Persephone

Persephone is described in Greek myth as the daughter of Zeus and Demeter who is abducted by Hades and becomes queen of the underworld. The Homeric/Hesiodic traditions portray her descent into the underworld, her marriage to Hades, and her periodic return to the surface, a cycle that explains the seasonal disappearance and reappearance of vegetation. Orphic accounts and some later traditions also present variant genealogies and offspring (for example linking Persephone into Orphic genealogies as mother of figures such as Dionysus/Iacchus/Zagreus), and some cultic traditions conflated or distinguished Persephone from the older chthonic goddess Despoina or emphasized the separate Kore (the Maiden) aspect.

In Classical Greek art Persephone is typically portrayed robed, often carrying a sheaf of grain; she may be shown holding a sceptre or a small box and is frequently depicted in scenes of abduction by Hades. Literary epithets describe her as venerable, majestic, and sometimes 'dread(ed) Persephone' in chthonic contexts; representations vary according to whether she is shown as the youthful vegetation figure Kore or as the underworld queen.

Persephone's principal mythic function is her cyclical descent to and return from the underworld, a movement mythically tied to the agricultural cycle (the disappearance of crops into the earth and their reappearance in spring). As queen of the lower world she shares chthonic authority with Hades over the dead in classical literary tradition. Religiously, she is central to the Eleusinian Mysteries where her return symbolizes renewal and the promise of a favorable afterlife for initiates; in Orphic and other variant traditions she is connected genealogically to other chthonic or mystery figures.