Goddesses in Everywoman by Jean Shinoda Bolen M.D

Author:Jean Shinoda Bolen, M.D.
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf

And in fact a sexual initiation that puts a woman in touch 220

Persephone: The Maiden and Queen of the Underworld, Receptive with her own sexuality is a potential of the Persephone archetype consistent with mythology. Once Persephone was Queen of the Underworld, she had a connection or a bond with Aphrodite, Goddess of Love and Beauty. Persephone may represent the underworld aspect of Aphrodite; Persephone is a more introverted sexuality, or a dormant sexuality. In the mythology, Adonis was loved by both Aphrodite and Persephone. And both goddesses shared the pomegranate as a symbol.

Morever, Persephone’s acceptance of the pomegranate seeds from Hades meant that she would be voluntarily returning to him. By this act, she ceased being the unwilling bride. She became his wife and Queen of the Underworld, instead of the captive. In real life, sometimes after years of marriage, a Persephone wife may cease feeling that she is a captive of an oppressive, selfish husband to whom she has resentfully stayed married. She feels differently only when she is able to see him as a vulnerable, decent, imperfect man and can appreciate that he loves her. When her perception changes, he may know for the first time in their marriage that she is with him to stay and that she loves him. In this new context of trust and appreciation, she may become orgasmic for the first time and view him as Dionysus the evoker of passion, rather than Hades the captor.

In ancient Greece, Dionysus’s intoxicating spirit moved women to ecstatic sexual heights. He was worshipped in mountain revels by Greek women who would periodically leave their traditional respectable roles, their hearths and homes, to participate in religious orgies. Dionysus transformed them into passionate maenads. And tradition and myth link Hades and Dionysus together: Dionysus was said to sleep in the house of Persephone in the intervals and between his reappearances. The philosopher Heraclitus said, “Hades and Dionysus, for whom they [the women] go mad and rage, are one and the same.”4

A contemporary Persephone woman can have a parallel “Dionysian” encounter. One woman said, “After I left my husband, I went out looking for what had been missing in the marriage. I figured a lot of it was me—uptight, well-brought-up, I saw myself as Miss Priss.” In a coffeehouse she met a man who became her lover. He was very sensual, and helped

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her become aware of “nerve endings I never even knew about before.”

UNCOVERING A CAPACITY FOR

ECSTATIC RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE

The archetypal affinity of the goddess Persephone for Hecade and Dionysus may provide a clue to the ecstatic, numinous priestess qualities that some Persephone women develop. They become intoxicated by ritual and feel possessed by a god or goddess. Within Christianity, they may be “charismatics” who “speak in tongues”

when the spirit moves them. And today, with the revival of goddess worship, where spiral dances evoke the goddess spirit, some women who seem ordinary Persephones by day become uncanny Hecates or Dionysian maenads by night.

DEVELOPING POTENTIAL AS MEDIUMS OR

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