No one may enter here
who does not love geometry

A female author?
for the Hymn to Demeter
"According to Ann Suter, a woman may have composed this anonymous hymn. The focus on Demeter's power, Persephone's coming of age, and the mother-daughter relationship, as well as the de-emphasis of Zeus, may point in that direction. We know that female poets [during the 7th-6th c. BCE], such as Sappho and Korinna, composed dactylic hexameter verses. In examining the Hymn to Aphrodite, Richard Janko notes a number of verbal parallels between its opening and Sappho's epicizing narrative of the wedding of Hektor and Andromache. Korinna says she reworks 'stories from our fathers' time' and sings of 'heroes male and female.' It is possible that other women composed hymns or epic verse, although their performance venues certainly would be more limited than those for traditional bardic poetry."

from "The Homeric Hymns, Translation, Introduction & Notes," p. 11, by Diane J. Rayor (2004)
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Setting the Scene
"As often in early hexameter , the first word in the poem names its subject, Demeter. In the Greek text, lines 1-11 set the scene for this hymn in one long sentence which juxtaposes the peaceful and unknowing innocence of Demeter and her daughter against the willfullness and raw power of Zeus and his brother. The collusion of the girl's great-grandmother, Gaia, in this forced marriage, seems initially troubling, although her consent replaces that of the absent Demeter and provides a hint of the ultimate reconciliation with which the hymn will end. [...] At Eleusis , worshippers gathered spring flowers in celebration of Persephone's return, but their actions also recall the scene of her abduction."

from "The Homeric Hymns," pp. 33-34, by Susan C. Shelmerdine (1995)
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How can Zeus be "granting"
if Hades is "abducting" (L-003)?
[In the Hymn to Demeter] the collocation of ἥρπαξεν [snatch away/abduct] and δῶκεν [granted/given] in the third line is both shocking and paradoxical. If Zeus gives his daughter in marriage, in accordance with his paternal perogatives, why must Hades carry her off. The reasons become immediately manifest: not only Persephone's unwilingness but also Demeter's resistance or lack of consent to the union if she had known about it. [...] The striking juxtapositon of giving and carrying off already contains the germ of the whole ensuing narrative.

from "The Politics of Olympus," by Jenny S. Clay, p.209 (2006)
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Illustration of Crocus Sativus, from Koehler's Medicinal Plants (Book 2, 1887)
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Persephone as Plant-Hunter
"The idyllic scene reflects the pre-agrarian age, when a young woman might well go on a 'hunt' for medicinal herbs and plants with magical properties (L-226-230). [As regards the plants collected] it is not clear in each case whether the flower was in fact the same as that which bears the name in the modern world. Certainly, in the case of the hundred-blosssomed narcissus, we are dealing with a magical thing, not a botanical specimen."

from "Persephone Unveiled: Seeing the Goddess and Freeing Your Soul," pp. 21-22, by Charles Stein (2006)
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Persephone's Anthologia
"The ἀνθολογἰα [anthologia, 'flower gathering'] of Persephone is a feature in most of the accounts of the rape. It may have been introduced as a natural girlish act, and so have no mythological importance; [....] On the other hand, flowers play a considerable part in ritual connected with deities of vegetation, so that the ἀνθολογἰα may be paralleled by festivals such as the ὴροσάνθεια [erosantheia] (Heysch.), at which Peloponnesian women gathered flowers. There was an actual ἀνθολογἰα in the mysteries at Atra; see Svoronos p. 235."

from "The Homeric Hymns," p.16, by Thomas William Allen and Edward Ernest Sikes (1904)
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Flowers and Korai
"Among the most common flower-based activities associated with young women [in Attic Greece], all familiar from literature, are the gathering of flowers, the use of gathered flowers to dye yarns for weaving, and the plaiting of flowers into garlands to wear on their heads or otherwise bedeck themselves, frequently for religious purposes. [...] The activity of young women gathering brightly colored flowers and dropping them into the broad pocket ((kolpos) , formed by lifting up the overfold of the peplos, is a common image in Greek literature of all periods."

from "The Poetics of Appearance in the Attic Korai," p.152, by Mary Clorinda Stieber (2004)
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Myth a "Breathing Entity"
"A myth becomes a breathing entity only when we strip it of its superficial covering and allow it to reveal its many layers of meaning and interpretation. It is only by penetrating to its hidden depths can we begin to decipher the ways in which the myth continues to address the perennial concerns of humankind."

from "Demeter and Persephone: Lessons from a Myth," p. 2, by Tamara Agha-Jaffar (2002)
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Divinities of the Countryside
"Greek conceptions of space and time were shaped by ideas that identified the world of nature with the world of the gods. The gods were thought to control the forces of nature and were believed to have their own place in the natural world. The countryside was thought to have been the home of the gods long before the birth of the first humans, and local political charter myths always placed human struggle for survival or human competition for political dominance in the context of the divine world."

from "Placing the Gods: Sanctuaries and Sacred Space in Ancient Greece," p. 199, by Susan E. Alcock, Robin Osborne (1996)
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Weaving Flowers & Scents
"Weaving the names of the flowers [...], the writer sets Peresphone before us, herself like one of them — kalykôpis — like the budding calyx of a flower — in a picture [...] which, in its mingling of a quaint freshness and simplicity, with a certain earnestness, reads like a description of some early Florentine Design, such as Sandro Botticelli's Allegory of the Seasons. By an exquisite chance also, a common metrical expression [L-013-14] connects the perfume of the newly created narcissus with the salt odour of the sea."

from "Greek Studies, A Series of Essays," by Waler Pater, p. 52, (1875 / 1920)
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Multi-Levels of Meaning in
the Hymn to Demeter
"The myth has many levels of meaning, including personal, sociological, archetypal, and ecological. It has been associated with the vegetal cycle, the mother-daughter relationship, coming to terms with death, death and rebirth, the rise and intrusion of patriarchal religions, and the suppression of the goddess-centered religions, and has been interpreted as a metaphor for the initiation of women moving from one developmental stage to another (puberty and old age) or from the role of mother or daughter into a more comprehensive identity."

from "Initiation through trauma: A comparative study of the descents of Inanna and Persephone (Dreaming Persephone forward)," p. 238, by Hollie Jeanne Hannan (2005) (Illustration: traditional Japanese design.)
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