Persephone and the two seasons

It's fall around here, the gentlest season-- when there are no hurricanes. Spring is pine pollen and sudden heat with no shade, and early forsythia that dies in a late frost. Summer wrings out the body like a washcloth. Winter is clammy, muddy, and snow brings calamity rather than peace. "Silver-white winters that melt into spring" just don't tend to happen around here.

But fall is the bluest time, a time of blue skies and chasing blues away. School's in, and students glow with possibilities. They still believe in themselves in September and October, and we believe in our ability to teach them.

I live far enough south that the evenings cool gradually. The interior of the car is hot when you return to it at quitting time, but roll down the windows and put it in gear, and in seconds the afternoon breeze has done a much better job than any air conditioner could.

Fall redeems all the seasons, and infuses them with nostalgia.

Remember fall, when your elementary school teacher stapled construction paper leaves to her bulletin board? How did she do it, when she made the base splay out and punched at the wall with only the top of the stapler? Do you remember how good it felt to see those leaves suspended in mid-scatter? Or to be able to read what it said there-- Fall into Learning. As Leaves Turn, Books Are Read?

Our nation began in the heart of four-season country, whether Jamestown, Virginia, or Plymouth, Massachusetts. The ancestors of our founding fathers lived with an exquisite rhythm of time, a symmetry of seasons. Aristotle once wrote that those who live in the most temperate of climates are the most civilized, and that they live at the center of the earth-- thus we know Artistole's region as the Mediterranean, the Middle of the Earth. Experience a beautiful turning of seasons, and you believe Aristotle.

It's a funny thing. I remember all the bulletin boards-- the fall-into-learning boards, the winter-winds-blow boards, the April-showers-bring-May-flowers boards. But since I grew up in California, none of the boards corresponded to anything we saw outside. Hardly any leaves turned; our trees were evergreen. Our winter winds brought rain-- and temperatures rarely below 40 degrees F. The April-May chronology was totally off. We started seeing flowers in January, and February was the month of blizzards-- of white and pink plum blossoms, that is.

Still, I seemed to have a genetic memory of four seasons, even though I would not see a real and true Northern hemisphere winter until I was an adult.

One's own personal life circumstances deeply affect one's perception of others. Case in point: the myth of Persephone, teenage goddess, the daughter of Demeter, and the queen of the Underworld. For almost a century, and still in many classrooms today, this myth is taught as the ancient Greeks' method of explaining the origin of the seasons.

It goes like this: the king of the dead, Hades, wants a wife, and so he takes Persephone, a daughter of Zeus, with Zeus' permission. She descends to the dead to become their queen. But mom Demeter is attached to her little girl, and makes all living things stop growing until such time as Zeus lets Persephone come back up, no strings attached-- except-- except-- if Persephone has eaten anything while below.

She has: a certain number of pomegranate seeds, a sort of magic bean, wedding cake, and body-and-blood all in one, which binds her to Hades forever. Ever after she spends a certain amount of time under the earth (as little as one-third of the time, as much as one-half, according to the storyteller), much to Demeter's chagrin, who makes the earth barren for the time that her daughter must spend underground.

Nineteenth- and early twentieth century mythologists (including the famous J.G. Frazer) seized on this story as an example of myth as primitive science: explaining the unexplainable for a primitive and credulous band of people.

But all these mythologists failed to recognize a number of things that sunk this theory:

• Greece, like California, has no barren time when nothing is growing. In fact, winter is the greenest time of the year. It's in summer that all the grass dies and you have to keep crops alive with irrigation.
• Seasons come from weather, which is the province of Zeus, not Demeter. Demeter could make the land barren at any time of the year because as "goddess of dirt" she rules the fertility of the earth-- not temperature, rainfall, or wind.
• It never says in any version, "Every year ever after, Demeter made the land barren for a third (or however long) of the year."
• It never says in any version, "And that's how the seasons got started."
• It never says in any version, "Before this time, there were no seasons, and the earth brought forth everything at all times."

