Persephone began as a reflection of her mother, Demeter. Demeter was the goddess of the harvest, turning the seasons and sustaining earth’s rich bounty. Nurturing and maternal, wrathful and protective, Demeter loved fiercely, raged terribly, and grieved desperately. 

Though Hades, god of the underworld, was the perfect antithesis to Demeter in many ways—grim, melancholy, frightening—he too loved fiercely, raged terribly, grieved desperately. Like Demeter, he bore a cornucopia of plenty—a symbol of fertility and abundance.

Demeter bore the living. Hades, the dead. From the pits of Tartarus to the fields of asphodel to Elysium, Hades passed judgement on the dead from his dismal throne.

Hades desired a wife and Zeus, knowing Demeter would never allow the union willingly, gave Hades permission to abduct Persephone for his own. As she was gathering flowers in a meadow, Hades burst through the earth on his golden chariot and abducted young Persephone, dragging her away from her daisies to his bleak Plutonian kingdom.

Persephone remained imprisoned below as Demeter searched for her beloved daughter. Grief stricken, Demeter roamed the earth, leaving great famine in her wake. She forbade the earth from bearing fruit. Summer fell away, and the first winter settled in.

The earth was left nearly barren by Demeter’s persistent rage, her fury at Zeus’s complicity boundless. Zeus sent Hermes, guide to the souls of the underworld, to collect Persephone and return her to her mother. But Persephone, starving and not knowing that to eat the fruit of the underworld was to damn oneself to its dominion, had consumed six pomegranate seeds.

Thereafter, Persephone was forced to spend half the year—one month for each seed—with Hades in the underworld. And so, as summer turns to autumn, as the flowers wilt and the earth turns cold, Persephone makes her annual descent into a realm of darkness and death. She leaves the warm embrace of her mother, who loves her fiercely, to the cool grip of her husband, who loves her forcefully.