Some myths are so old, they are retold, translated, illustrated, taught, borrowed, softened, sharpened, and moralised until the original story begins to feel like a natural law. Persephone was abducted. Demeter grieved. Hades took. Zeus compromised. The seasons were born.
It is one of the oldest and most enduring patterns in Western mythology: a young goddess disappears into darkness, a mother’s grief starves the earth, and the world is only restored when a woman is divided between two realms. Spring and summer belong to Demeter. Autumn and winter belong to Hades. Persephone seems to belong everyone, except to herself.
Persephone was the goddess of spring, associated with flowers, youth, innocence, renewal, and light. Yet even light can become a cage if it never changes. A meadow, however beautiful, can become suffocating if it offers no shadow, no depth, no danger, no unknown path beyond the expected one.
That was the point at which my own imagination entered this myth. The Abduction of Persephone: The Untold Story began with my own mischievous question: What if Persephone was not dragged helplessly into the Underworld, but went because she wanted something different? What if she was bored? What is she was a woman who felt desire?
In this version of Persephone’s story, her descent to the Underworld is not simply an event that happens to her. It is an act of curiosity, rebellion, and self-definition. She is not rejecting life. She is seeking wholeness. That shift changes everything.
The traditional myth is often framed around violation, grief, possession, and patriarchal negotiation. In reimagining this story, I wanted to disturb that structure without pretending its emotional power does not exist. Demeter’s grief still matters. The rupture still matters. The world still withers when Persephone disappears, but the question of abduction becomes more complicated, intimate, and unsettling.
Persephone’s mother loves her, but her love becomes stifling when it disallows Persephone’s agency. This is the conflict that must be negotiated by Persephone if she is to become her own woman. (Okay, goddess, but woman, too). The story therefore becomes not only a romance between Persephone and Hades, but also a coming-of-age tale about the painful separation between mother and daughter.
In a sense, to grow is to descend into the murky realm of love, grief, sexuality, ambition, danger, independence, knowledge, or solitude. It may be voluntary, reluctant, joyful, frightening, or all of these at once because transformation rarely takes place in perfect weather. Growth asks us to pass through uncertainty and to leave the familiar meadow and enter the region where no one can follow us in quite the same way.
This is one reason the Underworld mattered so much to me. I did not want it to be merely a place of punishment, gloom, or gothic spectacle. I wanted it to feel like a realm with its own ecology, dignity, and emotional weather. In my version of the old myth, the Underworld responds to feeling. When Hades falls in love, his realm changes. The Cerberus are overjoyed, The Shades become more alert, The Furies soften, the rivers shift, the air becomes lighter, and the light learns to behave differently.
Allowing Hades’ emotions to reshape matter was one of the great pleasures of writing this story, making it something between the subgenres of magical realism, dark romance, and mythic retelling. Hades’ desire unsettles the architecture of death because his divine emotion has consequences of cosmic proportions. I wanted to lean into that idea fully, because it turns romance into something much larger than personal fulfilment.
In The Abduction of Persephone, love is not simply a feeling between two characters. It is a force capable of changing the laws by which their worlds operate. That is also why the story could not remain purely comic, although it began with comedy.
My first imaginative glimpse of Persephone and Hades was playful. She would refuse to behave. He would fake solemn grandeur. She would puncture it. He would be disoriented by her irreverence. I loved the idea of the god of the dead, ancient and powerful and accustomed to obedience, being undone not by a weapon or prophecy, but by a young goddess demanding snacks and a tour.
The line: “If I am to remain here, we will not begin with solemnities designed to make me behave. We will begin with snacks and a tour” still captures something essential about my version of Persephone. She is not naïve. She is not passive. She is not impressed by theatrical masculinity. She enters the Underworld and immediately begins rearranging the emotional furniture.
But as I continued to write their story, the humour deepened into intimacy, and the intimacy deepened into consequence. This felt necessary because, when love is real, it cannot remain decorative forever. It must cost something. It must expose the characters. It must change them in ways neither can fully control.
For Hades, love is awakening. He is not simply the brooding male figure redeemed by a bright woman, because that would be too easy and too familiar. Instead, he is a god who has mistaken stillness for order. His loneliness has become structural. His realm is stable because he is emotionally sealed. Persephone’s arrival disrupts that seal. She reminds him that even death is part of a moving pattern.
For Persephone, love is not surrender. It is expansion. Her bond with Hades does not erase her connection to Demeter, nor does it make the upper world irrelevant. Her task is more difficult than choosing one realm over another. She must become the bridge.
That, to me, is the emotional heart of the myth. Persephone is not half-owned by her mother and half-owned by Hades. She is the living threshold between life and death, growth and decay, bloom and burial. Her movement between worlds is not a punishment but a sacred rhythm. She restores balance because she understands both sides.
The epilogue reflects that balance: autumn descending gently, winter following, spring unfurling, summer burning golden again. Yet the world is not simply restored to what it was before. Something has changed. The pattern now contains memory. The seasons continue their dance, but they do so with a deeper knowledge of love, loss, and return.
The eBook version of The Abduction of Persephone: The Untold Story, plus the 25 original artworks I used to develop the plot, are available as a bundle on Gumroad.