PART II of my excerpt, highlighting the myth of Persephone and Hades.

Aimlessly, dark-robed Demeter wandered the world, lost and without purpose; her daughter was gone. She left Sicily and landed in Hellas at the Peloponnesian city Sicyon. From there she roamed into wild Arkadia, where Poseidon saw her. Filled with desire for this vulnerable beauty, he approached her. Demeter, as Poseidon would have realized if he had not been so blinded by lust, was in no mood for sex. Golden-haired Demeter changed herself into a mare to escape his amorous advance. Dark-haired Poseidon was neither deceived nor deterred. He changed into a stallion and caught and mounted her. In due time, Demeter gave birth to the fabulous horse Arion and to a goddess so mysterious that the Arkadians know her only as Despoina (meaning “mistress”).

Demeter was so enraged with her brothers Zeus, Poseidon, and pitiless- hearted Hades that she refused to return to Olympos. Instead she took on the guise of an old woman and, unnoticed by mortals, for whom immortality is hard to see, continued wandering. All the while she withheld fertility and drought conditions prevailed. She visited the great palaces at Mycenai and Knossos. Still miserable, she took a boat across to Thornikos in southern Attike.

Sullen Demeter arrived in Eleusis and demanded that the Eleusinians build her a temple. She shut herself inside it for one year. Demeter did not forget her fury over Persephone’s disappearance, and the drought she induced reached crisis proportions.

Finally all-seeing Zeus, not wishing to lose the sacrifices of men, relented. He sent for Persephone to be returned to her mother. A complication arose because anyone who has eaten in the underworld is forbidden to leave. Persephone had been tricked into eating some pomegranate seeds. So the dark-clouded son of Kronos decreed that Persephone would spend part of the year with her mother and part with her husband.

Persephone learned to love her days in Hades, a place of knowledge and insight, mystery and paradox, as well as she loved her life on earth, a place full of passion and warmth, beauty and wonder.