Her story is, indeed, but the story, in
an intenser form, of Adonis, of Hyacinth, of Adrastus--the king's
blooming son, fated, in the story of Herodotus, to be wounded to
death with an iron spear--of Linus, a fair child who is torn to
pieces by hounds every spring-time--of the English Sleeping Beauty.
From being the goddess of summer and the flowers, she becomes the
goddess of night and sleep and death, confuseable with Hecate, the
goddess of midnight [110] terrors--Kore arretos,+ the mother of the
Erinnyes, who appeared to Pindar, to warn him of his approaching
death, upbraiding him because he had made no hymn in her praise,
which swan's song he thereupon began, but finished with her. She is
a twofold goddess, therefore, according as one or the other of these
two contrasted aspects of her nature is seized, respectively. A
duality, an inherent opposition in the very conception of Persephone,
runs all through her story, and is part of her ghostly power. There
is ever something in her of a divided or ambiguous identity: hence
the many euphemisms of later language concerning her.
The "worship of sorrow," as Goethe called it, is sometimes supposed
to have had almost no place in the religion of the Greeks.
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