Yael Dragwyla First North American rights

email: polaris93@aol.com 21,000 words

NEW MAGICKS FOR A NEW AGE

Volume II: The Magickal Sky
Book 2: The Planets
Part 11: Persephone
Sephirah i = √-1

Alternate names: Proserpina, Lilith, Kali, T’sou Mou, Eris, Medusa, Ezeli

Chapter 1: General Discussion

Where is Persephone’s physical niche in the Solar System, Her orbit around Sol? What are Her
physical characteristics? What is Her astrological influence upon us and our living world?
I originally postulated Her existence to help fill out the system of astrological dignities presented in
Volume I of this work, placing Her Sephirah “above” Kether and on the Left-Hand Transcendental Pillar
of Power on the Sphere of Life as Mars’s higher octave. As such, of the four Signs which heretofore
have not had more than one Planetary ruler assigned to them, She would thus be much more compatible
with Virgo and Gemini than with Libra and Taurus. I therefore assigned Her mundane rulership to the
Virgo and Gemini, so that She would thus co-ruler them with Mercury.
Since Her physical existence so far has not been scientifically confirmed, at best we can only make
educated guesses concerning Her physical whereabouts and characteristics, not to mention the details of
Her astrological influence on our world. But we do have Her niche on the Tree of Life to go on, along
with the natures of Her mundane rulerships, Virgo and Gemini, and that of Mars, Her lower octave.
Given these, perhaps we can arrive at some useful idea of where She is in the heavens, and what She is
like on both physical and esoteric planes.
Virgo is that Solar month that witnesses the Dying of the Light, when the year begins visibly dying,
in spite of the sometimes overwhelmingly oppressive heat that often characterizes this time of the year in
many parts of the Northern temperate zone. Though the days then are still longer than the nights, they
are no longer the overwhelming, endless, light-filled abysses of Summer’s height. The flowers are gone,
replaced by fruit and seed intended to outlive the death of the parent plants in Winter’s icy grip, safely
buried away in Earth’s depths until the Return of the Light in early Spring and, along with it, the vital
warmth of the Sun of the young year. The wild grasses and herbs have gone sere and brown and dead;
the harvest of cereal crops – what, oats, rye, barley, rice – begins. The beauty of Spring and early
Summer are gone – replaced by the mature, fulfilled beauty of harvest. With the year’s death also comes
it fulfillment, just as the death of youth is its replacement by full maturity, sexual and ripe, productive of
both work and children, part of the endless process of Life’s self-perpetuation.
On the other hand, Gemini, the last Solar month of Spring, is the high point of the young year,
exhibiting all its energy and young beauty, its adolescence, as it were. It is the time of the flower rather
than the fruit; maturity and fulfillment have yet to come. It is the time of promise, of joy in expectation
of fulfillment of that promise. As Virgo is the time when its fulfillment actually begins, so Gemini is the
time when the promise is first made.
As the mundane ruler of both, this hypothetical Planet shares their characteristics, which together
give a startlingly close capsule portrait of the life of Korè, better known to us as Persephone, daughter of
Demeter, Who is the Earth-Mother, the Goddess of the Grain.
 Pluto is named after the Roman God of Death, the Underworld and the Afterlife of the same name.
He, in turn, was named after Plouton, Wealthy One, the Greek euphemism for Hades or Dis, on Whom
the Roman God Pluto was modeled. As previously discussed, once when Hades was in a randy mood,
touring the daylight world in His black chariot, in search of likely nymphs with whom to tryst,* He saw
the maiden Korè dancing in a meadow with Her maiden-attendants, and fell head over heels in love with
her. Accordingly He abducted Her and carried Her off, down into the dark, hidden depths of the Earth, to
His kingdom, Tartaros, to make Her his Queen.

*Or, as a young friend of mine who is entirely too big a fan of Leonard Nimoy puts it, “In search of . . .
tush.”

The grief-stricken Demeter thereupon refused to allow any plants to bloom or bear fruit after Her
daughter was taken from Her in this way. With the help of the fearsome Hekate, She strove to force the
Olympian Gods to help Her to rescue Her daughter, and finally refused outright to nurture the world of
the living until Her daughter was returned to Her. Zeus, King of the Olympians, finally became
desperate enough to risk the wrath of His elder brother, Hades, and try to get Hades to return the girl to
the daylight world. Otherwise the Earth would never again bear living fruit or seed, and all life would
perish for lack of food. So for the sake of the living world he begged Hades to return Korè to Her mother
– adding that Demeter’s daughter would be returned if Korè had not yet tasted the food of the dead.
As it happened, Korè had eaten seven pomegranate seeds from a pomegranate She had picked – or,
according to some variants of the story, which Hades Himself had offered to Her – in Tartaros. Hades
therefore refused to return Her to Demeter, citing the condition which Zeus had put on His order. But the
Earth was dying; so in desperation Zeus bargained with His brother, in the end gaining a conditional and
grudging permission from Hades for Korè – Who had now changed Her name to Persephone, to signify
Her new status as a married woman – to return to the world of life: She could go home, but only for part
of the year; because She had eaten of the pomegranate seeds, the food of the inhabitants of Hades’
realm, she would have to bide in Tartaros as Hades’ wife and queen for part of each year.*

*The elements of this story strongly suggest that rather than being dragged off, kicking and screaming,
down to Tartaros by Hades , and there raped by him, Persephone went willingly enough. This may
in fact be a story of the initiation into the pleasures and mysteries of full sexual maturity, and
perhaps into Tantric Magick as well, of a pubescent girl by a mature man, perhaps a high priest or
shaman.
From time immemorial the pomegranate, with its brilliant crimson flesh and its sweet-tart taste,
has been a symbol of sexual maturation and sexuality, and of the attractions of sex. In many folk-
tale renditions of the biblical Genesis, the fruit of the Tree of (Sexual?) Knowledge of Good and Evil
by which the Serpent tempted Eve, and Adam through Eve, was a pomegranate. Eating of a
pomegranate or its seeds is therefore symbolic of participation in sexual activities.
Persephone ate seven pomegranate seeds while in Tartaros with Hades. Seven is an archetypal
number of Venus, a Goddess of the Sexual Mysteries, of sexuality and sexual pleasure. This
reinforces the symbolism of the pomegranate.
Either Persephone freely took the pomegranate from which She ate, on Her own initiative, or
Hades offered it to Her; it was not forced upon Her. This implies that the sexual activity or
initiation symbolized by the eating of the pomegranate was entirely voluntary on Persephone’s part,
or even initiated by Her.
There is also the change of name from Korè, Persephone’s name as a young girl, not yet
sexually bonded to a male lover, to Persephone, Her name as a married woman whose married has
been fully consecrated. This also suggests formal initiation, perhaps into Sex-Magick and not just
sexual maturity alone; normally initiates into a new religion or Magickal fraternity or sorority put
aside the name they had before their initiation and take a new one with some symbolic connection to
their new spiritual life and whatever Gods are associated with it, to signify their bond with those
Gods. After all, Persephone co-rules Her Signs with Mercury, Who is Thrice-Great Hermes, God of
Magick and Magickians, especially those practicing some form of Sex-Magick.
The story of Persephone and Hades may have had its origins in actual historical events, and then
been made into an allegory of initiation into full heterosexual maturity of young female initiates by
 older, male high priests, or perhaps a cult practicing one or another school of Sex Magick. The
elements of the story themselves suggest that this may be the case. And with all due respect to
“politically correct,” “modern” “feminism,” it is not true, even of patriarchistic societies which by
our standards were in general harshly oppressive toward their women, that all women instinctively
fear and detest men, or would rather avoid sex with them if at all possible. Many or most women are
in fact heterosexual by native temperament, and seek out sexual contact with men of their own
choice, even when very young, as Korè was. So this could well be the story of such a young woman
and her older lover, one of the (perhaps rare) instances of a marriage which was sought by both
parties to it and quite happy in all respects, including sexual ones.
Seen in this light, the story’s description of Demeter’s behavior becomes rather sourly
humorous, somewhat different than its usual interpretation, which is that of the loving mother who
grieves wildly for a child who has been stolen away and ravished by some brute. Instead, it may be
that Demeter is simply displaying a rather extreme form of anticipatory “empty-nest” syndrome of
the sort frequently seen in older women whose lives have for years been completely centered around
their children, otherwise having little substance. When the youngest of these children rather
graphically demonstrates that he or she is no longer a child by becoming involved in sexual activities
with one or more partners, whatever the sex of the latter, often Mommy goes to pieces and begins
throwing tantrums because her raison d’être and the entire basis of her existence is about to
permanently depart, and she has nothing to take its place! Of course the motives behind the mother’s
behavior include extreme resentment of the sexual partner her offspring has chosen. She attempts to
get the “straying” “child” to return home, using persuasion, threats, and whatever extortionate means
seem to her to have the most promise in this regard. (Of course, the “child’s” “sin” is in this case not
so much that he or she becomes involved with someone of that dread, horrible, terrible, awful
Opposite sex, but rather that he or she becomes involved with anyone else whatsoever, of whatever
gender, in a relationship which is likely to sever the parasitical parent-child bond that has existed so
strongly for so long between the doting mother and her offspring, regardless of the gender of the
latter. – This interpretation shouldn’t be taken as a paean of praise of heterosexual sex, for it isn’t.
Some of us is . . . and some of us ain’t . . . and some of us is both . . . and some of us is neither; and
if you don’t dig it, sweetbuns, well, sorry about that!)
So the legend of Persephone’s “rape” by Hades may actually be a story of the young girl who elopes
with her lover-lord, of her own free will and desire; her mother’s extreme rage at this development;
and the steps to which her relatives had to go to keep all parties concerned pacified without either
breaking up the new marriage or driving the enraged and terrified mother into carrying out whatever
threats she had made concerning what she would do if her daughter did not come home this very
instant!! (It should be remembered as well that while we urbanized, civilized moderns are quite
properly aghast at the idea of a girl who is just entering puberty, say, about 12 or 13 years old,
having a liaison with a fully mature man, one in his 30s or 40s, particularly on her own initiative,
things were very different not so long ago. The women of earlier agricultural or pastoral societies –
the sort among whom this story originated – generally married and began having children at what we
would consider an unhealthily early age. This was because the younger they were when they had
their first children, the healthier they themselves were at the time, and consequently the more likely
any children they might have would be to survive to produce children themselves. This pattern was
selected for by the exigencies of existence at the time – exigencies which are not the case in the
Developed countries today, it is true, but which are in effect even in the present in many Third
World and Fourth World areas of the world.

And so, for six months or so out of the year, Persephone lives above ground with Her mother,
Demeter. During this time, in Her joy at Her closeness to Her daughter, Demeter provides for the
growing, flowering, and fruiting of plants of all kinds, and all the world is filled with Her bounty. But at
the end of Summer Persephone returns once again to the Underworld, to stay there for four to six months,
living there with Her Lord Hades in the vast, tectonic darkness of the realms of Death. While She is
there, Her mother, in Her grief at being separated once more from Her daughter, withdraws from the
world, so that nothing grows during Autumn and Winter, and plant-life dies away. During the Winter
months all life shares in Demeter’s grief, suffering privation and cold, waiting with longing for the return
of warmth, light, and fertility which the coming of Spring brings to the land, due to Persephone’s annual
reunion with Her mother.
 This story may have its roots in a time when only women practiced agriculture. It is also probably
an allegory of the Triple Goddess in all three of Her aspects: Maiden, Matron, Crone. Korè, the Maiden,
Who only became Persephone after Her marriage to Hades, represents the unripe stalk of wheat or other
edible grass; Persephone, the Matron or Wife, symbolizes the same plant when it has ripened; and
Hekate, the Crone, is the plant after it has been harvested. Evidence to support this is given by the
origins of the name “Persephone,” which comes from the words phero and phonos, meaning “She who
brings destruction”; another form of Her name is “Persephatta,” from ptersis and ephato, meaning “She
who fixes destruction.” In addition, the Roman form of Her name, “Proserpina,” means “the Fearsome
One.” On the other hand, “Hekate” literally means “one hundred,” and may refer to the hundred Lunar
months of the term of the Sacred King of pre-patriarchal Mediterranean cultures, and therefore to the
sacrifice of these Sacred Kings at the end of their reigns, as offerings to the Gods of harvest, fertility, and
protection of the land and people. 221
A fit queen indeed for the frightful realms of Death and their grim Lord! As Korè, She Who became
Persephone was the tender maiden, innocent and vulnerable, like the beautiful buds of early spring and
the first green shoots of wheat, corn, barley, rye, oats, and rice. But She is also Persephone, Proserpina,
the Fearsome One, She Who Brings Destruction; and in this aspect She is the Harvest Queen, ruler of the
time of the dying off of the life of the land, which in ancient cultures was often commemorated by the
annual sacrifice of a beautiful, potent, vital youth, the Year-King, who willingly gave his life as sacrifice
so that the fertility of the land and good fortune of the people would thereby be ensured. Whereas Hades
or Pluto, Persephone’s consort, rules death and rebirth, and the months Scorpio, the time of the land’s
Great Dying, and Aries, the time of its rebirth and renewal, Persephone Herself rules the preparations for
death and the aftermath of birth, represented by the months Virgo and Gemini. So it is appropriate that
the first of the Transcendental Planets, the first to be correlated with a Sephirah “above” Kether, be
named after Her.
But where in the Solar System is She, and how does She manifest on the physical plane?
Logically, Her orbit should lie near Pluto’s. In fact, it is quite likely that She is the mysterious trans-
Plutonian “Planet X” that will account for most or all of the still-unexplained perturbations in the orbits
of Uranus and Neptune, an inhabitant of the vast Kuyper Disk extending from just inside Pluto’s orbit to
somewhere out near the beginning of the Öort Comet Cloud, 200 astronomical units from the Sun. If so,
Her distance from the Sun would be on the order of at least 10 times that of Jupiter,*† for otherwise we
would have found Her by now; and at that distance, if Her mass were responsible for the anomalies in
the orbits of Uranus and Neptune, She would have to be very large. If so, She could even be large
enough to qualify as a “brown dwarf,” a body not quite large enough to be a Star in its own right, but one
at least eight times the mass of Saturn, large enough that its enormous mass would give it a relatively
high internal temperature due to gravitational “cooking.” That is, the gravitational crushing of the mass
of such a body would raise its overall temperature to levels such that it would give off a considerable
amount of radiant heat. If so, the question then arises: why haven’t we found Her by now, due to tell-
tale anomalous traces of infra-red out on the fringes of the Solar Systems, where no radiant body should
be?

