Persephone & Demeter: The Healing Power of the Asteroid Goddesses

When I first became aware of the myth of Demeter and Persephone I was not yet a student of astrology. I revered these two female figures and their tale of loss, grief and rebirth helped me to understand myself and my own personal story, eventually becoming the basis of my dissertation for my Masters in Myth and Cosmology in 2020.

For those of you who are yet to read this story, Persephone was the daughter of the Great Earth Mother Demeter (Ceres) who was abducted by the Lord of the Underworld, Hades (also known as Pluto). In some versions of this tale, she descends willingly to tend to the dead and become Queen of the Underworld, and in other versions she is dragged off against her will. Her mother Demeter, is distraught at the loss of her daughter and in her grief the crops fail and the land becomes barren. In the end, the sky god Zeus intervenes and it is decided that Persephone will spend 6 months in the Underworld with her husband Hades and 6 months out of the year with her mother. Her annual return to her mother each Spring was a symbol for the Greeks of the promise of the renewal of life after death.

‘Demeter and Persephone’ by John Dickson Batten

This story speaks to so many of the themes that are prominent in a woman’s life: of being a daughter and the journey of maturation, themes of attachment and separation, the experience of becoming a mother, and also the capacity for grief and sorrow. My dissertation focused on the importance of the mother-daughter bond and the marginalisation of this relationship in our culture. I focused on the grief of the mother and the myth as a psychological account of mourning. Demeter gives herself to her mourning unashamedly, she becomes her grief. I imagined my mother wandering under that fallen sky, grieving her lost daughter, my sister, who died when I was seven.

As I learned more about astrology, I started to see how my knowledge of myth, and in particular my connection to the story of Demeter and Persephone, added another layer to my understanding of the birth chart and the astrological symbols. I felt the patterns expressed by this myth were speaking through my birth chart, with the universal somehow playing out in my individual story. This was further expanded when I discovered (through the work of Demetra George amongst others) that it was possible to look at the dark goddess archetypes in our charts through the asteroids. This capacity to validate and reflect back our experiences is one of the profound gifts of astrology and this was a great ‘aha’ moment for me as all the themes which I had so long worked with in my own life were suddenly more visible in the natal chart. I felt seen and recognised in a way that I had not done previously.

In particular, my relationship with Persephone changed. Whilst before I saw her primarily as the grieving daughter, I now saw her as a powerful Queen in her own right, a dark feminine goddess, who rules over the mysteries of death, transformation & renewal. In looking at the position of the asteroid Persephone in my natal chart I was able to see clearly how the death of my sister at such a young age and the consequent emotional separation from my mother plunged me into an experience of the underworld from which I have spent much of my life trying to recover. I felt comforted to discover that this archetype is so prominent in my chart and although it doesn’t alter the facts of my experiences it seems to speak of a story that has intent and purpose, a pattern of development that seems to suggest something bigger than the individual and something which as Liz Greene says ‘is contained within us at birth” (Liz Greene, The Astrology of Fate, 1984).

In the same way that we have denied aspects of the feminine in our culture, so too have we denied the shadow elements of ourselves; the messy, difficult, confronting parts of our natures, the parts that speak to the darker experiences of our lives. As such, working with the dark goddess asteroids can bring the rejected aspects of the feminine into the light and help us to face our fears and transform the pain around these experiences, bringing healing and wholeness.