Persephone | Tapestry

Information

Artist: Cassandra Blackthorn

Size: 22x34 (25.5x34 with the dowel and finials)

Material: Sustainable and luxurious heavy linen cotton blend, oxford weave

Description

There is no myth that encompasses the cycle of life and death like that of Persephone. One part maiden and one part Cthonic mistress, she was taken to Hades where she ate pomegranate seeds and became a seasonal inhabitant of the underworld.

Demeter grieved the loss of her daughter, consuming poppies in an attempt to sleep and forget her grief. The Homeric Hymn to Demeter tells how she wandered the land in search of her daughter, her journey becoming the nine-day pilgrimage of initiation for the cult of Demeter, known as the Eleusinian Mysteries. Each of this pilgrimage's nine days is symbolized in one leaf surrounding the skull central to the tapestry: 

The Call | Prorrhesis | Epidauria Festival for Asklepios | Baubo Procession | Vigil to Mylonas and Kereni | The Unrepeatables | The Feast | Libations for the Dead

Persephone had three children who embodied the extent of her domain, their symbols extending from the skull. Dionysus, God of wine, fertility, theatre, and ecstasy; Iaccus, a minor deity interwoven in the Eleusinian Mysteries; and Zagreus, the Cthonic counterpart to Dionysus who was torn apart and consumed, save his heart, with which the Goddess Semele resurrected him. 

Below runs the river of Styx, traversed by Charon's boat, and on either side is repeated the alchemical symbol for night and day. The ancient poet Hesiod wrote that a bronze anvil dropped from Heaven, it would take nine days to reach Earth, and another nine to reach Tartarus. At the top of the tapestry swirl the clouds that hide the home of the God's on Mount Olympus, the lightning bolts and alchemical symbol of Jupiter a nod to her paternal lineage.