Reflections
Reflections on Religious Studies
PROSERPINA: Death and the Maidens
This research paper was written for an upper-level religion class on Greco-Roman religions. For the class each student was assigned a god or goddes and given minimal instruction on how to shape the paper. Because I was given a barren goddess who was taken by force from her family, I decided to view Proserpina from a feminist rhetorical perspective and what purpose she may have had for ancient women in the pre-Christian Roman empire. The bulk of the paper is spent analyzing the myths surrounding Proserpina, namely the "Rape of Proserpina."
Should I revisit this paper in the future, I would look more deeply into the religious practices regarding the goddess Proserpina outside of the Elusian mysteries (which relate her heavily to her mother, Demeter/Ceres) and also evaluate and analyze the imagery used for her in Sicily.