🐖🌾The Kore 🥀 🪦
"She [Persephone] was having a good time, along with the daughters of Okeanos, who wear their girdles slung low. She was picking flowers: roses, crocus, and beautiful violets. Up and down the soft meadow. Iris blossoms too she picked, and hyacinth. And the narcissus, which was grown as a lure for the flower-faced girl by Gaia [Earth]. All according to the plans of Zeus. She [Gaia] was doing a favor for the one who receives many guests [Hadês]. It [the narcissus] was a wondrous thing in its splendor. To look at it gives a sense of holy awe to the immortal gods as well as mortal humans. It has a hundred heads growing from the root up. Its sweet fragrance spread over the wide skies up above. And the earth below smiled back in all its radiance. So too the churning mass of the salty sea. Persephone was filled with a sense of wonder, and she reached out with both hands to take hold of the pretty plaything. And the earth, full of roads leading every which way, opened up under her. It happened on the Plain of Nysa. There it was that the Lord who receives many guests made his lunge. He was riding on a chariot drawn by immortal horses. The son of Kronos. The one known by many names. He seized her against her will, put her on his golden chariot, And drove away as she wept. She cried with a piercing voice, calling upon her father [Zeus], the son of Kronos, the highest and the best. But not one of the immortal ones, or of human mortals, heard her voice. Not even the olive trees which bear their splendid harvest .... She was being taken, against her will, at the behest of Zeus, by her father’s brother, the one who makes many sêmata, the one who receives many guests, the son of Kronos, the one with many names. On the chariot drawn by immortal horses. So long as the earth and the star-filled sky were still within the goddess’s [Persephone’s] view, as also the fish-swarming sea [pontos], with its strong currents, as also the rays of the sun, she still had hope that she would yet see her dear mother and that special group, the immortal gods. For that long a time her great noos was soothed by hope, distressed as she was..." - Homeric Hymn to Demeter
I wanted to draw Persephone in the pose of a funerary Kore, particularly that of the Phrasikleia Kore.
I also felt a little inspired by a specific theory from J.G. Frazer’s "The Golden Bough". He analyzed the Thesmophoria, a ritual where piglets were cast into sacred pits to decay. Later, 'bailers' would descend into the dark to retrieve the remains, mixing them with seeds to ensure a good harvest.
Frazer thought that these pigs were the original "Corn Spirit", the raw, animal embodiment of the dying and rising vegetation, and that over centuries, this concept was anthropomorphized into the figure of Persephone. While most modern scholars reject this specific evolutionary theory, the visceral connection between the goddess, the sacrificial piglet, and the graphic imagery associated with it has always stuck with me
