Proserpina- Roman GodDeity"Queen of the Underworld"

The Abduction

Proserpina was gathering flowers on the plain of Enna in Sicily, violets and lilies spilling from her lap, when the earth split open. In Ovid's Metamorphoses, Pluto burst from below in a chariot drawn by black horses, seized the girl, and drove back into the ground. The earth closed over them. Only scattered flowers remained.

In Claudian's De Raptu Proserpinae, the meadow itself was the trap. Jupiter had arranged it. Cupid's arrow had already struck Pluto and filled him with desire. Ceres had kept her daughter secluded on Sicily, and her companions Diana and Minerva could do nothing against the god who took her.

Ceres's Search

Ceres searched the world with torches lit from Etna's fires. In the Fasti, she refused food and rest. In the Metamorphoses, her grief became wrath: she smashed the ploughs, killed the oxen, blighted the seeds in their furrows. Sicily, the world's granary, became wasteland.

The truth reached her through water. The nymph Cyane had witnessed the abduction and dissolved into a spring from grief. She floated Proserpina's dropped girdle to the surface. Arethusa, who had passed through underground channels, told Ceres she had glimpsed Proserpina enthroned below. The Sun, who sees all from his chariot, confirmed it. Jupiter had to intervene. Without Ceres, the earth would produce nothing, and humanity would starve.

The Pomegranate Seeds

Jupiter sent Mercury to the underworld. Pluto agreed to release Proserpina, but she had eaten pomegranate seeds during her captivity. The ancient law held: anyone who ate in the realm of the dead was bound to stay. Ascalaphus, a shade of the underworld, witnessed her eating and reported it. Proserpina turned him into a screech owl.

The compromise divided her year. She would spend the barren months with Pluto below and return to Ceres each spring. When she descended, her mother's grief killed the crops. When she returned, Ceres's joy brought them back.

Queen of the Dead

In the Aeneid, no living soul could enter Proserpina's kingdom without her price. The Sibyl of Cumae told Aeneas to find a golden bough hidden in a dark wood near Lake Avernus, sacred to Iuno Inferna. It would come freely to the hand of one fated to enter and return. Guided by two doves sent by Venus, Aeneas found it on a holm oak and carried it through the underworld to Proserpina's threshold.

She received other visitors. When Orpheus descended to recover his dead wife, Proserpina heard his music and wept. She persuaded Pluto to release Eurydice, on the condition that Orpheus not look back. He looked. In Apuleius's tale, Psyche descended to Proserpina's court and obtained a box of the queen's own beauty, a radiance that even Venus desired.

Roman curse tablets, inscribed on lead and buried in graves, invoked Proserpina by name across the empire. They asked her to bind enemies and send the dead against the living. At the Secular Games of 17 BCE, dark-colored victims were sacrificed at an underground altar in the Campus Martius, their blood draining directly into the earth to reach Proserpina and Pluto below.