Abstract:
Ancient Greek myth conceives the gods as mobile beings, visiting Olympus, the mortal
realm, and sometimes even Hades. A god’s movements in myth are always significant, since these
help a myth to articulate its conception of that deity. The movements of two goddesses, Demeter
and Persephone, throughout the geographies of the myth of Persephone’s abduction and
Demeter’s subsequent wanderings, can reveal the extent of the goddesses’ power; their
relationships to spaces infernal, mortal, and divine; and the importance of their geographical
movements to the social transitions of ritual actors. Demeter and Persephone’s movements
through geographical space in fact have significance on both a physical and a figurative level.
Physically speaking, Demeter’s movements indicate her power on earth, while Persephone’s, her
power in Hades. On a figurative level, Demeter’s movements provide a model for good and bad
social relations, both between human beings and between mortals and the gods, while
Persephone’s models the social transitions of marriage and death. In this study, I analyze the
significance of the goddesses’ movements through geography not only in the Homeric Hymn, but
in Callimachus’ Hymn 6 to Demeter, Pausanias’ Descriptions of Greece, and Diodorus Siculus’
Bibliotheca Historia.
