The Myth of Persephone and the Cycle of Creativity

Rembrandt, The Rape of Proserpina, 1632 (public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)

In typing up my life journal from 1993 to the present, I’ve been coming across hundreds of thousands of words that I forgot I ever wrote. Some of these take the form of excursive, semi-extemporaneous mini-essays. Here’s one of them. I won’t be including it in the manuscript for publication. I’m just sharing it here.

Incidentally, reading back through this journal makes me feel as if my life since my early twenties has been one long bout of intermittent amnesia. I truly don’t remember writing the text below, even though I obviously devoted considerable time and thought to it. I also don’t remember listening to the audiobook it mentions, though clearly the thing struck me deeply enough to elicit a 1,600-word journal entry.

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7/23/04     Friday     6:35 a.m.

Yesterday I began listening to an audiobook titled Creative Fire. It’s narrated by Clarissa Pinkola Estés, a Jungian analyst and storyteller who wrote Women Who Run with the Wolves. The subject of the book is creativity, its nature and workings, and how to achieve greater creativity in one’s life.

Early in the tape, Ms. Estés begins to explicate the myth of Persephone and to read it in a psychological-spiritual manner as a symbolic tale about the cycle of creative ebb and flow. At present I’ve only listened to a portion of this, but what I’ve heard has been quite interesting.

She assigns symbolic roles to each of the characters in the story. So far, I have heard her discuss Persephone, Demeter, and Hades. She says Demeter represents the creative life in full bloom, the height of creative exuberance and joyous manifestation. As the earth mother, Demeter is archetypally bountiful with all manner of good things. When she wants things to bloom and grow, they do. She provides nourishment for everyone.

Persephone, Demeter’s daughter, represents the playfulness that is necessary for creative flow. Persephone’s life consists of simply wandering playfully through the countryside picking flowers and enjoying her mother’s abundance. She is the relaxed, ludic attitude or state of spirit that enables one to be creative in a free and fulfilling way.

Hades, who erupts out of the ground from the underworld (i.e., the unconscious), is the unconscious force that arrives to snatch away the playfulness one has previously experienced in creative work. With Persephone abducted, missing, and hidden away beneath the earth, Demeter falls into grief and despair as she searches the whole world for her. This represents the period in a person’s life when, for various possible reasons, the playfulness with which one has approached his or her creative endeavors, the sense of relaxedness and fun, has fled. This is seen in everything from “second book anxiety” to the loss of a sense of inspiration to any other situation involving creative block. In the myth, when Demeter cannot find her daughter, the earth, her domain as goddess, begins to wither and die. Fields lie fallow. Fruit shrivels, and trees will produce no more. The earth becomes a wasteland. Similarly, in a person’s life the creative ideas, impulses, and projects that one formerly enjoyed, nurtured, and cultivated with a sense of assuredness and excitement begin to shrivel up. One loses one’s way, loses touch with that sense of exuberance and ease that one had formerly experienced in the work. The ideas won’t come, or when they do, the attempt to work them into manifest form are botched, usually by self-consciousness and a sense of lost vision and vitality. One feels paralyzed by self-doubt, grief, confusion, and panic, and like the earth in the myth, one’s life begins to wither and become a wasteland.

This is as far as I have gotten in my listening to Ms. Estés audiobook. But it occurred to me yesterday after I had listened to some of it and been very absorbed by it that I might well be able to finish the analysis/explication for her; that I might know the Persephone myth well enough to be able to arrive at the full reading of it in psychological terms on my own.

The two major characters in the myth who have not been introduced yet are Zeus and Hermes. Zeus, as Hades’ brother and chief of all the gods, represents the conscious mind and the will. Or in fact he may represent the higher consciousness, the directing force or source that transcends and encompasses the total psyche, since he has dominion ultimately over Hades as well as everyone and everything else.

Being rather lofty and inaccessible as he sits ensconced on his throne on Olympus, Zeus needs a messenger to carry his wishes and commands to whomever he wants, and this messenger is Hermes. In the myth of Persephone, when Zeus sees what is happening to the earth and hears the agonized wailing of its inhabitants, he knows that something must be done to rectify the situation, so he sends Hermes to order Hades to release Persephone. This is equivalent to the higher consciousness, the directive will that controls psychic life, willing that the playfulness one has lost be restored so that one’s creative life can begin again.

