mother Nature, the goddess who comprises all living beings on the broad earth.

Furthermore, the ancient Greek goddess Gaia is of interest today because today we face vast ecological problems. These ecological problems require a religious response from us. A few of our Christian brothers and sisters do a better job — they’re the ones who talk about “creation care,” meaning that God created the earth so we better not mess it up, because if we do we’re going against God’s will. I don’t happen to feel comfortable with that theology, but I respect the fact that this a genuinely religious response to the ecological crisis.

So what might be a genuine Unitarian Universalist religious response to the ecological crisis? Of course we already promote religious respect for the Earth; people in this congregation do this in a variety of ways. Some among us are neo-pagans, and may in fact understand the Earth as worthy of religious veneration. Some among us are humanists, with a religious appreciation of the importance of scientific insights, including the insights of ecology and climate science. Some among us — and this is our oldest religious tradition — are Transcendentalists, and like Emerson and Thoreau we feel that there is some transcendent reality in Nature.

These are three of our religious approaches, and we could probably come up with several more. It would be easy to emphasize the differences among us. Instead, let’s meditate for a while on the ancient Greek goddess Gaia, a Mother goddess who is part of our Western cultural inheritance, and see where such meditation leads us.

1. To begin with, I’d like to tell you a little about that ancient Greek goddess, Gaia. In the second reading this morning, we heard an ancient Greek hymn to Gaia, extolling her many virtues. She is the “eldest of all beings,” the first to emerge from the chaos that existed at the beginning of everything. Gaia “feeds all the creatures that are in the worlds, all that go upon the goodly land, and all that are in the paths of the seas, and all that fly.” It is she upon whom we human being depend for our very lives, and she can either bless human beings with a good harvest, or remove from them the means of life. If the ancient Greek goddess Gaia smiles upon humanity, then our farms produce good food for us, our houses are “filled with good things,” our cities are orderly, our sons “exult with everfresh delight,” and our “daughters in flower-laden bands play and skip merrily over the soft flowers of the field.”

All of which makes old Mother Earth sound like a delightful goddess indeed. But the ancient Greeks knew a Gaia who had her dark side, too; a goddess who was quite different from the sanitized versions of Mother Earth that seem to float around popular culture today. Let me tell you one of the gorier stories about Gaia:

In the beginning was Chaos, which was unformed stuff, or some say a bounded gap. Out of Chaos emerged Gaia, Mother Earth. Now after some indeterminate time, Gaia bore a son, who was named Ouranos, or the Heavens. Ouranos and Gaia had various children together, among whom was born Cronos.

Ouranos did not like some of his children, and he took his children Cottus and Briareos and Gyes and hid them away beneath the Earth. Gaia was angry at Ouranos for doing this, and she asked her other children to wreak revenge on their father. But only Cronos would follow Gaia’s plan — he took the sickle she gave him, ambushed his father, and castrated him. That was the end of Ouranos’s rule.

And there are many more rather grim stories involving Gaia: stories of monsters, stories where Gaia gets involved in a war with some other gods, more stories of revenge and hatred. There is a dark side to the ancient Greek goddess named Gaia. She was not all flowers and greenery; she was capable of wrath and destruction as well.

Our ancient Greek cultural inheritance portrays Mother Earth as a primal religious power. Gaia is not a greeting-card version of Mother Earth:– she is a powerful Mother Earth, who nurtures but who also participates fully in the total life cycle of birth and death. She is a goddess who is in some sense beyond real human comprehension. So the first part of our meditation on Mother Earth recognizes her great power.

2. From ancient Greek myths we jump forward a few thousand years to modern science, and we find that the name “Gaia” appears in the scientific world. Perhaps you have heard of the Gaia hypothesis. First proposed by James Lovelock in the 1960s, this scientific hypothesis proposed that the earth is a self-regulating system. as I understand it, the proponents of Gaia theory state that it is possible to understand the Earth as a living being, in the very specific sense that the Earth can be understood as the complex interaction of various systems. These interactions can best be modeled using non-linear mathematics, and a serious study of these interactions require scientists to look beyond the confines of their specific disciplines, so that biologists have to consider the effects of geology, and atmospheric and hydrospheric science on life forms, and vice versa.