*As calculated according to the Bode-Titius Law that determines the average radii of the orbits of the
Planets around Sol. Originally formulated by Johann Titius of Wittenberg and popularized by
Johann Elert Bode, director of the Berlin Observatory, in 1772, this is determined as follows.
We begin with the sequence of numbers {0,3,6,12,24,48,96,192, ...}. To each number in this
sequence, we add 4, thereby obtaining the sequence {4,7,10,16,28,52,100,196, . . .}. If the distance
from the Earth to the Sun is taken to be 10, Mercury’s orbital distance from the Sun corresponds to 4,
Venus’s to about 7, Mars’s to 16, the asteroid belt’s to 28, Jupiter’s to 52, and Saturn’s to 100.
Given this, Uranus’s orbital distance from Sol should correspond to 196, as indeed it does. But after
Uranus, this relationship begins to break down; Neptune’s orbital distance from Sol corresponds to
about 276 in this series, rather than 388, as predicted for it according to this series, and Pluto’s
corresponds to about 388, the slot predicted for Neptune.
In fact, it has been found that Planets beyond the orbit of Uranus fall into half-integral “slots” in
this series, rather than whole-integral ones, as the Planets from Sol outward through Uranus do. The
significance of this has to do with the way in which the original series {0,3,6,12,24,48,96,192, ...}
was calculated. The second number in that series, 3, is equal to 3 = 1 x 3 = (2/2) x 3 = 2 0 x 3; the
third is 6 = 2 x 3 = 21 x 3; the fourth is 12 = 2 x 2 x 3 = 2 2 x 3; the fifth is 24 = 23 x 3; and so on.
The first number in the series, 0, signifies an origin or reference point to which all the remaining
 numbers in the series are compared, thus is not really part of the series itself; in terms of exponential
notation, it would be calculated as 3 divided by 2 raised to an infinite power (any finite positive
number, e.g., 2, raised to an infinite power gives infinity; and any finite number, e.g., 3, divided by
infinity gives 0). So this series can be represented in terms of the series of exponents of 2 involved,
as follows: {[ negative infinity], 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, ...}.
As calculated by means of the Bode-Titius formula, the orbital placements of the Planets are
referred to as “slots” and numbered according to this last series. With reference to that series,
Mercury occupies the “minus infinitieth” such slot (and how fascinating it is that in many traditional
Tarot packs Mercury’s Trump, I, The Magus, has ∞, the symbol of infinity, shining on the forehead
or the hat of the Magus of the card’s illustration!); Venus, the 0 slot; Earth, slot 1; Mars, slot 2; the
asteroids, slot 3; Jupiter, slot 4; Saturn, slot 5; and Uranus, slot 6. Neptune occupies slot 6.5; that
is, His place in the Bode-Titius series corresponds to (3 x 26.5) + 4 of the original series. And Pluto
occupies slot 7, corresponding to 3 x 27 + 4 in the series.
Similarly, the next Bode-Titius slot after Pluto is 7.5, 54.7 astronomical units away from Sol,
and the one after that is slot 8, at 77.2 AU. (An astronomical unit is equal to the average distance of
the Earth from Sol, about 149,597,900 km or 93 (!) million miles.)221a

†When Persephone was given in marriage to Hades, it was with the provision that She spend 4-6 months
out of the year with Him and the rest of the time with Her mother Ceres. A Planet at least 10 times
as far from Sol as Jupiter would appear to be in retrograde motion for close to six months out of the
year, that is, decreasing in celestial longitude over time (moving in a Westward direction through the
Zodiac night after night) rather than increasing (moving in an Eastward direction) in the normal
fashion. When a Planet is in retrograde motion, it is closer to the Earth than at other times; in the
case of Planets from Mars outward, Earth is between Them and Sol when They are retrograde, hence
two AUs closer to them than when They are in direct motion and Sol lies between them and the
Earth, while Venus and Mercury lie between Earth and the Sun when They are in retrograde motion,
on His far side otherwise, twice Their orbital distances from Sol farther from Earth than when They
are retrograde. Many astrologers believe that when a Planet is retrograde, it signifies that persons
and affairs governed by it are in a passive, receptive state, that as far as the matters of its domain go,
it is a good time to “review, return, rewrite, re-edit, re-negotiate, reconcile, reunite, or do things that
generally involved a turning to the past” (Anthony Louis, Horary Astrology: The History and
Practice of Astro-Divination [St. Paul, MN: Llewellyn, 1991], p. 210). In questions of timing, it
may signify something in the past rather than in the present or the future. According to Zipporah
Dobyns, in Expanding Astrology’s Universe (San Diego: ACS Publications, 1988),

. . . The apparent backward motion seems . . . to indicate a tendency to turn the

attention and energy of that part of the nature inward before it expresses out.
. . . [P]eople who trust their inner direction are . . . more creative and
individualistic. Numbers of very successful and prominent people have had six or
seven retrogrades in their natal charts. . . . I think retrogrades indicate the urge to look
inside for answers, and it is our choice whether we trust that inner creative
potential. . . .
– Ibid., p. 95

In other words, retrograde Planets provide glimpses and experiences of what Carl Jung called the
Collective Unconscious and the ancient Greeks, the Underworld – the domain of Persephone’s Lord
Hades! That Her Planet, somewhere in the Kuyper Cloud beyond Pluto’s orbit, perhaps as much as
10 times as far from Sol as Jupiter is, would have an annual retrograde period of nearly 6 months is
an eerie echo on the physical plane of that codicil of Her marriage-contract with Hades that specified
She live with Him in the Underworld – the Collective Unconscious, to which retrogrades give us
access – for 6 months out of the year.

That we haven’t found such traces doesn’t mean they aren’t there. They could be hidden from us by
anything from swarms of comets and/or meteors to vast dust-clouds, drawn to Her by Her great
gravitational field, swathing Her like an enormous shawl worn to keep Her warm in the in the frigid
abysses of the outer reaches of the Solar System.
 It may be that She is “Shiva,” the “Death-Star” which some paleontologists believe was the ultimate
cause of the extinction of the dinosaurs as well as numerous other “Great Extinctions” which our living
world has undergone, even the almost inconceivably lethal “First Event” that terminated the Permian and
the Paleozoic Era of Earthly life, 245 million years ago, when 96% of all species then in existence
abruptly became extinct, for reasons as yet unknown. Somewhere out there may be a “failed Star,” a
brown-dwarf type of Planetary body which, moving on its long, achingly slow path around Sol, taking
perhaps tens or even hundreds of thousands of millennia to complete its lonely, hypermillennial journey
orbit around our parent Star, occasionally jostles loose great comets or other bodies from the Öort Cloud,
the vast swarms of comets that almost certainly form the last marches of the outer Solar System. If the
quasi-Planet Shiva actually exists way out there at the farthest reaches of Sol’s gravitational field, it is
thought, it must have an orbit even more eccentric than Pluto’s, so that most of the time it is much farther
out from Sol than even the bulk of the Öort Cloud. But every so often, once every few tens of millions of
years, it comes closer in, close enough to knock loose one or a dozen or a hundred or more comets and/or
meteors, which then fall back toward Sol, into the inner Solar System. Most of the time these bodies are
far too small to present any danger to Earth, or else have trajectories which take them wide of Earth’s
position when they intersect Her orbit on their way to the Sun, so that they simply fall into Sol or through
the Solar System’s disk and out of it entirely, never to return, doing no harm to us.
But in a few cases, they are spot-on target, and large enough to do terrible damage to the Earth.
Falling into Earth’s oceans and/or Her land masses, they raise enormous clouds of water-vapor and rock-
dust and liberate titanic bursts of energy when they impact Earth. Like the horrible scenarios of nuclear
Fimbulwinter postulated by Carl Sagan and his colleagues, such impacts would leave our skies shrouded
with a vast black pall of dust and clouds screening out almost all of Sol’s warmth and light for months or
even years. Green plants would die back almost entirely, and terrestrial life of all kinds would die en
masse. Hellish storms would sweep across the land, the rain and sleet sluicing minerals down into the
oceans, disturbing the mineral balance of the littoral and pelagic marine communities, doing great harm
to them. This same process, which is viciously erosive, would strip uncountable billions of acre-feet of
fertile soil and even bedrock from the land and dump it into the rivers and seas, choking them with
sediment and accelerating the eutrophication of land-locked bodies of water to rates utterly lethal to
every form of life they now support. As a result, there would be mass extinction on a global scale, hitting
land-based ecosystems even harder than marine, riparian, or lacustrian communities, wiping out
anywhere from 15% to 95% of all species on land and a somewhat smaller number in the rivers, lakes,
seas, and oceans. Everything dependent upon green plants for food, not to mention those very plants,
themselves, would be especially hard hit. The Earth would be covered with the dead, Her seas choked
with rotting fish, invertebrates, and kelp-mats. Only the eaters of carrion would thrive – jackals, feral
dogs, vultures, and the endless buzzing flies and the slow, creeping carpets of fungus and mold which
would eventually enshroud huge stretches of what had once been dry land. And then even they, too,
would begin to die back as they finished off that jubilee bounty set before them by an angry Star fallen to
Earth, and starve to death for lack of food as the once-living beings who had been set before them at that
feast had starved to death as a result of the death of most of the world’s green plant-life. And once more,
Life would begin to radiate out of what few refuges it had found for itself during the long, freezing,
planetary night of horror brought by that fallen Star, and, as has so often happened in Life’s long history,
that Life would begin mutating, changing, diversifying, producing countless new species and genera and
even whole classes of organisms to fill the niches vacated by all the ones that had been killed off . . .
She Who Brings Destruction, indeed! If “Shiva,” the “Death-Star,” actually exists somewhere out
there, at the Stygian borders of the Solar System, it would certainly be a fit candidate for Persephone.
But the existence of such a brown-dwarf “killer Star” is still only hypothetical; so far, no data exists to
support the idea of its existence beyond occasional catastrophic extinctions of Earth’s life, such as the
ones that closed the Permian and Cretaceous Ages. Using statistical methods whose value has not yet
been proven, the proponents of “Shiva” as the underlying cause of those extinctions have tried to find a
clearly periodic pattern among those extinction events that would lend support to the assumption that
some outside agency, acting at regular intervals, lies behind them. But so far, they haven’t succeeded.
Another possible candidate for Persephone would be one of the systems of asteroids, such as the
richly-endowed belt of asteroids between Mars and Jupiter; the asteroids associated with the orbits of
Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus; the Centaur group near Saturn and Uranus; or the Kuyper Disk that begins
where Pluto’s orbit leaves off and ends where the Öort cometary cloud begins. Especially in the case of
the “classic” system of asteroids with orbits between Mars and Jupiter, such swarms of small planetoidal
bodies signify either that a Planet or Planets once existed where the asteroids are now but were somehow
destroyed, the asteroids being their remains, or that for some reason a planetary body failed to form out
of the material the asteroids now comprise, this material thus being the remains of still-born fetal Planets.
Could Persephone comprise the totality of all the Solar System’s asteroidal systems? Is She the
Intelligence of Sol’s population of asteroids, the Spirit of Planets which were either somehow destroyed
or else never had a chance at life, being still-born in the womb of Time?
Or does She comprise the Solar System’s populations of comets? Theoretically, these include the
comets that make up the Öort-Opik Cloud, a vast swarm of comets with aphelia between 20,000 and
200,000 AU from Sol, first postulated by J. H. Öort in 1950. According to Öort, a gigantic, diffuse,
spherical reservoir of gas, dust, and comets surrounds our Sun at that distance. Passage of near-by Stars
perturbs these comets, so that some then fall toward the center of the Solar System, a few of them
becoming terrifying, brilliant comets such as Halley’s Comet, the most historic comet, every appearance
of which has been traced back to 240 b.c.e.
Öort estimated that, assuming this system of comets actually exists, somewhere at the outer bounds
of the Solar System, the Cloud contains about one hundred billion comets. These comets probably
originated as planetismals in the nebula out of which the Solar System first formed, but perhaps are also
continuously replenished over the Aeons with new material as Sol makes His rounds through the vast
clouds of gas and dust in many parts of our galaxy. When a comet, falling Sunward from the Cloud,
passes one of the giant Planets such as Jupiter or Uranus, it may be thrown into a short-period orbit
around that Planet or the Sun, with relatively frequent passages through our skies. Otherwise it will
return to the Öort cloud, not returning to the inner system for a very long time, taking between 10,000 to
a million years to come back again.
If the Öort-Opik Cloud exists, Persephone might comprise it together with the total population of
Sol’s meteors. The latter are closely associated with comets, and may have their origins as the remains
of comets which, coming too close to a Planet or the Sun, were torn to pieces by tidal forces, the resultant
debris taking up orbits near Sol because of His vast gravitational pull. Such an assignment for
Persephone would be extremely appropriate. Comets have been regarded as omens of vast, world-
shaking evils, such as great plagues, war, and the death of kings, in all human cultures from our earliest
beginnings right down to the present. For example, Halley’s Comet, which has a period of about 76
years, was later taken to have presaged the Norman Conquest by its return of 1065 e.v., one year before
the Norman Conquest.
Current astrological theory assumes that comets presage history-making events, but operate through
individuals whose birth coincides with their appearance, so that their ultimate effects are so delayed as
often to be overlooked. For example, Mark Twain was born in 1835, during that year’s return of Halley’s
Comet, one of its more splendid appearances; he died in 1910, at its next return, as he himself foretold:
“I came in with the comet – I’ll go out with it.”
Winnecke’s Comet, with a period of about 6 years, visited us in 1904 e.v., the year of Crowley’s
Cairo Working, which kicked off the Aeon of Horus (Age of Aquarius) and the 20th Century, in all its
glory and horror, for fair; it was accompanied at the time by Temple’s comet, which has a similar period.
Donati’s Comet, with a period of about 5,000 years, which made its first appearance of record in
June 1858 and attained its maximum brilliancy on October 9th of that year, was a factor in the nativity of
Theodore Roosevelt, who was born on October 27, 1858. (The year of the birth of his cousin, Franklin
D. Roosevelt, was also marked by the appearance of one of the brightest comets of record, which was
visible in broad daylight, even at noon.)
The Great Comet of 1843, which was never given a name, was apparently a periodic comet, with an
orbit of some 400 years. A tail 200 miles in length, the longest of any comet of record, must have made
it a glorious sight. Its perihelion distance was about 300,000 miles, extremely short, and carried it
through the Sun’s corona. Some think it may have presaged the discovery of the Malefic Neptune in
1846.
Comets are something like gigantic snowballs with small, rocky cores, as if some cosmic brat had
made them up to hurl at the Sun. Passing the Sun, they give off vast clouds of hydrogen and other gases,
permanently losing them, but even old comets can be quite massive, and ones new to the inner system
and Sol’s heat could be enormous. The average cometary nucleus has a mass of 10 9-1011 kg, a diameter
of 200-1,200 meters, and a density about a fifth that of water, but they can be far larger and more
massive, with a higher proportion of rock. A really large comet impacting upon our world could do
tremendous damage to Her – and us.
Meteors, which are either mixtures of nickel and iron or masses of rock, and which may comprise the
cores of dead comets that strayed too close to a Planet in their journey Sunward, can also wreak havoc
when impacting upon a Planet, particularly the larger meteors. Such impacting meteors, called
“meteorites,” gouge deep craters in the surfaces of Planets, some of them frighteningly large. Such
craters can be seen even on Earth today, in spite of the action of weathering and tectonic re-
arrangements of the crust, such as the famed Meteor Crater that lies between Flagstaff and Winslow,
Arizona, or the giant meteor-scar that makes up the central section of Hudson’s Bay, Canada, so big that
it wasn’t until human beings first went into space that we could see it for what it was.
And, whether it was a meteor or a comet, something impacting on the Yucatan Peninsula 65,000,000
years ago was so large that it left a crater 180 km in diameter. In the process, it generated enormous
tsunamis of hot mud which, flowing North, rushed up Texas watercourses emptying into the Gulf of
Mexico, far into the interior of what is today Texas and Oklahoma. And whether it was the primary
agent of dinosaur doom or only a johnny-come-lately accomplice of other, more local ecological factors
in the drama of the great extinctions of that time, its impact occurred right at the end of the Cretaceous
Era of Earthly life. River of mud pushed up Texas rivers by the impact of that something on the Yucatan
Peninsula at the close of Cretaceous.
Even though many of the more violent impacts of comets or meteors on our Planet included in
Earth’s remote past, in some cases they are still clearly visible today, even very old ones, graphic and
terrifying testimony of Earth’s catastrophic past. And what has happened before could always happen
again – as the whole world saw in July 1994 e.v., when the 23 pieces of a comet that had been torn to bits
by Jupiter’s titanic gravity as it came near and was captured by Him sometime early in 1993 e.v.,
slammed into that giant Planet’s darkside in rapid sequence, one after the other, as if shot from a
semiautomatic weapon.*

