persephone’s carrier bag
Sift through this collection of stories, performances, and contextual material that helped the group to situate the whole project more squarely within the myth, turning Persephone’s adventures into the root from which further action could grow.
“[Myth] lives in caves and out in the desert wind, and sometimes looms up in the city darkness and tells us to take care of something inside us that we cannot see with our everyday eyes.”
— Charlotte Du Cann, “The Seven Coats”
“We Are In The Underworld And We Haven’t Figured It Out Yet” by Martin Shaw
What does it mean to listen to the stories nature whispers to us? Shaw argues that our inability to properly “hear” nature has made us fail to realize that we are living in the Underworld already.
“This is not the dayworld, this is the nightworld we are entering. It’s not a mistake or aberration, it is fitting with the times.”
Follow the ancient Sumerian goddess Inanna as she travels to the Underworld realm ruled by her sister. What will she need to leave behind to enter? And what will she need to relinquish in order to return?
“From the Great Above Inanna opened her ear to the Great Below”
Lost Goddesses of Early Greece: A Collection of Pre-Hellenic Myths by Charlene Spretnak
In a matriarchal society without Zeus, Hades, or Homer, Persephone answers a vocational call as Queen of the Underworld.
“I am Persephone and I have come to be your Queen... If you come to Me, I will initiate you into your new world.”
The Red-Haired Girl from the Bog: The Landscape of Celtic Myth and Spirit by Patricia Monaghan
In the world of Irish myth where land and story are inseparable, Monaghan compares an Irish bog deity who controls the seasons with the societal and hormonal trials of womanhood.
“It defies reason: women grow old; they do not grow young again. Except in Irish myth.”
“Yellow Woman” by Leslie Marmon Silko
What if myths aren’t just stories that happened thousands of years ago? What if, like Silko’s protagonist, we suddenly wake up one day to find ourselves thrust into a mythic narrative where the foreign has become familiar––and vice versa?
“I was wondering if Yellow Woman had known who she was — if she knew that she would become part of the stories.”
“A Storm Blown from Paradise” by Paul Kingsnorth
What if time moved not in a line, but in a spiral? Environmentalist and writer Paul Kingsnorth’s essay looks to ancient forms of storytelling to think about the shape of time in a more cyclical way.
“Time, imply the old stories, moves at different speeds, and in different ways, depending on our quality of seeing.”
Persephone in the Late Anthropocene by Megan Grumbling
Part poetry, part libretto, and part almanac, Grumbling’s collection situates Persephone’s myth at the brink of disaster: the chaos humans have wreaked on the environment is echoed in her eroding words, memories, and relationships.
“Mysteries / are, well, not secrets / exactly. Anyone could learn them. Let’s say / they were a story. Or a cup. Let’s say / they were some part mirror / some part scythe.”
“The Cultural Reinvention of Persephone: From Maiden to the Dreaded One” by Princess Weekes
From Homer to Tumblr, Weekes examines Persephone’s rise as a pop culture feminist icon with wit, whimsy, and Gilmore Girls GIFs.
“She is the dreaded one, the Queen of the Underworld. The goddess of Spring…maybe she wanted to eat the damn seeds.”
“The Goddess of Spring” by Walt Disney Studios
With spindly arms and archetypal imagery, this musical animated short depicts Persephone’s abduction as inspired by classical literature.
“For there lived a maiden /
So gentle was she /
That all the world loved her tenderly.”
Now we’re livin’ it! Tough, tipsy, and warmhearted, Mitchell’s Persephone navigates a crumbling marriage and mid-life crisis as Orpheus tries to rescue Eurydice from death. This Tony Award-winning musical places the Underworld in an ecocritical context as industry and environment clash through Hades and Persephone’s marital conflict.
“In the coldest time of year / Why is it so hot down here? / Hotter than a crucible / It ain’t right and it ain’t natural.”
“Birth and Rebirth in the Eleusinian Mysteries” by Deena Metzger
At Demeter’s behest, storyteller and healer Deena Metzger restages the ancient Greek Eleusinian Mysteries festival.
“I looked at him like a woman possessed — which I was — and said, “She, Demeter, wants her Mysteries revived.”
“Listening to Persephone” by Andrea Most
By navigating the tension between problematic classics and non-canonical contemporary works, Most looks to a sexy, subversive, middle-aged Persephone for inspiration and guidance. If Persephone is bringing truth about the state of the world to our ears, are we able and ready to listen to her?
“My Persephone is still the beacon of spring with all of its many promises, but she is also a woman who knows how to adapt to change.”
