Sappho's "Myth-Weaver"
"According to Maximus of Tyre (Greek, 2nd. c. A.D.), "Socrates called love a Sophist, Sappho a myth-weaver (μυθόπλοκος)." ~ (Sappho, Fragment #188)

from Greek Lyric: Sappho and Alcaeus, edited and translation by David Campbell (1982)
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Demeter's Religion —
Intensely Personal
"If our business were to write the history of Eleusinian faith and practice, it would be a long and difficult task to trace the growth of the mass of myth, legend and fable, the development of ritual and the transmutation of ideas associated with the mysteries, and to find the sources Thracian, Egyptian or Philosophic from which those ideas were reinforced. But our task is much simpler. The hymn [to Demeter] tells us a good deal about the religion at the date when it was composed — a good deal but not all. [....] It seems generally agreed that behind the hymn, a long way perhaps behind it, was a ritual on the border-line between Magic and Religion — a ritual which would promote the growth and health of crops. [...]

"The ritual needed explanation, and an anthropomorphizing instinct [...] out of the double process came the beautiful myth of Demeter and Persephone, which at last the hymn gives us with a new beauty and tenderness of its own, fixing its outline and its details and making it immortal, not without some hint of kinship with Homer and the gods that Homer drew. Something more followed, which is briefly told us at the end of Hymn [L-473 ff.]

[...] We have [in all] reached a point [...] at a differentiated Eternity — a religion intensely personal."

from "Progress in Religion to the Christian Era," pp 90-91, by Terrot Reaveley Glover (1922)
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Triumph of Demeter
"Demeter's triumph is to undo some of the damage a male-arranged marriage has done to her relationship with her daughter. Her furious resolution to withhold the fruits of the earth forces Zeus to require Persephone's return from the underworld, and only a piece of chicanery with the pomegranate seeds prevents the mother's victory from being total. The Hymn not only recognizes female rage and female solidarity as potent and vivifying energies but also evokes outrage at the male exploitation of female sexuality and male disruption of the bond between mother and daughter. Further, the Hymn is a religious exploration of death, loss, and the triumph over death and loss — a religious vision expressed in terms of female experience. This sacred poem ends by praising Demeter's holy Mysteries, which it assures us are essential to our future after death."

from "Persephone Rises, 1860-1927: Mythography, Gender, and the Creation of a New Spirituality," p. 27, by Margot Kathleen Louis (2009)
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Open ring vessel with starry net motif, Greek Archaic period, c.700-480 BCE, Harvard Art Museums

Victory of life and death —
both transformed
"The victory that comprises the cosmogonic acts of the Hymn and the Eleusinian mysteries is the increase of life both on the material and spiritual levels. These arose from the chaotic conditions and rupture of existing realms created, on the one side, by the lord of Hades through the rape, a symbolic death, of Persephone, and on the other, by the destructive drought cast by Demeter over the surface of the entire Earth in consequence of that radical rupture. The release of Persephone from the underworld opened for all times the gates of Hades. This led to the increase of knowledge on the material level by introducing wheat to the world of agriculture and on the spiritual level by a vision into and experience of life immortal during the mysteries. Death broke into life, but life was forever a new dimension of death."

from "The Mythological Traditions of Liturgical Drama: the Eucharist as Theater," p. 143, by Christine C. Schnusenberg (2010)
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Persephone's Transmigrations
"The grave [...] was regarded as seed beneath the ground, the fruit therefore comes back above ground. The aim was to step from Hades into life again, the same person as before, though now more fully conscious [...]. The Eleusinian rites, the mysteries of Persephone served to keep alive this consciousness and this certainty. [...] According to the belief of the mystes, bodily well-being is the reward which the mysteries bestow for the duration of life, but the higher reward is the hope they give of a better rebirth in the time after death. [...] The transmigration of souls is thus interpreted highly optimistically, as a medium to ascent; the wheel of recurrence is affirmed."

from "The Principle of Hope, Volume 3," pp. 1113-14, by Ernst Bloch (1959)
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