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Kore

Kore

The Greek κόρη — the girl, the maiden — and the cult-name of demeter-persephone as the maiden who is taken to the underworld and returns. Kerényi’s study Kore (the third essay of the Jung–Kerényi collaboration) traces the figure through Anadyomene, the maiden-goddesses, Hecate, Demeter, Persephone, and Indonesian parallels, terminating in The Kore in Eleusis and The Eleusinian Paradox (Jung and Kerényi 1949, contents).

The Kore is the archetypal image of mother and daughter as a single unfolding structure. The daughter is taken — Hermes, sent by Zeus, “sprang from the Olympian abode down into the subterranean depths” to negotiate her return (Kerényi 1951, p. 239, on the Hymn to Demeter). She returns, but she also remains — she is wife to Hades, she is the subterranean bride to whom Dionysos comes in the Xenokles vase (Kerényi 1951, p. 251). The Kore is the figure in whom descent and return are one gesture, not two.

Kerényi’s Epilegomena: The Miracle of Eleusis reads the whole Eleusinian cult as the ritual realization of this mythologem (Jung and Kerényi 1949). Jung’s companion essay — The Psychological Aspects of the Kore — reads the figure as the feminine side of the individuating self, the bride of the underworld whose abduction and return is psyche’s own descent.

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