*”Waal, Y’r Honor, what I did was, I sawed the pin down an’ shot the sucker in the back!”

In addition to cometary and meteoric impacts on our world per se, passing comets that envelop us in
their spreading tails may be responsible for some of the plagues of epidemic disease which we and other
forms of life on our world are subject to from time to time. Some astronomers and life-scientists believe
that it is possible that microbiological life can be carried through space from world to world via meteors
or comets, say, as a result of volcanic eruptions on one world that hurl rock and vapor high enough into
the air for these to escape into space, or meteoric impacts which chip gigantic divots out of a world,
hurling them clear of that world’s gravitational field. If microbial life should be encysted in or resident
on such media at the time, or somehow caught by it on its way into space, that life might be able to make
the long, long journey through interstellar space to other Planets, even those of other Stars. Bacteria can
often form spores and cysts to ride out times of scarcity and hardship, in which form they could possibly
even survive the frigid, airless wastes of interstellar space. And if they were actually contained within
the material of such ejecta, covered by thick layers of rock and other protective material, they could also
survive the extreme heating of the outer layers of their rocky space-ships due to atmospheric re-entry
when they finally landed on some Planet suitable for their form of life. Under certain circumstances,
viruses could similarly ride out such a long, hellish journey.
Some astronomers even speculate that some forms of life may have evolved in interstellar space
rather than on any Planetary surface, somewhere out there among the vast clouds of gas and dust that
stretch between the Stars. If so, then as Sol makes His long circuit of the galaxy again and again over the
turning Aeons, conceivably He and all His attendant worlds, ourselves included, could have crossed the
paths of colonies of such space-borne life, which would almost certainly be microbiological in form.
This material would have collected on comets and asteroids as well as on anything else in the Solar
System, especially on the bodies making up the Öort-Opik Cloud. Later, some of these bodies, jostled by
a passing Star, perhaps, would have fallen into the Inner System, bringing their microbiological cargo
with them, the latter descending to our world riding the backs of meteors or the tail of a passing comet.
In either case, new and extremely virulent forms of plague organisms could have been brought to
Earth in this way, in the trains of comets. And this would account for the reputation as harbingers of
plague which comets have acquired over the centuries. Persephone co-rules Virgo, the Sign ruling
viruses and viral diseases, with Mercury. Could She be the ruler of plague-bearing comets from the Öort-
Opik Cloud?
Or could She be one of the Moon’s of Hera (Durga), the second one of the hypothetical Planets,
discussed in the chapter following this one, or even part of a double-Planet system that includes Hera? If
so, She wouldn’t be unique in this; Earth and Luna comprise one such double-Planet system Pluto and
Charon, Pluto’s Moon, another. 222
 She could even be associated with things beyond our Solar System. An alternate theory concerning
the terminal KT event or events, the agent or agents responsible for the massive extinctions among the
land life on our world 65 million years ago, including that of the dinosaurs, is that one or a series of
supernova occurring relatively close to the Earth bathed our world in successive floods of deadly high-
energy radiation, thereby doing enormous harm to our world’s biosphere, including killing off the
dinosaurs and numerous other forms of life. There is evidence for this in the form of supernova remnants
in about the right part of our galaxy. These catastrophically suicidal Stars would have been close enough
at the right time to have done a wrap on a great many forms of life on our world, especially those on
land, unprotected from high-intensity radiation by the protective waters of the oceans or lakes. Could
Persephone be associated with such truly interstellar bodies, phenomena, and processes?
Whatever the ultimate nature of Her physical avatar, its nature and behavior will have a strong
symbolic correspondence with Hers, as the other Planets have with Their respective Intelligences, as
discussed above. Like Korè/Persephone, Her avatar would bring life and death; like Virgo and Gemini,
it would promote and end fertility and health. As the physical representative of the Will of Persephone,
Queen of the Underworld, Whose Sign is Virgo, it would be associated with the Stygian cold and
darkness, the mephitic fumes and the tectonic upheavals of the Underworld. Like Korè, virgin daughter
of Demeter, tender maiden, Whose return to the upper world brings the light and life of Spring with Her,
associated with the Sign Gemini, it would be associated with fertility, or at least its chemistry, and with
the burgeoning promise of Creation. Beyond this, we really don’t know yet where to look for Her or Her
sisters among any other Transcendental Planets that may exist in our Solar System. For the moment our
speculations must be confined to what we know of Her nature as the higher octave of Mars, associated
with the first of the Transcendental Sephirah, i = √-1, and the nature of the Signs in which She is strong.
 Chapter 2: Astromythology and Psychospiritual Aspects of Persephone

Notes

Mars rules the warrior, and battles; Persephone, His higher octave, rules the collective expressions
of these – the soldier, and war, i.e., organizations of individual warriors engaged in whole systems
(strategies and grand strategies) of battles. Mars represents courage in the service of self, family, and
community; His apotheosis is Martius, Who is both Soldier and Shepherd. Persephone represents
courage in the service of species, civilization, and Planet – of all Life; Her apotheoses include the
Fireman and the U.S. Naval Construction Battalion – the Seabees” – as well as the Goddess Kali. She is
Yin aspect of the 93-Current, Thelema = Valor in the service of Life = Agape (Hera is the Yang aspect of
that Current, Nurturance in the Service of Life).
Pluto rules death; Persephone, His Queen, rules the organized instruments of civilization that bring
about death on a mass scale.
Persephone shares an interesting distinction with Mercury, Whose dignities She co-rules: like Him,
She moves between the Upper World and the Underworld and back again in regular cycles. Unlike
Mercury, Who, as Messenger of the Gods as well as the Psychopompos, travels regularly between
Heaven and the Underworld, Persephone moves between the Underworld and Earth; but still, She,
Pluto, and Mercury are the only three Gods who routinely travel between Pluto’s realm and other regions
of the Universe – and only She and Mercury do so regularly (Pluto’s rare visits to the Upper World are
usually when He is feeling randy and in search of nymphs to seduce). Mercury has a highly irregular
orbit; among other things, its angle of inclination to the plane of the Solar System is the second highest
known of all the Planets – only Pluto has a greater one. It may be that when Persephone is finally
located, Her orbit will have an inclination to the plane of the Solar System even greater than Pluto’s, very
nearly perpendicular to it.
Persephone’s marriage to Hades is the acknowledgement that death is the price of community, sexual
love, and sexual reproduction, that death makes possible rebirth through others among our kin and
community. Just as Hades represents death among individual eukaryotic organisms, Persephone
represents their rebirth via their kin and works, in the body and the spirit; without Hades, neither sex nor
eukaryotic life itself would be possible, and we would all still be amoebae, sexless, potentially immortal
– but doomed to certain ultimate extinction when the Earth dies from old age or catastrophe, because
amoebae are not capable of the collective effort necessary to institute interstellar colonization projects
and carry them out successfully. Persephone is the higher octave of Mars, because the warrior knows and
accepts the inevitability of personal as the price of love and for the love he or she has for others, a love so
great he or she is willing to risk horrible death in service to them. For this reason, Mars/Ares is
Hades/Pluto’s partner, and the lower octave of Persephone, the collective expression of Mars’s work in
the form of warrior lodges and orders, armies, urban fire, police, and other emergency-service
departments, etc. Eukaryotic death (Hades) makes possible aerobic life (Persephone); thus
Hermes/Mercury is the partner of Persephone in the same way that Ares/Mars is of Hades. Death
(Hades) makes possible community (Uranus); thus Uranus, another avatar of Persephone and Mercury’s
higher octave and Saturn’s partner (Saturn = endings), is exalted in Scorpio, Pluto’s diurnal rulership.
Thus Persephone and Hades are two unalienable aspects of one dyad, the life-death-rebirth cycle of
eukaryotic existence. In the infinite number of Underworlds of which Hades and Persephone are Lords,
the power and might of Hades (the Underworld or Collective Unconscious) is utterly necessary to the
continuance of Life (Persephone) in all its beauty, joy, pleasure, and poignancy, just as Death cannot
exist without Life. The recognition and naming not only of a Lord but a Lady of Death/Rebirth is
perhaps the greatest gift of ancient Greece to us: by this we are enabled to become conscious of and
familiar with death as a part of ourselves, so that we may understand death’s meaning and purpose for
Life, and “become friends” with it, as Carlos Castenada’s mentor, Don Juan, put it. This gives us as
living beings the ability to use death to advantage, rather than being terrified by the idea of it and
spiritually – in the Will – paralyzed by that fear.
We can handle the fact of death and loss because we have within us a biological legacy, represented
in our stories and pictures of Hades, the Grim Reaper, Pluto, etc., that enables us to harness these in the
service of life and love. The price of love is death – as the hidden treasure of death is love. Love and
death are inextricably woven together in the mammalian brain (hence ours), their neuroendocrinological
representations indissolubly interdependent. Thus every symbol of we have of Death is simultaneously
one of Life – and Love. The partnership of Love and Death in our lives is reflected by the opposition of
the dignities of Their Planets in the horoscope: Venus/Hera (Shakti/Durga [Eros]) wedded forever to
Pluto/Mars (Kali/Shiva). We are animals who love one another – and who die. It is our tragedy and our
triumph to be aware of it. Love and Death have been the great shaping forces of human evolution,
partners and mates rather than enemies. The story of the marriage of Persephone and Hades is the story
of that partnership.

Persephone is the bride of Hades (Pluto), just as, sociobiologically and evolutionarily speaking, death
is the price of community, sexual love, and reproduction. Death makes possible the forwarding of our
spirit and our genes through others. The death of the individual eukaryotic organism, represented by
Pluto, makes possible the transcendence of collective or genetic death* through love. The true warrior**
knows and accepts the inevitability of personal death because he/she puts the highest possible value on
love and community, and is willing to love and die in service to them. Thus Ares (Mars) works in
harness with Hades. The death of the individual eukaryotic organism (Pluto) makes possible aerobic life
(Persephone); thus Hermes (Mercury, God of the Wind) works with Persephone, as Ares does with
Hades. Death (Hades/Pluto) makes possible community (Uranus, Venus in Aquarius, Amphitrite
[Sephirah Aleph1] representing Hypersea and the modern ecological community, human and otherwise);
thus Uranus works with Hades. This community of Gods mirrors the communities of various kinds of
organisms on the Outer Planes (as above, so below).

Love & Death = Death & the Maiden = Hades & Persephone. Their work enables a population,
ecosystem or community to become the organism. Genotypes overlap – you can consolidate your genetic
gains and get rid of genetic losses via natural selection (death) and genetic overlapping (love) – all genes
benefit. In this way, mutations – which are inevitable – become assets for a population or taxon, because
they facilitate the evolutionary creativity necessary to enable populations to survive and adapt to
inevitable catastrophes (e.g., the disaster that terminated the Cretaceous). A microbe (i.e., a prokaryotic
organism such as a virus or bacteria, at least insofar as we currently understand the nature of such
organisms) can’t die, hence can’t love, and is thus more easily made extinct; mutations are deadly to
such an organism.

Persephone: the mother of Earthly life, the damp clay that served as Earthly Life’s first matrix, the
template upon which the first genetic molecules formed.

