archetype.guide
archetype.guide

Authored taxonomy · an archetype

Persephone (Bolen)

The maiden who is also the queen of what lies below.

Jean Shinoda Bolen’s Persephone, one of the seven goddess patterns of Goddesses in Everywoman (1984) and one of her vulnerable goddesses: the receptive maiden and mother’s daughter who may become queen of the underworld. A type of woman’s personality, distinct from Jung’s Kore.

Bolen’s Persephone is a pattern in women’s psychology that Jean Shinoda Bolen named after the daughter of Demeter, carried off by Hades to be queen of the dead. In Goddesses in Everywoman (1984) it is one of three vulnerable goddesses, with Hera and Demeter, whom Bolen groups as the goddesses of the traditional roles of wife, mother and daughter, whose identity and well-being depend on a significant relationship, and who in myth were raped, abducted, dominated or humiliated by male gods; their mode of attention she calls, after Irene Claremont de Castillejo, “diffuse awareness” (1984, p. 15; pp. 133–135). Bolen’s Persephone has two forms, as the chapter title says. As the maiden, the Kore, she is the receptive woman and mother’s daughter: youthful, compliant, unsure of what she wants, inclined to become what others expect of her and to wait for life to happen. As queen of the underworld she is the same woman matured by descent, at home in the inner, underworld side of life and able, in Bolen’s heading, to become a “guide to the underworld” for others who go there. The difficulties Bolen attaches to the pattern belong mostly to the first form. She is the “child-woman” and, in M. Esther Harding’s term, which Bolen adopts, the “anima woman” who unconsciously conforms to what a man wants (pp. 201–202); to live as the Kore is to be the eternal girl who commits herself to nothing; and she is susceptible to depression when she is dominated (pp. 213–214). The way of growth runs from maiden to queen, from being taken to making commitments of her own.

Go deeper

At the threshold

Sacred Goddess, Mother Earth,Thou from whose immortal bosomGods, and men, and beasts have birth,Leaf and blade, and bud and blossom,Breathe thine influence most divineOn thine own child, Proserpine.If with mists of evening dewThou dost nourish these young flowersTill they grow, in scent and hue,Fairest children of the Hours,Breathe thine influence most divineOn thine own child, Proserpine.

Public domain · Shelley, Song of Proserpine while Gathering Flowers on the Plain of Enna (1839)

The maiden gathering flowers calls on Mother Earth to breathe on her own child, innocent of what is about to rise from the plain.

Constellation

The figures who carry it

Hover a star. Jung’s own examples are marked; the rest are readings applied later, and the entry below says by whom.

All 5 figures as a list
  1. Jung’s example

    Persephone gathering flowers

    Homeric Hymn 2, to Demeter, c. 600 BCE

    The girl picking narcissus on the plain of Nysa when the earth opens and Hades takes her.

  2. Jung’s example

    The pomegranate seed

    Homeric Hymn 2, to Demeter, c. 600 BCE

    The seed she is made to eat, which binds her to the underworld for part of every year.

  3. Jung’s example

    Psyche in the underworld

    Apuleius, The Golden Ass, c. 170 CE

    The mortal girl sent to fetch a box from Persephone, one of the few to go down and return.

  4. Jung’s example

    Orpheus and Eurydice

    Ovid, Metamorphoses X, c. 8 CE

    The singer whose song moves the queen of the dead to let Eurydice go.

  5. Jung’s example

    Eleusinian Mysteries

    Homeric Hymn 2, to Demeter, c. 600 BCE

    The secret rites at Eleusis, built on the return of the daughter.

The wider sky

Where the Persephone (Bolen) has been seen

20 exemplars across 10 fields, from myth to this year. Each is marked as Jung’s own example, a scholar’s reading, a widely published reading, or ours.

Hover a field in the sky, or choose one above, to read its exemplars.

