Ceres and the Seasons

At a Glance

• Central figures: Ceres, goddess of grain and the harvest; her daughter Proserpina; Pluto, king of the underworld; Jupiter, king of the gods; and Mercury, sent as Jupiter’s messenger.
• Setting: Sicily, where Proserpina was taken; the wandering roads of the earth Ceres walked in search of her daughter; and the underworld kingdom of Pluto. The fullest Roman telling is in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Book V, and in the Fasti, Book IV.
• The turn: Pluto seizes Proserpina and drags her beneath the earth; Ceres, in grief and fury, withdraws her gift of fertility from the soil, and the world begins to starve.
• The outcome: Jupiter brokers a compromise - Proserpina will spend part of the year below with Pluto and part above with Ceres - but because Proserpina ate pomegranate seeds in the underworld, the division is binding and permanent.
• The legacy: The annual cycle of planting and fallow, growth and dormancy, which the Romans honored through the festival of the Cerealia, held in mid-April with games and offerings of grain in the Circus Maximus.

Proserpina was picking flowers in a meadow near Enna, in the center of Sicily, when the ground opened. She had been reaching for a narcissus - the bloom was impossibly bright, as if planted to draw the hand - and the earth split along a seam no one had seen before. A chariot came up through the gap, drawn by black horses, and the driver was Pluto. He seized her around the waist. She screamed. The nymphs who had been with her scattered or froze. The chariot plunged back into the dark, and the ground closed over them like water.

Ceres was not there. She had been in her fields - tending, as she always tended, the growth of things. When she came looking for her daughter, she found only the torn flowers and the crushed grass where the wheels had cut.

The Search

Ceres lit two pine torches from the fires of Aetna and carried them through the night. She did not stop. She walked the roads of Sicily, then crossed to the mainland, then kept walking - through Latium, through the wild places, along coastlines, through towns where people stared at this tall, grim woman carrying fire in both hands and calling a name no one recognized.

No one had seen Proserpina. No one could tell her anything. The rivers had not seen, or would not say. The nymphs wept but offered nothing useful. Ceres ate nothing, drank nothing, did not sleep. The torches burned without shortening, and she walked for nine days.

On the tenth day she found the nymph Cyane, who had tried to block Pluto’s chariot and been turned to water for it. Cyane could no longer speak - she was a pool now, a spring - but she floated Proserpina’s belt to the surface. Ceres saw it and understood. Her daughter had not wandered off. Her daughter had been taken down.

The Famine

Ceres went to Jupiter. She stood before him and demanded her daughter’s return. Jupiter was evasive. He had consented to the abduction - Pluto was his brother, and brothers had claims. He suggested that being queen of the dead was not such a poor fate.

Ceres said nothing more to Jupiter. She went back to the earth and withdrew. Every field she had blessed, she unblessed. The grain stopped growing. The wheat stalks bent and dried. Barley rotted in the furrow. Seeds that had been planted sat in the soil like stones and did nothing. Across Latium, across Sicily, across the whole of the world that depended on Ceres for its bread, the crops failed.

The farmers prayed. They brought offerings to her temples. They slaughtered pigs - Ceres’s preferred sacrifice - and laid them on the altars, but the altars were cold. The goddess was not listening, or she was listening and did not care. She wanted one thing, and the earth would starve until she got it.

People began to die. The cattle thinned. Rivers ran through landscapes that looked like ash. Jupiter received the prayers of the dying and understood that Ceres would not relent. She would let every living thing wither before she accepted the loss.

The Pomegranate Seeds

Jupiter sent Mercury down to the underworld with instructions: Pluto was to release Proserpina. The king of the gods had spoken; the famine had to end.

Mercury found Pluto seated on his throne of dark stone, Proserpina beside him. She was pale but composed. The underworld had not broken her, but it had changed something in her face - she looked like someone who had learned to be still in a place where nothing moved.

Pluto heard Mercury’s message and did not argue. He had expected this. But before he let Proserpina go, he offered her food - a pomegranate, split open, the seeds glistening like small red stones in the half-light. Proserpina had eaten nothing in all her time below. She was hungry. She took six seeds and ate them.

This was the trap, if it was a trap, or it was simply the law of the place. Anyone who ate the food of the dead was bound to the dead. The rule was older than Pluto, older than Jupiter, older than the gods themselves - it was woven into the structure of things. Six seeds. Six months below.

Mercury brought Proserpina to the surface. Ceres was waiting at the mouth of the cave, and when she saw her daughter she seized her and held her and did not let go for a long time. But Mercury delivered the rest of the message. The seeds had been eaten. Proserpina could not stay above the earth for the full year.

Jupiter’s Division

Jupiter imposed the settlement himself. Proserpina would spend six months of every year with Ceres, above, in the light and the growing fields. The other six months she would descend to Pluto’s kingdom and sit as queen of the underworld. This was not negotiable. The law of the eaten food held even against Ceres’s grief.

Ceres accepted it because she had no choice. But she made the terms visible. In the months when Proserpina was with her, she poured her power into the soil. The grain grew thick and gold. The orchards bore heavy fruit. The vines bent under the weight of their grapes. The world was fed.

In the months when Proserpina descended, Ceres pulled back. The fields went bare. The trees dropped their leaves. The earth turned cold and hard and nothing grew. She did not destroy - she simply stopped giving. The warmth went out of the ground, and the world waited.

The Cerealia

The Romans understood this rhythm as the fundamental fact of agriculture. Ceres was not a metaphor - she was the power in the grain, the numen that made the difference between a field that produced and a field that lay dead. Her grief was not decorative. When farmers watched the last stalks dry and brown in autumn, that was Ceres withdrawing, and when the first green shoots split the soil in spring, that was Ceres returning to the surface with her daughter.

Each April, on the Ides and the days following, Rome celebrated the Cerealia. The festival ran for eight days. The aediles - the magistrates responsible for the city’s grain supply - organized games in the Circus Maximus. Foxes were released into the Circus with burning torches tied to their tails, a strange and old rite that recalled Ceres’s own torchlit search through the darkness. Women dressed in white brought offerings of spelt and salt and the first cuttings of the new grain. The plebs - the common people, not the patricians - claimed Ceres as especially their own. She was the goddess of what kept them alive.

Proserpina, meanwhile, kept her double life. Six months a daughter in the Sicilian sunlight; six months a queen in the halls below the earth. She never complained about the arrangement, at least not in any telling that survived. The pomegranate seeds were eaten. The contract held.