Persephone

Mysterion, is a word (μυστήριον)  which does not sound in the modern English sense of mystery, as in something to be solved, an ending or a motive which will be revealed, as in Sherlock Holmes, or Agatha Christie, or Ruth Ware.  Which is mixing apples and oranges, I know, but if I said Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, would my youngish readers make the connection to the television series Bones?  Of course, witness the flurry of intense interest in the recent stories about Amelia Earhart--we are keen to have these mysteries solved, but we cleave to the idea of an unsolved mystery.  Easteār Island.  The five thousand blackbirds that threw themselves into building and poles, dying on New Year's Eve in 2010 in Arkansas.  Still these mysteries imply a solution, as yet undetermined, but still, determinable.

Mysterion is inherently mystical.  In the Biblical Greek, mysterion means "that which awaits disclosure or interpretation." It's not meant to be solved, not meant to be determined.  At least not by Harriet-the-Spy types, which is to say by humans.  In the Catholic church the Latin term is mysterium fidei, or mystery of faith: a mystery hidden in God, which can never be known unless revealed by God.

Last week, the doorbell rang, and two elderly members of Jehovah's Witnesses were at the door, smiling gently and holding out pamphlets.  One, a man, who scarcely let his companion, a woman, speak (although he told me repeatedly she had all the answers, the answers to every question I could pose) noticed the mezuzah on the front door jamb, a sign that the people in this home lead Jewish lives, which is more or less true, and truer than anything else you might say about religion and this household. 

[Yes, I know some of you are chuckling right now because you remember the time when my older kids were young, and we happened to all be at the dinner table at the same time and it was Hanukkah, and I had done nothing to honor that, not a menorah in sight, but I said, likely in a weary voice, because I was either in law school or working as an associate at the firm, "Hey, everyone, it's Hanukkah"--my voice probably had that tentative hopefulness, as if this was a topic that would unite all of us as a family around the table, rather than eliciting the silence which it did in fact generate--and then, after a bored minute passed, Zoe piped up and said, "Hey? Do we know anyone who is Amish?" 

And I knew then that I had failed as a mother.  No, Zoe, and not relevant. (And the jokes spun out until my dear law firm friends and I decided I should specialize in Amish law (which of course is a real thing in the sense that the Amish run afoul of the non-Amish and vice versa on a regular basis, what with cars, and buggies and Rumspringha), but which was hilarious to us in the after dinner working hours when we would riff about zippers and electricity and such, safely ensconced in our white shoe, white collar, east coast world.)]

Anyhow, this elderly, talkative, prone-to-interrupting man noticed the mezuzah, and asked if I was Jewish, but my answer did nothing to stop the talking.  I told them I had stage four cancer.  I wanted to see if they would tell me why, or what happens after one dies, but instead they told me to check out their website.  Which I did.  Did you know the kingdom of heaven foretold by Jehovah's Witnesses is limited to just 144,000 people?  (Some people think that changed in 1932; some people, and by people I mean Jehovahs Witnesses type people, still believe that.) The specificity of that number, 144,000, available on the website, seems to flow in the opposite direction of the mystery religions.  

By the way, there are over 8 million Jehovahs Witnesses in over 240 countries. 

Yesterday, while I was out, Kim, our beloved nanny and family friend, texted me to say that Debbie and Brenda stopped by.  She assumed I knew them.  They acted like they knew me.

The Eleusinian Mysteries date back to what is sometimes called the Greek Dark Ages.  I prefer Homeric times . Although might I suggest you read Circe, by Madeline Miller, which has rattled, a bit, my fondness for Homer, if I haven't already suggested that novel in these pages, in so far as they are pages--perhaps blue flickerings in the ethernet.  Remember when the cool kids would reference the internets, plural, and that phrasing suggested insider status? 

The Homeric Hymn to Demeter, tells the story of the earth goddess, Demeter, who was searching for her lost daughter Kore, or Persephone, as she became known in the underworld (and which was the name of the cocktail I ordered at Cameron's birthday dinner last weekend, only because I loved the name.  And it had gin).

According to mythology, Hades, god of the Underworld, fell in love with beautiful Persephone when he saw her picking flowers one day in a meadow. The god then carried her off in his chariot to live with him in the dark underworld.  Today, this story reminds me of Jeffrey Epstein.  I imagine his gaze (or the gaze of one of his proxies) falling on a young girl, who is beautiful because we all are, shouldering her book bag, her dancer's bag, her Vitaminwater.  Is there a mystery there?  Is it mysterious that everyone looked the other way, although people without power murmured, and women complained, and filed reports? Is it mysterious that someone could build a temple of sorts, on an island, and instruct his chosen initiates in the secret rites of his own darkness?  If an initiate tells an outsider and the outsider does not hear, is it a secret, or is it a story told, quietly, in a voice betrayed, to a patriarchy defined by capitalism, a story told underneath the noise of CNN and MIT, and in a language people like Bill Clinton and Donald Trump either could not understand or were completely implicated by?

