Divine Might by Natalie Haynes

Author:Natalie Haynes [Natalie Haynes]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Picador
Published: 2023-08-23T17:00:00+00:00

DEMETER

WHEN FACED WITH A FEMALE FIGURE OF UNDENIABLE POWER and strength, who is nonetheless beset by a grief she can’t describe, Iambe makes an interesting choice. The figure is the goddess Demeter – disguised and living among mortals – and the grief is because her daughter Persephone is missing, kidnapped by Hades, lost in the Underworld, his dark realm. The story is told in the second of the Homeric Hymns, and it is not a pretty one.

It begins with a brief precis: Demeter of the lovely hair has her slender-ankled daughter snatched by Aidoneus (a poetic variation of Hades), and Zeus gave her to him.1 That these three deities are siblings, so that it is Demeter’s brothers who are conspiring to kidnap her child, goes unmentioned. So does Persephone’s name, although her youth is referenced obliquely because she is paidzousan – playing like a child – with the daughters of Oceanos. The scene is all bucolic innocence: girls picking flowers in a field together. But even the earth is in on Zeus’ deception. Gaia – the earth goddess – causes a huge blossoming of narcissus flowers to act as bait for Persephone. She is still unnamed, but here called kalukopidi – the girl with a face as beautiful as a flower.

This introduction sets a deeply sinister scene. Not only is Zeus in cahoots with his brother Hades, but Gaia is in on it too. There are a couple of points to note here. First that Demeter is not Mother Earth, a role we can more accurately ascribe to Gaia. Rather, Demeter is the goddess of grain, of agriculture. In other words, she specializes in the plants which feed hungry mortals. Gaia – from an earlier generation of gods – is mother to giants and Titans, but shows little interest in the fate of human beings. In fact, she is pretty keen to get rid of some of them, according to the lost epic poem, Cypria.2 In a fragment quoted by a scholiast on the Iliad, Gaia and Zeus decide that there are too many mortals, and set events in motion to cause the Trojan War. There’s nothing like ten years of fighting to reduce human numbers. The second point is how horrible it is that it’s the narcissus flower – representational of a young man who was cursed with self-infatuation, from which he wasted away and died – that is used to trap Persephone. There is no indication that she is even slightly self-aware about her beauty: her behaviour is that of a guileless child. But the gods conspire against her all the same.

Persephone is drawn to this miraculous bouquet: a hundred flowers bloom from a single root. But as she draws closer, the earth splits open and the many-named son of Kronos (that’s Hades again, at the risk of contradicting his epithet) drives his immortal horses at her.3 He snatches Persephone against her will – aekousan – and she screams as he carries her away. She shrieks, calls out for her father, the best and loftiest son of Kronos.

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