PERSEPHONE LIVES

Myths as roadmaps for our personal lives

The day of the Spring Equinox is approaching fast. This is also the date of my birthday. Recently I have found myself wondering: on which days exactly did Persephone descend to the Underworld and return to the World Above? I did some research and found material of great personal significance. I was familiar with the myth, but I had not connected it to my own life story.

(Note: this essay presents an updated version of a blog I first posted on my website in 2019).

We live in an age where it has become popular (or cool) to redefine gods as “energies”, “vibrations” or “cosmic archetypes”. For that reason, I would like to say upfront that to me gods and goddesses are REAL. In truth they are far more real to me than many of the material things which appear so rock solid in everyday reality. The gods were there long before our personal lifetime, and long before the particular period of history we happen to inhabit. The gods will still be there long after we die.

Having said that, based on years of teaching and facilitating powerful (often life-changing) ceremonies and rites of passage, I do believe that the ancient myths or stories we tell about the gods do hold and present many archetypal patterns or blueprints shaping human lives. Those stories can be used as sacred charts to map The Great Within (as I like calling the inner realms when I teach Sacred Art). This is what gives those ancient stories a timeless or classic quality. People from any era can find teachings of immense value in them.

Today I am going to focus on Persephone, who was the daughter of Demeter in classical Greek mythology. The most common version of her story is that Hades, the god of the Underworld, abducted her (one day, when she was picking flowers) and forced her to come live with him in the Underworld or Great Below. Because she eats six pomegranate seeds in the Underworld, she is forever changed by, and committed to, life deep below the Earth.

Her Mother, Demeter, grieving madly for her daughter, stops plants from growing in the Great Above: the everyday world of sunlight, the living, growth and sap rising. Eventually Demeter and Hades hammer out an agreement: Persephone is to spend half the year in the world of the living and the other half of the year she will take her place as the Queen of the Dead in the Underworld. This division explains how our seasons came into being.

Today we know (of course) that, astronomically speaking, the seasons are created by Earth tilting on her axis by 23.43615°, but this does not invalidate or detract from the story of Persephone!

There are other versions of this famous myth. My students and I have ceremonially re-enacted this myth and thus discovered that Persephone wanted to explore the mysterious of the Land of the Dead! She wanted to leave her mother and have sex with Hades. (There are many remarkable connections between Death, Sex and Ecstasy -but that material falls outside the scope of today’s blog). The fact is, of course, that most young women want to leave home, meet a life partner, make their own way in the world and perhaps start a family of their own.

We have different (earlier and later) variants of the story:

An earlier form of the Demeter and Persephone myth tells a drastically different tale with no mention of a rapist uncle. Sensitive child Persephone heard the cries of the dead in the underworld and chose to go to them to comfort and release them. She gains maturity and strength through her selfless acts and becomes queen of the underworld. Demeter missed her daughter when gone, and still did not allow plants to grow while Persephone tended the dead. Persephone’s return marks the beginning of spring

-Susan Levitt

My younger self (from a few decades ago) would have wanted to know what the true story is. After more than half a century on this planet I now view things differently:  I believe that all three stories (I am including the scientific astronomical explanation here) are valid and that they offer templates or pathways for deep inner work.

I have lived away from my country (and family) of birth for 35 years (which means my entire adult life). I teach internationally and my paintings are found in collections all over the world. My life’s work is global too and I love working with people on (and from) all continents.

In stark contrast my mother, (who died 18 months ago), lived her entire life in a very different world from mine. Hers was a much smaller world. It consisted of the small village she lives in, and its immediate surroundings (wind mills, tulips fields and cattle farms).

This mismatch in realities created a permanent situation of “not enough”: I didn’t visit often enough and my visits weren’t long enough. Understandably she wished that she would see more of her three grandchildren overseas, though I made countless trips with toddlers and young children to facilitate the relationship between grandparents and grandchildren. The only “visit” that would have satisfied her needs was (presumably) a permanent return to her specific region in The Netherlands, (which has never been on the cards). My husband is Swedish, by the way. We are a multi-cultural and multi-lingual family.

About twenty years ago (when I had lived abroad for fully fifteen years) my mother once called me up and told me tearfully that her next-door neighbour had said “the nicest thing ever” to her. Of course I enquired what the man had said exactly: “It is time your daughter knows where her place is. I have a good mind to drive all the way to London, yank on her long hair to force her into my van and then deliver her right back to you, where she belongs!”

Sadly, my mother never decoded this as the brutal description of an abduction it is! Until the day she died she clung to the “Manly Hero” piece: this man who cares enough about her to force her errant daughter and incurable globetrotter to return “home”. What a gift! (Or oh, what a poisoned chalice!)

Once I got over the shock (this took its time!) I asked myself: what is the scenario being described here? It hit me almost immediately: this is a 21th century version of the Persephone myth!

Recent events (deaths in my family of birth) have brought this myth (and memory) to attention again. I decided to sit with the story and properly focus on it. The moment I set all my triggers and emotional reactions aside, I am being presented with some very interesting material – an opportunity to learn more about my place in the larger constellation that is my family of origin.

