Persephone’s Descent: The Underworld Initiation From Maiden to Queen

What is it that truly makes a woman a Queen?

At the roots of the ancient Goddess religions across the world, woven into our sacred mythologies of myriad traditions, and documented in the fairy and folk tales passed through the lips of women across time and space, this voyage of transitioning from a naive young Maiden into a wise and fertile Queen is perhaps the most relevant, important, and necessary mystery for all women to deeply know.

While our patriarchal capitalistic society has painted an image of either the “good Queen” or the “evil Queen,” the one subservient to the King and the one who devilishly undermines him, it can be challenging to reconstruct a true vision of the benevolent Queen who rules her domain, receives her treasure, and serves the world with love.

In fact, of all of the feminine archetypes, I would say that Queen is the one most lacking in the outer world. Her true light has yet to be fully awakened on a larger scale. Likely because, unless and until we truly face the demons that hide in our own inner Queendoms, the role of Queen will continue to be filled with shadows, manipulations, distortions, and fears. Which is mostly… what we see in the world. And so, through our own path of deep humility, by walking the shamanic path of descent, by becoming Queens of the graveyards of our own underworlds, only then will we taste the true light of Queen, a woman whole and sovereign unto herself.

To be stripped, strengthened, and refined through the cauldron of death and rebirth is necessary training ground for all true Queens.

In the Grail folklore of Europe, there is a beautiful myth, akin to the Lord of the Rings, that the greatest danger one faces when reaching the holy grail is becoming corrupted by it. We see this across the world in relationship to power. The closer we come to our power, the more easily we become corrupted by power. And so we see either those chasing power or those hiding from it. This dance plays out on the world’s stage, through the oppressor and the oppressed. The question is… how to be a woman who is at once powerful and also humble? This is the journey of Queen.

When we come closer to our true power, that is the creative impulse of all life and death that resides within women at the womb and men in the energetic womb known as the hara, we often experience what the ancients called “descent.” In fact, our power does not live in the outer world through manipulation that further makes us victims of our own agendas constructed by a wounded inner child. No, it lives within those wounds, within those shadows, in those places that the power hungry try to avoid and deny.

For the ancient Greeks this journey of maturity, of awakening out of the innocence of youth and descending down into the underbelly of the world where the bones of the ancestors lay hidden for us to recollect, reassemble, and reawaken from the dead, was described through the changing seasons of the feminine archetypes of Maiden - Mother - Crone. Just as the summer blooms begin to wither and the cold death of winter consumes the world, the sun returns to melt the ice and the seeds crack open and blossom into new.

This timeless reflection of a woman’s maturation through natural cycles is profoundly woven into the story of Persephone’s journey to the underworld.

The story goes that the sweet young maiden Persephone lived with her mother Demeter, the Goddess of abundance who ruled the natural world, up on Mount Olympus. For the Greeks, Mount Olympus was the land of the Gods, the closest to Heaven, and the opposite of the dark underworld. Persephone is the quintessential good girl, full of light, radiance, and utter innocence as one who has yet to taste the medicine of the dark.

One day, as Persephone is skipping through a field of fresh daisies, the Earth below her cracks open and Hades, the dark King of the Underworld rises up with his chariot of black stallions and snatches her to become his bride. Persephone’s scream is heard across the fields of flowers, deep into the wooded forests, and all the way to the cave of the wise woman Hecate. But nonetheless, she is dragged down through the gateways of the Earth into the land of the underworld, where nothing is as it appears to be.

Demeter quickly learns of her daughter’s abduction and descent, akin to death, and she grieves the loss of the innocence and life of her beloved child. Her grief causes the entire world to winter and all living things to die. She begs and pleads with the Gods to bring her daughter back from the dead, and desperate for Demeter to bring the Earth back to life, the Gods agree to give Persephone the right to choose whether or not to return. However, Hades has already given Persephone the pomegranate seeds that grow from the trees of the underworld, and once she tastes the fruit she is intoxicated, enchanted by their taste. When Persephone is given the right to choose, she declares her desire to remain down in the underworld with her King.

A compromise is made, and the Gods decide that Persephone will spend half of the year down in the underworld and the other half up on Mount Olympus. Each year when Persephone returns to the underworld, her Mother grieves through the falling leaves of autumn and the cold death of winter, while Hecate the Crone accompanies Persephone as her guide. When Persephone returns again, we see the spring flowers bursting up from the dark soil of winter, and the full sunlight of summer.

