Also figuring prominently in Persephone's myth in Sicily, as in Greece, is the symbol of the pomegranate. With its oozing, blood-red, seed-filled interior, the pomegranate is an obvious menstrual image. Moreover, pomegranate skin was well known as a birth-control agent at least as far back as archaic Greek times. In fact, historian John Riddle contends that the mention of the pomegranate in the myth was a direct and deliberate reference to the ancient knowledge of the plant's antifertility effects. I submit that Persephone's not being able to go back to her mother as a result of eating the seeds of the fruit may therefore, on one level, have referred to her being initiated into the knowledge of the menstrual cycle and fertility regulation, thereby allowing her to choose not to enter the "realm of the mother," that is, motherhood itself, during any given month. As Zuntz and others have noted, the union of Persephone and Hades results in no children. Iconography associated with Lake Pergusa is further imbued with metaformic resonance. The ancient symbol of Sicily (dating at least as far back as the Greek colonization) is the Trinacria, which consists of the head of the Gorgon Medusa in the center of three rotating legs. I suggest that the placement of the Medusa head corresponds with the geographical location of Enna and, by extension, nearby Lake Pergusa. The head's location at the precise juncture of the spread legs also clearly indicates that it is the "vulva/womb" of this image, the realm where menstruation and birth take place. Thus, Enna and Pergusa are here visually equated with the vulva/womb of menstruation and birth. And this equation is confirmed by the lore and literature: Diodorus Siculus relates that Enna (and, I suggest, by extension, Lake Pergusa) was known in antiquity as the "navel"-that is, the womb-of Sicily. I propose that in naming Pergusa as the place of Persephone and the underworld, Ovid was reflecting the archaic understanding that the menstrual, birth-giving womb and the underworld were part of the same realm; the womb was considered the cosmic chamber from which all life issues forth and to which all life returns in death to be born again. What follows builds on the historical information I have examined thus far but is yet more speculative. By applying a feminist hermeneutical lens to the data and by using cross-cultural comparisons, I engage in some logical and tantalizing conjecture as to the ritual activity that may have taken place at Lake Pergusa in more remote times. I agree with Bruce Lincoln, who, following on the work of Henri Jeanmarie, argues that the myth of Demeter and Persephone reveals a scenario of pre-Indo-European female puberty initiation. He points to linguistic evidence to support his view, such as the fact that the name used for Persephone-as maiden is Kore, which refers to a "young girl of initiatory age." The name change (to Persephone) that she undergoes along with her loss of maiden status is a regular feature in the initiatory rites of many peoples around the world. Moreover, the gesture that the figure of Iambe-Baubo in the myth makes in lifting her skirts and exposing her vagina, he says, is of the "obscene" type often found in connection with women's initiation and secret societies. Thus, I contend that among the pre-Greek blood-mystery rituals at Lake Pergusa would have been menarche rites-those marking a young woman's first menstruation. What might these have entailed? Traditionally, menarche rituals among tribal peoples in historical and contemporary times have involved some aspect of sequestering new menstruants. A study of menarche rites conducted around 1950 among the Tiwi people of Melville Island by Jane C. Goodale reveals another possible activity that may have taken place at Pergusa in connection with women's puberty rituals. On that island, in more than one tribe the menstruant could drink only through a straw made from the wing bone of a swan. Grahn notes that among still other peoples the drinking straw had to be made from the leg bone of other kinds of waterbirds. As discussed earlier, waterbirds are a common feature of Lake Pergusa, and the swan, an animal associated with death, is deliberately mentioned by Ovid in connection with the myth of Persephone. Could menarche rituals at Lake Pergusa have involved menstruants' making some kind of similar symbolic connection with waterbirds, which, as mentioned, were considered epiphanies of the female divinity? Such a custom would have served as a way of honoring the fact that the girl herself was now taking on the life-giving and death-wielding powers of the Goddess as woman capable of giving birth.

Lake Pergusa is a major wet zone in central Sicily and an important resting and wintering spot for migratory birds from all over the Mediterranean. The lake is the most important area in Sicily for the wintering of ducks and coots, and it hosts swans, herons, flamingos, cranes, and many other water species. Today, Lake Pergusa faces an environmental threat from an autorace track that has been built around its entire three-mile perimeter. The twentieth-century discovery of the archaeological site known as Cozzo  Matrice, a plateau situated less than a quarter mile from the lake, whose name means "hill of the Mother," has provided abundant evidence that Lake Pergusa was once the location of an important religious center dedicated to female deities. Ceramic material found there dates to as early as 4000 BCE, and remains of circular and elliptical huts overlooking the lake date to 2500 BCE. The presence of circular enclosures, which in Paleolithic and Neolithic Europe symbolized the "womb" of the female divinity, suggests that this site was probably sacred to a goddess or goddesses from very early times. An important archaeological layer has been found dating to the fifth century BCE that reveals the joint influence of the indigenous Sicilians (or Sicels) and the Greeks who began colonizing the island in the eighth century BCE. This layer contains the stone remains of a sanctuary and statuettes of either  Demeter or Persephone (or both), as well as related sacred objects. At other villages near the lake -Zagaria, Juculia, and Jacobo- statuettes representing Demeter and/or Persephone dating from the sixth to third centuries BCE have also been found. Perhaps most significant, Lake Pergusa was closely connected with Enna, a nearby twin-peaked or double-breasted mountain town that was a celebrated religious center dedicated primarily to Demeter. Archaeologists generally agree that the Greeks easily superimposed their religion of Demeter and Persephone over the indigenous Sicilian cult at Lake Pergusa and Enna because it strongly resembled the earlier tradition; thus, these two goddesses or their precursors were associated with the lake going back as far as the Bronze Age, if not earlier. Ross Holloway notes that even the Greek cult at Pergusa retained indigenous Sicelian, rather than Greek, characteristics.'? With the commencement of Roman occupation of the island in the late third century BCE, the goddesses came to be known by their Roman names, Ceres and Proserpine, but their cult at Enna and Lake Pergusa continued. Women served as important, and sometimes primary, leaders and ministrants of the religion both at Enna-Pergusa and throughout the island. A funerary plaque dedicated to a "priestess of Ceres" found on one of the mountain peaks of Enna indicates the prominence of women in religious leadership, as do the writings of historian Diodorus Siculus and Roman orator Cicero.

