I’m not sure whether I should laugh or cry.
Is OP aware that oh so many books exist on this subject?
And that almost universally the ones authored by people with doctorates in classicism and mythology disagree with OP?
Including the… epic hymn that first told this story? You know what’s in that original source material… right?
Abducted, yes. Demeter mourned? Definitely. Rape, no.
So here’s some info on Ancient Greek wedding traditions which (oh my stars and garters!!) included abducting the bride. With the father’s permission, which Hades got before he took her away.
Here’s a whole book on the subject of Ancient Greek wedding custom and its conflation with funeral rites. (Which sounds a bit like Hades and Persephone to anyone who’s ever dabbled in things like explication and context)
Here’s a link to another book that talks about Persephone’s rise to power as a result of her willingly eating the pomegranate seeds.
Oh shit!!
Here’s a whole bunch of myths and hymns that talk about her Queen of the Underworld badassery!!
Holy pug tacos Batman!!
Here’s another book about the myth focusing on the seasonal religious and liminal rites. WHICH TAKE PLACE IN THE DRY SUMMER (not the fucking winter), which you know if you read a book.Way to go, OP!
All these fucking books! What could anyone possibly do with them all?!?!?!?! Do you eat books to absorb their powers instead of read them?
A better guess would be that you got into a moral panic over the name of a certain Renaissance statue and maybe after reading three pages of Edith Hamilton or the first paragraph of a Wikipedia article. And then used that to castigate and demean not only the people who actually take their limited time to create gorgeous art but also to denigrate modern day worshippers of Persephone and Hades?
Maybe next time, you stringy piece of over-boiled okra, you might want to take your own advice and pick up a book, instead of reducing the feared and respected Queen of the Underworld who held power equal to or in many interpretations GREATER than her husband into a meaningless pastiche of female disenfranchisement that you seemingly plucked from your own ass.
JESUS CHRIST THANK YOU
I don’t often reblog posts of people getting owned, but when I do…
man the ancient greeks didn’t dare to speak persephone’s name she was that powerful and venerated (they called her Kore, “the maiden”), hades didn’t get that honour
Rebagel for those book links, I find the Persephone and Hades stuff on here fascinating and I want to research it more
Book links, owning and the sheer badassery that is Persephone.
reblog forever
Reblogging for the links until this misapprehension finally ceases.
See also: Seduction and Rape in Greek Myth and Predatory Goddesses, both by classicist Mary Lefkowicz.
EDIT: Finally put together a bibliography of scholarly works about Hades and Persephone with the help of @coloricioso to help refute these old, tired accusations: https://honorthegods.tumblr.com/post/174794576611/honorthegods-hades-and-persephone-side
I could be misremembering - and OP deactivated, so I can’t check - but if I remember correctly from when this post was first circulating, OP had that whole radfem “All men are inherently evil and toxic” thing going on. (Which, I suppose, kind of explains why they’d prefer that version of the Persephone story.)
Most people - present day and historically - didn’t interact with religion the way modern American conservative Christians do with the “there’s only one true version of this, and any deviation is a sin”, and it’s important to remember that.
There are a thousand, thousand, thousand versions of any story that existed in the oral tradition, and people take the meaning from it that speaks to them. Look at how many versions we have of Snow White retellings - you’ve got everything from Disney to Neil Gaiman’s with the creepy vampire-y stuff in Snow, Glass, Apples, to Bill Willingham’s in Fables who’s married to the Big Bad Wolf with seven kids, to Seanan McGuire’s in Indexing protecting people from getting caught up in fairy tales, to Ursula Vernon/T. Kingfisher’s with wild boars instead of dwarfs.
