persephone rising

I haven’t blogged about my spiritual path much yet, despite the fact that my blog’s name is inspired by my earth-based spirituality (and my fiery Aries soul). I’m part of the Reclaiming Tradition, a Tradition of Witchcraft “working to unify spirit and politics.” One of my favorite things about Reclaiming is how much we work with stories. Many Reclaiming rituals, books, classes, and Witchcamps (think summer camp for witches) use a story which acts as a connecting thread, guide, container, and imaginative resource for the work. These stories range from ancient pagan tales, such as the Descent of Inanna, to old fairy tales, to modern mythologies, such as the Wizard of Oz. This wide range reflects other things that I love about Reclaiming: there is no one book of truth which contains all of the world’s answers. Rather, each person is their own spiritual authority and the green, living, ever-changing world is our shared Divine Revelation. I can write my own sacred liturgy. I can improvise my own songs to the Goddess. Reclaiming is a dynamic, evolving tradition. When we create sacred space, we honor and invoke not only our ancestors but also our descendants, those whom so much of our work of healing, transformation, and creation will ultimately benefit.

There’s a quote that captures some of this. Starhawk, one of the co-founders of Reclaiming, writes in her book Dreaming the Dark:

Because the Gods reveal themselves in living women and men, they change. The myths change. Perhaps they revert back to their original forms. Perhaps they take us to places we have never been.

There’s lots more that I could say about Reclaiming, and paganism in general, but there’s something more specific that I want to write about today. A story. The story of Persephone.

I’ve recently become aware that I’ve been deeply living out the story of Persephone. This realization was sparked by reading the same chapter of Dreaming the Dark I quoted above. In it, Starhawk writes of Persephone (also known as Kore) as the

Goddess… who is a survivor of renewal even in the underworld. We need Her… in a city where every day women are raped, beaten, murdered in the parks and on the streets. We can know Her power in ourselves, in our friends who have survived rape, and beatings, and the damage inflicted by this culture. We can find Her in women who enter the domain of the dark, who work within the regions of pain to transform them.

I can find Persephone in myself, in my own survivor’s soul. I can see the strength and magic and powerful rebirth of Persephone in the many people of all genders whom I know, in person and through the invisible but strong and so necessary web of stories (in memoirs and blogs and circles of sharing) who are also survivors of sexual violence and trauma, who have walked through the burning fields of abusive families and the years of silence and denial, who in all their various strategies and stages of healing and resistance embody the power of the Goddess to live on even in the darkness and the silence and the loneliness, to wait and change in the dark belly of the underworld, like an embryo or a caterpillar, dissolved by acid, but changing, changing, changing, until finally She bursts forth into the world again, into the light and laughter and fresh green strength of spring.

The story of Persephone contains so much wisdom and information about trauma, about the deep ways that we respond to the sudden and violent appearance of the Dark Lord in the flower filled meadow. It is a powerful spiritual and psychological vehicle for healing, transformation, and empowerment.

My connection with the story of Persephone is multifaceted. In a sense, I am playing out the roles of all of the characters. I have been the innocent child, snatched suddenly and inexplicably away from the familiar, safe flowers, down a dark, agonizing hole and into a strange, dead world. I have been Demeter, so consumed by my anger and grief at what has been stolen from me that I have withdrawn from the world and relished coldness and distance, so angry that I have refused to allow anything to grow.

Now, I have known about this dynamic for a while, this angry refusal, this cutting off of myself and my own sacred fertility from the world. I blogged about it some here. But, realizing that what I was doing was living out the story of Demeter shifted how I related to this dynamic. It created more space. It gave me a container for understanding, and letting go of, this behavior. This story.

I had been wanting someone to notice my own personal winter, my own forced famine. To not only notice, but to swoop down from the sky in a fiery chariot, like Zeus, and set the world back to its proper order. I wanted to be rescued (preferably by a strong, handsome man). I wanted justice. I wanted things to be how they were before.

But if I was Persephone and Demeter, I must also be Zeus. The only person who was going to rescue me was part of myself. I had to (once again) be the person I was waiting for, the change I wanted to see in the world. And, although I could return my Persephone self to the living world, I could not undo the past. Persephone had been changed by her time in the land of the dead, and I too have been irrevocably altered by the trauma of sexual abuse.

I have been Persephone as Dark Queen, wearing my wound as a bitter crown, wielding my pain as a manipulative scepter. I have been Hades; I have held myself hostage, threatening to destroy myself or allow my life to unravel because I valued something external more than my own well being. I have been Hades in another way too; I have internalized the voice of my father as abuser; I have whispered his burning lies to myself in the dark, “You wanted it, you faggot. This is all your fault. You are dirty and wrong and you will never escape from this place because it is what you are.”

I have been Persephone as Hades’ wife, as well, married to the Dark Lord. I have held unto my father, or rather a dream of my father, all these years. I have been bound to him, to his cold, unyielding visage. I have sat in a stone throne holding his hand in the darkness and isolation of the land of the dead, desperately trying to bring him back to life, to breath some human warmth into him so that he would finally nurture me, finally touch me with love rather than violence, finally be present and alive, his heart in his body with all its sadness and joy. Instead, I have been pouring out my own precious warmth, wasting my life in a futile attempt to do the impossible.

I have been married to my father in another way. I have still been keeping his secrets. Oh, I’ve told many people that he molested me. I’ve written articles, spoken at speak-outs, read poetry in public, even facilitated a workshop about trauma. I’ve told all of my friends, old and new, and a few acquaintances. But I haven’t told my grandmother. I haven’t told my neighbors. I haven’t told my aunts and uncles and cousins (except for one or two). And sharing my story with them, speaking the unspeakable truth with people who know my father, who knew me as a child, who are part of our family – that is so different than telling my friends, or you lovely, anonymous people reading this blog.

It is time for me to begin doing so. It is time for Persephone to begin rising, like a bubble, to move towards the sunlight and warmth and rain of the mortal world. This world. This trembling, precious, unbelievably sad and joyful world.