Astral Codex Ten

Persephone

4 min read

Persephone

Article

Persephone is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between August 26, 2022 and November 17, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as “Kora is a parallel figure to Persephone or Proserpina”; “Most pagan myths have nothing to do with the single-victim process (rape of Persephone”; “rape of Persephone”. It most often appears alongside Odyssey, 1917, Abel.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 2
  • Issue count: 2
  • First seen: August 26, 2022
  • Last seen: November 17, 2023

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Your Book Review: Kora In Hell
August 26, 2022 · Original source
William Carlos Williams attributes the title to his friend/rival Ezra Pound, mythological references’ number one fanboy. Kora is a parallel figure to Persephone or Proserpina, the Spring captured and taken to Hades by Hades himself. Persephone as a plant goddess and her mother Demeter were the central figures of the Eleusinian Mysteries, which promised the initiated a groovy afterlife glimpsed at by psychedelic shrooms. And Kora means maiden. Ancient Greeks called her that either because she was like Voldemort, and you were apotropaically not supposed to say her true name because this is a Mystery Cult, damn it. Keeps some of the mystery. Or because she in a way represents all of the maidens, everywhere. So, in that sense, Kora in Hell alludes to the multitude of suffering young women Williams met while working as a doctor, assisting in 1917 style home labors, and, because WWI was going on at the time and doctors were extremely scarce, as a local police surgeon. Conditions were dire:
So yet another interpretation of the title is that WCW is not the Spring taken to Hades. WCW is Demeter, Persephone’s mom, who is desperately moving Heaven and Earth to get her daughter, the American poets of the future, back from the greedy claws of the God of the Underworld, personified in this allegory by the author of Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats.
Book Review: I See Satan Fall Like Lightning
November 17, 2023 · Original source
But Girard lost me with the part about the myths. Most pagan myths have nothing to do with the single-victim process (eg labors of Hercules, Jason and the Golden Fleece, rape of Persephone, the Iliad, the Trojan Horse, the Odyssey, etc, etc, etc). The same with most Bible stories (Adam and Eve, Noah’s Flood, the Tower of Babel, the Ten Plagues, the Ten Commandments, etc). It kind of seems like the sort of thing where Freud can claim all myths are about castration. There are lots of myths, and they’re about lots of things. “Person does bad thing, the gods collectively punish humanity, then once we get rid of him the collective punishment stops” is certainly one trope. But it’s not hard to fathom why a primitive community stricken by a plague might think God was punishing them for some iniquity. And if I haven’t committed iniquity lately, and you haven’t committed iniquity lately, it must be some particular bad guy who needs to be stopped.