It’s spring and every time I hear the sound of this word my heart fills with joy. Maybe it’s because I’m a Southern woman, but for me spring brings happiness regardless, especially after a rainy and severe winter. I cherish a beautiful memory that goes back to the stories of the Greek teacher in high school. When we didn’t have classwork or questions, he loved telling us about Greek myths in his own way, adapting those stories to the present to draw useful lessons from them. My favorite was the myth of Persephone, or the rape of Proserpina or, even better, Demeter and Persephone. This reading took place punctually every twenty-first of March, the day of early spring.
The story goes that the goddess Demeter and her daughter Persephone lived at the top of Olympus. One day, while picking fresh flowers, Persephone was kidnapped by Hades, god of the Underworld. Not seeing her return, her mother immediately became alarmed and for nine days wandered everywhere looking for her. But nothing left any hope of finding her again. It was only at dawn on the tenth day that Helios, god of the sun, revealed to Demeter the misadventure of his daughter, tragically taken away by Hades into the kingdom of the Underworld. «I will take revenge!», she thundered prostrate and sorrowful, «and the Earth will no longer bear fruit for men, until the human race becomes extinct due to a famine and even the gods will no longer be able to receive the sacrifices of men who filled them so much with pride!». Saying this, Demeter left Olympus. Desperate, she began to wander the seas and mountains hoping to find her daughter, even ignoring the pleas of humans worried about the signs of an imminent famine. But nothing could distract Demeter from her fury over the kidnapping. In the meantime, the first victims of the famine were also beginning to be seen. Men, women and children fell one after another, without the gods being able to do anything to change Demeter’s mind.
In the end, only Zeus succeeded, forced to give in to the pleas of mortals and the gods themselves, sending Hermes, the messenger from Olympus, right to Hades’ house, in the kingdom of the Underworld, ordering him to return Persephone to her mother. In a completely unexpected and peaceful way, Hades accepted Zeus’ order and this already seemed rather strange. How come he had suddenly calmed down? Indeed, he did more, urging the captive Persephone to return quickly to her mother. At the same moment in which Demeter saw her daughter again, the land became fertile again and the world began to enjoy her gifts again.
But Hades’ benevolence hid a terrible deception: before setting Persephone free, he had made her eat some pomegranate seed, thus performing the miracle that would prevent her from remaining forever in the kingdom of light. Persephone, therefore, was forced to return every year and for a long period to the kingdom of the Underworld. Demeter then decided that in the six months in which her daughter would remain in the kingdom of the dead, cold and frost would arrive in the world and nature would fall asleep, while in the remaining six months the land would flower again, giving rise to spring and summer. Here, dear readers, these are still myths and legends, but they always leave something magical inside us. After all, we are all looking for stories that can calm our hearts.
