Persephone reaches for a flower, the earth opens, and her mother's grief stops anything from growing. The founding story of the mysteries at Eleusis.
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The oldest full telling of the myth of Demeter and Persephone. Hades carries Persephone down to the underworld. Demeter searches the earth, comes to Eleusis disguised as an old woman, and nurses a baby prince in the fire to make him immortal. When the gods at last bargain for her daughter's return, she gives Eleusis her rites. The hymn is in the press now and nothing of it is readable yet. Help press it.
It was composed in Homer's style, probably in the seventh or sixth century BC, and belongs to the collection called the Homeric Hymns, though Homer did not write it. It very nearly disappeared. The hymn survives in one manuscript, found in Moscow in 1777 and now kept in Leiden.
The flower that traps Persephone is a narcissus, grown by Earth as a lure. The only thing that makes the grieving Demeter laugh is the crude joking of a servant woman, Iambe. Near the end the poem calls blessed whoever has seen these rites, and says the uninitiated have no such share once they are dead. Those lines are as close as we get to hearing what Eleusis promised.
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