an alternative reading to Kore’s abduction

by Faranak Mirjalili

(artwork above: Laura Krusemark for Anima Mundi School)

The story of Persephone and Demeter is a classical one in myth and depth-psychology and has been many times interpreted, by myself included, as a metaphor for the patriarchal abduction of the feminine—yin—principle by the masculine—yang—culture of Zeus and his brother Hades.

In this ancient Greek myth, the maiden Kore is abducted by her uncle Hades, the god of the underworld, after the marriage was approved by her father Zeus without the knowing of her mother Demeter. When Demeter finds out about Kore’s abduction, she rages and mourns endlessly and even stops nourishing the Olympian gods and human beings. As a result the lands and people suffer from drought and famine. Demeter refuses to be the nourishing goddess that she is, unless she is given back her daughter. The story is filled with many transformations of both human beings, the goddess herself and the community of Eleusis. And eventually, Demeter is given back her daughter and life starts blossoming with their reunion. Persephone, Queen of the Underworld and no longer the little Kore, is now the wife and consort of Hades. Because she ate 6 seeds of the pomegranate given to her by Hades, she has to seasonally return to the Underworld.

I believe that it is first and foremost a very important experience for women to go through the myth with the understanding that this indeed represents the abduction, violation, and rape of the feminine Soul principle in a time where patriarchal powers had established themselves in ancient Greek. But just like a walk in the forest is never the same experience, so is the way we can view a myth or fairytale. It changes with the time, place and gathering of people it is told in. Because the culture and pattern of consumerism and fast consumption is so ingrained in our psyche, we inevitably bring this programming into our relationship to story and myth. We might think that when we ‘know’ a story—we are done with it and we can go to the next one. But truth is, myth cannot be consumed and myth definitely is not a fast-food meal. It can nourish us, yes, but only if we come into relationship to its very being.

There is a numinous experience in working with a myth in a repetitive way and when we do, it starts to bloom and grow, much as a living entity does. It will start to surprise us in unexpected ways. Each myth is like an organism, that through engagement starts to unfurl into dimensions unknown to us before. It starts to flow within the patterns of our lives, putting its emphasis on a different note every time we work with the story. In my own experience, myth really starts to reveal itself to us when it is held within its oral tradition. Myths like to be told, they love the vocality of expression. Reading a story is very different than hearing it being told live. Writing a story is again a completely different experience from telling it to a group of people. The oral tradition has always been closely associated with magic, and there is a reason for that.

There is something very powerful about this form of repetitive and oral engagement with myth, especially when done in community and communion. It affects the whole of our surroundings in visible and invisible ways. Myths are ancient stories of the collective unconscious and move the archetypal and morphogenetic fields of the human psyche. In my own experience, I know that it comes with a certain responsibility, reverence, and understanding of the archetypal patterns in the individual. And truth be told, working with myth is not for the faint-at-heart. It is that kind of subtle magic, that we all secretly long for and fear at the same time.

UNDER KORE’S VEIL

Kore’s Initiation” by Faranak (painted with pomegranates)

What better way than to understand Kore than to step into her shoes. This most recent cycle with Persephone gave me a new look into the experience of Kore and her abduction. I was rather caught by surprise since I held a more matriarchal, feminist view on her abduction. One of the great authors on this feminist view on this myth is Kathie Carlson. In her book ‘Life’s Daughter, Death’s Bride’, she explicitly gives women the important and very healing matriarchal reading of this myth. I personally hold this interpretation dear to my heart, as I believe it is important for women to understand in what scope they have been cut away from the feminine Soul principle during the past thousands of years of patriarchy. Nevertheless, there is something mysterious about the figure of Hades, which keeps intriguing women into an attraction that is sometimes difficult to explain. This next story gave me a better understanding of that.

My teenage cousin had been in contact with me for some time, asking me to help her with her dreams. For a while, she was being chased by a serpent that she feared and was disgusted by. Dream after dream, the snake was out to get her. With a teenager, we as Analysts don’t necessarily have work with the parental complexes and Analysis in the way we do for adults. This is especially the case when they have not come to us with a psychological problem, but mostly because their creative imagination is called or stirred up.

We all remember how it was to be a teenager. Unfortunately, our cultures do not know how to help teenagers cross this immense threshold in their lives. Something magical can come alive during these years; there is something so vivid, so alive; a fast-flowing river that is able to move mountains. This is the age of tremendous energies waking up and trying to find direction. With a little bit of enchantment and guidance, this current can find its way through their psyches and bodies.

In ancient times, this would be an initiatory age and an important threshold in a boy or girl’s life. A symbolic and ritualistic death of the girl-child would be played out, from where the newborn young woman would rise. The outward rituals that were enacted were supported by the energies and deities of the inner worlds—the connection to the Goddess that was kept alive enabled the real initiation to take place inwardly. The ritual gave it an outward expression and a gateway for the transformative energies to come through into this world.

But we have long lost these initiations, and our Western cultures have systematically stripped us from these feminine rituals and rites that kept a pulsating connection to the Goddess alive. Those that knew the wisdom and gateways to the inner worlds have been persecuted, killed and their lineages broken. Now, it is up to us each individually to reclaim and heal these relationships in our own way. And those of us that are one step ahead, can help the younger generation to find their own unique way of relating to the Mundus Imaginalis—the realm of creative imagination.

After my advice to ‘befriend the snake’ through Active Imagination, dance and drawing, the serpent started to disappear from her dreams as other, new images erupted. A few weeks later I get a call: “Faranak, there is a guy I met, he says he likes me. I might like him too…what do I do?” With a big smile on my face, I guide her very subtly into her first experience of love and desire. The serpent, here very obviously representing the awakening Kundalini force within her, eventually found its way into giving her the very first sexual initiation and relationship to the masculine!