Interlude

I would I had some flowers o’ th’ spring, that mightBecome your time of day; and yours, and yours,That wear upon your virgin branches yetYour maidenheads growing. O Proserpina,From the flowers now that, frighted, thou let’st fallFrom Dis’s waggon! daffodils,That come before the swallow dares, and takeThe winds of March with beauty; violets dim,But sweeter than the lids of Juno’s eyesOr Cytherea’s breath; pale primroses,

Public domain · Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale, Act IV (1623)

Perdita calls on Proserpina for the flowers she let fall from Dis’s waggon: the loss of spring told through the girl who was taken.

She goes where she is taken and learns the country on the way.

She is soft to every hand, which is how the dark finds her.

A third of the year she is a queen below and the rest a daughter above, and neither is the whole of her.

The deep layer · what was written

Persephone (Bolen): the entry

Definition

Bolen’s Persephone is a pattern in women’s psychology that Jean Shinoda Bolen named after the daughter of Demeter, carried off by Hades to be queen of the dead. In Goddesses in Everywoman (1984) it is one of three vulnerable goddesses, with Hera and Demeter, whom Bolen groups as the goddesses of the traditional roles of wife, mother and daughter, whose identity and well-being depend on a significant relationship, and who in myth were raped, abducted, dominated or humiliated by male gods; their mode of attention she calls, after Irene Claremont de Castillejo, “diffuse awareness” (1984, p. 15; pp. 133–135). Bolen’s Persephone has two forms, as the chapter title says. As the maiden, the Kore, she is the receptive woman and mother’s daughter: youthful, compliant, unsure of what she wants, inclined to become what others expect of her and to wait for life to happen. As queen of the underworld she is the same woman matured by descent, at home in the inner, underworld side of life and able, in Bolen’s heading, to become a “guide to the underworld” for others who go there. The difficulties Bolen attaches to the pattern belong mostly to the first form. She is the “child-woman” and, in M. Esther Harding’s term, which Bolen adopts, the “anima woman” who unconsciously conforms to what a man wants (pp. 201–202); to live as the Kore is to be the eternal girl who commits herself to nothing; and she is susceptible to depression when she is dominated (pp. 213–214). The way of growth runs from maiden to queen, from being taken to making commitments of her own.

The definition excludes two things, and the second is the one most often confused. This is not Persephone the goddess, whose myth and cult are described here only as the material Bolen read. And it is not Jung’s Kore, a published classical entry in this guide. Jung’s Kore is an archetypal image, the maiden of myth and dream, which he read as part of the anima in a man and of the self in a woman. Bolen’s Persephone is a type of woman, with a childhood, relationships, a career and an old age. The kore entry records the same distinction from Jung’s side.

History

The pattern first appears in the chapter “Persephone: The Maiden and Queen of the Underworld, Receptive Woman and Mother’s Daughter” of Goddesses in Everywoman, published by Harper & Row in San Francisco in 1984 and in paperback in 1985, and reissued with a new introduction and the subtitle Powerful Archetypes in Women’s Lives in 2004 and again in 2014. The chapter retells the myth and then follows the pattern through a woman’s life.

The source both Bolen and Jung used is the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, which is public domain. The girl is picking flowers on the plain of Nysa when the earth opens and Hades takes her, with her father’s leave (ll. 4–32). The Hymn already contains both of Bolen’s forms: the frightened girl, and the queen Hades promises she will be:

you shall rule all that lives and moves and shall have the greatest rights among the deathless gods — Homeric Hymn to Demeter (Hymn 2), ll. 360–369, trans. H. G. Evelyn-White (1914), Gutenberg #348

Quotation · not covered by the CC BY licence

He secretly gives her a pomegranate seed (ll. 370–383), and so she must spend a third of each year below (ll. 441–469). Hesiod gives the bare genealogy: daughter of Demeter by Zeus, carried off by Aidoneus, “but wise Zeus gave her to him” (Theogony 912–914). Homer’s Odyssey, which Bolen also cites (p. 198), knows only the queen: “dread Proserpine” in Circe’s instructions (Book X), who sends up the ghosts of the dead women to Odysseus (Book XI).