Lovelock is a serious scientist who has an undergraduate degree in chemistry and doctorates in medicine and biophysics. In spite of his academic credentials, his use of the name “Gaia” turned out to be quite controversial. Some scientists seemed to think that using the name of an ancient Greek goddess made it seem as if Lovelock was proposing that the self-regulating system of the earth is somehow conscious and capable of willful action. Lovelock has explicitly denied that he intended this, and he has said that he does not believe that we should consider the Earth as a thinking, feeling being. And in the ensuing years, others have begun talking about earth systems science, or geophysiology — terms which are perhaps less inflammatory.

While the term “Gaia theory” may sound imprecise to some scientists, from a metaphorical standpoint I think that name can be useful to us. We all know that widespread worship of the ancient Greek gods and goddesses has long since died out. But using the name for an ancient goddess might help us keep in mind the complexity embodied by Gaia theory — just as those ancient goddesses were complex and in some sense impossible for us humans to understand, the complexity of the relationships between the various systems of the planet Earth is beyond our current comprehension, and impossible to model with any degree of accuracy. This in turn might help us to be aware that our actions may have consequences that we cannot foresee and that we do not intend. And that should prompt us to be wary of anyone who proposes a simplistic solution to the ecological problems facing us.

We know that we should be wary of simplistic answers to complex questions; we know that human beings often do things that turn out to be pretty stupid in retrospect; and we know that the solutions to life’s problems are rarely simple. We don’t have to know anything about the non-linear mathematics behind Gaia theory to understand this. So the second part of our meditation on the goddess Gaia reminds us that while we know a lot more about how the universe works than did the ancient Greeks, there’s an awful lot that we still don’t understand.

3. And now I’d like to turn to consider our own religious tradition. For me, one of the central points of our Unitarian Universalist tradition is that we are ultimately hopeful. In spite of everything that is wrong with the world, we continue to believe that the arc of the universe tends towards justice; we continue to believe that love is the most powerful force in the universe. Even in the face of evidence that things are not going particularly well, we continue to believe that we can make a positive difference in the world.

Right now, there is a fair amount of evidence that things are not going particularly well. I mentioned the scientist James Lovelock earlier; in the first reading this morning, from a recent article by Lovelock, he calmly states his belief that we are already past the tipping point of global climate change. Many of us would disagree with Lovelock on this point, but even so there’s plenty of other evidence that things are not going well in the world. If you pay attention to the news you can find plenty of evidence that implies that the world is currently in a handbasket, and it is not heaven to which we are headed to in that handbasket.

It is in times like these that we need hope. I would suggest that the image of Mother Earth can serve as a powerful symbol of hopefulness. Mother Earth is a mother. By definition, mothers are mothers because they have children: whether they have biological children or other kinds of children, by definition mothers care for children, nurture them, believe in them. Referring to this image as Gaia might help remind us that this remains an image, a symbol, not reality; that we are constantly striving to turn that image into reality. But it is an image that can lead us forward in hopefulness.

Raising children is an act of hope. Whenever we see a child, whenever we see new life starting out, we have the hope that this child will be one of the ones who helps make the world a better place. In the first reading this morning, James Lovelock says that human civilization should be the heart and mind of this planet. Whenever we see a child, we have the hope that this child will participate in the great work of maintaining civilization as the heart and mind of our planet. Yes, we adults do our part, to the best of our ability: but we always hope that the children in our lives will soar beyond our own efforts.

I would say that children are central to my religious outlook, even though I have no children of my own. Caring for children is central to my religious outlook, because in caring for children lies my hope for the future. For me, a central purpose of any religious community must be to raise children to help them become good adults; to instill in them the idea that there is more to life than being a good consumer; that we human beings must always strive to reach the highest moral and ethical ideals. In this sense, religious communities act like the best of mothers: nurturing, caring for, and believing in the children in our midst. As Unitarian Universalists, we can believe whatever we wish about God; but we are religiously called to create a religious community that nurtures the rising generations. This is how we live out the essential hopefulness of our Unitarian Universalist faith.

So in closing, let me say: happy Mother’s Day. Care for the children. Care for the earth. The two are synonymous. And mothers are central to it all.

Music Sunday

This meditation was offered by Rev. Dan Harper at First Unitarian Church in New Bedford. As usual, the meditation below is a reading text. The actual sermon as preached contained ad libs, interjections, and other improvisation. Sermon copyright (c) 2008 Daniel Harper.

Reading

The first reading was Poem no. 54 by Ricardo Reis (Fernando Pessoa), from Selected Poems of Fernando Pessoa, trans. Peter Rickard (Edinburgh Bilingual Library, 1971), p. 152. Copyright laws do not permit the reproduction of complete poems without permission.

