Myth of Persephone-Abortion

Bernini

Before I get into the meat of my mythological analysis, I’d like to note the astrological significance of this story. On December 19th 2021, when Venus stationed retrograde at 26 degrees Capricorn, she did so conjunct Pluto. Many, including myself, forecasted that something BIG in the realm of the feminine was going to happen. Pluto is the Roman name for Hades. And of course, his proximity to Venus immediately brought up this story. Pluto is also the Archetype of deep transformation in the container of the underworld. So while this subject feels fraught and scary, I must believe that it ultimately in service to getting women’s rights codified in the constitution.

RAPE OF PERSEPHONE-ABORTION

The constant fixation on Abortion, in part, stems from a death phobic, light obsessed paradigm.
-Written by an unwanted child.

Rape has a different meaning in myth when we literalize it. For the sake of this analysis, we will look at the rape as symbolic.

In the rape of Persephone, we see Hades develop a fascination with a young maiden out picking flowers in a pomegranate orchard. He then kidnaps her and brings her to rule beside him in the Underworld.

After a time, her mother Demeter, fraught with grief and unable to green the upperworld, strikes a deal with Hades, that Persephone be returned to the upperworld for half of the year, and the other half, she will spend in the underworld with Hades.

This is a multidimensional myth with layers of meaning.

One universal understanding is that through her experience, Persephone becomes the representation of the mystery embodied. It is through the cycles of death, life, & rebirth she has the capacity to embrace the fertile dark of the underworld and the resplendence of the upperworld in a rhythmic, undulating fashion. In other words, the myth speaks to the codes of the feminine. Which is why she is so aptly named “Persephone, Goddess of Spring and Queen of the Underworld.” As spring denotes new life, and the underworld demarcates death. She holds both simultaneously.

TWO PARALLEL MYTHOLOGIES

We have two great underworld myths like this. The myth of Inanna, who CHOOSES to go to the underworld, which represents the full embrace of the organic feminine. And Persephone who is plunged into the underworld by a masculine force. Both can be seen as universal initiations in a modern woman's life.

I’ll note that one interpretation of these two seemingly parallel myths posits that Inanna's story, which is documented as having taken place in the transition period between the lunar and solar cults, before patriarchy was established as the dominant shape of the culture, displays the power of women’s choice when juxtaposed against the myth of Persephone as a retelling of how the solar cults, that co-opted a now highly misogynistic Greek culture had, at the very least, raped a woman’s psyche and organic embodiment.

Both myths also represent that the feminine is the translator of the Dark to those who live solely in the upperworld. Overtime, as Her voice was removed from the public square, we had no one to decipher the mysteries of the life/death/rebirth cycle for us accurately. The myth of Jesus Christ (a man) is a distortion of these codes. It was part of the attempt by the sun cults to capture the mysteries governed by the feminine and put them into the keeping of men.

RIGHT OF PASSAGE, THE CODES OF THE FEMININE

The first right of passage for women is to embody the codex of simultaneously holding both life and death in her womb.

Every month a woman will have death pass through her body, as her menstrual cycle washes out an egg that could have been fertilized and become human. In the dominator paradigm, this magical, mysterious, “blood of life” has been coined “the curse”. Displaying just how turned off we are when facing death.

The inner dynamic of women is tied to the moon.

The same woman who had death pass though her at the dark of the moon, now becomes a symbol teeming with life and pregnant with material possibility at the full moon. And we all know that the full moon showers the earth with light. So we can see what exists in the dark. Making this the only acceptable emanation of womanhood. As we’ve moved into the era of the Sun/Son cults, we no longer sync with this rhythm.

Ironically, (or not) it really is the Sun that governs the male hormonal cycle, and the Moon which governs the female.

HOW ABORTION STEALS LIFE

In 1982, Author, Ursula LeGuin, wrote a short essay about her own experience with abortion. She reflects on the true life that would have been lost if she had not found an (illegal) abortionist.

“It’s like this: if I had dropped out of college, thrown away my education, depended on my parents … if I had done all that, which is what the anti-abortion people want me to have done, I would have borne a child for them, … the authorities, the theorists, the fundamentalists; I would have born a child for them, their child.
But I would not have born my own first child, or second child, or third child. My children.
The life of that fetus would have prevented, would have aborted, three other fetuses … the three wanted children, the three I had with my husband—whom, if I had not aborted the unwanted one, I would never have met … I would have been an “unwed mother” of a three-year-old in California, without work, with half an education, living off her parents….
But it is the children I have to come back to, my children Elisabeth, Caroline, Theodore, my joy, my pride, my loves. If I had not broken the law and aborted that life nobody wanted, they would have been aborted by a cruel, bigoted, and senseless law. They would never have been born. This thought I cannot bear.”

There is a way that having an unwanted life thrust upon you, or even an unwanted pregnancy, as in the case of my birth mother, that causes freeze or stasis in a woman. She becomes unable to contribute to the world in the way she was meant too. Stasis is a precursor to “death perpetual.” And “death perpetual” is the only frame of reference we have for death in today’s mainstream culture.

We must as a society begin to truly grapple with our fear of the dark, of the feminine, and of the mysteries encoded in her body. We can see in the myth that Demeter, the mother of Persephone, governs the greening of the world. It is something she chooses to do or not do based on her internal state. We have equally seen what the dangerously out of balance dominator paradigm has done to the body of the Earth/Feminine. Any system that is dangerously out of balance leads to “death perpetual.”

The reason we are so obsessed with the light is because the light reveals to us what can be known. And in our traumatized society, we become dysregulated in the unknown, in the mystery. Most, if not all of our trauma’s are tied in one way or another to our fear of death, which we can see in the new myth, the myth of Persephone. No longer are we choosing willingly to go to the underworld. But instead we must be picked up and carried there. Because we have been conditioned to be fundamentally afraid of what we will face in the dark.

What the dominator paradigm, that seeks to conquer our very reality, doesn’t see is that they are (as Hades is) pulling the feminine into the underworld of “death perpetual” or “hell”, when they do not allow the cycles of life to be in the hands of women, allowing HER to CHOOSE (as the Goddess/Inanna). Without that choice, women will continue to have the experience of being raped in every day life by the very culture she lives in. Removing her ability to choose for herself is a fundamental rejection of the feminine, her mystery and her power. That is exactly what we are affirming when we say we are “pro-life”. Death Perpetual.

Image: Rape of Persephone by Bernini, here we see Hades grabbing Persephone with the hounds of Hell nipping at her feet.