To Whom it May Not Concern
Performance, 2025
Script from performance March 6, 2025, at Casino for Social Research, Berlin. As part of the artistic program of Künstler,Künstlerin.
Photo: Patricia Morosan.
I am here today to share something with you. Some thoughts on Persephone, as she appears in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter.
I also want to say something about communication. And about being excluded from it in a former workplace.
You can sit down next to me here on the fabric, you can also remain where you are.
Please have a flower, if you want to.
As with all messages you can do whatever you want with what I am going to say. This goes also for my gifts to you.
There will also be a second performance like this, in fall. Then I shall offer you pomegranates instead of flowers, as they are also crucial to what I am going to tell you—however not ripe to pick at the moment.
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The Hymn to Demeter was probably written by a bard around 650-550 BCE, during what is called the Greek archaic period.
It is composed in dactylic hexameter and uses short repeated phrases. The song is part of what we today called The Homeric Hymns, which, just like Homer’s the Iliad and the Odyssey, were produced to be memorized and passed down orally.
The reason we have the text transferred to us today is that they were composed at a breaking point, when literacy, based on the emerging and newly invented Greek alphabet.1
As many have pointed out, among them famously the poet and classist Anne Carson, to listen to a story and to read one are very different things. The invention of the text created a barrier between reality and message that was unknown for a crowd listening to a story being sung by a bard. Like other metaphysical structures—a monetary economy for example—that the Greeks were so good at coming up with, and that began to get institutionalised by the time of the creation of the Homeric hymns, the alphabet created one visible world of appearance, and another abstract world of “meaning”.2
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The Homeric Hymn to Demeter tells the story of the abduction of Persephone by the ruler of the underworld and the king of the dead, Hades. Persephone, who also goes by the name of Korë, meaning maiden, was the daughter of Demeter—the goddess of harvest, fertility and the earth. The terrible abduction was already agreed upon, behind Demeters back, by Persphone’s father, the boss on Olympus Zeus, and Gaia, his mother.
When we arrive to Perspehpone in the hymn, we are in fact, and this is very typical of an antique Greek dramaturgy, arriving at a crime scene. Perspephone has been out picking flowers on a meadow, in the plain of Nysa situated by the shore of an endless ocean. Around her the oceanids, sea nymphs inhabiting the sea, swirled, and overseeing the whole scene was also Helios, the god of the sun. The rest of the story focuses on Perspehone’s mother and her efforts to reunite with her daughter, to recreate the idyllic bond the two had.
Demeter's grief caused immense failures in crop growth all over the world, a famine emerged and the other gods eventually got enough when they didn't receive sacrifices from humans.
Demeter gets to have her daughter back when Zeus interferes and tells Hades of. But just as Persephone is about to leave the underworld she eats a pommegranate seed forced in to her mouth by Hades. As a result she becomes at least partially committed to staying in the underworld.
The gods agree upon a new deal: that Perspehone can stay in the Olympus with her mother two thirds of the year, but during one third she has to be with Hades, whom remains her husband
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The hymn to Demeter is a story about painful separation. On a formal as well as a narrative level harmony, fertility and beauty is contrasted with violence absence and darkness.
These contrasts are already established in the opening scene.
…as she [Persephne played with the deep-breasted daughters of Ocean,
plucking flowers in the lush meadow—roses, crocuses,
and lovely violets, irises and hyacinth and the narcissus,
which Earth grew as a snare for the flower-faced maiden
in order to gratify by Zeus's design the Host-to-Many,
a flower wondrous and bright, awesome for all to see,
for the immortals above and for mortals below.
From its root a hundredfold bloom sprang up and smelled
so sweet that the whole vast heaven above
and the whole earth laughed, and the salty swell of the sea.
The girl marveled and stretched out both hands at once
to take the lovely toy. The earth with its wide ways yawned
over the Nysian plain; the lord Host-to-Many rose up on her
with his immortal horses, the celebrated son of Kronos;
he snatched the unwilling maid into his golden chariot
and led her off lamenting.
Important for the scene is the narcissus flower, a plant connected to “immortals above and mortals bellow”.
The translated version of the hymn I use is done by Helen Foley. She has in her writings on the poem described how the narcissus was thought to have inducive qualities in antiquity, and its etymology suggests dormancy and the dead (narkē meaning "numbness"). The plant was further on sacred both to Demeter, and to the underworld belonging creatures the eumenides.3
As liminal as the narcissus was the site where the initial scene in the hymn takes place: the meadow. Meadows were associated with both fertility as with the underworld, and were often depicted as places where abductions took place.
As Foley points out—a reading solely focusing on loss and pain misses many points in the hymn. For example the different long lasting entangled dependencies created by Demeter and Perspehone.
First of all it is their ties to each other, their mother daughter relationship, and the anger and grief that is the result of its breaking, that is driving the narrative forward in the hymn. It is also this bond that eventually reconfigures the order in the universe. Persephone becomes the link between the underworld, the human world and the Olympus, a link that refuses separation and in fact manifests the importance of a non breaking of maternal lineage, throughout death.
As the story evolves Demeters resistance clarifies the gods' dependencies on human mortals—the olymps have to acknowledge human suffering (for certain, but of less importance, because egoistic or vain reasons) and are not autocratic as they may think.