Persephone is alga to Hades’ fungus. Lichen, an organism found growing on tombstones and other
objects in graveyards (realm of death/rebirth), are thus symbolic of Their union.

* What Jonathon Schell, in The Fate of the Earth [Avon Books, 1982] calls the Second Death.

**As opposed to the adrenaline-freak and other sociopaths.

 Chapter 3: Correspondences

Gods:

As the Mother of Terror, She is associated with the disruptive Gods, the Hags, and the Gods and
Goddess of Night, Death, and Terror. The Gods and Goddesses associated with Her also include all
Goddesses of Battle and Death: Durga, Kali, Chandi, and Parvati of Hinduism; Pallas Athena/Medusa
and Aphrodite of the Greeks; Venus Victrix of the Romans; Astarte; Maîtresse Ezeli of Voudon;
Liberty of America and France; the Valkyries of the Norse; Sekhet of Egypt. In addition, She is
secondarily associated with all Spirits and Gods and Goddesses of Fire, the least stable of the Elements,
the one most prone to causing terrible destruction due to even a momentary lapse of control, such as the
Hindu Agni, the Norse Loki, the Greek Hestia, the Roman Vesta, and the Celtic Lugh.* In particular,
some of Her avatars in various world cultures include the following:

*See Volume 2, Part 2, Chapter 14, Section 2.4 for a detailed discussion of the asteroid Vesta, associated
with the Gods and Goddesses of Fire.

Egyptian: Black Isis, Goddess of Battle and Vengeance; Sebek, the crocodile God, Who destroys
failed souls and enemies of the Gods.
Greek: Persephone, Queen of the Underworld, wife of Hades, the Lord of Death; Eris, Goddess of
Chaos and Discord; Hekate, ruler of all sorcerous and necromantic Workings; Medusa, the
third or Crone aspect of the Patron Goddess of Athens, Pallas Athena;* and Phobos (“Fear”) and
Deimos (“Terror”), companions of Ares, the War-God, a lower octave of Persephone.

*The suppression of the cult of Medusa and Her analogs by patriarchal cultures in the Attic peninsula and
elsewhere in the Mediterranean basin is commemorated by the Star Algol, “the most evil and
unfortunate Star in the Heavens.”223 See Volume 3, Part 10, Chapter 1 for a detailed discussion
concerning this Star and its historical, mythological, astrological, and Magickal significance.

Roman: Proserpina, analog of Persephone, the wife of Pluto, the Roman God of Death, Power, and
vast wealth.
Hindu: Kali, Warrior-Goddess, Goddess of War, Death, and Destruction, and Her avatars Chandi and
Parvati; Shiva, Who declared, “I am become as Death, Shatterer of Worlds.”
Szekeli (Romany Gypsy): The Black Madonna, a Westernized, Christian version of Parvati similar
in nature to various modern appearances of Mary, e.g., Our Lady of Fatima, Our Lady of
Guadalupe, etc.
Chinese: T’sou Mou, Warrior-Hag Goddess Who is Guardian of the North Star (the one we call
Polaris), a slayer of demons Who is thus an analog of Kali, Chandi, and Parvati as well as of the
Archangel Michael.
Japanese: The Goddess of Fujiyama Mountain
Sumerian:
Babylonian:
Judeo-Christian: the Archangel Mikhail, Defender of the Throne of God, War-Leader of the Hosts of
Heaven, slayer of demons and destroyer of evil; Lilith, the evil shadow of the Queen of Heaven,
ELITh, who murders infants and causes spontaneous abortions and miscarriages.
Christian (specifically): the Black Madonna, a Christianized version of Black Isis (originally Kali,
brought to Europe by the Romany Gypsies, whose ancestors were Dravvidians, natives of the
Indian sub-continent), Who is supposed to promote fertility in those who pray to Her; Our Lady
of Guadalupe, a Christianized version of the Corn Maiden of Mexico and Central America, Who
prophesied Apocalyptic events to Her followers; Our Lady of Fatima (ditto); various beings
 described in the New Testament Book of Revelations, e.g., the Fourth Horseman of the
Apocalypse and the Star Wormwood.
Islam:
The French Enlightenment: Liberté (Liberty is, after all, one of the most terrifying states we can
suffer).
Scandinavian: Hel, Goddess of the Underworld
Russian: Baba Yaga, the Witch Who lives alone in Her house with the chicken-foot in the midst of
the World Forest.
Hungarian: the Devil’s Grandmother (Üaz Ordog Nagyanyaja; for those of you not familiar with
the Devil’s Grandmother, but who are acquainted with the artistic insanities of Gary Larson, you
may remember the one of the anteroom of Hell and a sweet old lady with horns on her head
serving cookies to the damned souls waiting there as her son, the Devil, cries, “Mama, no!”
She’s the lady you turn to to help get you out of the some vile trap her grandson has gotten you
into)
Africa:
Southeast Asia:
Celtic:
Polynesian: Pere (Pele), the Spirit of the volcanoes of the Pacific Rim and of the tectonic dynamics
that fuel them, sister and wife of the God Ta’aroa (Kanaloa), God of Death, Hell, and the Deep
Sea.*

*Persephone’s twin nature (reflecting Her nocturnal mundane dominion over Gemini), manifesting
simultaneously as Destroyer and Life-Giver, is clearly exemplified by Pere (Pele). Volcanic
eruptions can lay waste to vast regions of the land around them, burying cities and killing tends of
thousands of their inhabitants. Yet soil compounded of volcanic ash and other debris from such
eruptions is the most fertile in the world. Sometimes, without regular fertilizing with the ash from
such eruptions, soils become sterile and barren. Persephone’s Destroyer aspect is manifest in the
immediate destruction and devastation caused by such eruptions, while Her aspect as Life-Giver is
manifest in the long-term benefits accruing to a region due to repeated volcanic eruptions.

Native Australian:
Central American:
Eskimo:
North American native cultures, general: Spider-Woman (Standing Woman, in Dine/Navajo
culture).
American folklore: Little Iodine
Science-fiction:
Voudon: Oya, Goddess of the Netherworld, Death, Transformation, and Corruption, Warrior-Wife of
Chango (or Shango, as He is also known; He is the Haitian avatar of Jupiter).
SubGenius: Aunt Nunu, an incredibly ancient Goddess with a head shaped like a beehive, a body
shaped like a model for the “before” photos in advertisements for fat-farms, a nasty temper, and
an attitude subject to change without prior notice; Narnini, Her rotten little sister, or cousin, or
whatever She is, Who is even worse; Yacatisma; G’Broag’fran (?); Y’geartal.
Discordianism: Eris, Goddess of Chaos and Discord; the Tasmanian Devil (Warner Brothers cartoon
character)
H. P. Lovecraft: Cthulhu; Yog-Sothoth.
Stephen King: The villainess in Misery – she is both terrifying and transformative
The Land of Oz: the Witch Mombi who transforms Ozma into a boy, Tip, in order to hide her away
from the world until she can make best use of her (see Baum’s The Land of Oz [1903 e.v.]); the
queen of the black-skinned people who live hidden from the world in one of Ruth Plumley
Thompson’s Oz novels (they are basically good, but rather paranoid of outsiders, with some
reason; not sure which novel this was in)
LaVeyan Satanism: Lilith, Kali

God-Name in Hebrew:
World Religions:

SubGenius, as a Discordian religion, under the aegis of Ra-Hoor-Khuit; Bujinkan ninpo taijutsu,
because of its egalitarianism towards women and its inclusion of them in complete combat-arts training,
which is potentially superlatively lethal, as well as its libertarian attitudes overall.

Archangels:

Azrael, Samael, Mikhael

Angelic Choir:

Angel:

Angels given by Barrett, et al.:

Olympic Planetary Spirit:

Intelligence:

Spirit:

Spirits given by Bardon, Barrett, et al.:

Name of Planet in Hebrew:

t y l y l (Lilith)

Commandment (from Exodus 20: 3-17):

She has no Commandment from Exodus as such, but the Commandment of the Order of the Eleventh
Commandment: “Thou shalt not devastate the Earth or its life” (from Sterling Lanier’s marvelous novel
of post-nuclear holocaust/ecocatastrophe, Hiero’s Journey [1974]) is associated with Her.

The Ten Plagues of Egypt (from Exodus 9 and after):

Persephone is the Mother of Plagues of all kinds, hence She is associated with all ten of the plagues
visited on Egypt in Exodus, including the Death of the First-Born (actually, the Death of the First Rank
of Egyptian Society, the Aristocracy), the Plague of Locusts, the Plague of Darkness, the Plagues of Hail
and Fire, the Plague of Boils, the Plague of Murrain, the Plague of Flies, the Plague of Lice, the Plague of
Frogs, and the Plague of Water Turned to Blood (i.e., the turning of the waters of the Nile to the color of
blood). All of these catastrophes could have been the various respective results of a vast volcanic
explosion somewhere out in the Mediterranean (some modern Biblical and archeological scholars think
that the explosion of Thera about 3,500 years ago might have been the one responsible for the plagues
mentioned in Exodus). Hades, Persephone’s consort, rules volcanism, and one of Persephone’s avatars is
the Polynesian Goddess Pere (Pele), Who rules the processes of volcanism and tectonic activity in the
Pacific Ring of Fire, so if the plagues mentioned in Exodus were actually the result of the eruption of a
monster Mediterranean volcano and its aftereffects, this would be very much in keeping with
Persephone’s nature. She is also associated with comets, including the Centaurs of the Kuyper Cloud and
expatriates therefrom, such as Chiron, and a comet falling into the Mediterranean or Atlantic or other
relatively near-by body of water could also have accounted for most or all of these plagues.

Verses of the Creation Story from Genesis (Genesis 1-3):

Genesis 1:20-25.

Other Biblical Material:

 The New Testament Book of Revelations, especially Chapters 6 and 9.

Cantos from the Inferno of Dante Alighieri :

Cantos VIII-XI

Cantos from the Purgatorio of Dante Alighieri :

Cantos from the Paradiso of Dante Alighieri :

Cantos XXVIII-XXXIII

Orders of Qlippoth:

Qlipphotic Spirit (from Kenneth Grant):

Amendments to the Constitution of the United States of America:

Amendment XI

“The judicial power of the United States shall not be construed to any suit in law or
equity, commenced or prosecuted against any one of the United States by citizens of
another State, or by citizens or subjects of any foreign state.

Amendment XVIII – Prohibition (the “Eris Amendment, Part I”)

(1) After one year from the ratification of this article the manufacture, sale or
transportation of intoxicating liquors within, the importation thereof into, or the
exportation therefrom from the United States and all territory subject to the
jurisdiction thereof for beverage purposes is hereby prohibited.
(2) The Congress and the several States shall have concurrent power to enforce this
article by appropriate legislation.
(3) This article shall be inoperative unless it shall have been ratified as an amendment
to the Constitution by the Legislatures of the several States, as provided in the
Constitution, within seven years from the date of the submission hereof to the
States by the Congress.

Amendment XXI – repeal of Prohibition (the “Eris Amendment, Part II)

(1) The eighteenth article of amendment to the Constitution of the United States is
hereby repealed.
(2) The transportation or importation into any State, Territory, or Possession of the
United States for delivery or use therein of intoxicating liquors, in violation of the
laws thereof, is hereby prohibited.
(3) This article shall be inoperative unless it shall have been ratified as an amendment
to the Constitution by conventions in the several States, as provided in the
Constitution, within seven years from the date of the submission hereof to the
States by the Congress.”

Other Documents and Artifacts Associated with American History:

Persephone is the 11th Planet, of which the Statue of Liberty is an apt correspondent. The Statue of
Liberty represents not only the influence of Uranus in the United States chart and history, but also certain
aspects of Persephone and their manifestation as major influences in the world as a whole. Among other
things, the statue is 111 feet from heels to top of head; 111 is the sum of the values of the Hebrew letters
spelling out Alpha, the path associated with Key 11. Further, the Statue rests upon a base in the shape of
an 11-pointed Star. Persephone’s independence of spirit and Her love of justice are also reflected in the
famous poem by Emma Lazarus that is graven on a tablet within the pedestal on which the statue stands:

The New Colossus

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,

With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me.
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

Other Americana pertinent to Persephone would include, e.g., famous works of Suffragette and
feminist authors; the Roe-vs.-Wade decision of the Supreme Court protecting abortion rights (although,
since this decision expanded federal power over individuals and set a precedence for allowing federal
control over the reproductive rights of citizens, hence was blatantly in violation of both the Constitution
as a whole and the Bill of Rights in particular, it was actually a step backward for women, and perhaps
should not be associated with Persephone); etc.

General astrological classification:

She is malefic, but with some benefic qualities; cold; nocturnal; dry; magnetic; feminine. For
most purposes, She is considered to be barren, but in terms of Her ability to foster life, indeed, to make it
possible in the first place, She is fruitful. The higher octave of Mars, She co-rules the Signs of
Mercury’s strength, and is the Transcendental equivalent of Uranus, Who is associated with Binah,
because of Her location at the head of the Left-Hand Pillar of the Transcendental Sephiroth (see Figs. 1-4
of Volume III, Book 2, Part 1 of this work).

General Qaballistic classification:

The place of Her Sephirah, i = √-1, on the Left-Hand Transcendental Pillar of Power of the Sphere of
Life of the 16-Sephiroth Qaballah* is at the intersection of that Pillar and the Second Plane of the Tree of
Life, corresponding to the place of Binah, associated with Uranus, on the Left-Hand Pillar of Severity on
the traditional Tree of Life (see illustrations in Chapter 1 of Volume 3, Part 2 of this work showing Her
position on the Sphere of Life).
Her Atu is the Path connecting Sephirah 1, Kether, with Sephirah ℵ2 (Aleph2), reflected in the
traditional Tree of Life by Aleph, connecting Kether with Chokmah. Associations with Her Path include
firemen; the United States Naval Construction Battalion, or Sea Bees (Mottoes: “Can Do!” and “First
We Dig ‘Em – Then We Die in ‘Em”). Images include: the Sea Bee logo; the plaque above the
memorial in New York City commemorating all those firemen who died at their jobs, or as a result of
them: “New York’s Bravest.”

*See Parts 2 and 3 of Volume 1 and Chapter 1 of Part 2 of Volume 3 of this work for a full description of
the new 16-Sephiroth Qaballah and the Sphere of Life, and some of the esoteric implications inherent
in them.

