Persephone's Descent

When Persephone went down into the earth, down into the underworld on the back of Hades’s big, black horse, she was terrified and thrilled. He was easy to hate and love, easy to blame.

But what did she find down there? First strangeness, then sameness that bored her to agony and tears, but then--she took out her glass eyes and bent low, saw the lichen growing on the bare rock, eating slowly away at it, crumbling it to earth without counting the hours by a clock. Down in the unchanging dimness she finally, gradually began to stop looking for the sun or stars to tell her what to do or where to be (or even where she was). She stopped looking for her mother, she settled down inside herself and even the whisperings of minor and more cunning devils fell away to the shadows and she heard them no more than she heard the wind. She found solitude, she found darkness, and one day at the table with Hades, her host and husband, he offered her a pomegranate.

It was roundish and bulging, already cracked open so that its burnished skin seemed illogically dull compared to its fruit.

The seeds were wet but held their moisture to themselves and, unlike in the tender fig, each one was its own little orb; each one sat, pressed snugly into the protective white pith, further armored by the dull red-black sheath. Here was a marriage proposal like none she had ever received, and even though by all standards of the upper world she had already lost herself and her name to Hades, he sat and looked at her across the black table with his black eyes, waiting for her response.

And she saw his eyes were not only black, but dark like the earth around them, veined and flecked with bronze, gold, pewter, copper and many-colored stone. She saw that the hell she had thought herself in was in fact a womb, the house of the Mother. That her captor was in fact her guide and deliverer and the three-headed dog that guarded the gate back to the upper world was not a beast to keep her shut in away from the light but her own three-headed instinct, her own tripartite goddess self who knew this was the time to learn the truth of shadows and no longer be afraid.

So she looked at Hades the way she had learned to look at the lichen and fungus, taking out her glass eyes and using instead her womanly touch to know what to do. He was no longer thrilling or villainous--only steady as the earth, strong as the three-headed dog. He smelled like the deep moss, like the cracks in the stones that ran too deep to fathom.

The pomegranate, cracked in two, glowed, gleamed against all the blackness as if it were the central fire for this kingdom--this subterranean domain of the Earth Mother. Persephone, with her pale arms translucent as mist after so much time below reached out one now-virginal, naked hand and plucked one, two, three, four, five, six seeds, watching Hades steadily, easily as she did. Neither of them changed their expressions, but a depth came to the room, a mixing of cool air from very deep caves with that of the upper channels. Everything felt damp, as if there was a fog. But the air was clear, and so were her thoughts--or rather, her thoughts were silent, watching like the guardian dog.

The pomegranate seeds reflected deep pink off her white fingertips. Quickly, easily, she brought one to her mouth, almost tossing it in.

The flavor burst out tart and dry and sweet--a shock, and without her glassy eyes the air seemed to have called forth glow worms--the room glimmered as with a pulse, but Hades’s eyes remained as two still, deep rock pools, reflecting almost nothing.

In went the second, the third, the fourth, the fifth. Each one stung her mouth with a release--of sadness, agony, fear, terror and forgotten names. Each one brought to mind an aspect of her upper world life and, it seemed, erased the bitterness that had stained it until she felt refreshed, until her mouth and cheeks were vital red.

The rock walls hummed around her. The basalt, the lime and sandstone, the magma, the slate and silt and gravel all reverberated within her body, breathing with her or she with them.

She felt her hips shift, widening slightly, she felt her breasts relax from their high perch and settle like sphinxes with utter confidence in the knowledge of their riddles. Her shoulders also dropped, in fact every part of her descended and deepened; within she widened as a subterranean river widening the crevasse in a deep rock.

She knew her own mossy places, her own earthy smells, her own delicate undersides like the crinoline frills of mushrooms; in short, she knew her own weight and gravity, her own interconnected life-giving strata, her own perfect decay and renewal--she knew her Self.

Persephone popped the last of the six jewel-red seeds onto her tongue, and then with her mind and her heart and every mossy, craggy underworld part of her reclaimed self, she knew Hades.

Though Demeter wept to know her daughter had eaten of that vivid truth-teller and was no longer free to remain in the world of sun and harvest all year long, Persephone did not mourn. She had mourned already, long before the fruit; she had tasted that bitterness and known that hunger, and she had planted seeds of her own finding within herself.

She passes now, each equinox between the upper- and underworlds, taking nothing with her from either, standing unafraid while the three-headed dog sniffs every part of her. She has nothing to fear; she carries nothing more in the crossing than her own true self.

-Rose Arrowsmith DeCoux