Circe, Persephone, Eve — Part Two

The Miracle of Renewal

EVE’S FALL — MILTON’S MARRIAGES — VICO’S UNDERWORLD — EVE AS PERSEPHONE — PERSEPHONE AS DIANA THE GODDESS OF THE SPRINGS

7:09 a.m. on Friday…

Friday, March 7

I went to sleep thinking I’d post this today but I wake up and realize I’ve got more digging to do. I go straight back to Paradise Lost. To find Eve’s connection to Persephone, explicitly. I ran back books six, seven and eight over the last two days of work, listening then rereading them on paper after. There was a great war between Satan and God and God called upon Christ for reinforcements and God wins and Satan falls like lightning back to Hell. Book Nine finds Adam and Eve in the garden, set to go about their daily gardening tasks. Satan, unbeknownst to them, sneaks up from Hell and lurks in the shadows.

This isn’t the first time he’s lurked up on Eve in her garden. Back in Book IV, he did his initial stake out—before the great battle.

Again, this is the first couple, the first making and breaking of the sacred bond, the story we told ourselves to keep each other in check, to make it through the winter, to hold out till the return of spring. And Persephone, as fecundity personified, is the young virgin maiden seed that, if all goes well, if the proper ceremonies are observed, will return come spring in the form of grain-gold, since ears of corn were the first gold, and in fact “early people called ears of grain ‘golden apples’” (Vico).¹

The early iteration of this symbol involves the plucking of self-seeding fruit (the apples they gathered), whereas the later iteration involves plucking a golden bough, or ear of grain (which was planted then harvested).

But this all is before the fall, this is still the golden age, where, like for Persephone in the field near Enna, in Sicily, it is eternal spring. Satan describes the garden:

…murmuring waters fall

Down the slope hills, dispersed, or in a lake…

…vernal airs,

Breathing the smell of field and grove, attune

The trembling leaves, while universal Pan

Knit with the Graces and the Hours in dance

Led on th’ eternal spring. Not that fair field

Of Enna, where Prosérpine gath’ring flow’rs

Herself a fairer flow’r by gloomy Dis

Was gathered, which cost Ceres all that pain

To seek her through the world; …

but wide remote

From [that] garden, where the Fiend

Saw undelighted all delight, all kind

Of living creatures new to sight and strange:

Two of far nobler shape erect and tall,

Godlike erect, with native honour clad

In naked majesty.¹

We have the explicit Persephone (Proserpine) reference, a retelling of her story; we have the “eternal spring,” what the world was before Persephone’s abduction by Pluto; and we have Satan as “the Fiend,” as impatient Pluto who, in Ovid, spying Perspehone “happily plucking bunches of violets or pure white lilies, / filling the folds of her dress or her basket in girlish excitement, … —when Pluto espied her, / no sooner espied than he loved her and swept her away, so impatient / is passion. … Her dress had been torn at the top, / and all the flowers she had picked fell out of her loosened tunic”²— though despite dropping all her flowers, which she laments the loss of her whole way down to Hades, she herself was the fairer flow’r (as John Leonard’s notes indicate, my copy of Ovid seems to have clipped or alternately translated this line, simply saying, poor innocent girl!).

It’s Vronksy eying Anna, Judas jealous of Mary Magdalene’s gratitude for Christ forgiving her, and look how beautiful Adam and Eve’s relationship looks pre-Fall. It’s not completely unreasonable, Satan’s envy. Look at Adam,

His fair large front and eye sublime declared

Absolute rule; and hyacinth locks

Round from his parted forelock manly hung …

She as a veil down to the slender waist

Her unadorned golden tresses wore

Dishevelled, but in wanton ringlets waved

As the vine curls her tendrils, which implied

Subjection, but required with gentle sway,

And by her yielded, by him best received,

Yielded with coy submission, modest pride,

And sweet reluctant amorous delay. (IV, 300-311)

I mean… this is an attractive dynamic (for Satan, from Satan’s perspective, NOT mine).

They’re reclining together, eating fruits naked, no shame, which sends Satan spiraling. “O Hell!” he yells. He plots his abduction. He must have her—take her. To Eve, in his head, he says,

Though I unpitied: league with you I seek,

And mutual amity so strait, so close,

That I with you must dwell, or you with me

Henceforth; my dwelling haply may not please

Like this fair Paradise, your sense, yet such

Accept your Maker’s work; he gave it to me,

Which I as freely give; … there will be room,

Not like these narrow limits, to receive

Your numerous offspring (IV, 375-385)

And here we have our second explicit Persephone reference. Satan’s saying, I must have you, and though my dwelling, Hell, might not be as good as this Paradise you’re in, God did make it (Hell), he gave it to me, so you should accept it. There will be room for you, for me to impregnate you many times over, he says, echoing how Pluto tries to console Persephone on her way down to Hades, telling her that “Hades is spacious.”