In mythological tradition, all of the characters within the story are both aspects of our own psyche as well as our families, societies, and world.

What is particularly interesting to me about the story of Persephone, is that unlike the stories of Inanna of Sumeria (Read Her story here: Inanna’s Descent: How We Integrate the Shadow and Embrace Our Wholeness) and Ishtar of Babylonia, the most iconic Underworld Queens, Persephone does not descend through her own free will choice. For ancient Goddess religions it was part of a woman’s sacred initiation to descend into the dark underworld, meet her evil twin, be guided by the spirits of the upperworld in the depths of Hell, and to rise with the power sourced from the womb of creation. This is the journey of Inanna and Ishtar’s descent.

But for Persephone, it is inflicted upon Her, and not by a wise old Crone (though we do meet the Crone through Hecate’s presence) as was often the tradition in fairytales especially those of Welsch and Slavic descent who worshipped the Goddesses Cerridwen and Baba Yaga, but rather Persephone is initiated by the dark masculine in the form of Hades, which was the name the ancient Greeks gave to the land of the underworld, also known as Hell.

While this telling deviates from classic women’s initiation rights, I think it’s much more relatable in modern context where most women arrive at descent through heartbreak, sexual abuse, or other forms of domination in relationship with “the opposite sex.” (I wrote more about that here: Artemis Wisdom: How a Wild Woman Reclaims Her Freedom in a World That Made Her Prey.)

But we can also see Hades not just as a dark masculine figure in the world, but as a dark masculine figure within us.

In her epic novel Women Who Run With the Wolves, Clarissa Pinkola Estes describes this dark masculine character as the “predator” that lurks within the deep psyche as well as in the world. She calls it a “fallen” aspect of our consciousness that is always seeking redemption through attempting to trap the light that it sees outside of itself, unable to remember the light that hides within.

I like to think of Hades as the wounded inner child, or as the ancient Goddess religions understood as the doppleganger, the evil twin. Modern personal development models often call it “the saboteur” that is in need of reform, or for some to be abandoned, cleared, ignored, diminished, ridiculed, lightwashed, and cut out entirely. However, as the guardian of the darkness, I believe that this so called saboteur is actually the tormented and traumatized fragments of the self, that when completely embraced with the light of radical love reveal their true nature and hidden gifts.

As I mentioned earlier, for Inanna and Ishtar, descent is of one’s own free will choice, that reunites the Heavenly self with the Hellish self, depicted through the character of the evil twin sister named Ereshkigal for the Sumerians, a lion headed woman that meets us with all of her overwhelming grief and rage.

I often and deeply reflect and wonder, is this commonality of being dragged down into descent by an external “dark masculine” rather than the evil twin sister or the old woman witch, in fact a result of the deeper wound of the loss of a woman’s own initiation rites? If we were supported through our initiations by the wise witches, and if men were supported through their initiations by the true magicians, would this dark dance between the sexes still even exist?

How much of our sexual sovereignty and true love in relationships with those we feel sexual attraction towards (be that men or women) depends on embracing the dark predator within and not needing our partner or lovers to play out that archetype? (This comment in no way justifies abuse or blames those who have been victims of predators of any kind, rather it is meant to explore the dysfunctions of our societal structures at large and potential ways that we can restore balance for ourselves and future generations.)

Nonetheless, until Persephone descends down into the underworld, she is inevitably disempowered in the other worlds.

I think we can all recognize this quality of youth and the archetype of the “overbearing” Mother figure of Demeter, whether within our own family constellations or through others we have witnessed. There is a sickness in this world of possession and ownership of children that diminishes the wild soul and perpetuates the complacency inflicted through patriarchy. How many young girls coming into their sexuality do we see run off with a dark masculine archetype (be that a teenage boy, an older man, a cult, drugs and alcohol, or all manner of the dark side) in a reckless attempt to feel liberated from the shackles of the family paradigm?

We are all seeking freedom through self empowerment, to know our sovereignty and to feel liberated of that which has controlled us, and when we are not artfully guided through the initiations into our power, it is frankly inevitable that some form of Hades will drag us down there. The soul so deeply longs to remember its true nature that at times it will bring us to the brink of intolerable abuse, suffering, and death, all in an attempt to awaken us to the wild that lives within us.