A few months later, when I had just told the Persephone myth in our Mythical Feminine program, she reports a very interesting dream. One important note to make is that my cousin did not know about this story, or that I was to tell this. You can clearly see and sense the power of the collective, morphogenetic fields at work when we engage with archetypal structures. This is what she dreams:

There is an old woman that has kidnapped me and has kept me in an old house. The house is connected to a restaurant that I work in as a waitress. I could run away, but the problem was that I was chained at my hands, every time I tried to escape I was pulled back. There is a bowl of magic liquid in the house that speaks to me. It tells me that I am cursed and that the only way the curse can be broken is through a flower. I then give a bowl of soup [with some of the magic liquid in it] to a man in the restaurant. The next scene is someone knocking at the door: it is a beautiful, handsome blond young man that says he has come for me. When the old woman sees the young man, the spell is broken and she is destroyed. I am freed. I wake up.

The first important detail and connection to our myth is that she was kidnapped and held captive. But not by the male dominant figure of Hades! No, it is the old woman who has held her captive by chains. And it is through the masculine that she is actually freed, or saved from her imprisonment. A little cultural spotlight is necessary here: coming from a Persian background, the connection and symbioses with the mother are very prominent in middle-eastern cultures. To this day it is often not until the young woman has married that she can really move away from her mother’s house, either literally or symbolically. Until then—even if she is 40 years old—she is often, even unconsciously, not yet seen as a woman. This is what the old woman might represent: the old, traditional prison that has chained her invisibly—passed down through the mother lineage.

A ‘curse’ can often be interpreted as a psychological complex in Jungian psychology. We see here the maiden that is imprisoned and chained in an old-fashioned cultural complex. For her to be freed from this, she has to be given a flower. The flower connects us to an important symbol in our myth as it is through the enhancement of the beautiful (either narcissus or in some versions the poppy) flower that the ground opens and Hades is able to grab Persephone. The bowl of liquid could be an alchemical image of spirit Mercury, the substance that enables the alchemical transformation and is it is also the spirit that guides the seeker. By feeding a masculine component in herself, the man in the restaurant, a new masculine figure arises; a typical Sun hero that represents something very deep and unknown within our dreamer. What she noticed is that he was blond with blue eyes, where usually other male figures in her dream are dark-haired and eyed (our dreamer lives in Iran). When we put this is a cultural perspective, this blond and blue-eyed hero is a new masculinity arising from the depth of her unconscious: something unknown and exotic.

Through his presence, the old woman cripples and is destroyed. It is this new masculine empowerment that will free her up from the traditional maternal complexes that have chained her, along with many generations of women before her.

When my cousin shared this dream, it was as if Kore in her own time and place, was speaking to me—sharing her version of how she might have experienced the ‘abduction'. We have to always put in perspective the culture, time and place a story has risen in. Although there are universal and global motifs in every myth, the specific cultural ecology that it erupted in has to be understood, or else we can lose essential nourishment that come from these ancient tales.

In the feminine individuation journey, it takes a lot of power and strength to become free from the unconscious mother-daughter bond especially if a daughter has a close, symbiotic connection to her mother. Ancient Greek was in many ways similar to the Middle-Eastern cultures, where the relationship to the mother can be all-consuming, even suffocating. Despite—and perhaps because of—the patriarchal overtone, there is a strong matriarchal bond between mother and daughter and so this story is within its context an important one. It is this imprisonment by the maternal chains that threatened to keep our dreamer ‘an eternal mother’s girls’ that the emerging inner masculinity could free her from. Here, we see a healthy Animus being formed in the very early years of her adult life, an invaluable gift for Psyche.

Perhaps then, if we look at the symbolism of this dream and the story of Kore, we can say that a masculine energy was entering the consciousness with immense force. It is trying to free the feminine from her unconscious ties to the Mother, and help her move into the next spiral of feminine consciousness. And it is only the force and phallic power of the knife—that is Hades—that could sever this in the time of ancient Greek.

Islamic art showing a man offering a pomegranate to a woman

SEDUCTION AS A GATEWAY TO FREEDOM

There is not only dominance and violence in the attitude of Hades, but also a form of magic, beauty, and seduction. When Hades gives Persephone the pomegranate seeds, I’m reminded of some old Persian paintings and movies, where a man who loves a woman gives her a pomegranate as a symbol of his erotic affection for her. It is an ancient symbol of fertility, passion, and love. To me, the temptation of the pomegranate seeds can be seen as a courting into marriage life. Just like the spell of being mother-bound of my cousin’s dream could only be broken by the flower, perhaps Kore’s unconscious chains to Demeter could only be broken by the pomegranate seeds. In this way, she transforms into Persephone and is free to relate to her mother as a woman, not only as a daughter.
This is even more highlighted in some versions of the story where she is not tricked or forced to take the pomegranates but accepts it by choice. In some very old versions of the tale, Kore goes down into the Underworld willingly and is not at all abducted.

This story shows us a ‘successful’ alchemical separatio operation in the unconscious matriarchal mother-daughter bond. It is through the separation from her mother Demeter, that both daughter and mother can transform and come into their new function and role as ‘teachers of the mysteries’. Without that severance and the new masculinity arising, there would have been no change in consciousness and we would have not known the immensely transformative birth of the Eleusian Mysteries. It was during these mysteries that initiatory rites were enacted, and it was through the transformative story of Kore-Persephone that the Euleusian people were taught the secrets of life and death—a practice and religion that lasted somewhere between 2000 to 5000 years.