demeter

  Demeter Changing the Weather by AnnuskA - AnnA Theodora via {kind over matter} I cannot believe that the purpose of life is to be "happy." I think the purpose of life is to be useful, to be responsible, to be compassionate. It is, above all, to matter and to count, to stand for something, to have made some difference that you lived at all.
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Leo C. Rosten   photo via {krimos on flickr}Just a quicky on mythology, for those who aren't familiar with this myth. The world lived in a perpetual state of spring. Pretty cool. Then Hades, the keeper/king/whatever of the underworld, saw the maiden Persephone butterflying around some field some day and obviously fell in love.
Then what happened? What always happened back then: the God kidnapped the kiddo. Her mother Demeter, the goddess of grain and fertility, the preserver of marriage and sacred law, got mad as hell and set off in furious anger after the Mr. you're-so-dead guy who kidnapped her daughter. The fact she didn't have an idea of who had done it wouldn't make a difference for her, but she grew tired of that joke and decided to make everybody suffer too.
So she stopped giving all the goodies to the world like crops, sun, flowers, and started to pour hail and snow on everybody. That should teach'em all. But since everything was dying, the other Gods told Demeter to move on, these things can happen to anyone. She got pissed off and yelled: "Silence!!! I KILL you!!", Helios, the sun, got scared and *finally* decided to tell the Goddess what had happened. Everybody gave him a stinky eye, as meaning: "why didn't you tell her before?".
But Hades was plotting something to make sure his dear now-wife wouldn't go back to those poshy gods up Olympus and tried to make her eat something. Because if you eat something down the underworld you remain there. Since Persephone was starving after many months without eating anything, it was hard to deny all those four seeds of pomegranade.
Persephone was eating it all when Hermes arrived to rescue her and shouted: "Watchoo doing, Woman?!?! I don't believe you're eating his food!! Don't you read about mythology? Don't you know you can't do such? GOSH!!", then he slapped her hands (bistecaaaaa!!! HAHAHAHA!!) and the last seed fell on some hole never to be found again.
This meant the following: each seed was a set of 3 months of the year, that would force her to stay with Hades (4 seeds x 3 months = a whole year stuck in that dull place), but since she didn't eat the last one, she got to visit her mother 3 months per year, which made her so happy that the world bloomed again = spring.
The following seasons mirrored the mother's mood about the abduction. The End.