“The Seven Coats” by Charlotte Du Cann
What we choose to wear not only protects us from the elements, but also defines our essence. When we are forced to remove our outer layers as the goddess Inanna was, we catch a glimpse of the Underworld rearing its head in the shadows of our lives.
“The myth is not the story…When the story loses its sense, the myth emerges like the bones beneath the soil.”
The Lady’s Handbook for Her Mysterious Illness: A Memoir by Sarah Ramey
What do chronic illness, feminism, the climate crisis, and Persephone have to do with each other? By weaving together myth, medical research, and autobiography, Ramey spins a tale of her body’s journey to the Underworld and her years-long struggle in trying to make her way back.
“Mystery illnesses are like the climate change of the human body.”
“Going Under” by Sharon English
Persephone Project research team member Sharon English witnesses a naked woman walking out of Toronto’s Humber River and reflects on what it means to become submerged, bare and raw, in the spectral world of myth.
“We don’t need more comforts, layers. What’s needed is removal.”
Eating in the Underworld by Rachel Zucker
What if Persephone wasn’t kidnapped, but instead let her heart lead her away from home? Zucker’s poems, often structured as letters written between Persephone, Demeter, and Hades, explore a Persephone journeying through the joys and sorrows of love, loneliness, and womanhood.
“I stepped in. Away from where the body / of my mother is everywhere.”
“Backyard Gardens as Sacred Spaces: An Ecowomanist Spiritual Ecology” by Elonda Clay
Clay uses personal and literary recollections of backyard gardeners to reflect on the extent of African-American women's exclusion from Western ecological discourse and suggest that we recognize backyard gardening as the sacred seasonal act of radical rest and resistance that it is and has been for so many American women of African descent.
“…Life, death, and rebirth, growing seasons, the rising sun and the waning moon, planting seeds, growth, and harvest. These cycles give rhythm to the reciprocal relationships of care for the earth by humans and life-giving abundance for humans by the earth.”
“Demeter, Myths, and the Polyvalence of Festivals” by Sarah Iles Johnston
This article by Ohio State University Classics professor Sarah Iles Johnston delves deeply into ancient rituals dedicated to Persephone and Demeter, exploring why their myth remains so comparatively constant within a tradition of mythic multiplicity and contradiction, and how this myth drove the feminine power of these ancient rituals.
“The myths seem to be articulating through words what the rituals articulate through actions: hopes for enhanced fecundity, for the annual continuation of agricultural fertility, and the sanction, for a short period of time, of what would otherwise be behavior forbidden to women.”
This poetry collection from Rabbi and Kohenet Jill Hammer ruminates on Imbolc, the ancient Celtic festival that honours the goddess Brigid and marks the halfway point between the winter solstice and spring equinox. As both Brigid and Persephone have taught us, the journey back from the Underworld takes time, and Hammer’s collection explores the moment when that journey begins from a variety of cultural perspectives.
“At the gate of the farm / the world holds out its hand, / while in a field rimed with frost / the first snowdrop toddles from the ground.”
Naturally Woman: The Search for Self in Black Canadian Women’s Literature by Sharon Morgan Beckford
Beckford looks at diasporic mother-daughter relationships in both place-based and familial contexts and positions them squarely within myth and within a Carribean-Canadian historical/literary context, arguing that this diaspora allows the Aboveworld and the Underworld to coexist in tension.
“The myth is so much a part of our Western consciousness that we take its evocation for granted and perhaps overlook how much it has been permanently inscribed into much of our portrayals of contemporary life.”
“The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction” by Ursula K. Le Guin
Rather than basing narrative structure on the male hunter’s story (and hunter’s tools), Le Guin instead focuses on the carrier bag of the female gatherer. With this essay, we began to ask ourselves: What do we have in our carrier bag? And what can we offer with what we have gathered?
“Still there are seeds to be gathered, and room in the bag of stars.”
Sister Projects that Have Inspired Us
From sculptors to performers to storytelling activists, these are just some examples of those across the world who have, like us, kept ears to the Earth and hands in motion. Click on these links to find out what they each have to say about myth’s enduring power in days past, present, and future.
Homo algus (Sophie Prestigiacomo, France)
Persephone's Daughters (New Zealand)
Persephone in the Late Anthropocene (Hinge/Works Opera, USA)
The Persephone Project (Center for Humans and Nature, USA)
Seasons of the Sacred: Spring (Saint Ethelburga's, England)
Midsommar (Theatre of the Ancients, Spain)
The Westcountry School of Myth (Martin Shaw et al., England)
19 Ways for Living in the 5th World (Deena Metzger, USA)
“When she [Demeter] saw [Persephone], she rushed forth…They received joy from each other, and gave it.”
Hymn to Demeter, lines 385-386, 437