This is my favorite part of Carolyn Elliott’s Existential Kink. Conceptually/narratively it rang something in me, and kicked off a long term, low key interest in open individualism. I’m reproducing those two pages in full here:
There’s an ancient Greek story in which the King of the Underworld, Pluto, kidnaps and rapes the maiden goddess Persephone. You’re probably familiar with it, but to refresh your memory, it goes a little something like this:
Young Persephone is hanging out in the meadows picking flowers one lovely Olympian day and suddenly the earth rips open under her feet, a menacing man appears, grabs her, takes her down into the blackness of the Underworld, rapes her, marries her, and then tricks her into eating pomegranate seeds—Underworld food—so that she can never totally leave him, and she herself becomes the Queen of the Underworld.
It’s a sad, awful story of kidnapping, rape, control, violence, and abuse.
Yet.
For thousands of years it never occurred to anyone in Greece that there might be a King of the Underworld; there was just a Queen of the Underworld. Digging down into the most ancient layer of myth before the Persephone saga, there existed “She Who Destroys the Light.” Similar to the Hindu goddess Kali, Persephone was worshipped as the Goddess of Death.
So long before there was Pluto, there was Persephone, alone.
Persephone was a maiden goddess in the sense that she was undivided, complete, whole-unto-herself. She was called Kore, which means “maiden” but also “core, heart.” She was understood to be the core, the heart, the essence of everything.
The tale of Pluto and the Rape of Persephone was a later invention; it came thousands of years after the first celebrations of the goddess.
What should we make of that?
What I make of it is this:
Pluto is himself an unconscious aspect of the Kore’s (Persephone’s) divinity.
In modern astrology, Pluto represents the Unconscious Divine: all of those vast forces of death and terror and rape and evil and destruction and hoarding of wealth. In other words, all the terrible things in this world that we habitually refuse to identify with and to take personal responsibility for in order to maintain our feeling of being “regular” ego selves.
Pluto also represents the possibility of alchemy itself, the deliberate, miraculous transformations that become available when the powers of the Unconscious Divine are recognized, remembered, embraced, forgiven, loved, and made conscious.
The way I see it, one day the great Kore got bored with being the solitary, boundlessly powerful ruler of the Underworld. She decided she wanted some drama to break up the eternal monotony of being complete-unto-herself, omniscient, and omnipotent.
So, the Kore split in two: she created a benevolent, sweet, conscious self and a vicious, unconscious divine twin, Pluto.
She split in order to experience herself as a separate, innocent individual—a perpetual little girl picking flowers in a meadow—AND, then to subsequently have the super-edgy, kinky experience of duality and sexuality and violence and all the terrifying thrills and chills that come with it.
The Kore desired to experience a great story, and in a great story, whether comedy or tragedy, there are always struggle and obstacles and opposition. There are separation and reunion.
From this angle, the Rape of Persephone is the story of the singular divine choosing to create duality and then having a horrible, painful experience of itself and then ultimately returning to sovereignty, to union, this time with a self-awareness that can only come from having experienced itself as terrifyingly Other.