General attributions of the Tarot:

 The four* i’s (√-1’s).
A Trump has not yet been designed to represent Her. However, it should incorporate elements
symbolizing Her Path, which connects Kether with Sephirah Aleph2, the latter being associated with
Hera/Durga, the second hypothetical trans-Plutonian Planet (for more on which, see Volume II, Book II,
Part 12 of this work [file-name NM2BL.DOC]). This Path is analogous to Aleph of the traditional
Qaballah, represented by Trump 0, The Fool, associated with the Planet Uranus and the Element Air, so
until She is given a Trump of Her own, Trump 0 can be used for Her.

*Or six, if the Suits of Chaos and Quintessences/Stars are added to the traditional ones. The Six Persons
of the Tarot’s Court Cards would then include the Shaman or Old Man; the Hag, Crone, or Old
Woman; the Warrior, or Man in His Prime; Matron, or Woman in Her Prime; Maiden, Girl, or
Puella; and Youth, Boy, or Puer. The six Suits would be Wands/Fire; Cups/Water; Swords/Air
(Wood); Discs (Pentacles, Coins)/Earth (Metal); Fractals Patterns/Chaos (Void, chi); and
Stars/Quintessences (Tao). In that Tarot scheme, Persephone corresponds to the Person of the Youth
(Puer) and the Suit of Fractals/Chaos (Void) (similarly, Hera/Durga, the second hypothetical trans-
Plutonian Planet [for more on which, see Volume 2, Part 2, Chapter 12 of this work] corresponds to
the Tarot Person of the Hag and the Suit of Stars/Quintessences [Tao]). See Volume 1, Part C of this
work for detailed discussion of additional Suits for the Tarot.

Titles of Tarot Trump:

The Mother of Life, Grandmother of the Cherishing Waters of the World, Bride of the Lord of
Death, Mother of Mercy, Lord of the Last Resort of Innocence, the Fourth Horseman of the Apocalypse
(Revelations 6:7, NT), the Star Wormwood (Revelations 9:1-11), the Four Angels Bound at the River
Euphrates (Revelations 9:13-19), Keeper of the Way to the Stars, Lady of Yuggoth.

Correct Design of Tarot Trump:

There is none in the Golden Dawn system. An appropriate design for Her new Trump might be Kali,
dancing in triumph over the beheaded body of Shiva. A double-headed card, on the other hand, could
show Persephone, the Queen of Hell, upright, and Korè, Persephone as a maiden, reversed.

Titles and Attributes of Court Cards:

She associated with the four Pages/Princesses of the Tarot.

Titles and Attributes of Numbered Cards:

Alchemical and Pythagorean Associations:

Attributions from the I Ching and Taoist Cosmology:

Attributions from Ninpo (Way of the Ninja, Way of Wisdom) and Shinto (Way of the Kami or Gods):

Other Magickal Correspondences, according to Barrett, et. al.:

Day of the Week ruled by Persephone:

Geocentric: She rules the hours after sundown of the third day of the week (Tuesday night)

Heliocentric: The same

Hours of the Day ruled by Luna:

 Geocentric: She rules the third, tenth, and seventeenth sixty-minute periods after sunset on the third
night of the week (Tuesday night), and in general She rules any hour of the night following one
ruled by Hera/Durga and preceding one ruled by Pluto

Heliocentric: The same

Grades of the Temple:

Keeper of the Way Beyond the Temple (-1º = 12❒)

Colors:

Sephirah i = √-1:

King Scale: midnight black

Queen Scale: bone-white
Prince Scale: a complete rainbow, showing all seven traditional prismatic colors in order in a
typical rainbow, or even the complete electromagnetic spectrum
Princess Scale: the Mandelbröt Set or a typical Julia Set done in 23 colors

Her Path:

King Scale: a white star-burst with a black center on a background of gold (representing both
the motto “In the midst of Life, we are in Death” and entropy).
Queen Scale: a red star-burst with a golden center on a background of white (representing
menstruation or bleeding; the creation, enhancement, and diversification of Life as a result
of total disaster, such as comes about as the result of supernovae, volcanic eruptions, and
global extinction events such as the ones that ended the Permian and Cretaceous Ages; and
the motto, “in the midst of Death, we are in Life).
Emperor Scale: fractal patterns in a variety of colors
Empress Scale: all the primary and secondary colors run together to form a muddy, repellent
brown.

Persephone rules colors and patterns of colors that are associated with chaos, confusion, discord, and
unpredictability, such as fractals (e.g., part or all of the Mandelbröt Set) done in a variety of iridescent,
psychedelic, fluorescent and/or otherwise startling colors; colors associated with all kinds of explosions,
especially volcanic eruptions and detonations of nuclear or thermonuclear devices; Cherenkov radiation,
found in the wake of particles with velocity exceeding the speed of light in a physical medium; or the
light given off from particles trapped in the ergosphere of a black hole. She also rules infra-red,
microwave, radio, ELF, UHF, and VHF radiation, as well as the 3-degree Kelvin background radiation of
the universe that is the revenant of the Big Bang which began it all, because of the associations which
these have with entropy, its inevitable increase over time, and the final heat-death of all things that is the
ultimate working out of the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

Patterns:

Fractals, randomness, strange attractors.

Forms, shapes, lineal figures, geomantic figures, figures related to pure number, and numerological
associations:

Persephone is associated with figures and numbers related to or resembling those of Luna, Mercury,
Mars, Saturn, and Uranus, and combinations thereof, since She is Their apotheosis and culmination, as
well as Their origin and Womb.
She rules i = √-1, other imaginary numbers (i.e., the scalar multiples of i, which include the entire
Imaginary Line, comprising the multiples of all possible real numbers and i), and the complex numbers in
general (those of the form a + bi, where a and b are real numbers and i is the square root of minus-one).
Transcendental numbers such as π (pi) = 3.14159 . . . and e = 2.7183 . . . are also ruled by Her.
 She rules fractal patterns and fractal mathematics in general, as well as non-Euclidean geometry; the
mathematics of finite and transfinite sets of the form ℵj (Alephj), where the set-order j is not a positive
integer; Boolean algebra; in general, the mathematics of sets of entities which are not scalars, e.g.,
quaternions, vectors, multilinear vectors, etc.; and the mathematics any other weird numbers or other
mathematical entities.
By the same token, She rules such mathematical freaks as the 1-1/2-sided Moebius Strip or Afghan
Bands; the Klein Bottle, the 3-dimensional equivalent of the Moebius Strip; and Wild Spheres, which
are spheres topologically deformed into multiple- or infinite-armed monsters which, however much the
arms may proliferate and twist and turn and interlock, nevertheless never lose their basic topological
identities as sphere-equivalents.
Traditionally, the Inverse Red-and-Black Triangle of Female Power is associated with Her, as it is
with Kali and all other Sources of Yin Power. Thus the interiors of cones, as these point towards their
apices, are associated with Her, as are the mathematical constructs known as black holes.

Magick Square:

The Mystic Rose of 22 Petals (Regardie) – each Petal stands for one of the traditional 22 Paths or
Letters of the Hebrew alphabet, and its associated Tarot Trump
The Mystic Rose of 116 Petals – each Petal stands for one of the total set of 22 traditional Paths plus
the 94 new Paths of the new English-language 16-Sephiroth Sphere of Life, each with its own associated
Hebrew letter and traditional Trump or ASCII character, chemical element, and new Trump
Possibly an n x m something constructed on the surface of a Klein Bottle or something equally
esoteric

Stones, gems, and metals:

In the Periodic Table of the Chemical Elements, in general She rules the quantum-mechanical
determinants of the way by which the Periodic Table is divided into columns.
In particular, Persephone rules all stones associated with Spring, the Season with which Korè (Her
name before She was abducted/seduced and sexually initiated by Hades) is associated. She also rules
those stones and gems associated with the interior of the Earth, because She is Queen of the Underworld,
and those of the months and Signs of Autumn as well as of the Season itself, because She is the wife of
Death. Therefore She rules such stones as amethyst, associated with early Spring and its remnants of
Piscean malignance;* diamond, the stone of the malefic Star Algol, whose nature has much in common
with Hers;224 black and blue star sapphires, ruby, agate, and selenite, respectively stones of Uranus,
Saturn, Mars, Mercury, and Luna; 225 uranium, lead, iron, mercury metal, and silver (the metals of those
same five Planets), beaten, amalgamed or alloyed together; and agate and carnelian, respectively stones
of Gemini and Virgo. 226 She is also associated with bronze, lead, and steel, because of the use of these
metals in the making of weapons.
She rules power-metals such as radium, uranium, plutonium, and californium, all of which are
associated with extreme violence, catastrophe, devastation, and mass death – but also with the
opportunities for creation of new worlds and expansion and evolutionary radiation and diversification of
life that come about as a result of the disasters they create or are created by (e.g., nuclear and
thermonuclear explosions, supernovae,** etc.). Some of these metals, such as uranium and plutonium,
have been used to make weapons of mass destruction, such as the nuclear devices which were used to
obliterate the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and murder their inhabitants en masse, in 1945, or have
been involved in disastrous accidents responsible for the deaths, injuries, extreme illness, and mutated
genes of uncountable human beings and other organisms, such as the Ukrainian Chernobyl disaster of
1985.

*Because amethyst is associated with Pisces, ruler of the world’s oceans, it is also associated with
Ta’aroa, Polynesian God of Death, Hell, and the Oceanic Deeps, Whose wife/sister is Pere, the
Polynesian avatar of Persephone. For this reason the amethyst is doubly fitting for Persephone.

**Another indication of Persephone’s two-sided, Janus nature, appropriate to Her nocturnal exaltation in
Capricorn, whose Roman God was, of course, Janus, as well as Her nocturnal mundane hegemony
 over Gemini. It is within the interior of the huge, blue-white Stars which finally perish in supernova
explosions that the chemical proto-element hydrogen (its lightest form contains no neutrons, unlike
all other, heavier elements) is initially cooked into most of the heavier elements (save for those
which were in fact created earlier in the interior of the living Star, prior to its titanic self-destruction,
by the cooking together of H2 molecules into helium and still heavier atoms). In the final, suicidal
catastrophe that destroys such a Star, some of those heavier elements are still further crushed
together to form the transuranic elements, heaviest of all the chemical elements, beginning with
uranium (atomic number Z = 92) on up through such atomic monsters as the short-lived californium
(Z = 98) and beyond. If it weren’t for these enormous Stars addicted to life in the fast land,
dedicated to “living hard, dying young, and leaving a spectacular corpse,” few of the elements
necessary for the evolution of a living world such as Earth would ever have come into existence. So
we and our world are literally “such stuff as Stars are made on.” It was only by the death of Stars
that Life came into being. Supernovae are under the rulership of Persephone, as Goddess of Death –
and the life which their catastrophic, sky-cracking deaths made possible is under the rulership of Her
avatar of Korè, Goddess of Spring.

Finally, She is associated with the deadly and corrosive element oxygen – the sine qua non of
modern aerobic life, including Homo sapiens.* Also, oxygen is the primary element associated with
Mercury, co-regent of Persephone’s dignities.

*Still another example of Her twinned nature. Before the advent of photosynthesizing organisms, there
was almost no free oxygen in Earth’s nascent atmosphere, and Earth’s life was not then able to
survive exposure to large amounts of oxygen. But once photosynthesizing beings such as blue-green
algae, green plants, and aerobic, photosynthesizing bacteria appeared, these organisms quickly
liberated so much oxygen from atmospheric CO2 that all Earthly surface-dwelling and marine
anaerobes quickly became extinct. Gaia, Earth’s modern global biotic community, exists today only
because of the inconceivably vast, disastrous extinctions caused by the first photosynthesizing
organisms on Earth. Here again Persephone is associated simultaneously with mass death and the
new life thereby made possible or brought into existence.

Herbs and Trees:

Persephone rules black hellebore and mugwort, associated with the Star Algol, Her Stellar octave; 227
the pomegranate, traditionally associated with Her because it was the eating of its seeds that brought
about Her marriage to Hades; roses, lilies, crocuses, violets, hyacinths, and narcissi, favorite flowers of
the young Korè, which She was gathering when abducted by Hades; 228 poisonous plants, particularly
those that also are beautiful in appearance, such as oleanders; carnivorous plants; plants associated with
Virgo and Gemini, including all cereal plants, such as corn and rye (Virgo), and mosses (Gemini); 229 and
mistletoe and black poplars, associated with Her cults in the ancient world and mentioned in the ancient
religious stories about Her marriage to Hades. 229a
Algae and moss, very old forms of green plants that saw the advent of the Cambrian Era of Earth’s
Life. Algae form symbiotic relationships with fungi that manifest in the form of lichens, partnerships in
which the alga produces nutrients for the fungus by means of photosynthesis and the fungus helps break
down rock for soil for the alga via its secretions (and possibly also helps guard its partner from harm
from predators or disease). Lichens are one of the principle agents of the weathering and other
processes that ultimately convert bare, sterile rock to fertile soil. They are familiar to anyone who
has ever visited an old graveyard (an old word for which is lich-field, i.e., “corpse-field,” a place of the
dead), for they are almost invariably found on older tombstones, happily breaking down the stone of
which the tombstones are carved into dust over the centuries. Because of their association with the
places of the dead and the nature of the strange but very old, very successful partnership between these
two forms of life, which are from entirely different biological kingdoms, the alga and its partner the
fungus are perfect symbols for Persephone and Hades and Their own odd but oddly successful marriage.
The alga symbolizes the green growing things that burst forth in the Spring, and thus the warmth and
light of that Season and with them, the beauty of the young maiden Korè who was kidnapped at such a
time by Hades and taken by him down to his dark kingdom of the Underworld to become his bride. The
fungus symbolizes Hades, of course, since fungi are so frequently necrotrophs, feeding on the remains of
dead and rotting plant life or even animal life. And their symbiotic partnership is the symbol of the
bond between the world of light and the Underworld, both aspects of Life and necessary to it,
represented by the marriage of Hades and Persephone.
Finally, Persephone’s flowers includes roses – roses of nightmare white edged with the black of
space and the red of life, roses of stygian black edged with claret and white-hot steel, blood-red roses
edged with jet and ice.