Jung’s use of the same myth came forty years earlier. His essay on the Kore (1941), written with the classicist Karl Kerényi, treats Demeter and the Kore as two aspects of one feminine figure and gives the figure two psychological homes:

The figure of the Kore that interests us here belongs, when observed in a man, to the anima type; and when observed in a woman to the type of supraordinate personality. — C. G. Jung, “The Psychological Aspects of the Kore” (1941), CW 9i ¶310

Quotation · not covered by the CC BY licence

Between Jung and Bolen the maiden was elaborated by Jungian women, Nor Hall (1980), Sylvia Brinton Perera (1981) and Marion Woodman (1982) among them, as a stage or wound in a woman’s development. Bolen’s claim to build on Jung is stronger here than for most of her goddesses, since Jung wrote on this very figure, but her move from image to personality type is her own.

The debate

The relation to the classical kore is the central question, and the two differ on four points. Jung’s Kore is an archetype, present potentially in everyone; Bolen’s Persephone is a disposition some women have more than others. Jung’s figure is inseparable from her mother, each containing the other, and from a third figure, Hecate; Bolen splits mother and daughter into two types, each with its own woman, and makes their bond a pattern of relationship, the mother’s daughter, rather than an identity. Jung’s Kore points towards the self, the widening of a woman’s consciousness across the generations; Bolen’s points towards maturity, from compliant girl to queen. And Jung located the maiden in a man’s anima as well, whereas Bolen’s type belongs to women. The roster’s second classical neighbour, the anima, follows from the first: a receptive, compliant woman is the classic screen for a man’s anima projection, so that Bolen’s type describes from the woman’s side what Jungian theory had described from the man’s. The comparison is Bolen’s own: she describes the Persephone woman through Harding’s “anima woman”, who adapts herself to a man’s wishes (p. 201).

The general objections bear on the figure too. Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette (1992) noted that Bolen tends to identify gods and goddesses with personality types, and replied that no human being, and no god or goddess, is an archetype. Patricia Perri Rieker and M. Kay Jankowski (1995) cited Bolen as the popular face of essentialism (as quoted in ’Iolana, 2016), and Susan Rowland (2002) set the book among the grand narratives of goddess feminism. Steven Walker (2002) found goddess books of the period an incitement to archetypal inflation, citing Bolen among them (as quoted in ’Iolana, 2016), a risk sharpest for a type whose mature form is a guide to the underworld. The book’s first scholarly reviewers were Mary Ann Mattoon (1986) and Kay Deaux (1986).

Empirical status

None. No study has tested Bolen’s Persephone as a psychological construct, and none has tested Jung’s Kore. Online quizzes in Bolen’s vocabulary disclaim validity, and the scale attributed to a 2004 Oklahoma State University doctoral thesis has no published psychometrics; we have not located the thesis. Research on dependent personality and on mother–daughter enmeshment makes no use of the figure.

Appearances

Bolen’s instances are the girl in the meadow, the pomegranate and the queen below. The myth was the foundation of the Eleusinian Mysteries, and Persephone as queen grants Orpheus his request in Ovid (Metamorphoses X). The visual tradition includes Bernini’s The Rape of Proserpina (1621–22) and Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Proserpine (1874); Shakespeare’s Perdita recalls the flowers Proserpina let fall from Dis’s wagon (The Winter’s Tale, Act IV). All of these are readings, not Bolen’s, including the guide’s own exemplars.