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By the end of the Hymn, Demeter is said to be the founder of the Elusian mysteries, the most important and one of the most long running mystery cults in ancient Greece.
In a for the homeric poems standard way “real” life here is given an origin in a myth. But important to note, this institutionalisation of ritual is not attributed to Zeus, but to Demeter who with her daughter continued to be honored in the mysteries.
What exactly happened during the ritual events we cannot know. It probably contained dancing, and sacrifices as well as drinking of the potentially psychotic barely drink kykeon. Fertility was celebrated and the participants were prepared for a new “existence” as dead.
Secrecy is a word that comes to mind when I think about the cult. Its structure and content were not described in writing. The reason for this seems to be, as Aristotle pointed out, that the rites were not there to teach anyone anything, they were there to enable an experience.
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The myth of Persephone is, with a close reading, as we have seen, filled with feminist potentiality. And it has also often been interpreted as such. For feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray the story exemplifies a world “which is not yet an order of respect for fertility and sexual difference”.4
What is laid out in the hymn is indeed partly a feminist victory, but the narrative in many ways remains a “what if”: The total victory fails to arrive because of the sweet seed of the pomegranate that is “stealthy” put into Persphone’s mouth against her will and “by force”. A last act of violence from Hades, lastly changing the preconditions for the heavenly order to come.
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Since a little bit more than a year I have lived my life as a trans person. I am non-binary and transfeminine. I came out in December 2023, and have since then been considering myself along with a gender identity that I dont always signal to others.
This is often a very painful experience, and a question of finding my way through the world, with the people I love, and through different expressions that I find can help me navigate the social, emotional, and historical role I want to give my soul in this world. I often find myself diminished and ridiculed, and not taken seriously by people I once trusted. Often it has been suggested that my transness is some kind of currency, a matter of choosing an identity that is “profitable” in different ways. When it comes to the art world’s grant system for example.
It is not, of course, only hard, to become transgender. It is increasingly dangerous. Several times a week I get screamed at with derogatory comments. I see how basic right to healthcare, and legal protection are being stripped from trans people in the US, and how European politicians take the opportunity to advocate for the same development on this side of the atlantic.
To become trans was for me to leave a male realm based on dominance, control ownership, success and admiration. I am not saying that all forms of male identity have to be built upon these things. I am also not saying that I can't exercise dominance over people after coming out as trans, or that my transness as such makes me a better person.
But I do know I want to live differently, and that I care more for values and a social engagement that are different from the ones I had before: sharing, helping, affirming, caring. Again I think I instantly fail on all these things, but I am very vocal for them to prevail in all kinds of contexts.
So also in my former workplace. As a result I was excluded from the realm of the rational, and considered a problem, not accepting that power was not something that could be distributed. In not accepting a very clear male authority I was I guess also mirroring the fear of letting go of authority within the men that harassed me them selves. They had when they met my transness to confront the failure of their own male pride, as they were exposed to the shortcomings of their utopian ideal of creating wealth in a feudal manor, letting it tickle down to the rest of us eventually if we were just silently following their lead. They did all this instead of just sharing.
I was screamed at that I was a little idiot. I was accused of theft. I was told I had a delusional phase in my life. I was told I could not be close to them in space. I was told I had to step aside because I was “too much”. I was told that I shouldn't turn everything into a discussion about power. I was finally fired because I took a sick leave because of the harassment I was the victim of.
My crime was that I wanted equality, I wanted transparency, I wanted security and I wanted to get paid for the time I put down to work.
I wanted to be listened to, and finally I became the unspeakable, someone whose mind was not developed enough to be considered an intellectual counterpart, and whose words where only that of a delusional fools.
I did at some point understand that I was going to achieve nothing, that the only way to change anything was to maintain in the obscure realm of negativity, in a potentiality and in an unfulfilled what if or not yet.
In this consensual space could I eventually together with the women and queers maintain some crumbles of what you could call wealth, charity and justice. Until better days to come.
To challenge the dominant structural order of the cafe I worked at was, everybody told me, and they were right, a bad idea.
Stay undercover, sisters warned between the lines.
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I guess what I am trying to say is not so much look, Persephone’s partial success in the hymn represents a “what if” that we should take care of in one way or another—but rather that “what if, is” and that we should ask ourselves what we do with the consequences of it being here, .i.e., how we respond to her.
Lacan once wrote that a letter is always received. It is the consequences of it ending up where it does that matters, not so much what is written and for whom.
It is with other words up to all of us to understand that the reality we live in springs like a narcissus flower from the freshwater river of communication that runs from me to you.
Notes:
1. The Greek Alphabet probably came into use in the 8th century BCE, depending on how to define coming into use.
2. For further reading on this topic see for example, Anne Carson’s Eros the Bittersweet (1986), and Economy of the Unlost (1999); George Thomson The First Philosophers (1955) and Eric A. Havelock, The Literate Revolution in Greece and its Cultural Consequences, (1981).
3. See Helene P. Foley, The Homeric Hymn to Demeter: Translation, Commentary, and Interpretive Essays (1994).
4. Luce Irigaray, ”Between Myth and History: The Tragedy of Antigone”, (2010).