Meditation

I offer you this meditation on music and religion:

When it is a part of a worship service, music is not a performance. Music is always a mutual creation, created by the musician and those who listen to the music. Today, our culture assumes that music is purely the creation of the musician, and so when we go to hear a concert we sometimes forget that that concert would not exist without our energy and concentration.

And indeed, some popular music concerts are merely shows, where the performers don’t actually play the music, they simply dance and lip-synch along to a hit recording. Or, more commonly, the music is played, but it is played to reproduce as exactly as possible every last inflection of a well-known recording, with no place for the musicians sensing the listeners and incorporating something of their souls into the music. This is music that is played without respect or regard for the listener, because the listener is forced into an utterly passive role.

Music that is played in a worship service is the complete opposite of this. In a worship service, there is no audience, there is a congregation, which includes the musicians. Every person in a congregation is a full participants in the worship service. As a preacher, I can tell you that I get immediate and direct feedback from the congregation during the worship service, and they can and do affect the course of a sermon; and from talking with church musicians, I know they find the same thing is true for them.

But far more importantly, congregations come back week after week; the people in a congregation participate in an ongoing conversation with the musicians and other worship leaders. Sometimes, particularly in this congregation, the people in the congregation do indeed talk directly with the musicians. But there is something deeper than that going on. The people in the congregation are the ones who provide the true power of a weekly worship service; those of us who are worship leaders work to focus the energy of the congregation, but it is the congregation who ultimately determines what we are together, and who we are becoming.

Fernando Pessoa tells us that the answer to the question of life “lies beyond the gods.” I would say that if there is an answer to the question of life, it lies in direct intuition of that which is transcendent. There is that which is transient in religion — and so the ancient gods of Olympus were merely transient, because when ancient Greek culture died, they died — but there is that which is permanent in religion — and so it is that we seek that which is truly transcendent. We can experience something of that transcendent reality in music. And when we listen to music together as a congregation, we not only experience that transcendent reality, we co-create it: we hear our corporate selves into a new existence.

This morning we shall together hear into reality a beauty transcends our daily cares; and, as we do every Sunday, we participate in the divine transcendent through the co-creation of beauty together.

And so, at the end of Randy’s sermon, I invite you to pause for a minute of silent reflection — to let the music sink into our souls.

Sermon

The sermon consisted of Music Director Randy Fayan playing the Passacaglia and Fugue in C Minor, J. S. Bach, BWV 582

Demeter and Persephone

This sermon was preached by Rev. Dan Harper at First Unitarian Church in New Bedford. As usual, the sermon below is a reading text. The actual sermon as preached contained ad libs, interjections, and other improvisation. Sermon copyright (c) 2008 Daniel Harper.

Readings

The first reading is an excerpt from an Orphic Hymn to Persephone:

“…Persephone divine,
come, blessed queen, and to these rites incline:
only-begotten, Hades’s honoured wife,
O venerable Goddess, source of life:….
O vernal queen, whom grassy plains delight,
sweet to the smell, and pleasing to the sight:
whose holy form in budding fruits we view,
earth’s vigorous offspring of a various hue:
espoused in autumn, life and death alone
to wretched mortals from thy power is known:
for thine the task, according to thy will,
life to produce, and all that lives to kill.
Hear, blessed Goddess, send a rich increase
of various fruits from earth, with lovely peace:
send health with gentle hand, and crown my life
with blest abundance, free from noisy strife;
last in extreme old age the prey of death,
dismiss me willing to the realms beneath,
to thy fair palace and the blissful plains
where happy spirits dwell, and Hades reigns.”

[#29, The Hymns of Orpheus. Translated by Thomas Taylor (1792). Modern edition: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999.]

The second reading is from the mythographer Apollodorus, and it tells the best-known version of the story of Persephone’s abduction:

[1.5.1] Plouton [or Hades] fell in love with Persephone, and with Zeus’s help secretly kidnapped her. Demeter [her mother] roamed the earth over in search of her, by day and by night with torches. When she learned from the Hermionians that Plouton had kidnapped her, enraged at the gods she left the sky, and in the likeness of a woman made her way to Eleusis….
[1.5.3] When Zeus commanded Plouton to send Kore [or Persephone] back up, Plouton gave her a pomegranate seed to eat, as assurance that she would not remain long with her mother. With no foreknowledge of the outcome of her act, she consumed it. Askalaphos, the son of Akheron and Gorgyra, bore witness against her; in punishment for which Demeter pinned him down with a heavy rock in Hades’s realm. But Persephone was obliged to spend a third of each year with Plouton, and the remainder of the year among the gods.

