Cold Porcelain

http://www.mashiacrafts.com/1/post/2012/07/workshop-wednesday-how-to-make-cold-porcelain.html

Prototype: Pomegranate

Pomegranates: Work in Progress!

I decided to personify my myth using the shell of a pomegranate. The outside will be a vision of life. I'm unsure of how to portray that as of now...maybe with color, or the naturalistic appearance of a healthy pomegranate. The vessel will open and the inside will be a rotted mess.

Mood Board

This is my mood board inspired by the Persephone myth and the resulting changes in season.

The Myth of Persephone

Thanks to Wikipedia:

Abduction myth

See also: Rape of Persephone

Sarcophagus with the abduction ofPersephone. Walters Art Museum.Baltimore, Maryland

Persephone used to live far away from the other deities, a goddess within Nature herself before the days of planting seeds and nurturing plants. In the Olympian telling, the gods Hermes and Apollo had wooed Persephone; but Demeter rejected all their gifts and hid her daughter away from the company of the Olympian deities.^[69] The story of her abduction by Hades against her will, is traditionally referred to as the Rape of Persephone. It is mentioned briefly in Hesiod's Theogony,^[70] and told in considerable detail in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter. Zeus, it is said, permitted Hades who was in love with the beautiful Persephone, to carry her off, as her mother Demeter, was not likely to allow her daughter to go down to Hades. Persephone was gathering flowers with the Oceanids along with Artemis and Athena—the Homeric Hymn says—in a field whenHades came to abduct her, bursting through a cleft in the earth.^[71] Demeter, when she found her daughter had disappeared, searched for her all over the earth with torches. In most versions she forbids the earth to produce, or she neglects the earth and in the depth of her despair she causes nothing to grow. Helios, the sun, who sees everything, eventually told Demeter what had happened and at length she discovered the place of her abode. Finally, Zeus, pressed by the cries of the hungry people and by the other deities who also heard their anguish, forced Hades to return Persephone.^[72]

Oil painting of Hades abducting Persephone. Oil on wood with gilt background. 18th century. Property of Missing Link Antiques.

Hades abducting Persephone, wall painting in the small royal tomb at Vergina.Macedonia, Greece

Hades indeed complied with the request, but first he tricked her, giving her some pomegranate seeds to eat. Persephone was released by Hermes, who had been sent to retrieve her, but because she had tasted food in the underworld, she was obliged to spend a third of each year (the winter months) there, and the remaining part of the year with the gods above.^[73] With the later writers Ovid and Hyginus, Persephone's time in the underworld becomes half the year.^[74]

Various local traditions place Persephone's abduction in a different location. The Sicilians, among whom her worship was probably introduced by the Corinthian and Megarian colonists, believed that Hades found her in the meadows near Enna, and that a well arose on the spot where he descended with her into the lower world. The Cretans thought that their own island had been the scene of the rape, and the Eleusinians mentioned the Nysian plain in Boeotia, and said that Persephone had descended with Hades into the lower world at the entrance of the western Oceanus. Later accounts place the rape in Attica, near Athens, or near Eleusis.^[72]

The return of Persephone, by Frederic Leighton (1891)

The Homeric hymn mentions the Nysion (or Mysion), probably a mythical place which didn’t exist on the map. The locations of this mythical place may simply be conventions to show that a magically distant chthonic land of myth was intended in the remote past.^[20] Before Persephone was abducted by Hades, the shepherd Eumolpus and the swineherd Eubuleus, saw a girl being carried of into the earth which had violently opened up, in a black chariot, driven by an invisible driver. Eubuleus was feeding his pigs at the opening to the underworld when Persephone was abducted by Plouton. His swine were swallowed by the earth along with her, and the myth is an etiology for the relation of pigs with the ancient rites in Thesmophoria,^[75] and in Eleusis.

In the hymn, Persephone returns and she is reunited with her mother near Eleusis. Demeter as she has been promised established her mysteries (orgies) when the Eleusinians built for her a temple near the spring of Callichorus. These were awful mysteries, which were not allowed to be uttered. The uninitiated would spent a miserable existence in the gloomy space of Hades, after death. ^[76]

In some versions, Ascalaphus informed the other deities that Persephone had eaten the pomegranate seeds. When Demeter and her daughter were reunited, the Earth flourished with vegetation and color, but for some months each year, when Persephone returned to the underworld, the earth once again became a barren realm. This is an origin story to explain the seasons.