*

Reading these sections of Eve getting tempted by Satan, it’s easy to read them simply through the marital—or extramarital—lens. Milton, we know, in 1642, at age 33, “unwisely married Mary Powell, a woman half his age. The marriage was unhappy and Mary returned to her parents’ house after only a few weeks” (and wouldn’t reconcile with him for three years). We also know that, ten years later, Milton lost her, in childbirth, a few weeks after he went blind. Only to lose his infant son John six weeks after that. Then in 1656, when he was 47, Milton married his second wife, only to lose her just over a year later, and then also his five-month-old daughter shortly after that. He’d marry a third wife, but this strained his relations with his three daughters. He published Paradise Lost, which he dictated to his daughters aloud, in 1667, at almost fifty.

And this reading of the Adam-Eve-Satan drama as the arc of a relationship, the challenges of marriage, or even the process of aging, fits into the Vicovian vision of things: Marriage was a difficult rite to uphold for early man, and this story captures the pitfalls and challenges.

But in JG Frazier’s The Golden Bough (1922), which I’ve been listening to on audiobook for months now, and which sorts through the various archaic religious practices of primitive peoples that all seem to involve agricultural rites, priest-kings tied to weather or crops or fire, often some form of tree worship, sacrifices or scapegoats or most significantly theophagy, the ritual killing and often eating of the king—all which shed light on the scourging and crucifixion and resurrection of Christ—the Persephone-Demeter myth is addressed explicitly. In fact, I’m upstairs ram-boarding the room yesterday when I suddenly hit on the Persephone-Demeter chapter, chapter 44 of 69.

The way the primitive agricultural rites work is through personification. That is, the paragon of whatever boon they seek the return of, to overcome war or famine or winter, is sacrificed or ritually killed or in some cases eaten in order for the people to commune with and receive its power. Most initial religious practices are strictly agricultural, fasts late in winter pre-harvest to await the ceremony, often involving some sacrifice or form theophagy—the killing of the corn king, which was sometimes a literal person, the leader, sometimes an effigy, or an animal, or a stranger who happened to pass by, or the last person to scythe the last ear of the harvest, to welcome the return of spring. Persephone, then, mirrors earlier corn goddesses, who are killed, sent to the underworld and left there to germinate until they can sprout up again like the seeds sprout up come spring. It’s no coincidence that Good Friday, the day Christ is ritually killed and sent underground (into his tomb), to harrow hell, and then sprout back up like the seeds sprout occurs in spring—in traditional Christian knowledge, Good Friday is specifically March 25, three days after the spring solstice, mirroring the December 25th winter solstice of his birth, making this same-day spring equinox date also the day of his annunciation (9 months before December 25), and also, astonishingly, of the Fall of Adam and Eve (as Hollander explains in the notes to Dante’s Inferno, since Dante sets his personal harrowing of hell through Inferno and back up onto the mountain of purgatory on the classic Good Friday day, three days after the spring equinox, March 25, of the year 1300).

But the breaking of the marriage rites of Eve’s betrayal, and the personification of the return of the harvest in Persephone, are connected. It’s because of Pluto’s abduction of Persephone that the crops don’t grow half the year; we must restrain ourselves from being like Satan, like Eve, eventually like Adam and giving into our immediate desires. If we are to reap a harvest for ourselves, we must sacrifice something, give something up (no mindless phone use!!), if we are to make it through winter, back up out of hell, back into spring.

And this is no moralistic point, this is just the stories that were told and the messages disseminated that led to today’s current society, where the notion of harvest is mostly gone, due to overabundance, such that no one knows where anything comes from.

And I had this thought recently about the notion of the underworld, or hell. On the one hand it’s where we’re banished to for sin, or where we go when we die if we’ve sinned. But in another, it’s that dank dark place seeds dwell in and sit and gestate in, in order to sprout. Eve and Persephone’s underworlds, respectively.

Vico says: the first “underworld” was the source of a spring. Humans gathered near natural springs, that was how they were able to stop wandering, and it was thought that the source of a perennial was “the underworld.” The first deity of springs “was Diana, who is described … as having three forms: Diana in heaven; the huntress Cynthia on earth, with her brother Apollo; and Proserpine in the underworld.”² Persephone, as the idea of eternal fecundity, then, is the goddess of the springs–the underworld—applied agriculturally.

The second notion of the underworld that emerged, according to Vico, was extended to include graves. “This underworld is no deeper than a ditch, like that where Homer’s Ulysses sees the underworld and the souls of deceased heroes. In this underworld, they imagine the Elysian Fields, where through burial the souls of the dead enjoy eternal peace.” In Homer’s Hymn to Demeter, it’s only once Persephone returns that the Elysian fields go from barren to covered in corn. Vico then describes Aeneas’s descent into the underworld, on which he breaks off the golden bough to enter, “as a Virgilian invention continuing the heroic metaphor of golden apples, which were ears of grain.”

