Embodying Persephone’s Desire: Authentic Movement
Jungian interpretations of the Homeric Hymn to Demeter that address the theme of woundedness focus primarily on the abduction/rape of the maiden and the inconsolable rage of Demeter.
Another subtler wound implicit in the Hymn frequently goes unmentioned: Kore’s initial status as a nameless offshoot of the mother goddess.
This essay shows how the author explores emotional implications of the myth through a ritualized enactment of the central Eleusinian mysteries using the principles of authentic movement, a process that generated a fresh interpretation of
the Hymn to Demeter.
The thesis is that an interpretive variation of the myth focusing on the mutual vulnerability and strength of Hades and Persephone—their willingness to recognize and be recognized, to penetrate and be penetrated—makes possible a shared healing, in turn contributing to the fertility of the underworld.
It is through the coniunctio of Persephone and Hades that the underworld becomes a place of abundance.
A myth chooses us, say depth psychologists, not the other way around (Downing, 1981, p. 27).
Whether first appearing in a dream, through active imagination, or in writing, painting, choreography or sculpture, and whether the myth presents itself in the guise of a contemporary novel, film, or video game, the ego is first a spectator, captivated by a spectacle and often unable to look away.
A hallmark of being chosen by a myth is the uncanny need to reencounter it many times over months, years, or even decades.
It is as though one is slowly seduced, drawn into the delicious recesses of a deep mystery in which each fresh encounter generates a new understanding of the story and of oneself as enacting some or all of its mythic patterns.
A sense of the whole drama slowly becomes available to different kinds of perception, awareness arising from a particular and perhaps momentary way of being that brings some things into focus while obscuring others.
For instance, one can apprehend the drama intellectually, imaginatively, spiritually, or somatically, musing upon the lived experience of individual characters, their relationship to one another, and how they shape and are shaped by pivotal
moments in the story.
But if the ego is an avid, interested spectator, then who directs this unfolding drama?
In
Jungian language, it is the Self, the archetype of wholeness within each person.
The Self is “our life’s goal, for it is the completest expression of that fateful combination we call individuality” (1953/1966, p. 240).
He also referred to the Self as the imago dei, an image of god, who gracefully integrates ability and entelechy to facilitate the emergence of the individual over time.
A myth that chooses us rumbles through the deep structures of the psyche, like a temblor in earthquake country, breaking apart, breaking down, and unearthing hidden riches.
Breakdown is not easy, but it can be meaningful.
Perhaps two figures, who may be participating even as I write, have selected the metaphor: Hades,
lord of the underworld, and his powerful queen, Persephone.
This supposition demonstrates a key premise of the archetypal school of Jungian psychology.
Not only do myths express patterns of experience that are relevant for
contemporary people, we can speak of Hades and Persephone as persons (Hillman, 1992), figures who are “alive” in the psyche in much the same way characters in fiction are “alive” for an author.
There is no doubt this myth has chosen me.
Over the last three decades, I have repeatedly returned to the Homeric Hymn to Demeter (Boer, 1970), which tells the story of Demeter, Kore/Persephone, and Hades, never once exhausting its wealth.
Hillman suggests why:
What makes an image archetypal is that so much wealth can be gotten from it. An archetypal image is a rich image. …
This subliminal richness is another way of speaking of its invisible depth, like Pluto is another way of speaking about Hades.
Our exercise with the image gives us a new appreciation of the unfathomable nature of any image, even the meanest, once it dies to its everyday simple appearance.
It becomes bottomlessly more layered, complicatedly more textured.
And as we do our image-making, even further implications appear, more suppositions and analogies dawn on us. An image is like an inexhaustible source of insights. (1977, p. 80)
As Hillman points out in The Dream and the Underworld (1979), Pluto, meaning “wealth” or “riches,” is an apt name for Hades.
No one who is content with the surface of things will ever understand this because “our main concern is … with the unknown” (1977, p. 68).
Even Hades and Persephone, as beloved as they are, serve as psychopomps or soul guides who lead beyond themselves to deeper ground.
The Homeric Hymn to Demeter is one of the richest and most profound texts from the classical tradition, the subject of analysis and inspiration for a variety of scholars, artists, and educated readers, including Agha-Jaffar, 2002, Bachofen, 1881/1967, Baring & Cashford, 1991, Bernstein, 2004, Downing, 1981, 1994, Edinger, 1994, Foley, 1994, Holtzman & Kulish, 1998, Jung & Kerenyi, 1951, Luke, 1992, Meyer, 1987, Rudhardt, 1994, Spretnak, 1984, Stone, 1990, Vandiver, 1999, and Wilkinson, 1996.
Clearly, it is a myth that chooses many people.
As a source of psychological insight, the Hymn to Demeter has become the companion to those whose lives have been suddenly, irrevocably changed.
To use the text’s own imagery, readers have been abducted into the underworld as was Demeter’s nameless daughter Kore.