Animals and Other Organisms:

In general, Persephone isn’t concerned with the individual as such. Rather, She rules the genotype,
the Person as a set of genetic and spiritual potentials. She therefore rules viruses, especially retroviruses,
and above all those which, like the HTL3 virus (which may be implicated in AIDS), are responsible for
deadly plagues. (See Part 10 of Book VI of Volume III of this work, on human and viral ecology and the
light these may shed on the phenomena and processes of exorcism, possession, and shamanism.)
Mitochondria, tiny organelles within eukaryotic cells of all kinds, including those which make up our
bodies, necessary to the cell’s ability to extract metabolically useful energy from sugar via oxygen-
facilitated combustion, are also among Her subjects. The partnership between mitochondria and the rest
of the organelles making up modern cells constitutes what may be the most ancient form of true
symbiosis on Earth. Virgo, Her diurnal mundane domain, is much concerned with abstract relationships,
abstraction as a process, systems, and the process of systemization, which is appropriate to Her
governance of one of the oldest and most fundamental and primordial of all biological systems, the
delicate, elegant partnership among the cellular organelles comprising the eukaryotic cell, without which
we would not exist.*

*Yet another simultaneous association of Persephone with both the living and the dead. Eukaryotic cells
first came into existence some time after the closest approach of Luna (Nota bene: Persephone was
originally a Lunar Goddess) to the Earth, which caused gigantic cracks to open in our world that
completely girdled Her at 45 degrees North and South of the equator. At the time this happened,
apparently there was already a flourishing biotic community, a complete biosphere, in place on
Earth, dependent upon the reducing atmosphere of methane, ammonia, and other highly toxic (to us!)
gases She then had. This community perished as a result of Luna’s close approach to the Earth, but
shattered bits and pieces of it hung on afterward. Some of the revenants of Earth’s original biosphere
somehow learned to co-exist in close cooperative associations within envelopes of organic
membrane, one or two molecules thick, thereafter living with one another in close symbiotic
associations, in microscopic versions of a complete Planetary biosphere. Mitochondria are
apparently descendants of those survivors of that ancient global catastrophe which made it necessary
for the evolution of cellular associations of the sort that finally became the modern eukaryotic cell to
facilitate the common survival of the members of these associations. Thus as a result of the death of
Earth’s ancient biosphere, with its reducing atmosphere and forms of life unlike any living today,
brought on by Luna, a lower octave of Persephone, Earth’s modern biosphere, Gaia, came into
existence. Here again Persephone is associated at once with both death and life – the death and life
of whole worlds.
For further discussion concerning the early Earth, the evolution of life, and the evolutionary
origins of the eukaryotic cell, see Neil F. Comins’ What If the Moon Didn’t Exist? Voyages to
Earths That Might Have Been (New York: Harper Collins, Publishers, 1993); James Lovelock’s
The Ages of Gaia (New York: W. W. Norton, 1988) and Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1979; and Lynn Margulis’ monographs Early Life (Boston: Science
Books International, 1982), Origin of the Eukaryotic Cell: Evidence and Research Implications for
a Theory of the Origin and Evolution of Microbial Plant and Animal Cells on the Precambrian Earth
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1970), and Symbiosis in Cell Evolution (San Francisco:
Freeman, 1981); her collaboration with Dorian Sagan, Microcosmos (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1986); and Mark and Dianna McMenamin’s monograph Hypersea: Life on Land (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1994).
 In fact, Persephone DNA code itself, the basic building-blocks of all known forms of Earthly life, the
alphabet with which is written the biological Logos. Mercury, Whose dignities She shares, in His
Graeco-Egyptian aspect as Hermes-Djehuti is one of the inventors of the alphabet, Who gave it as well as
the gift of writing to humankind. But before all our human alphabets there was the alphabet of Life
itself, DNA, and it is Persephone Who gave it, and with it the physical vehicle of the Spirit, to our world.
As mentioned in Part 1 of this chapter, She also rules plagues of all kinds, especially plagues of
disease, such as the Black Death and those which blight crops and kill livestock; plagues of vermin, such
as rats, flies, cockroaches; and plagues of animals, plants, and other organisms which, like the
grasshopper and its terrifying altar ego the locust, are benign in one phase and malefic in another , at
least from one point of view. From an ecological point of view, of course, such plagues are necessary
balancing mechanisms for the ecosystem, by which excess population and other sources of distress are
reduced to manageable levels. However horrific this re-balancing process may be in the short run, in the
long run it is absolutely necessary to the continuation of all life as well as to the well-being of ecosystems
and most individual members thereof. Here again Persephone’s twinned nature is expressed: the
nurturing destroyer, She Who Destroys in Order to Preserve and Heal.
There are some species of organisms with which She does have a close affinity. These are the ones
that parasitize the domesticated grasses, garden vegetables, and ornamental plants, such as the
rhizoctoniac fungi, or those which live in symbiotic associations with corn, rye, oats, and food-crops,
such as certain soil bacteria. The parasitic organisms would be associated with Her destroying aspect, the
symbiotic ones with Her benign one. Of course, all poisonous organisms, such as the duckbilled platypus
or scorpion (animals), the amanita mushrooms and ergot (respectively a mushroom and a rye-blight
fungus), and deadly nightshade, hemlock, mistletoe, oleander, yew, and belladonna (plants), are ruled by
her.
Because She is associated with chaos and discord,* She therefore would rule skunks, which are
famous for their skill at thoroughly disrupting picnics and scattering their erstwhile participants to the
winds within seconds; and ants, which not only add a similar spice to picnics, but also make war, that
dread apotheosis of chaos-machinery.

*The Goddess Eris, one of the very oldest Mother-Goddesses in Europe, is the actual ruler of chaos and
discord. She is also closely associated with the hypothetical trans-Plutonian Planet Tubman (for a
detailed discussion of Whom see Book II Part 13, Chapter 3 [NM2BMC.DOC] of this volume).

Traditionally She has been associated with bats and other creatures of night and dark caves. By
extension, She would be associated with black widows and brown recluse spiders, which lurk in dark
corners and have cruelly deadly venoms; cave-bears; owls, which hunt at night;* and such
mythological monsters as werewolves, vampires, and ghouls.
Other animals associated with Her are the dragon, the bat, the basilisk, the cockatrice, the snake, and
the toad.

*These are, however, ruled primarily by Pallas Athena, being sacred to Her and Her cult.

Persephone is also associated with domestic ferrets, which have an astounding capacity for mayhem
– all, of course, with little or no malice behind it . . .*

*As the reader may have surmised by now, the author keeps ferrets. – Or is kept by them, we’re not sure
who’s driving at this point, gang . . .

Ecological domain or process:

 Persephone rules epidemic disease and other plagues as mechanisms necessary to the health of all
ecosystems and of Gaia as a whole (see above).
Persephone rules the domain or biological “empire” of viruses and all forms of life based upon RNA
rather than DNA; anaerobic organisms of all kinds and all things that dwell deep within soil and rock,
e.g., sub-surface fungi and bacteria found at enormous depths within the Earth’s crust and perhaps even
the mantle of our world. In a sense, She is the mother of all Earth’s life, for it was She Who provided the
matrices of damp clay in which arose the first genuine forms of self-replicating organic molecules, the
precursors of the RNA and DNA templates in which are encoded the genes of all Earthly life.
In Hypersea: Life on Land (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), Mark and Dianna
McMenamin state that

. . . a living organism must actively direct a flow of nutrient-rich fluids or be intimately

associated with one that does. This is because . . . the most awesome aspect of the land
biota is . . . that it vastly surprises the marine biota in the physical connectedness of its
constituents. The organisms of the land biota found that intimacy was a way to survive
in an almost impossibly harsh environment. Lichens, which are found in landscapes as
hostile to life as the desert valleys of Antarctica, are the most familiar examples of this
survival talent – achieved through the symbiosis of algal and fungal components.
The land biota has done far more than just survive; [it] now surpasses that of the
sea in both biomass and diversity. [The land] organisms that are visible to the unaided
eye are actually habitats for rich ecosystems of smaller organisms that cover their
surfaces, probe their interstices, take up residence in bodily cavities and invade . .. even
the inner sanctum of their cells. Marine animals and even the few plants that live in
marine environments (algae are not members of the kingdom Plantae; they are
protoctists) also have symbionts and parasites, but the relationships seem sparse and
platonic compared with the orgy on land.
Ibid., pp. 3-4

Persephone rules the algae, among the first photosynthesizing organisms. The beginnings of Earth’s
vast treasure of atmospheric oxygen, ruled by Mercury, Who shares Persephone’s dignities and is one of
Her lower octaves, thus is collectively ruled by Her, as Her lower octave Uranus rules Earth’s atmosphere
as a living system. The humble lichen, result of the marriage of alga (Persephone) and fungus (Pluto),
was the first to break down the exposed rock of Earth’s land-surfaces, thus providing the beginnings of
what would someday become rich, fertile soil (ruled by Pluto, Lord of underground treasures, include the
mineral wealth of the soil that nourishes all rooted plants and therefore all the animals and other beings
that eat those plants). Whereas Pluto is associated with the formation of the primordial Earth in its
molten state, Persephone is associated with the first emergence of what was to become the oceans,
continents, islands, and atmosphere of the young Earth as our world began to cool down from that initial,
incandescent state.
Such “inorganic” land-systems may be, at least in part, the products of Hypersea, which underscores
Hypersea’s critical importance not only in the successful evolution of Earthly biota to life on land, away
from a watery environment, but perhaps in the evolution of Gaia, Earth’s biosphere, Herself, including
the formations of the very mountains, plains, great oceanic basins, and other features of Earth’s surface.
In The Ages of Gaia: A Biography of Our Living Earth (New York: Bantam, 1988), James Lovelock
says:

. . . Most geologists . . . have neglected the presence of living organisms as an active

participant in their theories of the Earth’s evolution.
The counterpart of this geological apartheid is the failure of most biologists to
recognize that the evolution of the species is strongly coupled with the evolution of
their environment. . . .
Apart from Lynn Margulis [co-developer with Lovelock of Gaia Theory], the only
other biologist I know to have taken the environment into account when considering life
is J. Z. Young. In 1971, this distinguished physiologist was independently moved to
write in a chapter on homeostasis in his book, An Introduction to the Study of Man:
‘The entity that is maintained intact, and of which we all form a part, is not the life of
one of us, but in the end the whole of life upon the planet.” J. Z. Young’s view serves
as a link between Gaia theory and the general scientific consensus. Through Gaia
 theory, I see the Earth and the life it bears as a system, a system that has the capacity to
regulate the temperature and the composition of the Earth’s surface and to keep it
comfortable for living organisms. The self-regulation of the system is an active process
driven by the free energy available from sunlight.
Ibid., pp. 30-31

The Gaia hypothesis, first formulated by James Lovelock in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and later
modified and refined by Lovelock and Lynn Margulis, postulates that the Earth, our Planet, is Herself
alive, a living being in Her own right, a superorganism conforming to the general thermodynamic,
biochemical, and other fundamental properties of living beings. He says:

The idea that the Earth is alive is probably as old as human kind. But the first
public expression of it as a fact of science was by a Scottish scientist, James Hutton. In
1785, he said, at a meeting of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, that the Earth was a
superorganism and that its proper study should be physiology. He went on to compare
the cycling of the nutritious elements in the soil, and the movement of water from the
oceans to the land, with the circulation of the blood. James Hutton is rightly
remembered as the father of geology, but his idea of a living Earth was forgotten, or
denied, in the intense reductionism of the nineteenth century – except in the minds of
isolate philosophers like Korolenko.
Today, we all use the word ‘biosphere’ rarely recognizing that it was Eduard Suess
who in 1875 first used the term, in passing, when describing his work on the geological
structure of the Alps. Vernadsky developed the concept, and from 1911 used its
modern meaning. Vernadsky said: ‘The biosphere is the envelope of life, i.e., the area
of living matter . . . the biosphere can be regarded as the area of the Earth’s crust
occupied by transformers which convert cosmic radiations into effective terrestrial
energy: electrical, chemical, mechanical, thermal, etc.’
Ibid., p. 10

An important step in our understanding is to recognize the significance of

collections of living things. You can I are both composed of a collection of organs and
tissues . . . . [each of which] can exist independently of the body when kept warm and
supplied with nutrients. Then the cells themselves, as Lynn Margulis has shown, are
communities of microorganisms that once lived free. The energy-transforming entities
of animal cells (the mitochondria) and of plants (the mitochondria and the chloroplasts)
both were once bacteria living independently.
Life is social. It exists in communities and collectives. There is a useful word in
physics to describe the properties of collectives: colligative. It is needed because there
is no way to express or measure the temperature or the pressure of a single molecule.
Temperature and pressure, say the physicists, are the colligative properties of a sensible
[perceivable or conceivable] collection of molecules. All collections of living things
show properties unexpected from a knowledge of a single one of them. We, and some
other animals, keep a constant temperature whatever the temperature of our
surroundings. This fact could never have been deduced from the observations of a
single cell from a human being. The tendency to constancy was first noted by the
French physiologist Claude Bernard in the nineteenth century. His American successor
in this century, Walter Cannon, called it homeostasis or the wisdom of the body.
Homeostasis is a colligative property of life.
– Ibid., p. 18

A multicellular organism – a man, a wasp, a tree, a daisy – comprises an intricate, interconnected set of
cell communities; a nation or tribe as an entity is made up of its people and the territory they occupy.
But what of large entities such as ecosystems, or even Gaia?

