PERSEPHONE
Maiden and queen of the underworld, expresses a woman's tendency toward compliancy, passivity, and a need to please and be wanted by others.

Vulnerable Goddess

Virtues:
Ability to be receptive
Appreciative of imagination and dreams
Potential psychic abilities

Vices:
Depression
Manipulation
Withdrawal into unreality

Also know as Proserpina, Persephone is the goddess queen of the underworld, wife of the god Haides. She is also the goddess of spring growth, and worshipped alongside her mother Demeter in the Eleusinian Mysteries. This agricultural-based cult promised its initiates passage to a blessed afterlife.As a maiden, while playing in a flowery meadow with her Nymph companions, She was seized by Haides and carried off to the underworld as his bride.

Her mother Demeter despaired at her dissappearance and searched for her throughout the world accompanied by the goddess Hekate bearing torches. When she learned that Zeus had conspired in her daughter's abduction she was furious, and refused to let the earth fruit until Persephone was returned. Zeus consented, but because the girl had tasted of the food of Haides--a handful of pomegranate seeds--she was forced to forever spend a part of the year with her husband in the underworld.

Her annual return to the earth in spring was marked by the flowering of the meadows and the sudden growth of the new grain. Her return to the underworld in winter, conversely, saw the dying down of plants and the halting of growth.Persephone was usually depicted as a young goddess holding sheafs of grain and a flaming torch.