The Hymn to Demeter—along with the Descent of Inanna, a Sumerian myth that predates the Hymn by at least 1,000 years and the Greco-Roman tale of Eros and
Psyche, recorded in a second-century CE novel—are grand stories of trauma and transformation (Wolkstein & Kramer, 1983; Apuleius, p. 1994).
Although the hymn’s title suggests Demeter as the main focus, I am moved
most profoundly by the mutual vulnerability and strength of Hades and Persephone.
Their willingness to recognize and be recognized, to penetrate and be penetrated makes healing possible and contributes to the fertility of the underworld.
It is through the coniunctio of Persephone and Hades that the underworld becomes a place of abundance.
This insight did not arise from reading the text or any of the abundant scholarly analyses of the hymn.
Rather, it occurred through an authentic movement process, which is a creative and therapeutic practice that values the expressive body as a means to discover unconscious material.
Using the body to explore the psyche or soul is a matter of “following the inner sensation, allowing the impulse to take the form of physical action,” says
Whitehouse; it is what she calls “active imagination in movement” (1999, p. 52).
The experience for the mover can be profound and persuasive, a non-ordinary moment that requires careful integration into waking life.
For instance one person, describing the forcefulness of the experience, says she often has found herself “enacting very particular, specific movement gestures… directed by some unknown certainty within me” (Adler, 1999, p. 184; italics added).
The pioneers who developed authentic movement, and those who continue to practice,
develop, and teach it, take seriously Jung’s comment that So it is with the hand that guides the crayon or brush, the foot that executes the dance-step, with the eye and the ear, with the word and the thought: a dark impulse is the ultimate arbiter of the
pattern, an unconscious a priori precipitates itself into plastic form. (1954/1981, p. 204 [para 402])
Perhaps a dark impulse led my partner and I into the dance, directed our steps, and offered me an insight into the vulnerability of Hades and Persephone that may not have been possible in any other way.
It was a genuine discovery process that unearthed unconscious material that may belong to the original story and to the pattern of experience the story dramatizes.
I know I was prompted by some unknown certainty, and that I never could have choreographed the dance without psyche.
Collective blindness or collective neglect?
The Hymn to Demeter offers scant detail about Kore/Persephone in the underworld.
Hades seizes the maiden, and scholars assume for good reason that the abduction includes rape primarily because the Hymn to Demeter is a literary text from a patriarchal age in which a bride was property passed from the father to the
husband (Foley, 1994; Vandiver, 1999; Yalom, 2001).
This included the tradition of bride abduction and may easily have led to rape as a means to claim and degrade the female through physical domination.)
Readers do not know what the underworld looks or feels like to the young girl, and they do not know what happens between Kore/Persephone and Hades.
Wilkinson commented, “the rites of passage that might enable one to negotiate a
descent without being destroyed are unknown and unpictured to the living” (1996, p. 213).
As the Homeric Hymn to Demeter makes plain, the underworld is equally inaccessible to the gods. Demeter rages on earth and Mount Olympus, but she cannot descend to rescue her daughter.
None of the other Olympians, not even mighty Zeus, travels to the underworld.
The exception is Hermes who, as messenger between realms, must go there; but
even he does not stay.
The sole occupant of the underworld, Hades, is so entrenched that the name of the god is also the name of the place.
Lacking the necessary distance that makes perspective possible, how could he
describe the underworld even if he wanted to?
He is only able to abduct the maiden after she rips the narcissus up by its roots, opening the crucial gap that allows his momentary passage to the sunlit meadow (Rudhardt, 1994, p. 204).
Once he seizes Demeter’s daughter, Hades immediately descends, never to emerge again.
To the gods and to readers the underworld is a mysterious and inaccessible place.
Today, in the twenty-first century, blindness to the underworld appears to have intensified.
The culture’s aggressive denial of death (Becker, 1973, p. 11) is the complement to an equally aggressive pursuit of instant transformation.
P. Aries, who studied the evolution of western attitudes towards death, discovered that it took only 30 years at the beginning of the 20th century to uproot thousands of years of tradition.
Death ceased being a commonplace, acceptable, and social experience and instead became something “shameful and forbidden” (1974, p. 85).
Baring and Cashford point out that the attitude toward death had already undergone significant change around 2500 BCE, with the loss of an archetypal feminine perspective that valued death-in-life as the very basis for transformation (1991, p. 159).
Thus it is that many people regard the slow, arduous journey into and through the underworld not merely as unwelcome but as abhorrent.
The descent to the underworld can manifest as chaos, depression, illness, and addiction, or simply as a felt sense that a once vital, juicy life is now desiccated.
It is tempting to believe that something is terribly wrong—I have failed—because it is assumed that masterful, competent people do not have such an experience.
Even if they do, they fix it right away because who, in their right mind, would ever define success as falling apart?
In its blindness, contemporary culture seems to have forgotten that descent is archetypal, honorable, and visionary.
We seem to make no collective ritual space for it. Instead, a powerful and profitable pharmaceutical industry offers relief in the form of a pill—several kinds, in fact—that sufferers ingest in the privacy of their own homes.
We see little value in chaos even after admitting that the forms, structures, beliefs, and roles that are crumbling no longer serve and after knowing destruction not merely as an end but as a prelude to new beginning.
