this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2023
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It was a silly joke they keep laughing about over dinner.
According to OSP, Hades got permission from Zeus to kidnap the girl, which more or less how things were done still. (Yes, we had ritual kidnappings.) It was Demeter and her codependency on her daughter that caused problems. So Persephone is essentially doing caregiving service for mom every othern six-month interval.
Old-timey pre-Hercules Disney paints Hades as kinda Satany which informs 20th century interpretations. Curiously in the Percy novels, Hades is more true to Hellenism, but gets a touch of the diabolic for the Lightning Thief movie.
I mean, if you ignore that women were very much property to be traded in Hellenic/Mycenaenian society.
It was hardly a unique problem in those days, of course, but the simple reality is that, even under the ritual kidnapping interpretation, which is very, very debatable, what Persephone wanted never really entered the discussion.
Yes. Even the OSP on Persephone and Hades ( on YouTube ) starts with Red saying Okay, let's not kid ourselves here. Relationships in Greek mythology are almost unilaterally really bad. And Red then details out some of the less offending examples since the more offending ones are just too extreme to safely talk about without trigger warnings.
I should add, consent is terrifyingly new. In the 1970s, there was a controversy regarding wife rape id est, whether it was immoral or illegal to have forcible sex with your spouse, and in the 2010s we've finally admitted sex should be opt-in (e.g. you can be legally liable if you don't get affirmative consent, Yes, I totally am game for sex tonight. ) And biblical scholars have to explain to people no-one ever had consensual sex, rather the penetrator was the active participant and the one penetrated was passive. (In the case of a gay coupling, the bottom was innocent of wrongdoing but still had to be killed to prevent the region from being polluted by the act of gay sex because reasons.)
So yes, we can presume that any relationship in classical Greece or in mythical Greece is going to be dysfunctional all to Tartarus and involve some crimes against humanity, and features a lot of far from consensual. We, today, in 2023, are at the dawn of humankind taking women's autonomy and clear, informed consent in relationships seriously. (Maybe after the fact, we'll notice that all our contracts with commercial interests should get some of that clear, informed consent as well.)
But -- silly me -- I was on mobile and got distracted and posted without getting to the part I thought was interesting.
The hymn in which Hades traps Persephone with the pomegranate seeds is a single hymn and the part about the seeds is torn and unclear what all was going on there, so whether or not it was a ruse by Stalwart Hades and D͙̻̋ͧͪ̈́ͯȑ͍̮ͩ̒̈e͎͇̦͛̋ả̰̖̐͊d̦̙̆͒̒̒̚ ͔̻̿̃P͈̋ͯ̒ͮĕ̮̥̈̚r͈̻͎̤ͅs̲͕̣̿ͥ̈͂e̍́͐ph͚o̱̭̖͑n͖̺̆̋̇e̫̹̝͂̾̆̒̅ or some kind of magic to seal her commitment to the underworld is now up to us. But Persephone isn't the goddess of spring so much as the goddess of keeping Demeter from being sad. Springtime is the result of Demeter getting to see her daughter once again.
But then Persephone's rule of the underworld predates Hades. Demeter and Persephone was around in the Mycenaean days, but it was Poseidon that was king of the dead, and Persephone was queen.