Meanwhile, Demeter, a mother, so she had no choice, scoured the earth for her lost daughter, in the long tradition of mothers searching for their missing children.  Though Hermes told her of her daughter’s fate, she continued her quest until she finally arrived at the city of Eleusis. It was here, disguised as an old woman, that the goddess cared for Demophon, the only son of Metaneira, the wife of the king of Eleusis. Demeter set about making Demophon immortal by placing him on a fire every night. But when Metaneira saw this, she raised an alarm--what was a ritual of good will and hope to Demeter looked like violence to Metaneira. When Demeter revealed her true identity, she demanded a temple be built in her honor, as one does when falsely accused of murder and mayhem. This story, of lost children, of burnt children, of kidnapped children, of mothers with different understandings of how life and death work, were meant to work, was the beginning of the celebrated sanctuary of Eleusis.

Another thing about the Jehovah's Witnesses--they don't believe in blood transfusions.  Blood products are often (always?) part of chemotherapy infusions.  So it's complicated.  I myself, as you all know, discovered I had lung cancer while receiving a blood transfusion for severe anemia.  I know someone who is choosing traditional Chinese medicine instead of chemotherapy.  I know someone who has chosen not to receive the next kind of chemo because it will adversely affect her quality of life, even if more effective. I know someone who took the summer off of her chemo regime because she wanted one last summer, one last summer in the sun, by the water, sipping an iced drink.  She died the following January.  

Once the temple was completed, Demeter withdrew from the world of humans and lived inside it.  But she was of course not done trying to get her daughter back. With her powers, she created a great drought to convince the other gods to release Persephone from Hades. As the drought claimed ever more victims, Zeus finally sent Hermes to persuade Hades to release Persephone, who was now Hades' wife.  I can't say bride, because it implies something about control to me, which of course is its own kind of myth in other places on earth, where children and women are bought and sold and "married off."  Matchmaker, matchmaker, make me a match, find me a find, catch me a catch. 

Before giving Persephone back up, Hades put a pomegranate kernel in her mouth, knowing its divine taste would compel her to return to him. Sometimes the story is told such that Persephone could have been released if she had not eaten anything in the underworld during her captivity, but at the last moment, Hades gave her a pomegranate seed. Did she choose the pomegranate seed or was it pressed to her betrayed lips? What might it mean to ascribe choice to Persephone at this late hour?

Finally, as a compromise, the gods decided that Persephone would be released but that she would have to return to Hades for a part of each year, a way of ensuring, perhaps, that she was never truly home.  Or did she have a preference? Did she learn to love the dark waters of the underworld? Did she fall in with her kidnapper, a kind of early Patty Hearst (had she joined the Symbionese Liberation Army of her own volition, or was she raped and held against her will)? Did she love Hades; did she love Demeter? Of course, at best, she lived in contradiction, as we all do.  As Louise Gluck said: Persephone is having sex in hell.

In 1974, several months after her kidnapping, Patty Hearst announced on a tape distributed to the media that she had joined the SLA and taken the name "Tania" (inspired by the nom de guerre of Haydee Tamara Bunke Bider, Che Guevara's companion.  Kore changed to Persephone--Kore was the Ancient Greek word for young girl, meant to connote innocence.  After she was kidnapped, Kore becomes Persephone.  Persephone, outside of the craft cocktail world of Cambridge, Massachusetts, means bringer of death and destruction.

When we learn about mythology, in grade school, in college, by reading Edith Hamilton's Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes, first published in 1942, by the light from the hallway coming through the half-opened bedroom door, long after the rest of the family has fallen asleep, the quiet Ohio street humming with the sounds of muffled televisions, the faint sound of an argument in the rustling trees, the insect roar of the summer cicadas, what we learn when we start to incorporate the idea of symbols into the way we look at the world, what we are taught is that the story of Demeter and Persephone is symbolic of the changing seasons, the change from life to death to life again, which is to say from summer to autumn--where we are perched as I write this, the very barest edge to the wind now spells snow--to winter to spring, when world turns to green again. 

The Jehovah's Witnesses believe homosexuality is a sin (I didn't mention this sin when they visited our house recently); they don't believe any other religions meet God's standards and we are all doomed.  The religion is patriarchal in organization--women cannot serve at the highest levels.  Jehovah's Witnesses are encouraged not to go to college.   

And then. In 1933, there were approximately 20,000 Jehovah's Witnesses in Nazi Germany--10,000 were imprisoned. Of those, 2,000 were sent to the camps, where they were identified by purple triangles; as many as 1,200 died, including 250 who were executed. 

As you know, the pink triangle was used to identify homosexual men in the camps, a category that included bisexual men and transgender women. Lesbian and bisexual women and trans men were not systematically imprisoned; some were, and classified as "asocial," and were made to wear a black triangle. 

