M3 Counterparts

            The elevation of Persephone to Queen of the Underworld ends up leveling the playing field of the Greek hierarchy. Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades each stand as rulers of a separate domain (sky, earth, and underworld, respectively). Now, though, each of these men has a female counterpart with as much or more power than the man. After witnessing Demeter’s mastery over crops and agriculture, her power over the earth cannot be denied. While Poseidon is the Earthshaker himself, Demeter’s power has a far more personal and lasting effect on humanity. People can survive the occasional earthquake, but not so much a crop failure.

            Likewise, Hades has Persephone as his counterpart. While he tends toward dignified repose, she can dish out the punishment, and is more to be feared than Hades is. Certainly she feels a large degree of independence, as well, for her to go ahead and have an affair with Adonis, particularly when Zeus gets involved to decree Adonis’s disposition.

            Zeus has his own female counterpart, but I’m not quite prepared to tell you who it is. We’ve just had 13 straight weeks of Persephone, so I think we need a bit of a hiatus from the Greeks. I’m thinking something Biblical for a bit.

            You want a hint about Zeus’s counterpart? Why? I’m not . . . fine. Okay, here’s a hint. He’s related to her. Yeah, I know, that’s not shocking since he’s related to most of the gods and goddesses. Well, too bad. Just deal with it for now. I’ll also say that she’s probably the most powerful of the Greek goddesses, putting all the others to shame with sheer scale of her power.

            Yep, that was another tease. Deal with it.

M3 The Dread Queen

            Core, now under her married name of Persephone, is a force to be reckoned with, and not always a nice one. The level of power she now has is, frankly, staggering. And she seems to use that power quite easily, and to bring about fear in people.

            When people speak of Hades, it’s usually with respect, and by calling him “mighty.” Persephone, though, is a different story. She is seen, not unlike Galadriel, as a beautiful and terrible queen. Odysseus, who openly flaunted Poseidon’s power and deliberately blinded his son Polyphemus is wary of Persephone’s great power: “does Proserpine want to lay a still further load of grief upon me” he asks of his mother.

            From that line, we can tell that he believes Persephone (Proserpine is the Roman spelling) is the one who hands down harsh punishments. She and Hades share this realm, but she is the one Odysseus attributes responsibility to for his grief.

            A little more explanation about that. It’s important to note that Odysseus isn’t actually suffering from anything done by Persephone. Rather, it’s that the automatically assigns the responsibility to her that’s more important. He does this readily, which tells us that Persephone has this reputation about her.

            We aren’t privy much to Core’s temperament prior to the kidnaping, and the crying seems very girlish, but that girl from before is not who she is now. Now she is Persephone, the Queen of the Underworld. She is powerful, sometimes cruel, and has no problem with making people suffer (again, an extension of how Odysseus readily assigns blame).

            Persephone is almost always referred to as the Queen of the Underworld, yet Hades is seldom referred to as the King of the Underworld. The only king readily within the Greek pantheon is actually Zeus as King of the Gods. It’s interesting that she would have the title of Queen, then, denoting not just the elevated power she now has, but also the status.

M3 Core 2.0

            Since the clause about food from the underworld is boilerplate, it’s something that most of the gods know about, and Core is no different. Many attribute her fasting upon arrival simply to sorrow over missing her mother, but this doesn’t exclude the idea that she knew that she could not eat of this food. Hades plied her with food the entire time she was there, as he understood this to be the case.

            The entire game has been about getting her to eat underworld food. If she eats, Hades wins. If she doesn’t, Demeter wins, and, as Demeter’s daughter, Core would know this. She couldn’t help but know this, especially as it is the standard.

            This, of course, begs the question, why did she eat the seeds?

            Simple, she wants to upgrade.

            Demeter is adamant that she will starve out humanity unless she gets her daughter back. Core knows how much her mother loves her, and the math isn’t hard that no one side is going to win this entirely, unless it’s Core.

            By eating the seeds, she irrevocably becomes part of the underworld. This cannot be changed. It can be mitigated, however. Because Demeter is adamant, Core must become a timeshare. Half the year she is on earth with her mother, and half the year she is with Hades as his wife. Had Core consented to marry Hades in the beginning, she likely would have only assumed this new aspect as queen of the underworld. If she had not eaten the seeds, she would have gone back to being a daughter of Demeter, a goddess of agriculture.

By taking the seeds, she must, of necessity in order to attempt to satisfy both parties, be both. She remains the daughter of Demeter, holding power over agriculture and the earth, and is the wife of Hades, the queen of the underworld, Persephone.