Instead, those among us who endure the disorientation of an underworld journey are left to find its meaning with few or no companions, witnesses, and teachers.
The enigmatic and inviolable queen Perhaps all underworld journeys are essentially individual, essentially mysterious to the collective.
Irigaray alluded to this when she said that “Kore-Persephone escapes perspective.
Her depth, in all its dimensions, never offers itself up to the gaze, whatever the point of view may be.
She passes beyond all boundaries, withholding herself from appearance, even without Hades” (1991, p. 115).
Foley called Persephone “inscrutable” and “never fully known” (1994, p. 130). Downing stated “the goddess who rules in Hades represents the mystery of the
unknown, its fearfulness and its unforgivingness” (1981, p. 50).
The enigmatic nature of Persephone could be an expression of her power.
She may refuse to be fully known to remain inviolable.
She may choose to preserve herself for herself despite the traumatic abduction or because of it.
Or her inviolability may symbolize the true nature of an underworld queen, the quintessence of bottomless depth in which arriving is simply not possible
because there is no final understanding, only an endless cascade of deeper and deeper understandings.
Stories of descent to the underworld, both ancient and contemporary, are clear on one point: for those who endure the descent and successfully return, the world will never be the same because the person is never the same (Campbell, 1968; Foley, 1994; Mahdi, Foster, & Little, 1987; van Gennep, 1960; Wolkstein & Kramer,
1983).
Descent is an initiation into a new role and a new relationship to life that is irrevocable.
Thus the underworld journey is a fruitful image of the individuation process, which Jung defined as “fidelity to the law of one’s own being” rather than the law of the collective, and the realization of one’s individual and unique wholeness (1954/1970, pp. 172-173).
Individuation is a “high act of courage” that feels as inescapable as a law of God (p. 175).
Ideally, it also moves culture beyond what Woodman and Dickson poetically described as “Mother Mud” and “Father Law”—that miasmic and authoritative body of custom and convention that binds collectivities (1987, p. 181).
Because descent pits person against collective where one sorts inherited values and beliefs to find authentic ones, it wounds.
It also is terrifying because leaving the collective is a symbolic death. How does one withstand the turbulence of moving out and away from a crucial relationship “in the midst of strong, binding counter forces” that would prevent separation?
This is one of the many fine questions Schwartz-Salant asked in his discussion of another myth that depicts the real dangers of a son or daughter leaving a powerful mother (1998, p. 126).
“When one dares to take up the mantle of individuation, [one is] to some degree, caught up in this web whereby separation leads to death” (p. 138).
The person simultaneously feels “the demand to individuation and the equal or greater demand to stay merged with an inner loved object, either known, or more likely, never known enough” (p. 138, emphasis added).
One may ask: in a merged relationship, is it possible for either to know the other?
In the Hymn to Demeter, does Demeter truly know her daughter before she becomes Persephone?
Equally, does the Kore truly know her mother?
To borrow Perera’s lovely phrase, wounding creates “separations across which fresh passions can leap” (1981, p. 80).
Trauma and passion are bedfellows. The painful and forced separation of Demeter and Persephone
is, of course, the trauma that sets the Hymn to Demeter in motion.
Thus Demeter’s hymn can be read as the story of fresh passion created by two deep wounds, abduction and betrayal.
However, the text implies another erotic wound in the Hymn, one that is prior to the abduction, one that in fact motivates the plot:
Hades’s desire for a consort and queen. Zeus and Gaia may know of this desire; they certainly are complicit in its consequences, Zeus by giving Kore/Persephone to his brother without Demeter’s permission and Gaia by “growing the narcissus as a snare for the young girl—a flower herself, as her mother says—instead of supporting Demeter against him, as might have been expected” (Baring & Cashford, 1991, p. 383).
Eros is a potent force throughout the Hymn.
The visible passion of Demeter and the invisible passion of Hades are just two of many examples.
For the maiden, abduction is the most intimate possible experience.
In one shocking moment, everything she has known of the world changes.
Over the course of her mysterious sojourn in the underworld Persephone is literally wedded to Hades and figuratively wedded to the depths.
This is the place of her transformation. Forever after she “is both eternal virgin (Kore) as well as wife of Hades” (Foley, 1994, p. 110).
Furthermore, the abduction and subsequent negotiations among the immortals result in a profound transformation in Persephone’s status and rights.
Marriage to Hades, irrespective of the circumstances, grants “the girl a powerful role of her own as queen of the underworld … indeed, among the dead Persephone comes to have an awesome power and autonomy that is matched by few other female divinities in the cosmos” (p. 129).
Foley’s claim was echoed in my own experience of embodying the descent, as my notes below document.
Its raw emotional power convinced me that the maiden’s ineluctable desire to become herself was another expression of eros in the myth and an essential part of her underworld journey. ~Elizabeth Eowyn Nelson, Ph.D., Embodying Persephone’s Desire: Authentic Movement and Underworld Transformation, Page 5-9 [Jungian Journal of Scholarly Studies]
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