This is part of a Wednesday series on Goddess spirituality and political activism.
A slightly belated happy Ostara to all of you. Ostara or Eastre is the celebration of the spring equinox, when the light and dark are equal and the earth emerges from the time of darkness and cold. Many of the myths for this time of year speak of returning from a journey to the Underworld, such as the story of Demeter and Persephone .
Demeter is the Greek Goddess of fertility, agriculture, and all growing things. Her daughter Persephone (also called Kore, "Maiden"), grew up in an idyllic world of perpetual summer.
All that changed one day when Persephone was out gathering flowers. A crack opened in the earth, and out flew a dark chariot pulled by two nightmarish black horses. In the chariot stood Hades , the God of Death. He seized the terrified Persephone and carried her off to his shadowy underworld realm.
When Demeter discovered that her daughter was missing, she began a frantic search. For nine days (in some versions, nine months), she hardly ate or slept. One day slid into another as she searched every furrow of the earth and questioned everyone that she saw. Finally she took refuge in the home of the local rulers, who did not recognize the Goddess in her bedraggled state.
During the night, she decided to reward their hospitality by making their son immortal. She laid him in the fireplace like a log, surrounded by flames. The queen entered, saw her son, and screamed. Demeter drew the child from the fire, unhurt, and explained that she had been burning away his mortality, but now the spell was broken and he would have a mortal lifespan.*
Demeter resumed her search, and found the witch Goddess Hecate, who confirmed her worst fears. Persephone had been abducted to become the bride of Hades.
No.
Demeter tore at her clothes and hair, screaming in agony. She filled the air with her grief and rage.
Then she fought back.
Demeter, Goddess of fertility, cursed the earth to be sterile. She closed up every seed and left nothing growing. The earth froze as Demeter created the first winter.
The other deities came to Demeter and begged her to restore the earth’s fertility. Demeter was unmoved: winter would remain until Persephone came back. Finally even Zeus agreed to allow her return.
But it was too late. Hades had tricked Persephone into eating six pomegranate seeds. No one may return to the land of the living after eating the food of the dead.
Demeter would not back down. Snow blanketed the earth, and nothing grew. The Fates themselves were brought to render judgment. They decreed that Persephone would spend six months of the year with her mother, and six months in the underworld as Hades’s queen. To Demeter, this was still unjust. She would not undo her curse.
The deadlock was broken by Baubo , a mysterious old Goddess who may have been Hecate in disguise. She began teasing Demeter with all manner of indecent speech. Finally she pulled up her own skirt, flashing the surprised Goddess.
Demeter laughed.**
The snow melted away, and buds began to push their way through the soil. And the earth parted, and Persephone emerged, met by her mother’s waiting arms.
Much of Paganism has to do with the cycles of nature. Day turns to night, and back around to day again. Spring and summer cycle around to fall and winter, and just as we’re starting to feel that the earth will never waken, spring comes again. This is why it feels intuitively right to me that life turns to death, then cycles around to life again.
Politics, too, is about cycles. I’m sure I’m not the only one who feels like we’ve just merged from eight years in the Underworld. (Possibly Cheney is still there.)
Every election, we see obituaries being written for one party or the other, but the change isn't permanent. Though I’m sometimes loath to admit it, there are advantages to this. One-party systems become corrupt in a hurry, whether it’s New Jersey under Democrats or Alaska under Republicans. Forty years of a gerrymandered Democratic majority in the US House created a stagnant protection racket for incumbents. (Although it does say something about Republicans that it only took them ten years to reach the same level of insular corruption.)
In the down part of the cycle, when we’re out of power, we take more risks because we have less to protect. We create a bold vision and start laying the groundwork for it. (And I’ll admit that it provides me with some amusement that same-sex marriage started in Massachusetts with Mitt Romney in the Governor’s mansion, and George W. Bush in the White House.)
After the 2004 election, we heard a lot of chatter about a "permanent Republican majority." The Republicans behaved as if this was going to happen; they consolidated an enormous amount of power in the Presidency, and in the government in general. They claimed the power to spy on anyone’s phone calls or email, and declare anyone an "enemy combatant" and strip away basic rights. Some of them tried hard to force-feed us the idea that any criticism of the President was tantamount to treason.
They were in denial of the fact that the cycle would keep turning – and it turns a whole lot faster when greed and mismanagement crash the economy. Now they’ve handed all this power over to the other side, after spending years convincing themselves that Barack Obama and Hilalry Clinton were the scariest people alive.
We’re in the springtime part of the cycle right now: a brand new Democratic administration is trying to heal the earth from a devastating winter. Right now, part of our job is to drag the Overton window as far to the left as possible, and make it as hard as possible for them to pull it back.
Eventually the winter will come again, and the Republicans (or some offshoot) will be in power. Remembering the despair I felt in 2004, I know we’ll have to cling to two important facts. First, that every winter eventually surrenders to spring. And second, that like Demeter, we have to fight as if our children’s lives depend on it, because they do. We’ll make hell freeze over if we have to.
*I’m not sure of the significance of this part of the story, but an identical incident occurs during Isis’s search for Osiris.
**The resemblance to the myth of Amaterasu and Uzume is hard to miss. Myths have cycles, and mythmakers re-cycle!
Update: My schedule is loopy again next week - fitting for April Fool's Day, I guess - and I don't have my regular day off. So, the next Goddess diary will be in 2 weeks.