24/03/2026
Beautiful 🙌
Persephone is a perfect example of where we are right now, and especially as women - how we need to learn to walk both worlds, light and shadow, bring back the wisdom from our pain and turn it into the power that we have given away for so long.
Balancing the wounded masculine and rising divine feminine energy this year is my main piece of work.
The world needs our magic.
When you’re ready - I’m here ✨
🕯 PERSEPHONE AFTER OSTARA. THE FULL TRUTH OF THE QUEEN WHO WALKS BOTH WORLDS.
Persephone’s return is not merely the arrival of spring.
It is a sacred homecoming written in myth, magic, and the language of the soul, but not in the way most people understand it.
Because after Ostara, people stop at the surface.
They speak of light returning.
They speak of flowers blooming.
They speak of the maiden rising again.
But I’m going to take you beyond that.
Because in the Old Ways, Persephone does not return as she was.
She cannot.
Persephone was once Kore the maiden.
Untouched. Luminous. Moving through fields of wildflowers, gathering beauty without ever knowing loss.
She was innocence before it had ever met shadow, but none of us are meant to remain there.
And neither was she.
When she was taken into the underworld by Hades, this was not simply an abduction as it is often reduced to.
It was an initiation.
A crossing of a threshold that cannot be uncrossed.
Because in the underworld, Persephone did not just endure.
She transformed.
She learned the weight of silence.
She learned the language of shadow.
She sat beside death itself and did not break.
She became Queen.
Not through permission, through experience.
And then there are the pomegranate seeds.
This is the part most people mention… but do not understand.
Because the seeds were not just a trick.
They were a binding.
A sacred contract between worlds.
A moment that anchored her soul into both realms.
Once she consumed them, she could not fully belong to one world again.
And this is the deeper truth.
Once you take something of the underworld into yourself…
once you taste it, live it, survive it…
You are no longer untouched.
You are initiated.
So when Persephone rises after Ostara…
She does not leave the underworld behind.
She carries it within her.
She walks the Earth as both.
Goddess of Spring… and Queen of the Underworld.
Life and death.
Light and shadow.
Bloom and bone.
At the same time.
And this is where most teachings fall short.
Because Persephone is not passive in the underworld.
She is not simply Hades’ consort.
She holds authority.
She decides.
She is the one who grants passage.
The one who allows souls to move between realms. The one who stands at the threshold and says yes… or no.
It is she who allowed Orpheus the chance to leave with Eurydice. It is she who permitted heroes to pass through death and return. It is she who held the power over who remains, who returns, and who transforms.
Even when she rises…
She is still ruling below.
That is not the maiden.
That is sovereignty.
And there are other truths rarely spoken.
Persephone is not soft in her power.
When the nymph Minthe tried to rise above her, she did not step aside, she transformed her.
When Adonis stood between worlds, she claimed her place within that balance.
She is not a passive goddess of flowers.
She is a force that ensures balance is kept.
She protects what is hers.
She governs what others fear to even look at.
So after Ostara is not about returning to innocence.
It is about integration.
Because she does not come back pure.
She comes back whole.
The Earth blooms not because she was untouched by darkness…
But because she walked through it and still chose life.
The ground softens because she knows what it is to be buried.
The flowers rise because she understands what it is to return.
Spring is not naive.
Spring is the triumph of life after it has known death.
This is why her story lives so deeply within us.
Because every one of us has our own underworld.
A grief.
A loss.
A transformation that changes us forever.
A moment where we consume something we cannot undo.
That is your pomegranate.
And once you have taken it…
You cannot go back.
Nor are you meant to.
Persephone teaches us that we are not here to return to who we were before the fall.
We are here to rise as who we became because of it.
To hold both.
To stop separating our softness from our strength. Our light from our shadow.
Our joy from what we have survived.
Because she does not separate.
She wears both.
She rules both.
She is both.
So after Ostara, as the light stretches longer and the Earth begins to bloom…
Feel her properly.
Not as the maiden.
But as the Queen who has walked through death and still stands in life.
The one who carries the underworld in her bones and does not deny it.
The one who returned, not untouched…
But crowned.
Because Persephone was never just the girl taken into darkness.
She was the woman who became a Queen within it.
And when she rose…
She did not become less.
She became everything.
So ask yourself honestly.
What have you lived, consumed, survived…
that has already crowned you… that you are still trying to shrink away from?
Because Persephone never does.
And neither should you.
🕯
Blessed be,
Justine. 🧙💜