She now has dominion over the world of the living and the land of the dead.

Core, through this compromise, has become one of the most powerful goddesses in the Greek pantheon.

M3 Mythological Laws

            Before we get to the opportunity before Core, we need to discuss the seeds. Specifically, we need to discuss what Core knows about eating food from the Underworld. When Rhea hands down the deal, the stipulation is that Core cannot have partaken of any food from the underworld. This is something that Demeter does not even balk at, and it is something that even Hades’s gardener can understand, though he shouldn’t even be privy to the terms of the deal.

            When a compromise or a deal is made, consideration is given to both sides. But the compromise that Rhea hands down would be completely one-sided if not for the provision about the food of the underworld. Given how all sides react to this particular clause, this is not a surprise or new invention, it’s boilerplate.

            In fact, given what this applies to, it may reflect a law of nature, like gravity, or Voltron as Defender of the Universe (Lion Voltron, not Vehicle). The underworld is almost always a one-way trip. People check in, but they don’t check out. Heroes are the exception, such as Odysseus and Heracles, however, they need to cross into the underworld while alive, and are restricted to what they can and cannot do.

            The very nature of the underworld is that it hold onto people who enter. They become part of the underworld, and are inseparable from it. So when Core eats the seeds, which are part of the underworld, she, too, becomes part of Hades’s realm, which changes the ball game.

M3 Core's Wishes

            Most presentations of Persephone’s myth relegate her to the damsel in distress. Many even call the myth “The Rape of Persephone.” She has been kidnapped by the dastardly villain Hades and must be rescue. There she goes on a hunger strike and cries until she is rescued from his evil clutches. Even Disney’s Hercules presents Hades as the bad guy. He’s a convenient scapegoat, and his association with the underworld makes him an easy target.

            But as we’ve seen, Hades has acted with great civility—especially for the Greek gods. The question must be asked, then, what are Core’s wishes in all of this? Has she actually been forcibly abducted?

            She fasted, yes, but this may not be due to grief, but rather to the prohibition about the food of the dead. She would know that to partake of that food would mean she must remain with Hades no matter what. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it would remove her completely from her mother. This would have repercussions for her status later on.

            She cries, yes, and Hades even remarks that she “seems unhappy” and so will be returned to Demeter. However, I think there is something greater going on behind all of this. Core is in an interesting situation, which I think she can capitalize on.

M3 Gentleman Hades

            The myth of Persephone stands out as a point where a god has the opportunity and even the motive to rape a woman, but chooses not to. Yes, he—technically—kidnaps Core, but this is mostly due to Zeus waffling over an answer. Hades did the right thing in going to Zeus and asking for permission to marry Core. This is unheard of in mythology.

M3 Zeus's Smarts

            Zeus, king of the gods, is very hands-off when it comes to the whole situation with Core, Demeter, and Hades. In fact, he makes an appeal to a higher power in order for any movement to be made. He realizes that he will be unable to get either Demeter or Hades to budge. A mother will not be without her daughter, and Hades is smitten with love.

            Yes, smitten.

            So with two forces that refuse to move and make headway, Zeus takes the only rational course of action. He tells on them.

M3 To Eat or Not to Eat

While staying as Hades’s guest, Core fasts. She refuses to eat for 10 days. At this next bit the myth changes based on who is telling it. Some myths say that she broke down eating 7 pomegranate seeds. Others say 6, still others say 3. One myth even says that she didn’t eat any seeds, but that Hades’s gardener swore that she did. This is important as it becomes part of the deal for her release. See, technically, eating something from the underworld makes her part of the underworld.

M3 Hades's Domain

            So, Zeus can’t work Demeter over. He simply has no way to leverage her. She has all the power when it comes to crops, so Zeus has no choice but to work on hades. But the thing is he’s also stonewalled as he doesn’t “want to offend Hades.”

M3 Demeter's Loss

            Welcome to a new year where we’re going to begin off M³ with a bang and tackle the myth of Persephone. Buckle up, this one’s intense.

            Our story begins with Hades, who’s a lonely kind of guy, and has his eye on Core (who will become Persephone, later). Instead of behaving like all the other Greek gods and simply ravaging her, Hades approaches and asks Zeus for permission to marry her. Seeking out dad’s permission is very old-school, and classy on Hades’s part, even if she is Hades’s niece at the same time (Yes, it’s incest, but it’s the Greeks. What are you going to do?).