Persephone has a really good agent

[justinemusk]

I’m an atheist, and I’ve often thought that writing is the closest thing I have to a religion. Bookstores serve to center me, give me peace, reconnect me to who I am at core: what I imagine places of worship do for other people.

And writing itself is the act of making meaning from the random chaos in your world (and your head). We are meaning-makers. That’s kind of heavy. No wonder we procrastinate like hell. And drink a lot of coffee.

Last night I went to this goddess thing held in a seriously cute boutique on Melrose Place (where everything was seventy-five percent off, because as we all know, the goddesses must shop). It was a talk given by Agapi Stassinopoulos, author of CONVERSATIONS WITH GODDESSES. The idea is that the seven ancient Greek goddesses (Aphrodite, Hera, Hestia, Artemis, etc.) represent seven different archetypes, and each woman can recognize herself in them. Through them you gain insight into yourself.

When my friend Joanna and I read through the archetypes, we recognized each other immediately. “You’re Demeter,” I informed her, which she had already figured out for herself, and she told me, “You’re Persephone.”

Persephone is Queen of the freaking Underworld (“no wonder I like to wear black,” I remarked to Joanna, “I am Queen of the freaking Underworld!”). She has an aura of mystery about her that attracts people, including “men of darker appetites” who just might, say, abduct her while she is frolicking in the fields and picking narcissus (symbolizing her own streak of narcissism) and take her away down to Hades. She needs a strong mother figure in her life, like Demeter, who goes to Zeus and chews his head off and unleashes all the fury of a mama lioness until she gets her baby back. But Persephone has tasted of the forbidden fruit, which means she can never go home completely. So she divides her time between Hades and the regular world. It’s kind of like being bicoastal.

Persephone is also the goddess of spring. She rules a world of darkness and shadow, of hurt and pain and loss; she takes this pain into herself and transforms it. Spring is about renewal. Spring is about creation. She comes up into the world and she can be the free, wild girl in the fields again. She is an edgy girl, our Persephone, yet there is an innocence to her.

Perhaps, as writers, we are all Persephones. Our job is to go down into the darkness and gather the materials we find there: all the conflict, hurt and loss, all the sad and brutal wisdom, all the things that feed man’s and woman’s “darker appetites”. We take them into ourselves and transmute them into the light and love of fiction. We bring them up into the springtime and let them go. We renew ourselves (and procrastinate like hell). Perhaps we go to Hawaii for a week.

Then it’s down into the darkness again, cavorting with the gods.

It’s a pretty privileged gig, when you think about it. We just need to make sure we have a Demeter in place to fight for us. And who else could that be except a really, really good agent.


Justine Musk
http://tribalwriter.com/

[Sophie Minter]

Pesephone sounds pretty cool, but uh...couldn't I be...Zeus? After all, he threw thunderbolts at people, thunderbolts! I know, he's a man, and I'm a woman but they have all the cool toys/powers.

[MoiraYoung]

I've often thought of the antisocial-social-antisocial-social-antisocial again loop that defines me as a Persephone-like descent. Great post!