bunnyjadwiga

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Stopped by the Public library today and picked up some more mythology books. (I'll post more on the Norse/Viking ones later). I thought I'd share my thoughts on the other picture books that cover Demeter/Persephone here.
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I've got a few more versions to discuss in a later post, and then I'll touch on the Norse picture books as well.

In general, the mythology of Demeter/Ceres gets short shrift in most settings. In part this is because in Rome, Ceres was a plebian Goddess; it's also because some of the juiciest bits of her mythology were probably bound up with the Eleusinian Mysteries, whose details could not be told under pain of death.

Of course, there is one story that shows up in the mythological corpus with great regularity: the Rape of Persephone. It is described in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter:
http://ancienthistory.about.com/library/bl/bl_text_homerhymn_demeter.htm
which is where most tellers of the tale get the bones of their story.
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