You'd think that if someone was explaining something, they'd let everyone know they were explaining it.

Greece has a unique climate, the Mediterranean, with two seasons, the dry and the wet. The wet begins in October and greens everything up with its rains. It is over by March or so, and there is almost no rain until the following October. Grain is sown in the fall, much like grass seed in my neck of the woods, and grows slowly and steadily until it is harvested the following spring. Of course there are flowers at this time, and everyone rejoices as it gets warmer. But you never get Rossetti's bleak midwinter:

In the bleak midwinter

Frosty wind made moan,

Earth stood hard as iron,

Water like a stone:

Snow had fallen,

Snow on snow,

Snow on snow,

In the bleak midwinter,

Long ago.

And thus you never get Demeter making the ground hard as iron. Instead, you have the poet Hesiod's practical words:

Beware of the month Lenaion, bad days,
that would take the skin off
an ox; beware of it, and the frosts, which,
as Boreas,
the north wind, blows over the land, cruelly develop;
(translation Lattimore)

One month out of the year, an alien wind blows down from the north. Hesiod goes on to speak of more typical winter preparations:

Take skins of firstling kids, when the cold season
is upon you,
and stitch them together with the sinew of an ox,
for a cape to put over
your back, and keep the rain off,
and on your head you should wear
a hat made out of felt, to keep your ears free
of the water.
(translation Lattimore)

All this cold, wet time, the grain is growing, to be harvested in late spring:

Keep away from sitting in the shade or lying in bed
till the sun's up
in the time of the harvest, when the sunshine
scorches your skin dry.

This past weekend I was invited to a Sunday lunch, and wanted to bring something autumnal. I chose whole baked apples. I could have standed to bake them a little longer, an honest friend at the lunch told me. But the look and the smell-- I could almost feel the cold water dripping from my cheeks as I bobbed and bobbed in a tub for that elusive stem my teeth could clamp.

Despite growing up in the Mediterranean climate of California, I love the four seasons. But I know that none of Persephone's ancient teenage fans would have understood if we told them that their Demeter made it winter every year.

Comments

[Iulia]

Thanks for this entry; it's beautiful. I saw pomegranates at the grocery 2/$4 last week and introduced a friend to the fruit. Too bad our hands and mouths weren't really as stained as I had promised they'd be. And in the spirit of Persephone and seasons, I will link you to a poem by Eavan Bolan.
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15385

[Lee]

A lovely, interesting post which reminds me how rarely we stop to question accepted notions - one of the reasons I enjoy teens so much.

My own children, by the way, have a very different seasonal rhythm than I, since they spent their childhood in Africa.

[DF]

Iulia, what a precise distillation that poem is of the feelings that the Demeter-Persephone relationship evokes in mothers, especially in the narrator's anticipation of separation from her daughter!

What's particularly interesting to me is that with all this focus on separation, the myth itself actually has Persephone end by being absent from Demeter only a fraction of the year. Gods get to do things humans don't, is the apparent message.

Lee, as a four-season lover despite my childhood in California, I would love to know how those who grew up in other climates feel about times of the year, whether they have more, less, or equally pronounced feelings if there are fewer obvious changes in temperature, sunlight, and the rest.

Thank you both for reading!

[Michael Leddy]

Beautiful post on Persephone -- I am keeping it in mind for when I teach Ovid later this semester.

I grew up in the northeast, and my feelings about the seasons are always complicated by nostalgia. Fall is "school," new notebooks and pencils, "jacket weather." It's always been my favorite season. I love that the Odyssey takes place when the leaves are already on the ground.

In the midwest, where I now live, fall sometimes seems to last only a few weeks, following a too-long summer and a too-soon-to-arrive winter. It's better than nothing though: a former student who now lives in California has told me on several occasions how much she misses the seasons that she knew here.