In an earlier version, Hecate rescued Persephone. On an Attic red-figured bell krater of ca 440 BC in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Persephone is rising as if up stairs from a cleft in the earth, while Hermes stands aside; Hecate, holding two torches, looks back as she leads her to the enthroned Demeter.^[77]

The tenth-century Byzantine encyclopedia Suda introduces a goddess of a blessed afterlife assured to Orphic mystery initiates. This Macaria is asserted to be the daughter of Hades, but no mother is mentioned.^[78]

[edit]Pluto-Interpretation of the myth

Pinax of Persephone and Hades from Locri. Reggio Calabria, National Museum of Magna Graecia.

In the myth Pluto abducts Persephone to be his wife and the queen of his realm.^[79] Pluto (Πλούτων, Ploutōn) was a name for the ruler of the underworld; the god was also known as Hades, a name for the underworld itself. The name Pluton was conflated with that of Ploutos (Πλούτος Ploutos, "wealth"), a god of wealth, because mineral wealth was found underground, and because Pluto as a chthonic god ruled the deep earth that contained the seeds necessary for a bountiful harvest.^[79] Plouton is lord of the dead, but as Persephone's husband he has serious claims to the powers of fertility.^[80]

In the Theogony of Hesiod, Demeter was united with the hero Iasion in Crete and she bore Ploutos.^[70] This union seems to be a reference to a hieros gamos (ritual copulation) to ensure the earth's fertility.^[80] This ritual copulation appears in Minoan Crete, in many Near Eastern agricultural societies, and also in theAnthesteria.^[81]

Nilsson believes that the original cult of Ploutos (or Pluto) in Eleusis was similar with the Minoan cult of the "divine child", who died in order to be reborn. The child was abandoned by his mother and then it was brought up by the powers of nature. Similar myths appear in the cults of Hyakinthos (Amyklai), Erichthonios (Athens), and later in the cult of Dionysos.^[82]

The Greek version of the abduction myth is related to corn – important and rare in the Greek environment – and the return (ascent) of Persephone was celebrated at the autumn sowing. Pluto (Ploutos) represents the wealth of the corn that was stored in underground silos or ceramic jars (pithoi), during summer months. Similar subterranean pithoi were used in ancient times for burials and Pluto is fused with Hades, the King of the realm of the dead. During summer months, the Greek Corn-Maiden (Kore) is lying in the corn of the underground silos, in the realm of Hades and she is fused with Persephone, the Queen of the underworld. At the beginning of the autumn, when the seeds of the old crop are laid on the fields, she ascends and is reunited with her mother Demeter, for at that time the old crop and the new meet each other. For the initiated, this union was the symbol of the eternity of human life that flows from the generations which spring from each other.^[83][84]

[edit]The Arcadian myths

From L-R, Artemis, Demeter, Veil of Despoina, Anytus, Tritoness from the throne of Despoina at Lycosura. National Archaeological Museum of Athens

The primitive myths of isolated Arcadia seem to be related to the first Greek-speaking people who came from the north-east during the bronze age. Despoina, (the mistress) the goddess of the Arcadian mysteries, is the daughter of Demeter and Poseidon Hippios (horse), who represents the river spirit of the underworld that appears as a horse as often happens in northern-European folklore. He pursues the mare-Demeter and from the union she bears the horse Arion and a daughter who originally had the form or the shape of a mare. The two goddesses were not clearly separated and they were closely connected with the springs and the animals. They were related with the god of rivers and springs; Poseidon and especially with Artemis, the Mistress of the Animals who was the first nymph.^[2] According to the Greek tradition a hunt-goddess preceded the harvest goddess.^[85] In Arcadia, Demeter and Persephone were often called Despoinai (Δέσποιναι, "the mistresses") in historical times. They are the two Great Goddesses of the Arcadian cults, and evidently they come from a more primitive religion.^[20] The Greek godPoseidon probably substituted the companion (Paredros, Πάρεδρος) of the Minoan Great goddess^[86] in the Arcadian mysteries.