[Pseudo-Appollodorus, Bibliotheca. Trans. Keith Aldrich as The Library of Greek Mythology by Apollodorus. Lawrence: Coronado Press, 1975).]

Sermon

This is the third in a series of sermons on Greek goddesses. This morning I would like to speak about Demeter and Persephone: Demeter was the goddess of the seasons, of farming and husbandry, of marriage, and of the cycle of life and death; while Persephone, her daughter, was the goddess of the underworld, goddess of the dead, and also the goddess of springtime.

But before I begin talking about the myths relating to Demeter and Persephone, I’d like to remind you — as if you need reminding — that myths are slippery things. The ancient mythographers, who collected and wrote down the ancient Greek myths (and who, by the way, were all men), offer many different versions of any given myth; and because myths come from oral tradition we might suspect that there were as many different versions of a myth as there were persons who retold that myth.

After centuries of Christian dominance in Western culture, we are accustomed to think of religion as being based on written texts;– we are accustomed to think that religion is the same no matter where you are on the world;– and we are still influenced by the Christian idea of orthodoxy: that there is one and only one true interpretation of religion, an interpretation which is overseen by a central religious authority. But Greek myths were not based on written texts, they were based on oral poetry and more importantly on rituals that were acted out in various sacred places. Greek myths varied from place to place, so that the story of Demeter and Persephone varied from Athens to Sicily. And there was no central authority to interpret the myths or Greek religion; the myths were interpreted variously by the priests and priestesses in the various sacred places, and interpreted variously by each mythographer, each poet, each philosopher.

As a result, the ancient Greeks could not pretend that there was any one true and final interpretation of their religion; nor did they think there was any one true and final answer to their religious questions. Different points of view led to different understandings of the gods and goddesses, their children, and their liaisons.

In this sense, Greek myths are much like family stories. The stories we tell about our families are notoriously slippery. One child in a family has a wonderful childhood, filled with love and magic and wonder; another child in the same family has a miserable childhood; and when these siblings grow up, and tell their stories to one another, they are astonished at how different their stories are; it can seem as if they grew up in two different families. Similarly, a child may have a lovely childhood, completely unaware that one parent lives a gloomy, depressed life; or vice versa.

Myths are slippery things, and families are slippery things. And this morning I’m going to talk about the mythical family of Demeter and Persephone.

1. In the second reading this morning, we heard one of the more familiar mythical stories about how Persephone was abducted by Hades, the god of the underworld, and that familiar story goes something like this:

Once upon a time, Hades, the god of the underworld, was looking for a queen to rule along with him. Somehow, he happened to see Persephone, who was also known as Kore. Something about her captivated him. He went to Zeus, the ruler of all the Olympian gods, and he asked Zeus’s permission to marry Persephone. Now probably Hades asked Zeus’s permission simply because Zeus was the ruler of the other Olympian gods. But others say that Zeus lay with Persephone first, and they had a child together. And still others say Zeus was Persephone’s father. Well, whatever the family relationships might have been, Hades asked to marry Persephone and have her become the queen of the underworld. Zeus would neither grant his permission nor deny his permission. Hades took this as tacit consent from the ruler of the gods.

One spring day, Persephone was out wandering in a field, far from her mother Demeter. She was not alone, however; some say that she was with friends of hers who were nymphs, the daughters of Oceanus; but others say she was with the great goddesses Artemis and Athena. Whomever she was with on that spring day, the fields were filled with flowers: crocuses, irises, hyacinths, roses. One flower in particular captivated Persephone, and that was the narcissus. She wandered away from her friends to seek out this particularly beautiful flower.

Persephone reached down to pluck one particularly fine blossom, when suddenly the ground opened up. Hades came up out of the ground, riding in a gold chariot drawn by magnificent immortal horses. He caught her up, and took her in the chariot, wheeled the horses around, and sped back into the ground.

Oddly enough, almost no one seems to have heard Persephone cry out. Her friends did not hear her; Zeus, up on Mount Olympus, didn’t hear her (although perhaps he didn’t want to); none of the other Olympian gods or goddesses heard her, though they are all usually so good at hearing things like that. Later, when Demeter began her search for her daughter, the goddess Hecate, who had been sitting inside her cave, said she had heard Persephone’s cries; and Helios, the Sun, way up in the sky, far above Mount Olympos, said he heard her cries. But that was later.

