Hymn to Demeter (2022)

The Homeric Hymns are among the oldest surviving texts from Ancient Greece. The gods, images, and ideas contained within them evidence a vast ecosystem of cultural and intellectual exchange across the Mediterranean. These hymns are not direct translations. In the tradition of the original hymnists who continually adapted these stories over centuries, we have made them our own. Drawing inspiration from the original fragmented texts, from an array of contemporary poetic translations, and from other praise music traditions, we created a set of prayers and paeans specific to the insight and anxieties of our own age. Demeter, goddess of the harvest, mourns her daughter Persephone and wanders through a wasteland of her own grief. This hymn ends with a divine compromise in which Persephone returns from the underworld every spring to reunite with her mother. Upon eating pomegranate seeds, Persephone is eternally bound to the realm of the dead but carries within her the cyclical promise of new life. Our adaptation condenses the story to focus on the relationship between mother and daughter-an enduring metaphor for processing loss and navigating the bonds between death and life, joy and despair.