Autumn is always a time of paradoxes.
It’s a time of year when both fruitful abundance of the harvest is plenty, and also a time of decay and death. It’s both life giving and life taking, all at the same time.
The Ancient Greeks were great at explaining all of this.
They had three goddesses known as The Horae (this translates as ‘hours’, although it comes from the Proto-Indo European word for ‘years’!). The Horae were 3 women who represented the seasons - Thallo was the embodiment of springtime, Auxo embodied the summer and Carpo represented the autumn.
But where was winter?
The Ancient Greeks didn’t recognise winter as a season at all, and so they completely ignored it and just saw it as an extension to autumn.
The Greek myths, as all myths and folklore, are a wonderful way of explaining things like why the seasons change when it would otherwise have been hard to explain.
One of the best known Greek myths that helps to explain the shifting seasons is that of Persephone and Hades.
Hades, the god of death and the underworld, was said to have kidnapped his niece, the beautiful Persephone, goddess of spring, of nature and of grain, and took her to the underworld to make her his bride.
The other gods were understandably concerned, and so scrambled to bring her back to the Earth’s surface. However, Persephone had already eaten the fruits of the underworld, and so was unable to fully return to the land of the living.
So the gods negotiated with Hades who would allow her to return to earth in the spring and summer, before retreating back down to the underworld in the autumn.
This cyclical nature of Persephone's return helped to explain how grain vanished into the earth when sown, sprouted in the spring before being harvested when fully grown, and whatever of the plant was left, retreated back into the ground in the autumn.
These wonderfully vivid stories help to really explain the cycles of life and death.
For anyone who’s interested in Greek mythology, there’s great series on Netflix called ‘Kaos’, which is all about the Greek gods and heavily features the story of Persephone and Hades.
I can definitely recommend it. It’s actually really well done and is pretty accurate with the actual mythology for the most part.
Humans have always found ever more creative ways to explain seasonal changes and cycles.
All of which are fascinating.
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