And then finally, the underworld was extended to include “the plains and valleys, in contrast to the heavenly heights of the mountains,” where “impious peoples lived dispersed in their abominable promiscuity” (lol). This is the underworld of Erebus, the son of Chaos—“that is, the confusion of the human seed … the underworld guarded by Cerebus, who shows doglike immodesty by copulating shamelessly in public.”³ This aspect of the underworld is where Phlegathon and Acheron, the rivers of despair, flow—that Dante traverses in the Inferno.

The Persephone myth for Vico is quite simple: “Theseus” (who founded Athens) “descends to the underworld to bring back Proserpine, meaning Ceres” (they’re the same for Vico). “In other words, he descends to bring back sown seed as ripened grain.” Dis, or Pluto, is “the god of heroic weath, meaning poetic gold or the grain” (325)—which is why he holds Persephone, the goddess of the grain.

Frazier in the Golden Bough says that corn goddesses in archaic spring rituals were sometimes young maidens, sometimes old women. Persephone and Demeter, he says, are, like in the archaic rituals, personifications of the year’s coming crop and last years crop, respectively—since, as Vico writes, “When the golden bough is torn from the tree, another grows in its place, because there can be no second harvest until the first has been gathered” (325).

*

It’s technically Adam’s fault for letting Eve get tempted by Satan—for letting her out of his sight. The day Satan shows up to the garden, Eve proposes splitting up for the day. If they break up their tasks, she proposes, they’ll get more gardening done, and god told them to tend to their garden. She’s trying to be an efficient worker. Not to mention, if they’re working near each other, they’ll make eyes at each other, flirt—“For while so near each other thus all day / Our task we choose, what wonder if so near / Looks intervene and smiles, or object new / Casual discourse draw on, which intermits / Our days work…⁴

Adam has his doubts. He goes, but what about this “malicious Foe / Envying our happiness” we’ve been warned is out here lurking, “somewhere right at hand.”

Eve gets upset by this and says, you’re saying you don’t trust me?

He says, I’m saying I don’t trust the Foe.

But she argues more and finally he says, well if you’re gonna have a bad attitude, you go on: “Go; for thy stay, not free, absents thee more.” Just meet me back here at noon, he says.

And so off Eve goes to the groves “like a wood-nymph light / Oreae or Dryad, or of Delia’s train,” and Delia, is Diana, Vico’s first goddess of the springs, or the fertility goddess of the wood (also Artemis), or according to Vico also Persephone, and Oreae and Dryads the wood nymphs of her sacred grove.

And Satan slithers up to her and sees her,

Veiled in a cloud of fragrance, where she stood,

Half spied, so thick the roses bushing round

About her glowed, oft stooping to support

Each flow’r of slender stalk, whose head though gay

Carnation, purple, azure, or speckled with gold,

Hung drooping unsustained; them she upstays

Gently with myrtle band, mindless the while,

Herself, though fairest unsupported flow’r,

From her best prop so far, and storm so nigh. (IX, 425-433)

Again alluding to Persephone who, like Eve trying to support the drooping flowers, drops the flowers she picks in Enna, both flowers standing in for themselves, the fairer flow’r

And Satan approaches the grove, a “Spot more delicious than those gardens feigned / Or of revived Adonis,” another mythical mortal, the lover of Persephone and Aphrodite (Venus) who, when he’s killed by a boar, is revived back to life by Jupiter (or Persephone), on the request of Venus, and spends half his the years with Persephone and half Venus…

And Satan leers at beautiful Eve but Eve doesn’t notice, “she busied heard the sound / of rustling leaves, but minded not, as used / To such disport before her through the field, / From every beast, more duteous at her call, / Than at Circean call the herd disguised.” (IX. 518-522) She doesn’t notice because Satan is diguised as a snake, he’s turned into a beast and Eve is used to the beasts of the garden responding to her like the men Circe turns to beasts, filled with unthinking lust and gluttony, respond to Circe’s every move—Eve, to Satan, who “Fawning, and licked the ground wherein she trod,” with “gentle dumb expression,” is Circe; and Satan, the shipwrecked man turned beast.

And Satan makes his case, he appeals to her vanity, he tells her she’s the most beautiful thing god has made, every living creature can see that, and isn’t it unfortunate that only one man gets to experience you, to appreciate you, “one man except, / Who sees thee? (and what is one?) who shouldst be seen / A goddess among gods, adored and served / By angels numberless, thy daily train.”

Saying, in other words, you should be… on Instagram!

She should be experienced and appreciated by Ev’ryone! That’s how beautiful you are.

“So glozed the Tempter,” and who doesn’t like to be complimented, “Into the heart of Eve his words made way,” but mostly Eve goes, how are you, as a snake, talking right now? I thought animals couldn’t talk. To which Satan goes, we’ll see I used to be a mere beast, but one day I came across a place, “Beyond a row of Myrtle’s, on a flat, / Fast by a fountain, on small thicket past,” where I found this tree I ate from. You should come eat from it. I can show you where.

“Lead then, said Eve.” (IX, 631)

1. Milton, Paradise Lost, IV, 260-290

2. Ovid, Metamorphoses, V, 393-399

3. Vico, New Science, 323

4. Paradise Lost, IX, 220-224