The Grieving Mother Behind the Seasons

Demeter was a daughter of Cronus and Rhea and the Greek goddess of grain, agriculture and the harvest, whose central myth is told at length in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter. When her daughter Persephone was abducted by Hades to become queen of the underworld, with Zeus's tacit consent, Demeter searched for her across the earth in grief and anger, neglecting her divine duties so completely that crops failed and humanity faced starvation, a famine severe enough that the gods themselves lost the sacrifices mortals depended on to sustain them. Zeus was eventually forced to intervene, and a compromise was struck: because Persephone had eaten a few pomegranate seeds while in the underworld, binding her to it, she would spend part of each year below the earth with Hades and the remainder above with her mother, an arrangement the hymn presents as the origin of the seasons, since Demeter withholds the harvest during her daughter's annual absence and restores it on her return. The same hymn also credits Demeter with founding the Eleusinian Mysteries, secret initiation rites at Eleusis near Athens that promised initiates a better fate after death, rites conducted in her honor and Persephone's alike.