Saturday Goddess Blogging

Last night, on the dark moon, I put all of my seeds on my altar; it's a big batch. I have seeds that I harvested last year, from my black hollyhocks and from my woad, and I have seeds that I've ordered for this Spring, black violas and dill and black nasturtiums and catnip and peppermint and sage and . . . . Well, you get the idea. Every night as the moon grows larger, I'll charge the seeds, and then, at the March full moon, begin to plant them, some inside in tiny newspaper pots and some outside.

In additon to the Goddesses that I regularly invoke, last night I invoked Demeter, and I'll invoke her every night during this moon cycle. Demeter, Ceres to the Romans, is the mother of grain, of growing food, of ripening fruit, of bounty.

Demeter's name is De, which means earth (the same word as Gaia) and meter, which means mother. She is the goddess of growing things, especially of grains like wheat and barley and millet. Her daughter, Persephone, is the grain itself, so Demeter is the earth giving birth to the grain.

Mythologically, Demeter is the sister of Zeus, Poseidon, Hades, and Hera, and so, like them, she is the daughter of Gaia and Kronos, Earth and Time. This makes a lot of sense for a goddess of growing crops, because that is exactly what produces crops: earth and time.

Persephone was out picking flowers one day when, with the help of her uncle Zeus, Hades kidnapped her, took her to his kingdom -- the underworld -- and raped her. Demeter was counseled by her fellow gods and goddesses to just "get over it." Good feminist that she was, Demeter would not. Depressed and upset, she stopped the crops from growing; the Earth began to die.

Demeter wandered the Earth, searching for Persephone. For a time, she became a nursemaid and would have made the baby she tended immortal, but the babe's mother didn't understand what Demeter was doing and "rescued" her baby.

In the end, Zeus had to get Hades to return Persephone to her mother in order to keep the Earth from dying completely. Hades tricked Persephone into eating some pomegranate seeds and, as a result, Persephone must spend part of every year in the underworld with Hades. During that time, the Earth again begins to become barren, but Persephne returns to her mother in the Spring and Demeter's delight again makes the crops grow.

The story of Demeter and Persephone was the core of the Eleusinian Mysteries.

Honor Demeter this Spring by planting some seeds, standing up to the notion that women and children must suffer in the patriarchy because "that's the way it is," digging in your heels for something that's important to you, or by exercising the ferocious part of yourself.