Sources

  • Bolen, J. S. (1984). Goddesses in Everywoman: A New Psychology of Women. Harper & Row. ISBN 978-0-06-250082-3. Chapter “Persephone: The Maiden and Queen of the Underworld, Receptive Woman and Mother’s Daughter”, chapter 10, pp. 197–223 (pp. 198, 201–202, 213–214 cited); also pp. 15, 132–138 (chapter 7, the vulnerable goddesses). Pages, and the chapter title as the contents give it, from Internet Archive full-text search of the 1984 printing, https://archive.org/details/goddessesinevery00jean (contents, index and running heads). Chapter titles also checked against the contents of the Harper Colophon paperback (1985), ISBN 978-0-06-091291-8, https://openlibrary.org/books/OL24226567M
  • Bolen, J. S. (2004). Goddesses in Everywoman: Powerful Archetypes in Women’s Lives (twentieth-anniversary ed., new introduction). Quill. ISBN 978-0-06-057284-6.
  • Homeric Hymn to Demeter (Hymn 2); Hesiod, Theogony 912–914. In Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns, and Homerica (H. G. Evelyn-White, Trans., 1914). Project Gutenberg #348.
  • Homer, Odyssey X–XI (S. Butler, Trans.). Project Gutenberg #1727.
  • Ovid, Metamorphoses X (Orpheus). Project Gutenberg #26073.
  • Shakespeare, W. The Winter’s Tale, Act IV. Project Gutenberg #1539.
  • Jung, C. G. (1941). Zum psychologischen Aspekt der Korefigur. In C. G. Jung & K. Kerényi, Das göttliche Mädchen. English as The psychological aspects of the Kore, CW 9i ¶306–383; ¶310 checked against a transcription of the Princeton text, https://carljungdepthpsychologysite.blog/?p=160699
  • Hall, N. (1980). The Moon and the Virgin: Reflections on the Archetypal Feminine. Harper & Row. ISBN 978-0-06-090793-8.
  • Perera, S. B. (1981). Descent to the Goddess: A Way of Initiation for Women. Inner City Books. ISBN 978-0-919123-05-2.
  • Woodman, M. (1982). Addiction to Perfection: The Still Unravished Bride. Inner City Books. ISBN 978-0-919123-11-3.
  • Moore, R., & Gillette, D. (1992). The Warrior Within: Accessing the Knight in the Male Psyche. William Morrow. ISBN 978-0-688-09592-5. Notes to chapter 2, n. 17 (pp. 245–246 by the index).
  • Rieker, P. P., & Jankowski, M. K. (1995). Sexism and women’s psychological status. In C. V. Willie et al. (Eds.), Mental Health, Racism, and Sexism (pp. 27–50). University of Pittsburgh Press. ISBN 978-0-8229-3869-9. Pp. 30–32, as quoted in ’Iolana (2016), p. 327.
  • Rowland, S. (2002). Jung: A Feminist Revision. Polity. ISBN 978-0-7456-2517-1. P. 150, as quoted in ’Iolana (2016), p. 40.
  • Walker, S. F. (2002). Jung and the Jungians on Myth. Routledge. P. 128, as quoted in ’Iolana (2016), p. 324. https://theses.gla.ac.uk/7313/
  • ’Iolana, P. (2016). Jung and Goddess: The Significance of Jungian and post-Jungian Theory to the Development of the Western Goddess Movement (PhD thesis). University of Glasgow. https://theses.gla.ac.uk/7313/
  • Mattoon, M. A. (1986). A new psychology of women? [Review of Bolen, 1984]. San Francisco Jung Institute Library Journal, 6(4), 13–24. https://doi.org/10.1525/jung.1.1986.6.4.13
  • Deaux, K. (1986). [Review of Goddesses in Everywoman]. Contemporary Psychology, 31(6), 468. https://doi.org/10.1037/024853
  • Hudson Archetypal Goddess Scale, online version with disclaimer and attribution to P. A. Hudson (2004). https://psytests.org/typo/goddessen.html
  • Rossetti, D. G. (1874). Proserpine. Oil on canvas. Tate. https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/rossetti-proserpine-n05064

Leaving

From too much love of living,From hope and fear set free,We thank with brief thanksgivingWhatever gods may beThat no life lives for ever;That dead men rise up never;That even the weariest riverWinds somewhere safe to sea.

Public domain · Swinburne, The Garden of Proserpine (1866)

The queen of the dead is imagined as the place where life ends gently, weariness and all rivers winding somewhere safe to sea.

The colour drains

Back into the dark, and on.

Next in the journey◉ Great MotherLoving and terrible, the first world.Return to the void