Most retellings of this myth stop when Persephone goes back below. Hades, the pomegranate, the seasons, the end. But the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, our oldest long account, keeps going. Half of the poem takes place after the girl has been taken, and the middle of it is a story about a goddess disguised as an old woman, a household that takes her in, a joke that makes her laugh, and a baby who nearly became immortal. When I first noticed how much of the poem I'd been skipping, I realised that I had been reading the wrong myth.
The one who saw everything
Start with the abduction, because there's a detail in it that matters later. Persephone, a girl called Kore in the hymn, is picking flowers in a meadow with the daughters of Oceanus when she reaches for a narcissus that Gaia has grown as a lure. The earth opens, and Hades rises in a golden chariot and takes her. Her cry is heard by only two beings: Hecate in her cave, and Helios, the sun, who sees everything.
Demeter searches for nine days with torches, neither eating nor washing. On the tenth, Hecate comes to say she heard a voice but didn't see the face, and the two go to Helios, who tells her the truth. He says that Zeus gave the girl to Hades, her uncle and a perfectly good husband in his opinion. I love that Helios is so blunt. He doesn't try to soften it. The world's most reliable witness reports that the crime was approved by the girl's own father.
The old woman at the well
After that, Demeter does something I think is wonderfully strange for a goddess. She leaves Olympus and wanders the earth disguised as an old woman. She sits down at a well in Eleusis, a town near Athens, where the daughters of King Celeus come for water. She says she was kidnapped by pirates and escaped, and she asks for work. They bring her home, and the queen, Metaneira, hires her as nurse for her late-born son, Demophon.
Notice what the goddess of grain is doing. The world is starving because of her grief, and instead of confronting Zeus, she has taken a job as a nanny. There's something very human in it. She can't have her own daughter, so she looks after someone else's child. Grief makes her work.
The joke
Here's the moment I'd put in front of everyone. She sits in Metaneira's hall, veiled, silent, refusing wine and food. Nothing moves her. Then a woman named Iambe, a servant in the house, starts to joke with her. In the hymn it's described as jesting and mocking, and later sources, including Clement of Alexandria, report that the humour was obscene. Whatever Iambe said or did, the goddess smiled and laughed, and then agreed to drink a mixture of barley, water and mint, known as the kykeon.
That drink became central to the Eleusinian Mysteries. Initiates drank it in imitation of the goddess. And Iambe's joking was remembered in the rites too, in the ribald banter that accompanied the procession. The Greeks believed that the way you pull a person out of grief is not by talking about it. It is by finding a way to make them laugh against their will.
I find this a sophisticated piece of psychology. A famine that threatens the whole of humanity is, for a moment, held up by a servant telling a dirty joke. The cosmos waits on a punchline.
The fire and the scream
Now the strangest part. Demeter decides to repay the household by making Demophon immortal. She feeds him ambrosia and breathes on him, and at night she buries him in the hearth fire to burn away his mortality. He grows like a god. Then one night Metaneira peeks in and sees her baby in the flames. She screams. The goddess is furious, pulls the child out of the fire and throws him down, and reveals herself. She tells the queen that she would have made him ageless and deathless, but that now it is impossible. He will grow up and die like any other man. But because he lay on her knees, he will have honour forever.
It's a second failed attempt at immortality, and I don't think it's an accident that it sits so close to the main story. In the first half, a girl loses her place in the upper world. In the second, a boy loses the chance to leave the mortal one. Both are stopped by a decision that someone else makes. And both are compensated, not undone: Persephone gets half a year above, and Demophon gets honour.
The consolation prize
Then Demeter demands a temple and an altar at Eleusis, and teaches the rites to the princes of the town. Meanwhile she keeps the grain locked in the ground, and the human race starts to die. Zeus, realising that sacrifices will stop, sends Hermes down to bring Persephone back. Hades agrees, but before she goes he slips her a pomegranate seed. In the hymn it's just one seed. Later poets increase it to as many as seven, and the length of her stay below grows or shrinks accordingly.
The hymn ends by promising that the people who have seen the mysteries are blessed, and that those who haven't will have no share in good things when they are dead. That promise, I think, is the real point of the poem. Humans can't be made immortal. But they can be given a ritual that lets them face death with something like hope.
What I take from it
So here's my reading. The famous half of the myth gives us the seasons. The neglected half gives us the Mysteries, and it does so by running the same pattern twice: something is lost, something is offered in exchange, and the exchange is never quite fair. The goddess who laughs at a dirty joke and nearly burns a baby into a god is more complicated than the weeping mother we usually get. She is a person who has tried every route to undo a loss, and finally settles for a ceremony that makes the loss bearable.