When Demeter missed Persephone, she became absolutely frantic. Where had her daughter gone? She went all over the land and all over the sea looking for Persephone. No one, neither god nor mortal, would tell her the truth of where Persephone had gone. At last, after ten days, Hecate came forward and told this story: she said she did not know who had stolen Persephone away, but that she had heard Persephone’s voice. Then Demeter stormed up to see Helios, the Sun. Helios said he thought Zeus had given Persephone to Hades, for he had seen Hades had come up out of the earth and steal her away. But Zeus denied any role in this, and said Persephone should stay with Hades.

I said Demeter was frantic, and soon she was prostrated with grief, and would no longer allow food to grow on the wide earth; nor would she let the seasons progress in their usual way. Famine spread across the earth, and human beingss began to die. At last, in order to prevent all life on earth from being destroyed, Zeus told Demeter that she could have Persephone back — that is, as long as Persephone had not eaten anything at all during her time with Hades in the underworld.

When Persephone came back to the upper world, her mother greeted her joyously, and springtime came again on the earth. But when Demeter asked her if she had eaten anything in the underworld, Persephone said she had eaten several pomegranate seeds. Some say she ate four seeds, others say she ate six, or seven; some say that Persephone was tricked into eating the seeds, others say she ate them unknowingly, and still others say she ate them by choice.

For whatever reason Persephone ate the seeds, the end result was the same: she had to spend part of every year in the underworld. Each year, Persephone descends to the underworld to spend so many months there; and while she is away, her mother Demeter grieves, it is wintertime, and nothing can grow upon the earth. When Persephone returns to the upper world, Demeter becomes glad again, and springtime returns.

That’s the story. But I want to know why Persephone ate those seeds. Was it because Hades tricked her into it? Did she eat the seeds without thinking? (such a scenario seems unlikely). Did she choose to eat them? We don’t get a definite answer; yet such an answer would tell us whether Persephone decided on her own to stay in the underworld, or whether she was forced into staying.

Now there’s another story that says when Persephone had grown up, all the Olympian gods fell in love with her. Now Persephone could have followed the example of Artemis and Athena, and demanded that she never have to marry; but she did not. Well, all these gods were pursuing her, and her mother got worried:– what if old lame Hephaistos became her husband? So Demeter took Persephone away, and hid her in a deep dark cave behind stalactites and stalagmites that should have kept all the gods away from her. But Zeus found a way to sneak in, and he and Persephone had a child together, much to Demeter’s dismay. This story raises an interesting question:– Did Persephone want to get married to someone, but Demeter kept interfering?

What is missing in all these myths is Persephone’s point of view. We hear an awful lot about what Demeter went through. But what was Persephone thinking and feeling?

2. I said that both myths and family histories are slippery things. It is nearly impossible to catch hold of either one; they slip away from any final understanding. Yet if we try to adopt Persephone’s point of view, perhaps we could find new perspectives on this old story. The problem is that we don’t quite know what Persephone’s point of view might have been. So we have to speculate instead. For example:

   a) What if Persephone felt that Demeter was an over-protective, controlling mother? Persephone could have seen that other goddesses were able to get away from their parent’s protection. Athena, for example, was born to her mother inside Zeus’s head. When she came of age, Athena started forging armor for herself, and the pounding of her hammer on the anvil gave Zeus such headaches that the other gods had to cut open Zeus’s head. Out sprang Athena, fully grown, fully armored, and not to be messed with. There was no question about Athena’s father or mother controlling her life. As for Artemis, who was also a daughter of Zeus:– while she was still a child, she asked for, and got, privileges from Zeus including weaponry, attendants, and the right to never marry. Once again, there was no question about Artemis’s father or mother controlling her life.

Persephone could have seen all this, and yet there she was, another daughter of Zeus, and Demeter her mother rarely let her out of sight. Perhaps she saw Athena and Artemis as powerful, actualized women, and she might have asked herself: Why not me?

   b) So what if we retold the story of Persephone like this: Persephone goes out into that field alone, and up out of the ground comes Hades. Hades grabs her, which surprises the heck out of her, and so she screams. But then she thinks: Hades is a very powerful god, and maybe this is a way to get away from her mother — not only that, but she will get to be a queen of the underworld. The gold chariot confirms what she had heard, that Hades is fantastically rich — after all, he has access to all the riches that lie underground, which includes gold, silver, gems, and the like. And if you can get past the idea that he is the god of the dead, maybe he’s an OK guy after all.