A word about Hermes: in addition to being the messenger of the gods, Hermes is also the god of magic and medicine. This may indicate that one should recognize and work with the value of ritual and symbolic psychic showmanship—as in, e.g., undertaking this psychological reading of myths—in order to cultivate spiritual wholeness. Magic is based on the use of ritual to alter consciousness. Perhaps in the case of captive creativity, the employment of some sort of ritual would constitute the sending of Hermes, divine messenger and god of magic and healing, to the underworld by Zeus to effect Persephone’s release and the resulting return of life to the surface world.

When Hermes arrives in the underworld, he tells Hades of Zeus’s decree. He also says Persephone may only be released if she has not eaten anything during her time in the underworld. Hades agrees—what else can he do?—and gives the news to Persephone, who has thus far ben refusing to eat because of her grief at being separated from her mother and brought to this dark and strange place. When she learns that she has been set free, she is so overjoyed that she consents to take a bite of something. She eats six pomegranate seeds (the number varies in different versions of the story) and thus changes her nature and destiny forever. Now, although she is still released from Hades to rejoin her mother in the surface world, and although she resumes her former joyous playing in her mother’s domain as the earth blooms and produces a bountiful crop of good things, she must spend a part of each year in the underworld seated on a throne beside Hades, serving as his queen. By ingesting those seeds, by taking part of the underworld into herself, she has become part of it, and it has become part of her. Each year when she returns there for a season, her mother falls into grief again and the earth withers and dies.

The psychological interpretation is, I think, clear. The story is about the cyclical nature of creativity, its periods of bloom and fallowness. One is forever changed by experiencing that loss of vitality and inspiration when creativity seems to fade. The return will happen, the rebirth will come, but forever afterward it will happen in a cyclical way. Once “Persephone” has tasted the fruit of the “underworld,” she must return repeatedly—but each time she does, the world (you) is rewarded eventually with a burst of new life. The symbolic significance of the seeds here is crucial, for Demeter is the goddess of seeds and planting, yet now her daughter has taken some of the seeds of the dark god into herself. This makes the story one about psychological wholeness, for it shows how the very daughter of life and the source of creativity becomes a bridge, an intermediary, between the land of the living and the land of the dead, between the two minds.

Also, Hades was known elsewhere as Pluto, and in this aspect he was famed for his fabulous, almost inconceivable riches. The surface world, consciousness, Demeter’s realm, is therefore enriched by extension when Persephone becomes queen of that jeweled and gold-filled realm beneath the earth. Persephone both incites and excites her mother to the height of creativity; the playfulness of creative work leads to all sorts of productions and to good and satisfying things. Persephone also presides over the wealth of Hades; this playful, relaxed quality which enables and empowers creativity also has a share in, and in fact is now coregent over, the riches of the unconscious mind, which are simply no more nor less than the accumulated experiences of one’s lifetime that await creative expression, that await being processed through one’s individuality in order to be made into art. Also, the riches of the collective unconscious, the archetypes, lie deeply at the base of this realm, and again, Persephone, the personification of playful, relaxed effort, is the one who brings these to consciousness, or at least who tells of them to consciousness.

So this myth offers both a taxonomy of the creative process that lets us know what is happening inside us and a prescription in the form of counsel to trust the process and know that Persephone will only remain underground for a season, that new life will always follow creative fallow periods, and fallow periods will always follow periods of productivity.

A final thought: since the total landscape of myth, all the parts discussed above and more, represent the total psyche, it might be useful to consider who or what knows or watches all of this. When we consider these symbolic matters, and more crucially, in everyday life when we regard our own psychic processes, who are we? Who or what observes the psyche? Isn’t this more fundamentally oneself, in a deep, central sense, than these productions one can observe? Here we arrive back at emptiness, headlessness, the void, pure awareness, call it what you will. And this, along with the recognition of it (or actually its recognition of itself), is as necessary, useful, and healing as any of the rest.