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Demeter and Persephone: Lessons from a Myth Agha-Jaffar, Tamara. Demeter and Persephone: Lessons from a Myth (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, Inc, 2002) 195 pp., paper, ISBN 0-7864-1343-3.
Agha-Jaffar's Demeter and Persephone is a critical study of the myth that accomplishes a number of goals. In an accessible style, the book offers a close reading of the story of Demeter and Persephone as a story of trial, learning, and the eventual accession of both goddesses to maturity, personal agency, and power in relation to the male gods with whom they are co-rulers of the human world. The explication of the myth also explores the psychological processes of individuation, loss, mourning, and the transformation that comes from trial and trauma. While this close reading is the heart of the book, the references to other feminist scholars of mythology, theology and psychology makes this text and bibliography a rich resource for scholars and a useful text for introductory classes in women's studies that might include foci on any of several topics: resistance to and strategies for women's individual and collective empowerment, psychological/archetypal approaches to mythology and literature, and non-competitive methodologies in feminist research.
The exposition and interpretation of this myth is inspired by a generous impulse to keep this myth relevant to the lives of young by exploring how the myth offers insight "about who we are, about our roles as mothers and daughters, about the nature of our interactions, about our subordinate status in patriarchal society, about fighting back, about refusing to submit, and about personal growth" (3). In chapter seven, "The Underworld and Hades," Agha-Jaffar discusses the psychological role of Kore/Persephone's abduction and stay in the underworld as an archetypal model of the inner work a person must perform after a trauma: "Like Kore, we enter the underworld in a virginal state; and, like Persephone, we have the potential to emerge utterly transformed, and utterly empowered" (122), as Persephone does by refusing to return to her mother until she is granted the power to protect humans in their journey to the underworld in death. Demeter, after the long process of her grief, promises Zeus that she will not release the earth from its privation until he returns her daughter and grants her greater status...