Persephone, the Seasons, and a Promise of More

The one great myth of Hades is the seizing of Persephone. The Homeric Hymn to Demeter tells how Hades, with Zeus's quiet consent, carries the maiden down to be his queen; her mother Demeter, goddess of grain, mourns and withholds all growth until the earth starves. A settlement is reached, but Persephone has eaten pomegranate seeds in the underworld and so must return there for part of each year. The Greeks read the pattern into the agricultural calendar, her descent is the barren season, her return the growth, though the details of which season vary by region.

This myth carried more than an explanation of the year. It was the charter-story of the Eleusinian Mysteries, the most important initiatory cult of the Greek world, celebrated near Athens for roughly a thousand years. Initiates, sworn to secrecy that antiquity largely kept, were promised through Demeter and Persephone a better hope for their lot after death.

So the same underworld that the Odyssey paints as a grey diminishment became, through Eleusis, the ground of a genuine hope. The two pictures coexisted; the Greeks did not resolve them, and different Greeks leaned on different ones.