DEMYSTIFYING MYTHS #1

Myths are some of the oldest tools humans have for understanding themselves. They have been told and retold for centuries, playful enough to slip past the sieve of the unconscious and precise enough to hand us symbols we can use to create, to grieve, and to resolve. Mythology helps us read life’s complexity through symbolic meaning, systemic dynamics and archetypes. A powerful language through symbols.

In this series I want to dig into some of these stories and pull out what they still have to tell us. Starting with Persephone, because her story is about a kind of courage that is rarely applauded: the willingness to give meaning to what happens to us.

Her acceptance of the unknown, and her willingness to nourish herself from the space that opened beneath her feet, is a quiet strength that works from the inside out and, that brings you inwards and eventually, guides the way back up to surface again.

Melanie Klein and Freud saw psychic life as a movement we keep repeating rather than a straight line. Again and again we return to old anxieties and old losses, knots given to us while we were experiencing life for the first time, that the willingness to be aware of their ties every time we touch them, is an opportunity to allow us more capacity to hold space of being whole.

As in an spiral, every confrontation turned inward is a journey back to a place we once couldn’t bear, revisited with the eyes from present being. Detaching from old self and beliefs, to embrace it into a new perspective. An old knot that gets integrated into the conscious self, becomes a choice: to keep it alive in the world we create, extending the pattern forward.

In Persephone’s story we can reach passages of detachments by untangling from limiting beliefs, and finding the audacity to stop looking outside for answers and turn toward the one she's been reveled, and embracing her true self.

You should know that she was once someone else: Kore and her name means “maiden.” She was someone else’s daughter, with a spring-bright future laid out ahead of her.

Kore lived in an endless spring, spending her days gathering flowers with sunlight on her skin, and her mother was Demeter, the goddess of the harvest, and she was always close by. Nothing was missing in paradise.

It was a sweet life, but like every life spent filling a creation of someone else's, it was also a small one.

How many times have you believed that the right way to live is to find the comfortable place, the predictable rhythm, the people who already know who you are, and stay there, filling the spaces created for you? There is a particular kind of smallness that comes from never being asked to meet yourself. You can live a whole life in the endless spring and never find out what grows in you when the light goes out.

II. Another one layer

One day, a particular flower caught Kore’s eye. It was stranger than all the others, and more beautiful. It didn’t belong to the meadow she knew.

She reached for it, uncertain but curious about what else was being offered and, as she pulled it from the ground, the earth opened beneath her feet.

Kore fell into the underworld, and she carried down with her a refusal to live a life afraid of it. She ate from that world, a few pomegranate seeds, and they bound her to it. They let her belong there and discover what could live beneath the flowering world she knew, without any light at all.(In time she would even fall in love down there and build an empire, but that is a story for later.)

It takes audacity to look at the parts of yourself you’ve spent years not even knowing it exists. The anger you were told was ugly. The grief you never finished. The desire you were ashamed of. The talent you buried because it would have made you too visible. The old wounds that still quietly decide who you trust, who you love, and how you measure your reality.

Kore’s descent is the act of asking the questions you’ve been too polite to ask yourself, and of looking at the parts of you that you’ve been too ashamed to let breathe.

No one can make this descent for you. Some people or events will trigger the encounter, and some, can hold the lantern at the entrance. But only you can walk in.

III. The World Above Goes Cold

Up above, Demeter searched for her daughter and wept, and the fields fell in silence with her. Her grief was so deep that nothing in earth grew anymore, and people went hungry and cold. First came autumn, and then the first winter the world had ever known. The earth began to die as Demeter mourned.

When you go inward, the outside world reacts. Things that used to bloom stop blooming. Relationships built on the old version of you feel the change. The people who loved Kore don’t always know what to do with who she is becoming, and they don’t always have to.

That includes us... There is a part of every one of us that mourns the ideal of endless spring, and that grieves a little at every choice that takes us away from it.

The underworld is a symbol of the unconscious. It is the place in us where everything set aside, feared or left unnamed has its space, though not always our attention. Without acknowledging that place, we can only live from a false perception of who we are, because we can’t integrate what we once found repellent, or what was imprinted on us. This is why Jung warned that whatever inner situation we don’t make conscious comes back to meet us from the outside, as fate. Only by bringing light to the shadow can we take charge of our choices and stop calling what happens to us “fate.”

IV. Persephone individuation

When Kore embraces the dark without losing her bright world, she becomes Persephone. A more authentic version of herself, in what Jung called individuation: the integration of shadow and light, bringing the whole self into consciousness.

The beauty of this movement is this:

She went down as Kore, someone’s daughter (someone's projection of being).
She came back as Persephone, her own queen, at home in both the light and the dark.

And after facing the shadows of underworld, she now spends part of the year on the surface, through spring and summer, and the rest of it, through autumn and winter, beside Hades, ruling it. She doesn’t stay below forever, but she can't never fully leave either. Moving between the two worlds and carrying her authority in both.

The dark doesn’t erase her spring. but gives it roots.

Think about how much we hand over to fate while we float above in an ideal world. “That’s just my luck.” “It always happens to me.” “I’m just not that kind of person.” How often is it really fate, and how often is it an invisible pattern making our choices from the dark? A real life requires contrast, and a self aware enough to hold it.

Individuation isn’t about becoming someone else. It’s about finally becoming the one you were before you learned to be small.

And Demeter, the mother who stayed above all this time? Her grief, and the seasons born from it, are a story for another day.

When you feel it’s time, the door is open.