Politics, if that's where we want to locate the production of triangles to organize concentration camps, makes for strange bedfellows, they say.  Strange bedfellows sounds like a slur in this context. 

The fact of the concentration camps was not a secret, even though when I learned about the Holocaust in grade school, I misunderstood.  The 1930s and 1940s seemed like history, like Ancient Greece, almost but not quite. I imagined outsiders, those people who were not initiates, did not know what the secret rituals of Nazi Germany were, because this was so long ago that perhaps countries could hide something like the camps. It was a mystery.

Because if they knew, surely they have done more, sooner, to stop this? 

I no longer think anything was a long time ago. Not the Holocaust, not slavery, not Hades kidnapping a young girl, Kore, in order to turn her into Persephone.  Everything old is new again. The perennial shift from life to death to life again.  It is no secret, no mystery that we think in triangles, in a way that divides us into, do i want the word tribes, our separate camps, our separate heavens and separate hells.

But I am drawn to mysterion, to the idea that we cannot know what God does not, has not, will not reveal to us. Unless and until he does.  Or I am drawn to something that has nothing to do with God, something more like the idea that I am safe within myself, that it is possible to feel something like safety, something more akin to love from a space of not knowing, of knowing there is no knowing.  Until invited in, by the initiated, by those who have come before and gone ahead, perhaps by God, or Demeter, or Persephone. I pray not by the likes of Hades.

The other night one of the twins was spooked and asked me to crawl into bed while he fell asleep.  I lay tucked in next to his beautiful body. Let's call him Kouros.  His breathing slowed, and I watched him slip into sleep.  I imagined him as the man he will become.  I imagined leaving him.   

I watched the photos fill up Facebook this last week or so--the scrubbed faces of the children, the navy shorts, the pale pink dresses, the children heading off to grade 1, then 2, then 3.  The longing in the posts of the mothers sending their children off to college. Fall, or autumn, the term Asher prefers as a second grader, will always feel like the beginning of the year. As a parent, it also always signifies loss.

I believe in Persephone, that she would become the bringer of death and destruction. But I don't think that means that she was incapable of love. Her fate may be precisely what made her capable of love, which we can only recognize when we experience the absence of love.  I believe in Demeter. I would chase the ends of the earth looking for my lost child.  I can aspire, anyhow, to be the kind of woman who demands a temple when she is misunderstood.  I suspect I would not have the courage to make such a demand.  I might silently think I deserve an apology, but knowing me, I would end up forgiving without the formality.

I don't understand the Jehovahs Witnesses or the Amish. I don't understand the truly faithful, the humans who are certain about God, and death--my mind won't make the literal leap of faith. I don't truly understand Judaism and how it can guide me through the end of life.  When I was diagnosed with cancer and went to a rabbi seeking a way out of fear at my terminal diagnosis, he told me the best I could hope for was to get comfortable with not knowing.

Here we are, at the edge of autumn, Persephone packing her bags for the underworld, Demeter tucking a card into her suitcase for her daughter to read later. Persephone imagining the luscious pomegranate seeds waiting for her with Hades. Demeter pacing the marble halls of her temple. Asher and Elijah shooting hoops in the driveway as the wind cools. Zoe taking classes about anatomy, learning the specifics of the bodies we inhabit. Zachary climbing rock walls in Pennsylvania, seemingly fearless, content with the simple.  Avery feeding the goats in California--the first few rain drops fell after the long summer.  Cameron working, sifting through design and function to build out the internets, laughing, ordering a cocktail.  I can hear Kyle through the study walls, counseling a client who clearly prefers to take the risk.  The goldendoodle is at my feet, actually on my feet, still recovering from the terror of the evening's thunderstorm.  The cancer is working away, trying to find a way around the medicine. I believe that, and don't, all at once.

Am I Tamara Bunke, the daughter of Germans who fled to Argentina when the Nazis came to power or Tania, a guerrilla fighter, possible lover of Che, who was shot and killed crossing the Rio Grande? In 1966, Tamara wrote a poem: Will my name one day be forgotten and nothing of me remain on the Earth? 

Am I Patty Hearst, heiress and college student, or am I Tania, out in the world committing federal crimes?  

Am I Kore, actually breathing in the scent of wildflowers? Am I Persephone, roaming the underworld, returning the world to death and winter again and again and again. 

Which name will be remembered?  Will any name be remembered?  Is that where our power is, in our names? In being remembered?

Or is it in the searching for our lost children, tucking into their exhausted bodies to usher them into sleep, is it in writing poems, in witnessing atrocities, is it knowing we are safe, even though we have not been initiated, even though we will not understand the mysteries on this side of the world, even though we are all midway through the Rio Grande, rifle held over our heads, the water streaming against our tired bodies?