THE MYTH

OF
HADES
AND
PERSEPHONE

VU GIA HAN
BUI TRAN PHUONG UYEN
TRAN DIEU AN
 INTRODUCTION
Persephone leads a double life. She
finds her affection elsewhere.. An
eternity of enforced loneliness looms,
and Persephone contemplates a
drastic choice to escape it.
Only one thing stands in her way.

Hades.

Where earthquakes rend hill and vale

asunder, and the abyss yawns to
devour falling screams, the black halls
of the Underworld await. The Lord of
the Dead follows only one set of rules:
his own.

And he expects Persephone to obey.

CHAPTERS
Love at first sight 02

The yellow flower 03

Harder than expected 04

Unfortunate event? 05

The old lady with a torch 06

Demophon 07

The escape 08

A slice of freedom 09

Cursed 10

S p r i n g a n d W i n t e
r 11

The disappearance 12

01
Hades fell instantly in love with divinely
beautiful Persephone when he saw her
picking flowers one day in nature. The
location of the crime is being traditionally
placed in either Sicily (famed for its
fertility) or Asia. He then asked his brother
Zeus, an expert in abductions, to assist
him, and so the two of them devised a plan
to trap her.

02
As Kore was playing with her companions,
she noticed a beautiful yellow flower
narcissus. She called upon her playmates,
the sea Nymphs, to accompany her but
they couldn’t possibly go with her as
leaving the side of their water bodies
would result in their death.

03
Therefore, she decided to go alone and
pluck the flower from the bosom of Gaia.
She pulled with all her power and the
narcissus only came out after a lot of
effort.

04
However, to her utter fright, she saw the
tiny hole from which she had drawn out the
flower shaft, grow rapidly in size until it
started to resemble a mighty enormous
chasm. The gods had caused the ground to
split underneath Persephone, and then she
slipped beneath the Earth. Thus, Hades
was able to trap her in his underground
kingdom where he made her his wife.

05
Although at first Persephone was very
unhappy in the Underworld, in time she
came to love Hades and live happily with
him. Meanwhile, Demeter starts searching
every corner of the Earth for the precious
daughter and although Helios told her of
her daughter’s fate, she, nevertheless,
continued her wanderings, disguised as an
old lady with a torch in her hands, for nine
long days and nine long nights, until she
finally arrived at Eleusis.

06
There the goddess cared for Demophon,
the son of Keleos, king of Eleusis, who
would later offer the gift of grain to
humanity and teach farming. A temple was
also built in honor of the goddess, thus
commencing the celebrated sanctuary of
Eleusis and the Eleusinian Mysteries, which
lasted for over a millennium.

07
Once the temple in Eleusis was completed,
Demeter withdrew from the world and lived
inside it. But her anger and sadness were
still great, so he created a great drought
to convince the gods to release her
daughter from Hades.

08
As the drought cost the lives of many, Zeus
finally sent Hermes to persuade Hades to
release his ill-gotten bride. Thus a
compromise was made: Hades consulted
with Zeus and they both decided to allow
Persephone to live on earth for eight
months each year, while the rest of the
time she would be on his side in the
Underworld

09
However, before giving her up, Hades put a
pomegranate seed in the girl’s mouth,
knowing its divine taste would compel her
to return to him. In ancient mythology, to
eat the fruit of one’s captor meant that
one would have to return to that captor in
the end, so Persephone was doomed to
return to the underworld for four months
every year.

10
Thus, the myth of Hades and Persephone is
associated with the coming of Spring and
Winter: the descent of Kore in the
Underworld can be seen as an allegorical
representation of the coming of winter
when the land is not fertile and does not
give crops, while her ascent to Olympus
and the return to her mother symbolizes
the coming of spring and the period of
harvest.

11
This book draws you into a spectacular
world of dark mythology, where legends
bloom with sensual new life and the
stories you thought you knew turn out
to be just the beginning

The disappearance and the return of

Persephone were also the theme of the
great Eleusinian Mysteries, whose promised
the initiates a more perfect life after
death. Therefore, this myth and its relevant
Mysteries explained the change of the
seasons of Nature and the eternal cycle of
death and rebirth.

12