Homeric Hymn to Demeter
“The epic journey is about coming to terms with death, the pain of loss, and mortal limits.When a divine figure like Demeter undertakes an epic journey or an angry withdrawal, she is drawn into the sphere of human tragedy.In the pattern of withdrawal and return in the HymnToDemeter, the absence of Demeter is a withdrawal from the assembly of the gods to the world of humans.After the abduction of her daughter, Persephone, by Hades to the underworld (unconscious), Demeter searches for her over the earth with kindled torches.Her anger towards Zeus turns into an unapproachable wrath.A terribly savage, doglike, grief comes to her and she thereupon avoids the assembly of the gods, detaches and descends to the fields of humans.Demeter’s hymn is shaped by initiatory patterns in which the Eleusinian initiates shared, imitating the experiences of the goddesses.Both Demeter and Persephone withdrawal and return.Demeter's descent threatens to blur the veil between the two worlds.Once readopting her divine form, she remains in the liminal space of her temple on earth, using her powers to destroy rather than renew.But they are reunited and reincorporated into Olympus with newfound powers.Demeter never forgets her divinity, nor her role as nurse and divinemother, and its this preservation that enables the woman to take her initiate under her divineprotection throughout the EleusinianMysteries.The rites involved a detachment from the central civic spaces and values of culture.In all-night dances, in the darkness of the Hall of Initiation, the mystery initiates moved out of time and space, by which they normally defined their world, readopting their own divinity.In so doing they developed both a permanent sense of liminality and a relation to a more human experience; not a reentry into the life of the city-state, but the distinguishing gain of a different lot in life."
Excerpt from Homeric Hymn to Demeter by Helene Foley
Books mentioned:
Homeric Hymn to Demeter by Helene Foley
