came into the heart of Demeter." Her bitter sorrow cannot be assuaged;
implacable, she cast a barren pall upon the earth. To end this plague
Hades agreed with Zeus's request to release Persephone to her mother,
but not before "secretly" giving her "sweet pomegranate seed to eat,
taking care for himself that she might not remain continually with
grave, dark-robed Demeter." Thus Persephone returned to Demeter.
"And when Demeter saw them, she rushed forth as does a Maenad
down some thick-wooded mountain, while Persephone. . . when she
saw her mother's sweet eyes. . . leaped down to run to her, and falling
upon her neck, embraced her." But Demeter suspected foul play; "her
heart suddenly misgave her for some snare, so that she. . . asked
[ Persephone] at once: 'My child, tell me, surely you have not tasted any
food while you were below?' " For if she has, she must forever spend a
third of the year beneath the earth with Hades and two-thirds with
Demeter.

Persephone answered that yes, Hades "secretly put in my mouth
sweet food, a pomegranate seed, and forced me to taste against my
will." She further related how the original abduction occurred: while
gathering flowers with several other young women (one of whom was
Artemis), she plucked a golden narcissus, whereupon the earth parted
and Hades "bore [her] away, all unwilling, beneath the earth."

"So did they then with hearts at one, greatly cheer each the other's
soul and spirit with many an embrace." Thereafter, Hecate became
companion to Persephone, and Demeter allowed the "idle and utterly
leafless" plain to put forth grain. "[A]s springtime waxed, it was soon
to be waving with long ears of corn, and its rich furrows to be loaded
with grain."

The Demeter-Persephone myth is singularly relevant to the histori-
cal transition that occurred in middle-class women's culture in the late
nineteenth century in the Western world. It allegorizes the transfor-
mation from a matricentric preindustrial culture -- Demeter's realm --
to a male-dominated capitalist-industrialist ethos, characterized by
growing professionalism and bureaucracy: the realm of patriarchal
captivity.

Demeter represents the world of the mothers. It is a green world, "a
ploughed field, a garden." ² In the nineteenth century the goddess
Diana was often used to represent her green-world arena. Indeed,
Robert Graves theorizes in The White Goddess that early in their history
the figures of Diana, the woodland goddess, and Demeter, the grain
goddess, merged. ³ Both are aspects of the Great Goddess, also known

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