it is almost always portrayed as a rite of passage, an initiation process. The motif of the "death-marriage," for example, which appears in both the Hades-Persephone myth and the Eros and Psyche story, might be understood as, in part, an image of the passage from childhood and its psychic unity with the mother to adulthood and its state of aloneness and self-consciousness. Persephone is a virgin who lives in union with her mother and is untouched by life, and she is abducted and dragged into the underworld by the god Hades, where she is raped or sexually penetrated by the god and is thus changed in her essential nature. She can never again return to the innocence of her former state. In the tale of Eros and Psyche, Psyche is condemned to death and is carried off by her invisible bridegroom, the god Eros, whom she cannot yet see. Once she looks upon his face, she is changed, and although they are united at the end of the tale as they are at the beginning, it is a different kind of union, and Psyche has transformed. These initiation images could be said to correspond, on one level, to the physiological and emotional changes which occur at puberty. But the same pattern of change, penetration, transformation and renewal can also describe psychological events that occur at other critical periods in life. In other words, the mythic image is a vivid portrayal of the experience of puberty, but the passage of puberty is also itself an image of other stages in life where a movement into deeper or broader consciousness occurs.
— Howard Sasportas Liz Greene
Persephone's abduction is not a metaphor for development — it is development, as the psyche actually lives it: sudden, unwanted, totalizing. The passage from innocence is never chosen. If it were chosen, it would be something else, some milder transit, some guided tour through what is coming. The myth insists on force precisely because the soul knows that nothing in it would have consented. The virgin who lives in union with her mother is not naive — she is complete in that union, and the completeness is real. Hades does not find her lacking. He takes her anyway.
What the Eros and Psyche story adds is the directionality of that penetration: Psyche transforms by seeing. The invisible bridegroom was always present; the wound is the act of looking. This is worth sitting with, because it means the change did not begin at abduction — it began at the moment she could no longer sustain unknowing. Greene and Sasportas note that the mythic pattern applies beyond puberty, to any critical passage where consciousness widens. That universality matters. The soul does not cross these thresholds once. It is taken, again and again, into underworlds it would not have entered voluntarily, and each time the return is to a union that is no longer the first one.
Howard Sasportas Liz Greene·The Development of Personality: Seminars in Psychological Astrology, Volume 1·1987