#iambe

Queen of the Dead part 2, 127

In the Hymn, Demeter demands that the people of Eleusis build her a temple and an altar on the rising hill above the Kallichoron well. Keleos summons the people and make sure that this is done. Demeter then withdraws into the temple. I didn't include that part of the story for two reasons. 1. In my comic Demeter already has a temple and cult in Eleusis. 2. Building a temple takes a very long time. In the Hymn it almost sounds like that all it took was a day's work, but building a temple, at least a big one, normally took several years.

She literally laughs at sex jokes.

Demeter telling Celeus' daughters that she is Cretan is cinema in its purest form 🎥 it gives it that Odyssean touch… OH! wait, which came first, the chicken or the egg?

Ms. Artzs is a art teacher in Noonrise Town. She mostly spent time painting the walls and building...

Mr. Slider works for Martinov Family. He’s the advisor. He doesn’t talk to much to folks in GreenRiver Town, he only focus on his tasks...

Mr. Carter handles the money in Noonrise Town. He helps the mayor and money problems. He loves counting money and can’t help it but to keep it...

Iambe is the advisor to Ling Himalayan at his club. She was corrupted after losing her family and was found by him. She believes what he told her about the world...

The Persephone well will never run dry. When I started doing this over two years ago, I worked at a bookstore and I managed to run through all the books I could find in the store that mentioned her. Now, admittedly, I come across new stuff less often but even as I say this I have three books I own that I know I’m going to write about that I just haven’t gotten around to reading yet. Also now all my friends are very aware of this and will direct me to new stuff if they come across it. 

This one, however, was just a book I was reading for fun. In general, I just love mythology and folklore so I often read books about it. Regardless, I wasn’t surprised to find some Persephone, but how she appeared was definitely surprising.

For the reference, I enjoyed the heck out of this book. It involves an archetypal and Jungian psychological analysis of various tales as they relate to the female psyche as a means of, I guess, empowerment? Self help? I don’t know. I just love reading deep dives of stories. Why else would I do THIS?

So based on this introduction about Baubo, who I had never heard of before, I was definitely not expecting the Persephone myth. This is a chapter on sexuality so when I looked in the index and saw that Persephone was mentioned in it, I had a different thought. When I read “Narcissus and the Pomegranate” it talked a lot about how you can read the story not just about budding adulthood but budding sexuality as represented through the seeds. This was. . . not that.

I have straight up never heard this before in any of the - what?- fifty or so versions of this myth that I’ve consumed in my thirty years. I immediately noticed the shift to Demeter over Persephone, common enough in print myth retellings that use the Homeric Hymn as a basis, but then we have Demeter at the well, presumably the same well in Eleusis that is often mentioned in myth, the same well I’ve actually seen in Eleusis, but instead of being approached by Callidice and the other daughters of the king, we have Baubo. And then it just glosses over the rest of the story, which for the purposes of this chapter makes sense because it’s literally a chapter about sexual humor specifically, but still, what the heck? The author of this book says where she gets a lot of her stories but I’ve read the damn Homeric Hymn. I’ve read books about the damn Homeric Hymn, specially ones written by women who address the female aspects of the story. Show me Baubo. Seriously. I don’t doubt her existence in general as a goddess, but I doubt it in this narrative. [EDIT: I had an anonymous reader tell me that Baubo is more commonly known as Iambe and NOW IT MAKES SENSE. She was a servant of Metanira (the queen) in tellings of the myth. Now my question becomes: why is she so rarely represented? She’s never even appeared in any of my Persephone Project posts even though I’ve heard of her from one of the many versions I’ve read (I think the Robert Graves version since that’s one of the only sources I can find and I have some definite Thoughts about how he presents information).]

Later on Persephone is mentioned a bunch again in a chapter about specifically women travelling to the underworld tales. Makes sense.  The red lines indicate the important part.

Now this is some stuff I can back up!  “Narcissus and the Pomegranate” talked about this a bunch although it often focused more on the goddess being both a land and underworld goddess who had a male consort who travels to her, but still. Either way you flip the genders, the basic formula being older than Persephone and being a consensual union is accurate.  “Narcissus and the Pomegranate” hypothesized that this change with the Hades and Persephone myth was to give Zeus more power by having him approve the marriage (and carry out the wedding practices of the time). 

So a few points here: 1. I don’t recall ever hearing the thing about the two trees before. And as a giant Tolkien nerd (I said I like mythology! Let me tell you about The Silmarillon for 11 hours) I would definitely remember a reference to two trees. 2. The reborn from Elysium concept I have heard before, but it’s definitely not common. I’ve heard it specifically as an element of initiation into the Eleusisan Mysteries rather than standard belief of the masses, thereby making it a specific Persephone/Demeter/Hades worship thing.