Diodorus and Cicero attest that the religion dedicated to Demeter and Persephone at Enna-Pergusa was characterized by elaborate festivals celebrating Sicily's agricultural cycle, particularly as it related to the production of wheat and barley, as well as rites centering on the human seasons of birth, growth, and death. It will become significant to this discussion that one of those rites was the Thesmophoria, an all-female rite honoring Demeter and Persephone that was also conducted in Greece. In Sicily, as elsewhere, Demeter was the goddess of growth and abundance, and Persephone was a goddess of both budding spring and death, or the underworld. Several ancient literary renderings name Enna or its environs as the location of Persephone's abduction into the underworld by Hades. Key to this discussion is the fact that Roman poet Ovid names Lake Pergusa specifically as the precise spot where this took place. Ovid further describes the lake as a remarkable environment filled with forests, waterbirds, and wildly blooming flowers. [...]

The flower motif is also important because it may help us date the religious center at Lake Pergusa. Sicilian scholar Giuseppe Martorana believes that the ancient descriptions of Enna and/or Lake Pergusa as places where "flowers continually bloom" and "spring smiles eternally" refer to the preagricultural, hunter-gatherer epoch in the history of the island. Extrapolating from his assertion, this would place religious activity at the lake earlier than 6000 BCE, when it is documented that Sicilians began domesticating crops. Martorana hypothesizes that this was a time in which a pre-Greek version of Kore as maiden goddess of spring was the principal deity of Sicily. It is important to note that although she embodied the life-giving aspects of springtime, she would have been, at the same time, a goddess of death. Thus, says Martorana, Kore, or some earlier form of her, was probably the original goddess of Lake Pergusa-an independent, free-standing goddess who embodied the totality of the life and death cycle. He maintains that it was not until the cultural transition to agriculture that her supremacy gave way to that of Demeter, "Goddess of the technology of grain cultivation." With the flowers of Kore replaced by the grain of Demeter, the primary religious conception of the goddess moved from that of the parthenogenetic, self-fertilizing "virgin" to that of the "mother". Günther Zuntz details archaeological and literary evidence confirming that Persephone, or some earlier version of her, was indeed a very old, "pre-Greek" goddess who may well have been a -or the- principal deity of pre-Greek Sicily. Noting that the Sicilians of the late Paleolithic and Neolithic periods put great spiritual emphasis on death and rebirth, as evidenced by the centrality of tomb-wombs in their sacred life, Zuntz affirms that Kore-Persephone was a holdover of the "silent Goddess of Life and Death" of the early peoples of the island. Significantly, archaeologists Paolo Orsi and Bernabo Brea noted in the first half of the twentieth century that the entire region surrounding Pergusa was one large necropolis from the eighth through sixth centuries BCE. I thus suggest that the lake may have symbolically represented to ancient inhabitants the chthonic, underworldly regions, and the nearby mountaintop of Enna, where Demeter's worship predominated, represented the upperworldly realms. [...]

The mythological motif of Persephone's gathering flowers in both the Homeric Hymn to Demeter and the Metamorphoses is also extremely significant here. I believe this is a reference to the picking of entheogenic plants, the ingesting of which propels Persephone's journey into the underworldly realms. In the Hymn, it is her picking of the narcissus in particular that initiates the "abduction" by (into) Hades. Ann Suter notes that the etymological root of narcissus is nark, meaning "grow numb, stiff, dead." This and the fact that nark is also the root for narcotic strongly suggest that Persephone's descent describes female shamanic initiation induced by sacred medicines to help one shift consciousness, become "dead," and enter the otherworld/underworld for the purpose of connecting with divine consciousness and obtaining wisdom. Again, following on Martorana, the reference to "gathering" may place the origins of such a ritual in the preagricultural Paleolithic era. Although Ovid does not mention the narcissus (rather, he speaks of violets or lilies), I believe he is nevertheless referencing the activity of picking sacred medicinal flowers or herbs in conjunction with puberty initiation. If the posited Paleolithic time period is correct, this would make such a ritual very ancient indeed. Cicero intimates that "mysterious rites" were conducted in connection with Demeter and Persephone at Enna, suggesting that in later Greco Roman times, formal mystery rites akin to the nine-day Greater Mysteries of Eleusis may have been held there (and, again, by extension, at Lake Pergusa). Given the level of intensity of the initiatory experience at Eleusis, I agree with scholars who contend that the Greek mysteries most likely involved the use of entheogens; and, if the Sicilian mystery rites were indeed similar to their Greek counterparts, they thus involved the use of such sacred medicines as well. I therefore suggest that such mystery rites-both at Enna-Pergusa and in Greece-may have originated in more remote times in the kinds of female initiatory rituals I am describing here, in which women may have used the sacred medicines they discovered and developed through their intimate work with plants.

Enna

Lago Pergusa visto dall’ aereo

Le lac Pergusa de l’avion

The Pergusa lake from the craft