Themes to address a global challenge
Is the integration of our light and dark natures embodied in the two Goddesses our way forward?
Is this a plea from Mother Earth to redress the imbalance of our times?
The resurrection of this banished myth and its embodiment holds power and potency as a living archetype for our times.
Today, we’re fast approaching the final flick of the dinosaur’s tail – climate crisis, politics of greed, capitalist consumerism – heralding the need to depart from sclerotic regimes and divisive systems, towards a re-establishment of humanistic paradigms and deeper value systems.
Midst the clumsy ‘noise’ of the heavy-footed dinosaurs, where do we turn for guidance?
Over 2500 years ago the Eleusinian Mysteries, which were considered the most sacred teachings of the ancient world, were administered by the Mother & Daughter Goddesses every year to the initiates, who travelled the Sacred Way from Athens to receive them.
In 365 AD, the Mysteries were banished by the Roman Emperor Theodosius I to suppress Hellenic resistance to Christianity. A patriarchal order arose over the next 2500 years to shape our global landscape in its image.
In depicting the themes of matured identity (in Persephone’s maturation from Kore - an immature young girl - to Persephone, Queen of the Underworld) and the assimilated empowerment of feminine leadership, its wisdom is a beacon for the modern era.
Embodying Divine Archetypes: The Influence of Persephone
Since first visiting Greece as a young girl, Vicky has identified the myth of Demeter and Persephone as a metaphor for the 20th-century migrant experience of living between cultures; a time of abduction and loss of the child from the motherland by the lure of the new world.
Once they have partaken of its fruits, the migrant is changed and can never return the same.
This has underpinned her work as an artist over the last 30 years. Her film and multimedia works, which combine moving images and the written word, have been screened and exhibited internationally.
“I think it has always been inside me. The myth of Persephone and Demeter. I think I was born with it pre-existing in the underbelly of my subconscious; an archetypal template, waiting to spring into life, fully formed, through its seasons. I never know when, except I’m always at a crossroads, struggling with a situation or a project: wrestling with myself for answers.
Until there, on the battlefield, the emotional fervour fires hot enough for the myth to appear. It somehow needs that heated charge to be born, to spring from the depths of my very own winter.”
— Vicky Yiannoutsos
