The Gates of Horn and Ivory - Chapter 4.2 Kore

“Mother, aren’t we going the wrong way?” she asked Demeter when the ship left the shore and started following the sun due west instead of sailing towards the sunrise.

Demeter smiled, but said nothing.

“Where are we going?”

“Sicily.”

“Why?”

“You’ll see, the latter smiled in anticipation.”

Anthesphoria was a festival of flowers, and as such, dedicated to Persephone, or, more precisely, to her incarnation as the maiden, Kore.

The mind creates sophisticated models to get a grip on reality, abstract structures which are often personified to make it easier for it to relate to them. 

These models may not make sense rationally, they are archetypal, and are useful in interpreting the world in the absence of knowledge.

They build stories to explain the unseen patterns of nature, which are experienced, but not understood.

The archetype of the Goddess kept shifting, depending on its symbolic meaning.