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Girl with grapes keeps me in touch
with faith
Uri with his statue of Persephone
Strictly speaking, the young woman with the grapes shouldn't
be in my garden. She is a flagrant breach of the Commandments,
and I don't even have to be looking at her to be committing
a sin.
It's not the seventh Commandment that I'm flouting, you'll
be relieved to know: the grape girl and I are not carrying
on adulterously behind the tennis courts.
It's the second of God's laws, the one about sculptured images
of other gods. I'm red-handed, with no alibi - it's an open-and-shut
case.
The girl is made of stone, and her name is Persephone, the
daughter of Mother Earth and the wife of the King of Hades.
I ordered her for my garden after reading her story in Ted
Hughes' electrifying Tales From Ovid, a collection of poems
translated from 2,000-year-old Latin stories.
All the stories revolve around transformations - wicked sailors
are turned into dolphins, a lovelorn girl is reduced to an
echo, the boy she adores becomes a flower.
The original version of Pygmalion is here, which inspired
the Bernard Shaw play that became the musical My Fair Lady.
The originals, with poems such as Venus And Adonis and Pyramus
And Thisbe, were one of Shakespeare's prime sources. My favourite
was the story of Persephone.
I remembered hearing the story when I was a schoolboy in
Cyprus. She was so beautiful that the king of the dead fell
in love with her and carried her off as she gathered flowers,
to be queen of the underworld.
Her mother, Ceres, the goddess of the Earth and its harvests,
became so distraught that she almost wasted away. She pleaded
with Zeus, the king of the gods, who ruled that Persephone
could come back to the world of the living, as long as she
had not eaten or drunk anything in the kingdom of the dead.
Poor Persephone! She had taken a single bite from a pomegranate,
and so was condemned to spend half the year with her beloved
mother, and half with her heartless husband.
And that's why our gardens spend six months in bloom and
six months in hibernation. When my Persephone arrived from
Chilstone, the garden ornaments firm, I was intrigued to see
that my underworld queen had grapes wrapped around her wrist.
Perhaps in one version of the story she eats those instead
of a pomegranite. The story certainly exists in many versions:
when I first heard it she had her Greek name, Persephone,
but Hughes calls her Proserpina.
My classical dictionary, by Dr J Lempriere, lists her other
names: Core, Theogamia, Libitina, Hecate, Juno inferna, Anthesphoria,
Cotyto, Deois, Libera.
My edition of Lempriere's dictionary was published in 1831,
incidentally, two decades before Darwin turned ancient history
on its head.
The chronological table at the front of the book lists, without
irony, the principle moments of civilisation, and dates them:
world created 4004BC, Noah's flood 2348BC, Tower of Babel
2247BC, Joseph sold into Egypt by his brothers 1728BC, birth
of Moses 1571 BC, Saul crowned in Israel 1095BC.
Those dates are regarded as nonsense now - just as the legend
of Persephone is seen as nothing but a folk tale, a children's
story.
But Lempriere was a serious scholar, and the priests who
prayed to Persephone were holy, wise men. The 'truths' which
Darwin revealed will no doubt be seen as nonsense one day,
overturned by a new set of explanations.
As a reason for the seasons, I like the story of Persephone
better than a table of astronomical data and metereological
calculations based on the Earth's tilt and orbit.
It is exciting to think of a woman making her return from
the realm of the dead, bringing new life to the planet, after
a long, bleak, comfortless winter.
Her annual resurrection is not unlike the one Christians
all over the world will celebrate next week. No one can seriously
deny the significance of the death of winter, the birth of
spring in the Easter story.
Christianity would not have become a worldwide religion if
the first priests had swapped the festivals of Christmas and
Easter, putting the rebirth in mid-winter and the feasting
with the buds and the blossom.
The rites would have been meaningless. That gives me another
reason to love my Persephone: there's no danger that Mel Gibson
will film her story as an orgy on sadistic violence.
I believe that when God warned us not to bow down to false
Gods, the Jewish faith was in danger of being swept aside
by pagan religions. In the 21st century, Greek myth is no
threat to Judaism - the only spiritual movement that seriously
threatens our beliefs is atheism, fuelled by the science which
tore up Lempriere's chronological table.
The girl with the grapes in my garden helps me stay in touch
with a more simple human faith, a spirituality fed by stories
and metaphors, not equations and theories.
Email
him at uri@urigeller.com
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