Demeter and Persephone

The Eleusinian mother-daughter pair is the classical paradigm to which Jung returns when he names the hypertrophic mother — “Like Demeter, she compels the gods by her stubborn persistence to grant her the right of possession over her daughter” (Jung 1959, CW 9i §167). The Homeric Hymn to Demeter gives the archetypal grammar: the daughter Persephone is seized by Hades, the mother Demeter wanders in grief, the world goes to famine until Zeus is “forced to bring Persephone back from the lower world; but the goddess, by the contriving of Hades, still remains partly a deity of the lower world” (Hymn to Demeter; Hesiod and Homerica, c. 700 BCE).

The myth is not a fable about loss. It is the founding charter of the neumann-great-mother in her transformative aspect: separation from the daughter and reunion with her are the same act in different moments. Karl Kerényi reads the pair in The Gods of the Greeks as the structural double of one feminine principle — the older woman and the younger, the grain and the seed, the surface and the depth (Kerényi 1951). The Eleusinian mysteries ritualize what depth psychology will later call individuation: the daughter’s descent, the mother’s grief, the cyclical return.

The myth also names the mother-complex of the daughter at its hypertrophic limit — the mother who cannot release her daughter to the underworld is the mother whose Eros has become “will to power” (Jung CW 9i §167). The Mysteries answer this by making the descent ritual rather than catastrophe.

Relationships

• mother-complex
• neumann-great-mother
• mother-complex-of-the-daughter
• matriarchal-consciousness

Primary sources

• hesiod-homeric-hymns (Hymn to Demeter, c. 700 BCE)
• kernyi-gods-greeks (Kerényi 1951)
• the-archetypes-and-the-collective-unconscious (Jung 1959, CW 9i §167)