Are there specific days in the year when Persephone makes her Descent and Ascent? I have read articles by various authors. Opinions vary (just as the period Persephone spends underground varies from four to six months) but some people actively honour and venerate her as the Goddess of the Equinoxes.

Aha! The penny drops! I knew that I was not done with this myth – there was a reason why it came “to the boil” again. My birthday is on March 20th. When I was a child my mother used to call me her Little Herald of Spring. My birthday literally marks the Spring Equinox, or Persephone’s return to the realm of Demeter, her mother. (In other words: the situation my mother’s neighbour is trying fix: the return of the prodigal daughter to her Mother’s world!)

Some scholars say that the Sumerian myth of Inanna’s Descent was a template for the (arising later on the timeline) Greek story about Persephone.  People who have read my first book, Natural Born Shamans: A Spiritual Toolkit for Life, will know that even as a child I did psycho pomp work at night. I help souls transition to the Afterlife. I also do death preparation work with (living) clients.

For as long as I can remember, I have spent my days in the world of the living and my nights in the Land of the Dead. According to some linguists, Persephone means “She Who Kills The Light” - and I often call myself a Darkness Worker. I work with sacred darkness: the Land of the Dead, shadow work, ancestral healing work. My true soul home is the dark Scandinavian winter, with the Northern Lights crackling overhead and The Wild Hunt riding out. Hades is said to mean “The Invisible”. My life as a painter is dedicated to making the invisible (other worlds, the spirit world) visible for others. 

Persephone is clearly a key archetype in my life and certain placements in my natal chart (astrology) show this very clearly. My way of coping with traumatic events is embarking on rich darkness journeys, such as this one. I could have remained stuck in the place of mad outrage at my mother’s neighbour and her total failure to discern the patriarchal (even abusive) dimension of this story.

I once said to my mother, when she trotted this story out again, if he actually shows up here in London, I will lock my door and call the police!

Compassionate reflection: my mother was a severely abused child, sadly this screwed up her “settings” and many perceptions, for life.

However, I can still “harvest the pomegranate seeds” (to mix my metaphors well and truly!) and learn profound lessons about the serpentine movements that govern the seasons and the seasons in my life: my birthday, my professional life, the sacred journeys back and forth to my country of birth, the dialogues in my mother tongue (literally stories rolling off my mother’s tongue in this case!)

I decided to embrace the myth and eat six pomegranate seeds before every visit to The Netherlands, literally The Low Lands (yes, literally low lands as in "the land below sea level"!) The Netherlands as the Nether World… I performed this act to remind myself of the obligations of my soul, a commitment made before birth.

The symbolic correspondences are limitless. And I keep discovering more, as I grow older and continue to meditate on this myth. Our family lives on a Hill in London. For decades the Great Below and the Great Above have acted as the mountains and valleys of my life. One cannot exist without the other, just like Day cannot exist without Night.

All those dimensions, including my daytime job and my work at night, are twinned and act as communicating vessels. I am the herald or messenger and I am also also the psycho pomp or soul conductor. This famous myth plays out in my own life. It repeats in every 24-hour period. Persephone lives!

Do you have a personal myth or story? Are you willing to share it in the comments?

I aim to post two essays a week here on Substack, but if you would like to see my daily posts about about sacred art, Nordic spirituality and my life as a Forest Witch, please follow me on Instagram or Facebook, thank you!

Imelda Almqvist, Forest House and School, Sweden

BIO FOR IMELDA ALMQVIST

Imelda Almqvist is an international teacher of Sacred Art and Seiðr/Old Norse Traditions (the ancestral wisdom teachings of Northern Europe). So far she has written four non-fiction books and two picture books for children. Natural Born Shamans: A Spiritual Toolkit for Life (Using shamanism creatively with young people of all ages) in 2016, Sacred Art: A Hollow Bone for Spirit (Where Art Meets Shamanism) in 2019, Medicine of the Imagination - Dwelling in Possibility (an impassioned plea for fearless imagination) in 2020 and North Sea Water In My Veins (The Pre-Christian spirituality of the Low Countries) will be published in June 2022.

The Green Bear is a series of picture book for children, aged 3 – 8 years. The stories and vibrant artwork, set in Scandinavia, invite children to explore enchanting parallel worlds and to keep their sense of magic alive as they grow up.

Imelda has presented her work on both The Shift Network and Sounds True. She appears in a TV program, titled Ice Age Shaman, made for the Smithsonian Museum, in the series Mystic Britain, talking about Mesolithic arctic deer shamanism.

Imelda is currently working on a handbook for rune magicians (about the runes of the Elder Futhark) and on more books in the Green Bear Series. Imelda runs an on-line school called Pregnant Hag Teachings, where all classes she teaches remain available as recordings, which can be watched any time!

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Online School:                  https://pregnant-hag-teachings.teachable.com/courses/

Facebook:                            https://www.facebook.com/imelda.almqvist/

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Twitter: @ImeldaAlmqvist

Imelda Almqvist