Hades and Persephone Nowadays

TRIGGER WARNING: a part of this blog touches upon rape and incest. Not much, but a little.

I received an email the other day calling for papers on the reception of Hades and Persephone in modern popular culture. Ellie Mackin Roberts and Aimee Hinds Scott plan to edit a scholarly volume entitled Persephone in Love: Persephone and Hades in Popular Culture.

I am glad someone decided to put a volume together about this topic, but I will not be contributing to it. Why? While I enjoy mythological reception, I haven’t done the necessary research to write for a specialist volume on reception studies in relation to modern society. I prefer looking at how mythology was received from Greece to Rome and into the Middle Ages. That said, I have some thoughts on this topic, hence this blog.

For the most part, I despise modern sword and sandal films. I have refused to watch Troy, but that is likely more of an issue with casting and costume. While I’ve avoided Troy, I despise Gladiator. Historical films annoy me more than myth-based films. Why? Because Greek and Roman myth were constantly adapted in antiquity. Yes, we have the Iliad and the Odyssey, but we have the surviving myth-based Athenian dramas, Greek and Latin poetry, and the various mythographies. Topics of mythology were also addressed in various other texts in antiquity of which you might not immediately think: read the early parts of Herodotus, Thucydides, Diodorus Siculus and other historians; various local traditions are sometimes included in geographical texts such as Strabo and Pausanias; and various casual references in all kinds of literature.

And these often do not agree with each other. 

Classical mythology was changeable. Classical mythology is changeable.

In antiquity, different towns had their own versions of myths which fit its individual culture. In Greek drama, playwrights manipulated stories to make cultural or political points relative to contemporary events. Various poets manipulated traditional myths for their own purposes. 

This, of course, is as equally true of the myth of Hades and Persephone.

In most ancient examples of this story, Hades abducted Persephone as a young woman (or girl) and took her into the underworld against her will. The identification of Persephone as a “girl” likely comes from her being known as Kore which as often as not refers to a female’s status as a virgin as it does to her age. In any event, the story was a rape narrative. Persephone is taken against her will into the underworld to become the wife of Hades without her consent. Her mother, Demeter, then looks for her, preventing the growth of crops or the coming of spring. The people prayed to Zeus because they are starving, and Persephone is returned to her mother for a portion of each year (how long for depended on which version of the story you follow; some say Persephone ate six pomegranate seeds, and thus she had to spend six months each year in the underworld). 

This story is truly problematic for today’s society, but it is a reflection on the understanding of the family of the gods (incest didn’t seem to count among the deities - Zeus and Demeter were siblings), and how women were seen in antiquity: Zeus had no problem with a man taking his daughter against her will and that of her mother until pesky humans began nagging him about the consequences.

Such a story does not resonate with a modern audience. Thankfully. 

I could discuss how some universities are actually giving trigger warnings to students before discussing this myth, because at its bare bones, it is a truly horrendous story if this literally happened today.

But as I said, classical myths can and have been changed to better suit the societies which are engaging with them.

And it seems that many people online have decided to change this myth significantly.

I just did a google image search for “Hades Persephone memes”. The most common feature of these is that Hades and Persephone have a genuinely loving relationship. The idea that Hades seems to be the only Olympian god who doesn’t have the sexual mores of an alley cat seems to be the main focus of common reimaginings of him. I personally find many of these memes absolutely hilarious.

One online comic, Goofy Gods, made a huge point of retelling the story of Hades and Persephone’s relationship with the expressed intention of giving it a happier vibe. It’s published on Facebook and Instagram, and the start of the series begins here: https://www.facebook.com/2359239657524654/posts/3033141943467752/. Again, I adore this reimagining, and I think all their comics are worth a look at, if only for puppy Cerberus.

There are other references to Hades in today’s popular culture, but I have not actually read all the Percy Jackson books, and only when looking online today have I come across something called Olympic Lore which I didn’t bother to look into. The only other popular culture reference on Hades which I have come across is in urban fantasy Dresden Files series by Jim Butcher. In the book Skin Game, Harry Dresden has to help in an attempt to burgle Hades and happens to meet his intended victim and his dog. In it, Chicago’s only professional wizard actually questions his host/victim about the nature of his introduction to Persephone, in which Hades responses it was all a story made up to make Demeter feel better as she didn’t approve and was suffering from “empty nest” syndrome.

Now, it could be argued that this and the Goofy Gods series of comics is rape erasure, but I’d like to suggest that it is not the case. 

None of these actually remove the previous versions of this myth. A telling of Hades and Persephone without the rape merely falls into the same behaviour undertaken in ancient times: the adaptation of myths to better fit the society which is consuming the myth. One of the earliest telling of this myth was the Homeric Hymn to Demeter. To say that people today should not manipulate this story to today’s tastes is to say that Ovid’s use of the Sicilian version of the story in his Metamorphoses is Nysa (mythical location for the abduction scene used in the Homeric Hymn). I also adore how in Ovid’s version a water nymph admonishes Hades for snatching Persephone:

“Thou canst not be the son-in-law of Ceres [Demeter] against her will. The maiden should have been wooed, not ravished. But, if it is proper for me to compare small things with great, I also have been wooed, by Anapis, and I wedded him, too, yielding to prayer, not fear like this maiden.”

There is nothing like this in the Homeric Hymn. This does not make this an invalid inclusion. It is also suggestive of a change between the Greek society which produced this hymn centuries before in Greece verses the Roman society during the principate of Augustus.

I have read that in the case of Arthurian legend there is no canon. All versions are equally valid as there is no definitive canonical version to which all subsequent Arthurian tales ought to be compared (shout out to my brother Rick for all things Arthurian). Disney’s Sword in the Stone is equal to Malory’s Mort d’Arthur.The more I consider Greek myths, the more I think the same can be said. The Iliad and the Odyssey sometimes contradict each other, and when you add the fragments of the lost Trojan cycle poems, you find even more. AND these only relate to Trojan War, let alone the rest of the mythic corpus. These myths are so mutable because of this lack of a canon. If you apply the same principle used in relation to Arthurian legend, these new imaginings are equally valid.

The creators of Goofy Gods haven’t posted a single image of their Persephone comics, but here is their latest offering. I think it’s hilarious and I strongly recommend you check out their work.

I hope Ellie Mackin Roberts and Aimee Hinds Scott receive plenty of excellent submissions and their book is a great success.

And I hope to continue to come across more Graeco-Roman myth inspired memes online. I might one day decide to watch Troy, but I think I will stick to the memes and comics for the meantime.