The name of the living planet, Gaia, is not a synonym for the biosphere. The
biosphere is defined as that part of the Earth where living things normally exist. Still
less is Gaia the same as the biota, which is simply the collection of all individual living
organisms. The biota and the biosphere taken together form part but not all of Gaia.
 Just as the shell is part of a snail, so the rocks, the air, and the oceans are part of Gaia.
Gaia . . . has continuity with the past back to the origins of life, and extends into the
future as long as life persists. Gaia, as a total planetary being, has properties that are
not necessarily discernible by just knowing individual species or populations of
organisms living together.
– Ibid., p. 19

The Gaia hypothesis, then, supposes that Earth’s atmosphere, oceans, climate, and crust are regulated in
states comfortable for life as a result of the activities of Earthly life. Specifically, temperature, oxidation
state, acidity, and certain characteristics of the rocks and waters are at any time kept remarkably constant,
which homeostasis is maintained by active feedback processes operated automatically and unconsciously
by the biota:

. . . Solar energy sustains comfortable conditions for life. The conditions are only
constant in the short term and evolve in synchrony with the changing needs of the biota
as it evolves. Life and its environment are so closely coupled that evolution concerns
Gaia, not the organisms or the environment taken separately.
– Ibid., p. 19

Even the tectonic activity of the Earth – the plate dynamics of the movement of pieces of Her crust over
Her surface by which, over hundreds of millions of years, the continents themselves are born and live
and fall apart to be recycled as parts of new continents – may well be the result of the activities of the
living beings who have populated our Planet down the Aeons:

. . . [B]iological calcium carbonate deposition may have made possible the efficient
operation of the endogenic cycle – the slow movement of the elements from the surface
and the ocean to the crustal rocks and back again. The geologist Don Anderson has
speculated that the deposition of limestone on the ocean floor is a key factor in the
motion of the Earth’s crust. He proposed that sometime far back in the Earth’s history,
sufficient limestone was deposited to alter the chemical composition of the crustal rocks
of the ocean floor near the continental margins. As a result an event, called the basalt-
eclogite phase transition by geologists, took place. This transition so altered the
physical properties of the crustal rocks that it became possible for the great machinery
of plane movement to begin turning. Don Anderson commented in an article in Science
in 1984:

The Earth is apparently also exceptional in having active plate tectonics.

If the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of Venus could turn into limestone,
the surface temperature and those [sic] of the upper mantle would drop. The
basalt-eclogite phase change would migrate to shallow depths, causing the
lower part of the crust to become unstable. Thus there is the interesting
possibility that plate tectonics may exist on the Earth became limestone-
generating life evolved here.
– Ibid., pp. 104-105

Is Gaia, or more specifically, Her Aspect of Hypersea, the source of the mechanisms responsible for
the biological phenomena of community and the oddities of Life’s evolution described by Lyall Watson,
discussed above? Amphitrite, associated with Hypersea, is in a sense the mother of Earthly life, certainly
its midwife. Then surely Persephone, associated with the appearance of the first pre-biotic matrices, the
sine qua non of life’s first emergence in the world, e.g., damp clay and still, warm ponds, necessary for
the birth of Earth’s life and its first evolutionary developments, is the mother of Amphitrite, the
grandmother of that life.* Amphitrite – the Hypersea, Life in all its purposive activity – may have been
the ultimate source of the formation of Earth’s sea-beds and mountains and other geological formations,
as these are today. But it was Persephone, associated with the Earth as She was at the moment of Life’s
origins, the moment Earth Herself could be said to have become an living being, Gaia, with Her own
living Will, provided the conditions necessary for that transmutation of the primordial Earth from
inorganic though active chunk of hot rock whirling through the universe to living superorganism. Thus
Persephone rules even more fundamental, more ancient processes than does Amphitrite, ruler of the
Element Fire and the twin phenomena of Will and metabolically-maintained homeostasis, the hallmarks
of Life.
Nota bene: Sexual reproduction and bonding enable members of a population or ecosystem to
become collective organisms. Through sexual reproduction, organisms come to share parts of their genes
with others in their communities, so that the death of an individual does not mean the end of its genes. In
other words, sex enables living beings to consolidate their genetic gains gained serendipitously via
mutation through genetic overlapping brought about by the good auspices of sexual love (Eros,
Persephone, the marriage of Hades and Persephone), while simultaneously ridding themselves of genetic
losses, the result of unfortunate recombinations of older genes as well as mutations), via natural selection
(Death, Hades). In this way, all genes present in members of such a community benefit, and all their
mutations become at least potential assets that can be redistributed over the population in new ways
should some combinations of those genes with older genes prove to be deleterious to those organisms
bearing them.
Microbes that do not participate in sexual conjugation or some other means of recombination of their
genes with those of other microbes with genes differing from theirs can’t die, hence can’t love, and are
inevitable candidates for extinction. Mutations are deadly to such microbes, for two reasons: Any
change in the genes of an individual microbe produces a brand-new individual; enough such changes in
enough of the genetic particles with which that microbe is associated thus spells its extinction. Since
over time copy-errors will inevitably corrupt its genes more and more, finally appearing in all the
particles with which it is associated, due to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, it must finally come to
an end, no matter what.
Further, the mutant “offspring” of such a microbe will have nutritional and other needs that are
almost identical with those of the original microbe, hence become its deadliest competitors. So the price
of “immortality” of this sort is a loveless, lonely existence fraught with danger and terror, in which one’s
own children are inevitably one’s worst enemies, and which is bound to be mortal anyway, in spite of the
apparent freedom from death which its method of self-perpetuation seems at first to confer upon it.
Hades and Persephone and Their marriage represent the great inventions Life came up with to get
around such problems: sexual conjugation, allowing the ready recombination of genes of individuals in a
population or community, giving all their genes a better chance as a result; sexual reproduction, because
of which those organisms that take the best care of their young, and give those young the best possible
provision for the future, have the greatest edge on genetic survival; eukaryotic life, the first close-knit
cooperative associations of living organisms, enough to turn those associations into the first
superorganisms, multicellular life of the form we are familiar with today; and, in general, love and
community, in which living beings, by pairs or in larger associations, come to regard their neighbors’
lives and well-being as at least as important as their own, and to act to care for and rescue from harm
their loved ones and neighbors even at great risk to their own lives and well-being. Without these, most
of the living beings and communities now existing would never have come into existence; Earthly life
would comprise only single-celled, prokaryotic forms, most of them dwelling in the ocean, and would be
a lonely, dull, loveless, joyless, silent world, indeed.

*For more about Gaia and Hypersea, see Part 13, Chapter 2, in Book II of Volume II of this work, on
Amphitrite (Sephirah Aleph1).

Legendary orders of being:

Spirits of all kinds, especially evil spirits and spirits ruling the infliction of great epidemic plagues of
disease upon the world.

Foods, drugs, and perfumes:

Surely myrrh is a perfume of Persephone, because of its ancient funerary associations. So,
“paradoxically,” are the scents of the flowers of early Spring, e.g., narcissus, because these were the
favorite flowers of Korè.
Things that taste of brine, vaginal secretions, or menstrual blood are also associated with Persephone.
So are foods made from menstrual blood or from the tissues of an abortion, induced or spontaneous,
because of Her Autumnal associations of death and infertility.
*I don’t recommend using such substances to make food or beverages, whether for ritual purposes or any
other. They are listed here only as examples of things associated with Persephone. (I.e., “Kids!
Don’t nobody do this at home!”)

Foods that are red in color are sacred to the dead and the Gods of dead; red meat, especially, is
associated with Hades. Venus rules plant-life, which is sessile and rooted and often vibrant with color,
and Mars rules animal life, which is active and free to move across the Earth, and is by nature
predacious, if only on vegetation. In the same way, Pluto rules those special foods which, made of the
flesh and blood of animals, nurture the dead, and His wife, Persephone, rules food for the dead made out
of plant materials. She is also associated with edible and poisonous fungi, for the same reason that Venus
is associated with plants, the edible ones for their food-value, the poisonous ones because those who eat
them enter Her realm – permanently.* Above all, She is associated with the pomegranate, both for its
color and because of its role in the myth of Hades and Persephone.

*Fungi are mostly subjects of Pluto, however, because of their ecological niche and general way of life.
See Part 10, Chapter 3 of Book II of this volume for a detailed discussion of the organisms associated
with Pluto.

Of drugs, all poisons are associated with Her, especially those made from plants (animal venoms are
more closely associated with Pluto). Homeopathic tinctures made from any substance ruled by Her is
one of Her drugs. Drugs which induce depression or narcosis, or which are useful as aids for those
undergoing psychoanalysis, are likewise Hers. Drugs derived from fungi, especially from the amanitas
and other toxic fungi, or those associated with decaying matter, are associated with Her as well as with
Pluto.
Persephone is associated with ergot and LSD, since these drugs destroy perceptual sets and free the
brain and psyche from restraints on their reception of and sensitivity to new data and experience. These
drugs destroy in order to make liberty, creativity, and enlightenment possible, perfect chemical
exemplars of Her influence.

Clothing, Magickal Weapons, and other things, objects, and processes:

Winding-sheets, the furniture of mausolea, and psychoanalyst’s couches are all associated with her.
Tools used by morticians, especially those used to make the corpse look its most attractive, are ruled by
Her, as are food and objects interred with the dead as tokens of love and respect by mourners, and
anything used to beautify and decorate tombs, columbaria, or other housing for the dead.
As one of the Chthonic Goddesses, Persephone is associated with sex-Magick, and therefore with
appliances and clothing used for sexual stimulation for ritual purposes. As the Merciful Aspect of Death,
giving haven to tormented, murdered innocents of all species and providing future incarnations for them
in which they will receive protection, comfort, justice, love, and healing from their psychospiritual
wounds, She also rules everything associated with forensic pathology (a process by which evil done to
the dead is revealed, so that justice can be done).
Of the fundamental principles of natural science, Persephone is associated with entropy and of
anything that increases it.* She rules uncertainty, information (as defined mathematically), chaos,
disorder, discord, and the startling and frequently breathtakingly beautiful evolutionary creativity of
Nature that these stimulate.

*For a detailed discussion of the definition and nature of entropy, see the Glossary in Section 4 of the
Appendices to Volume I of this work.
 Entropy is, after all, the great driving engine of evolution. The creativity of Life – the ability of the
living world to adapt and change, sometimes in spectacularly innovative and elegant ways, to a
continually and unpredictably changing universe – and perhaps even Life itself have come into existence
only because of the entropic aspects of the universe. Entropy – the natural tendency of all things toward
a state of continuously increasing disorder and chaos – is only countered by Life’s ever-present effort to
maintain itself and its surroundings in a state of maximum order and elegance. Entropy is in part defined
by Time’s unidirectional nature – the fact that “fire don’t burn backward” – and evolution is an
archetypally temporal process, its very apotheosis. Time is ruled by Saturn, of Whom Persephone is a
higher octave, and just as Saturn is the Lord of Time, Persephone is the Queen of Evolutionary Process,
the ruler of natural selection.
In particular, Persephone rules the great extinctions of Earth’s evolutionary history, as well as their
underlying causes. Those extinctions have provided spectacular opportunities for the free play of
biological creativity by freeing up niches for the survivors, niches formerly occupied by other organisms
which have since become extinct. Through mutation, migration and natural selection, the three major
aspects of the evolutionary process known as adaptive radiation, the survivors come to have new forms
and new ways of life, some of them unprecedented in all life’s previous history. These are perfect
exemplars of one of Persephone’s most important functions, that of assisting creative change through
drastic modification or even annihilation of extant forms and processes.
Psychospiritually speaking Persephone rules initiations of all kinds, which involve death to an old
way of life and “birth” to a new one. For example, the process of becoming a “born-again Christian” is
ruled by Her (a fact which this ancient Attic Greek Mother-Goddess would probably find utterly
hilarious). In particular, She rules all Magickal and sexual initiations.

Anatomy and physiology:

As previously discussed, Persephone rules DNA. She also rules those parts of the brain which
produce chemicals that cause spontaneous, genetically-controlled death of the organism as a natural
event, as well as those chemicals themselves. As diurnal mundane Lord of Virgo, She rules the small
intestines and upper regions of the large bowel. And because of Her traditional, mythological
associations, She rules menopause, puberty, menstruation, production of estrogen in the female body, and
sexual readiness in the female brain (Venus rules these on a personal one-to-one, individual level:
Persephone rules them on collective levels, and their importance, as manifest through the actions of
individuals, to ecosystems and Gaia as a whole.

Psychology:

Persephone rules chemically-assisted enlightenment, such as that attained party through the judicious
use of LSD or other psychedelics; the processes of abstraction, systematization, and those related to
them, because of Her rulership of Virgo; the experience of dying, either directly or vicariously;
psychological states associated with menstruation and the onset of menopause and puberty in the female;
and female sexual drive and readiness.

Diseases:

Pathologies associated with Persephone include compulsive necrophilia; so-called pre-menstrual

syndrome (PMS),* sleep apnia; suffocation and asphyxiation; compulsive trouble-making; morbid
states of mind of all kinds; sterility; compulsive sexuality, sometimes called sex-addiction, love-
addiction, or nymphomania, in the female; ** female frigidity; ** gynophobia and misogyny; † child-
abuse, as a chronic syndrome, particularly when involving sexual molestation, rape, and/or sadistic
torments against the victim;**† unchecked fecundity, ending in ecological disaster due to
overpopulation; plagues of all kinds, particularly those that are artificial in origin; ‡ ecological and
biospherical pathologies, i.e., those affecting whole biological communities, Planets, or even larger
ecological domains; and extinctions of whole species or even higher-order biological taxa, especially
those occurring during so-called Great Extinctions.††
*The syndrome of PMS is actually the result of nutritional deficiencies, primarily of calcium, vitamin C,
and/or vitamin D. When whatever deficiencies exist are corrected by dietary supplementation, the
problem slowly but surely clears up completely. See Adelle Davis, Let’s Get Well (New York:
Signet Books1972), Chapters 25 and 28, and elsewhere.

**Generally these syndromes are associated with post-traumatic stress disorder that is the result of
chronic terrorization and traumatization of a very young child, involving repeated sexual molestation
and/or assault as well as long-term, aggravated psychospiritual abuse by one or more perpetrators in
the child’s early environment. The worst damage is done when the perpetrator is someone who
would normally be very close to the child, usually the father. For more information on such
dysfunctions and their etiologies, see, e.g., Truddi Chase, When Rabbit Howls (New York: Jove
Books, 1990); Aphrodite Jones, Cruel Sacrifice (New York: Pinnacle Books, 1994); Judith Lewis
Herman, M.D., Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence – from Domestic Abuse to
Political Terror (New York: Basic Books/HarperCollins Publishers, 1992); Janice Knowlton with
Michael Newton, Daddy was the Black Dahlia Killer (New York: Pocket Books, 1995); Jeffrey
Moussaieff Masson, The Assault on Truth: Freud’s Suppression of the Seduction Theory (New York:
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1984); Alice Miller, Thou Shalt Not Be Aware: Society’s Betrayal of the
Child (Hildegarde and Hunter Hannum, translators. New York: Meridian Books, 1986); Dr.
Lenore Terr, Too Scared to Cry (New York: HarperCollins, 1990); et al., passim.

