Think about how the actions described in the hymn encode the rites of the Eleusinian mysteries: bearing lit torches in procession; fasting (and breaking fast with a special drink of barley water and pennyroyal: why not wine?); sitting in ashes (as a ritual of purification) of a fire burning on the grounds of the Telesterion (the temple built in honor of Demeter in Eleusis); jesting (probably obscene, foregrounding female fertility). Why is it appropriate that the rites would be thus encoded rather than stated forth plainly?

Although the hymn praises Demeter only by name, Persephone, too, is praised in two ways: 1) as the wife of Hades, Queen of the Underworld ("‘When you are here/ you shall be mistress of everything which lives and moves; your honors among the immortals shall be the greatest/ and those who wrong you shall always be punished,/ if they do not propitiate your spirit with sacrifices,/ performing sacred rites and making due offerings" [lines 364-69]) and 2) as the daughter of Demeter, from whom in the practice of the rites of the cult she is largely indistinguishable. Remember that the primary objective of the rites was a feeling of well-being: the hymn suggests that feeling was a momentary recapitulation of mother-child reunion (sleeping in the arms of Demeter [line 264]; "So then all day long, being one in spirit,/ they warmed each other's hearts and minds in many ways/ with loving embraces, and an end to sorrow came for their hearts,/ as they took joys from each other and gave in return" [lines 434-437]). In part, that feeling seems to have been achieved in the communal worship of the (predominantly female) initiates.

Like Thetis in the Iliad, Demeter shares more deeply in the human experience than her fellow divinities. Although Persephone is immortal, Demeter mourns for her (as Achilles and Priam do their loved ones) as if she were dead. Why is such behavior appropriate? Think about what we said in class about the sociocultural reality of daughters given/bought in marriage. That the gods themselves recognize the powerful, human significance of the loss for Demeter is demonstrated by Helios's comment that he "pities" Demeter "in her grief." To be pitied is a mortal condition. To be cursed with both consciousness and mortality–to suffer loss--is, as Zeus declared in the ILIAD, a pitiable condition.

At the conclusion of the Hymn, Persephone opens a path to the world below through her annual descent into Hades and ascent to Olympus. Initiates now have an ear in the underworld, and the universe has a link between the heavens (Persephone's father's realm), earth (her mother's realm, though "under" the authority of the heavens), and the world below (her husband's realm). Persephone, as a result of her experience, changes the dynamic between gods and men. Although she is Hades's wife and thus queen of the underworld, she is herself accessible to propitiation through sacrifice. Hades may be pitiless, but his wife isn't. Persephone's experience (lost to death/Hades, resurrected to be reunited in loving embrace with her mother) makes it possible for the Initiated to appeal to her for a similar fate: not to waste "away in dank darkness" as the uninitiated do, but to have "another lot" (lines 481-482).

A word more about pomegranates: As we've said, it's a pretty powerful symbol of female sexuality, but the eating itself is significant. One of the rites of marriage (coming before sexual consummation) was a wife's sharing her husband's food (think wedding dinner). Eating demonstrated the consummation of marriage in a social sense. If you eat the food of others, you are bound by the values of hospitality (xenia); if you eat the food of other worlds, you belong to them in part (Persephone here, of course; but think about how this is true in the other "worlds" of the Odyssey as well).