It is through this process that Persephone does achieve liberation from the grip of her Mother, however she simultaneously tethers herself to the darkness of her underworld King. If we view this through the lens of all characters as aspects within us, we see that an inner marriage in the underworld involves both the freedom from a dominating matriarch as well as the grief that comes through the loss of one’s own innocence. As Demeter grieves her daughter, we grieve the naïveté of our youth.

But once Persephone tastes the fruit of the underworld, the pomegranate seeds like ruby gems of the darkness, she is forever tied.

Mythologically, fruit is typically a symbol for the womb, and biologically we see how this fruit is the final blossoming and flowering of the seeds that gestate down in the underworld. Persephone eats both the fruit and the seeds of the underworld trees. She tastes the sweet fibers of the pomegranate flesh and also ingests the seeds that generate it. Of all the fruits pomegranate seeds are the most visually akin to jewels, to treasure.

What a profound mirror for when we dive into our own shadow work. While we may experience the terror and the pain of being in our own proverbial Hell, we also taste the sweetness of the gifts that are buried there and we become impregnated with the seeds that enable us to birth those gifts into the world.

However, the underworld can be both dangerous and addictive. Without the support of our own inner Hecate (the wise woman) and likely an outer Hecate figure in the form of a wise grandmother, women’s wisdom community, shamanic healer, or skilled psycho/somatic therapist, we can get lost in the many twists and turns and folds of the dark labyrinth of the psyche.

In the legend of Inanna’s descent, she brings with her spirit guides from the upperworld that heal her evil twin as she hangs dead for three nights on the hook. In the classic fairytale The Handless Maiden, the young Queen is guided by a spirit in white to the fruits of the underworld and the homes of the wild mother. For Persephone, the wise old Crone accompanies her, which is also representative of the forming of the inner wise woman through the dark descent voyage. We enter Her territory, the underworld land of the dead, and we become wisened to its ways, expanding our capacity to cross the thresholds of life and death with more knowing, with more treasure.

It is not only the grandmother Crone who ensures our rebirth through descent, it is also the grief of the Mother.

While on one hand we can view Demeter’s pleas for Persephone’s return as a possessive Mother unable to release her daughter through the natural process of individuation, it is also the inner Mother and her love for the light of the soul that brings us back from the dead. When we experience descent, grief is a tremendously important part of the process of resurrection, along with rage. (We journey deeper here: How We Heal Through the Initiations of Life, Death, and Rebirth.)

In the fairytale The Handless Maiden, which is very similar to the story of Persephone, when the Maiden is seized by the devil, it is her sobbing tears that make the devil unable to reach her. In the story of Inanna, her evil twin Ereshkigal destroys her over the grief of her dead husband. Inanna’s spirit guides must deliver Ereshkigal compassion as she grieves for three nights while Inanna hangs dead on the hook. Only when Ereshkigal has fully healed will she let Inanna be brought back to life.

Grief emerges from the well of the deep soulful self, and as long as we allow it to flow we also wash ourselves clean of the layers upon layers of unconscious wounding and conditioning that controls most of the outer world. Grief keeps us connected to both our hearts and our wombs. Grief keeps us fluid, soft, tender, and alive. Grief is a powerful gateway to truth and to love.

To be Queen is ultimately to know our own territory, to own it, and to face our fears of all that lives beneath the surface to no longer be a victim of it.

Once the deal is made by the Gods (the ruling aspect of the psyche) that Persephone will spend half of the year in the underworld with Hades, and half of the year in the upperworld with her Mother, one might say that the initiation is complete. However, Persephone traverses these lands again and again. Initiation is never complete. Enlightenment is not an end state, it is actually the mastery of being both human and divine.

That said, there is usually a cycle of particularly difficult and painful descent that requires a lot of wisdom, a lot of grief, a lot of rage, and a lot of courage. Once we know the terrain we become more familiar with the wild and wise ways. And for the sake of empowerment, we reclaim the role of Inanna/Ishtar in choosing when it’s time to descend to retrieve more power, embrace more shadows, love more of the darkness, and when it’s time to reconstruct our wings and fly back up into the light.

As we become initiated and wisened through our own darkness, we reclaim immense power in our inner and outer world, through knowing how to protect ourselves from the grips of the darkness (Hecate, the wise woman), how to bring ourselves back through our persistence and our love (Demeter, the mother), and how to return to innocence as a choice rather than naïveté (Persephone, the now initiated maiden). Persephone becomes Queen of the Underworld once she has fully embraced the darkness of her inner world and can meet it, recognize it, and dismantle it in her outer world. Only then does she truly rise as an empowered woman.