†For extensive discussion of the roots of these syndromes, see Donald G. Dutton, Ph. D with Susan K.
Golant, The Batterer: A Psychological Profile (New York: Basic Books/HarperCollins Publishers,
1995).

‡For extensive discussion concerning the inception of plagues, their causes, and their impacts on
humanity, see Laurie Garrett, The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of
Balance (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994). Other resources on this topic that may be of
interest include, e.g., Frederick F. Cartwright in collaboration with Michael D. Biddiss, Disease and
History (New York: Dorset Press, 1972); Arno Karlen, Man and Microbes: Disease and Plagues in
History and Modern Times (New York: A Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam Book, 1995); William H.
McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (New York: Monticello Editions/History Book Club, 1993); Richard
Preston, The Hot Zone: A Terrifying True Story (New York: Random House, 1994).

††For in-depth discussions concerning extinctions in general and Great Extinctions in particular, see,
e.g., Niles Eldridge, The Miner’s Canary: Unraveling the Mysteries of Extinction (New York:
Prentice Hall Press, 1991); Douglas H. Erwin, The Great Paleozoic Crisis: Life and Death in the
Permian (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993); Peter Ward, The End of Evolution: On
Mass Extinctions and the Preservation of Biodiversity (New York: Bantam Books, 1994).

Persephone rules viral diseases, in particular the great plagues of the world caused by viral
epidemics, including influenza, AIDS, herpes, and so forth. Viruses are also ruled by Uranus, but
whereas Uranus is associated with viral biochemistry, Persephone is ruled with the actual sentience or
psyche associated with a given virus, its history, its spiritual origin and goals.
She rules possession (considered to be a diseases process associated with both body and soul). (See
also Chapter 10 of Part 6 of Volume 3 of this work.)

Occupations and ecological niches:

Persephone rules those who bathe or otherwise prepare or dispose of the bodies of the dead, such as
morticians; coroners; agitators, anarchists, and those who make careers of sabotage, cybertage
(cybernetic sabotage), and ecotage (sabotage performed in order to further environmental goals);
epidemiologists and disease pathologists; forensic pathologists; those involved in research,
development, or production of the tools of war, including nuclear, biological, or chemical warfare
materièl; statisticians; systems scientists, information theorists, and computer scientists; geneticists;
virologists; those employed in any aspect of population control, such as birth-control clinics, euthanasia
dispensers, etc.; chaos scientists of all kinds, e.g., meteorologists, mathematicians, actuarial specialists,
etc.; work involving prophylactic and therapeutic treatment of victims or perpetrators of child- or
woman-abuse, and that concerned with dysfunctional families at risk for or already manifesting child-
abuse; sex-therapy; prostitution, strip-tease, and any other work involving professional sexual titillation
and satisfaction of clientele; psychological therapy involving the use of psychedelics; psychoanalysis in
general; nutritionists and nutritional biologists.
Persephone is also concerned with epidemiological research and medicine, public health, arbiters of
moral principles that incidentally help prevent the spread of diseases between populations, virological
research.

Places, nations, and peoples:

Persephone rules places such as mausoleums, chapels used for funeral services, coroners’ offices,
graveyards, and all other places connected with dying, death, and the preparation and disposal of the
bodies of the dead. She rules sites for political rallies involving anarchistic issues, goals, and activities.
She rules agencies involved with protective services for women and children, and houses or other
structures in which women and/or children are abused. She rules genetic research laboratories, and
places devoted to recombinant DNA experiments. She rules biological warfare research and deployment
installations; houses of prostitution; nude-dancing parlors; sex-toy stores and boutiques; bookstores and
video-rental stores carrying erotic or pornographic material; and studios where erotic films are made and
processed. She also co-rules the offices of psychoanalysts.
On the genetic or population level, Persephone rules the genetic reservoir of Earth’s life, of Gaia.
She rules also rules that part of any population which shows significant mutations and/or congenital
changes from the parent population, particularly when these are simultaneously associated with crippling
deformities or dysfunctions and paranormal abilities, above all when they are the result of nuclear
radiation or other environmental pollution.
She rules all abused children, those who protect them, and those who persecute them (these last are
associated with Her Qlippoth). She rules those who die as a result of injustice, and those who help to
bring about justice in such cases. She is especially associated with the Hibakushi (Japanese for
“sufferers”), those who have been made ill by radiation sickness caused by nuclear explosions or fallout,
or who have inherited one or more mutated genes from parents who have suffered from the Bomb or
anything associated with it. And She rules all survivors of disasters and wars, concentration-camp
inmates, and political prisoners.

Planetary Age of Man:

Nations: Nazi Germany, primarily associated with Qlippoth of Pluto, is secondarily associated with
Qlippoth of Persephone.

Cities: The intra-urban freeway system of Los Angeles, California (at least as non-natives
experience it!) make a good case for Persephone’s rulership of that benighted city. So do the attitudes
and behavior of many of its inhabitants – not to mention the fact that during the 1980s and 1990s e.v., a
standard item of equipment issued to members of the LAPD has been the M-16, an automatic weapon
used for riot control. (Lately that issue has been upgraded in certain districts of that city to the AK-47,
the American equivalent of the Kalashnikov, a fully automatic Soviet Russian weapon easily capable of
turning a brand-new American automobile into something resembling a colander that has just ridden out
a Himalayan avalanche.)
Also, according to latest report, Persephone and Her dread Lord, Hades, have a pied á terre in the
Central District of Seattle, Washington. The couple have frequently been seen late at night riding around
Seattle and its environs on Hades’ favorite toy, a gigantic Harley hog, Persephone riding pillion behind
Her husband, both of Them dressed in vintage, authentic Hell’s Angel’s leathers (with Grateful Dead tees
for undies).

Peoples and ethnic groups: She rules Discordians, Erisians, and SubGenii. Generically, She rules all
mutants of any species. (By extension, She thus rules pioneers, hence Her esoteric dominion over Aries,
the Sign of the Pioneer.)

Planetary Age of Man:

 She rules the life-spans of populations and societies, and the various stages of their evolution. She
also marks the extinctions of species and groups of species, e.g., the extinction of the Archosaurs, toothed
birds, and ammonites at the end of the Cretaceous and the Mesozoic Era of Earth’s life, the far greater
mass extinction (96% of all species) that closed out the Paleozoic, and, more significantly (to us, at any
rate), the ominous die-offs of so many of the non-human inhabitants of our world that are currently taking
place as a cumulative result of collective human activities, which may soon put paid to the Cenozoic, our
own Era.
On the level of the individual, assuming that the ideal length of a human life is 120 years,
Persephone rules ages 101-110, the Eleventh Age.
Among human communities and societies, She rules, e.g., Prohibition in America, 1919-1933 e.v.,
and the later federal prohibition of recreational drugs, beginning with marijuana in the 1930s and
continuing on down to the present day (both through Her Qlippoth); Nazi Germany (through Her
Qlippoth); the advent of Suffragism and Feminism;
Persephone also rules the crisis of puberty, the transformation of the larval form of an individual
member of a species into the imago of that species. During this stage of life, the human child, heretofore
neurophysiologically unequipped for mature sexuality and reproduction, develops into the first stages of
sexual maturity, changing from a sexually unready organism into one potentially capable of desiring and
engaging in sexual interactions with others of its kind.

Matters of the horoscope:

Political sabotage and anarchistic activities; child-abuse; child-welfare services; acts of malicious
intent perpetrated against women, especially crimes of sexual assault, and those civic agencies that deal
with such crimes, e.g., police, hospitals, etc.; sabotage of any kind, for any reason; plagues, famines,
and catastrophes of all kinds; disastrous weather, e.g., tornadoes;* chaos science, statistical and
actuarial science, systems theory, etc.; population biology and the ecology of plagues; crimes of passion
and violence; mortuarial cosmetology and funerary activities; prostitution, pornography, nude dancing,
strip-tease, and other activities and professions involving sexual titillation and erotic pleasure-giving;
sex-Magick and its results, and thus Kundalini energy; mass death and murder; child-abuse; puberty,
menstruation, menopause, and female sex-drive; initiations; Suffragism, Feminism.

*This particular correspondence is appropriate for more than one reason. Tornadoes are a species of
atmospheric phenomena, which are generically ruled by both Uranus and Mercury. Uranus is
Mercury’s higher octave, while Persephone co-rules Mercury’s Signs. Moreover, because tornadoes
are meteorological phenomena, they are thus manifestations of phenomena studied by chaos
scientists, who are ruled by Persephone.

Music:

Any music rich in discords; SubGenius Doktormusik; acid rock; heavy-metal music; 12-tone and
other experimental highly abstract or idealized forms of music. Individual musical works ruled by Her
include, e.g., “Mother-in-law” (a popular song that first came out in the early 1960s), “The Stripper”
(instrumental theme music from the movie of the same title), “Gloomy Sunday” (the instrumental piece
playing of which over the radio in European countries is followed by waves of suicides of young people),
“Das Horst Wessel Lied” (associated with Her Qlippoth); the “Internationale”

Poetry:

Books and other literary productions:

Mein Kampf (associated with Her Qlippoth); the Communist Manifesto; the Declaration of
Independence of the United States of America; satire, particularly of a morbid cast or in the form of
black humor, such as Chas. Addams’ strange cartoons depicting even stranger people, and Shel
Silverstein’s Uncle Shelby’s Things to See, Do, and Say; the misopedic Slovenly Peter;* James Glieck’s
Chaos: Making a New Science (Penguin, 1987); Alex Comfort’s The Joy of Sex: A Gourmet Guide to
Sex; and Xaviera Hollander’s Joy of Sex (which is really get-down-and-boogie good – not to mention
utterly hilarious in all the right places); the classic pornographic novels, e.g., Pauline Reagé’s The Story
of O, Anonymous’ A Man and a Maid, etc.; Truddi Chase’s autobiographical recounting of her
horrifying childhood and the consequences of the abuses she suffered as a child, When Rabbit Howls (E.
P. Dutton, 1987); Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb; Robert Malthus’ An Essay on the Principles of
Population as it Affects the Future Improvement of Society (1798); R. R. McCammon’s post-nuclear
holocaust novel, Swan Song (Pocket Books, 1987); Trevor Hoyle’s science-fiction novel of total
ecocatastrophe and probable death of Gaia, The Last Gasp (Crown Books, 1983); John Hersey’s
journalistic masterpiece on the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima, Japan in August of 1945 e.v. and its
aftermath, Hiroshima, and his heart-wrenching alternate-world novel, White Lotus;** The Diary of Anne
Frank; Adelle Davis, Let’s Eat Right to Keep Fit; B. H. Liddell Hart, On Strategy; Karl von
Clausewitz, On War; Terry Pratchett’s wonderful, extremely touching Discworld novel, Reaper Man
(1993) and its sequels, Mort (1987) and Soul Music (1995); Lucifer’s Hammer by Larry Niven and Jerry
Pournelle (1979), a fantastic blend of poetry and hard science, about the end of civilization as we know it
(and a lot of taxa of Earth’s life, to boot), as a result of a collision of a gigantic comet with the Earth;

*Which, by the way, like all normal children who get a chance to read it before they are spoiled by
puberty, I just adored.

**This novel is an almost-perfect mirror of the history of Black Americans, set in China in the 20th
century in an alternate world in which the Chinese import white slaves to do their manual labor,
undergo their own civil war and manumission of the slaves, etc. The one glaring difference between
that alternate history and our own is that, as in our own world, China was not first colonized from
elsewhere before importing slaves, unlike America, which was first settled by Europeans, who then
imported Black slaves from Africa. This, however, makes little difference as far as the emotional
and moral impact of the novel, one of the most moving I have ever read, goes. Anyone who can read
that and still make a calm, reasoned argument for the continuation of chattel slavery, of whatever
“race,” gender, class, or any other group, anywhere in the world, that isn’t meant as a satire or send-
up has to be a pure-D sociopath (= heartless idiot/power-hungry & greedy monster, take your pick).

Computer software:

Windows 95 (all Mac users will now either please stop snickering or leave the room)

Graphic arts:

Sculpture:

Architecture:

The bombed-out ruins kept as a memorial at ground zero, Hiroshima, Japan

Performance arts:

The Eleusinian Mysteries (the original)

Cinema and movies:

Akira Kurosawa, Dreams; the movies Godzilla 1998, Deep Impact (1998), Asteroid (1996), and
Armageddon (1998)

Saints and exemplars:

 Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin (1814-1876 e.v.), the Original Hairy-Eyed Bomb-Throwing
Anarchist; Watson and Crick, discoverers of the DNA helix; Masters and Johnson, the sexologists and
sex-therapists; Xaviera Hollander, sexologist and erstwhile madam; Claude Shannon, “father” of
modern cybernetic theory and information science; John von Neuman, pioneer in Games Theory;
Karl Marx; the Marx Brothers; Bob Black, Black Sheep in Wolf’s Clothing of the Church of the
SubGenius; J. R. “Bob” Dobbs, martyred founder of the Church of the SubGenius (BWAH-ah-ah! );
the Queen in the Disney animated production of Snow White; step-mothers and mothers-in-law, good and
bad, in many folk-tales, from Snow White and the Seven Dwarves to the Book of Ruth in the Old
Testament; Carrie Nation, about whom the following little ditty was coined, at the time when the great
debates concerning Prohibition in America were taking place during the second decade of this century:

Carrie Nation took an axe

And gave the nation forty whacks.
And when she found what she had done –
She turned and gave it forty-one!*

*According to urban legend, there was an alternate last line to this jungle, to wit: “And then she really
beat the living **** out of it!”

American emblems, sigils, symbols, myth, folklore, and urban legend:

The Ladies from Hades; Little Iodine (like O, who had a daughter, Iodine had a daughter –
Uranium); Carrie Nation; Slewfoot Sue