She grabs at her chance, stops screaming, and goes off with Hades into the underworld. It’s not the best marriage in the world. And the underworld can get a little grim, filled as it is with dead people. She’s not sure she wants to stay in Hades. But when she hears that her mother is crying and threatening that there won’t be any springtime until she gets her Persephone back — how familiar that all sounds — well, when Persephone hears that her mother has gotten permission to come down to the underworld and fetch her back, Persephone quickly eats some pomegranate seeds, knowing this will mean she won’t be able to stay with Demeter.

That’s one way we could retell the story of Persephone. In this version of the story, Persephone goes from one bad family situation into another bad family situation. And then in the end, she has to split her time between these two unhappy families.

   c. So here’s another way to retell this story. Let’s assume that Persephone is a much more powerful goddess than we have thus far given her credit for being. Remember, all these myths were written down by men who had a vested interest in maintaining that male gods were more powerful than female goddesses). In fact, there is an ancient myth that it was Persephone who first created human beings:– one day, she was crossing a river, saw some clay, and fashioned the clay into a human shape; she got Zeus to breathe life into the figure; and thus Zeus had power over human beings while they were alive, but Persephone had power over them after they died. And in another story, it is said that Persephone was not the daughter of Zeus at all, nor of Demeter. So Persephone seems to be very powerful, and in control of her life. What if we retold her story like this:

Persephone is happy to be the goddess of springtime, and to work with Demeter. But Persephone feels that Demeter is trying to take too much power from her; trying to control her, the goddess who created humankind, who takes charge of human beings once they die! So Persephone arranges to meet up with Hades, while Athena and Artemis, two other powerful goddesses, provide cover for her. Zip! — she and Hades disappear below the ground. It’s a great strategic alliance: Persephone is the goddess who rules over dead human beings, while Hades is the god of the underworld where the dead go.

At the same time, Persephone knows that she will have to return to the upper world once a year, to fulfill her other role as the goddess of the springtime. Demeter messes up the plan a little bit by freaking out and running all over the place. To calm her down, Persephone gets Hecate and Helios to say that Persephone is safe in the underworld; but Demeter isn’t satisfied, so Persephone carefully eats half a dozen pomegranate seeds, and goes to the upper world to calm Demeter down.

Let’s remember that Demeter may or may not be Persephone’s mother. When Demeter sees Persephone, she is ecstatic — she once more has the goddess of springtime working with her. “Not so fast,” says Persephone; “I may be the goddess of springtime, but I’m also goddess of the dead — and by the way, the two are closely related, in case you hadn’t noticed, Demeter. And I’ve eaten half a dozen pomegranate seeds to symbolize my commitment to the entire cycle of life, from birth through death.”

And that’s yet another retelling of the story of Persephone, one which may hang together better than the old story told by the ancient mythographers.

3. I began by saying that mythical stories are slippery things; just as the stories we tell about our families are slippery things. We have seen this in the mythical family story of Demeter and Persephone. A great deal depends on who tells the story. This story was told from Demeter’s point of view, but if we try to imagine how Persephone would tell it, we might come up with a very different way of understanding the story.

And as we grow older, we retell our own stories over and over — to our selves, and to the people we love. Sometimes, someone else tells our own story for us, and we accept their telling of the story — as when sometimes our parents tell us what kind of person they expect us to be, and we blindly accept what they say, and live out their expectations. Persephone could just accept the stories that others tell about her: Hades abducted her, someone made her eat pomegranate seeds, Demeter came and returned her to the upper world, then Zeus ruled she had to split her time between the two worlds. Or Persephone could retell her story so that she claims her own power as both the goddess of springtime, and the goddess of the dead.

There’s another religious way of summing all this up: We are alive, and so we fear death, and try to avoid it. But Persephone knows that death and life are intertwined; she knows both the giving of life in springtime, and she knows the ultimate ending of death. Persephone recognizes the power life in Demeter, and the power of death in Hades, and she manages to give them both their due. We ask ourselves: Can we reach that true integration of valuing life while honoring death? And we ask ourselves another question that Persephone raises: Can we claim our individual power in the face of death, which renders us ultimately powerless?

One last very short myth about Persephone before I end: It is said that when Persephone goes into the ground accompanying Hades, that is really an even older myth about planting seeds in the cold ground in springtime; we plant seeds is what appears to be dead earth, only to have it grow, and thrive, and come to harvest, and so feed us and make us grow.