1.
The *De* in Demeter means earth in Doric. Or, it is a Cretan dialect word meaning barley. *Meter* means mother. Thus, Demeter signifies Mother Earth. Demeter's daughter Persephone holds the meaning of seed. Hades means a hidden place, or one who is hidden. This later led to the meaning of "to hide" in the word "hide."
In myth, the story of Hades and Persephone explains the order of nature through the fate of Persephone, kidnapped into the underworld.
Reunited with Demeter, Persephone was tricked by Hades into eating a pomegranate before ascending to the surface, and thus was forced to spend half of every year in the underworld. This demonstrates the principle that seeds, buried in the earth to endure the cold winter, sprout when spring arrives.
Hades's other name is known as Ploutos, signifying the god of minerals and wealth. Ploutos means abundance. The ancient Greeks considered minerals buried in the earth to belong to Hades, the god of the underworld. Thus, when Hades was called Ploutos, ironically, he received more worship than anyone else.
2.
Persephone means seed in ancient Greek.
Persephone originally derived from the Sanskrit *parsa*, meaning sheaf of grain, which changed into *perso*. (There is also a theory that it derives from Perse, daughter of Oceanus, who appears in Mycenaean linear script inscriptions discovered at Pylos.)
Later, the Romans mispronounced it, rendering it similar to a word meaning roots breaking through the earth rather than sheaves of grain, and thus it became Persephone.
Such occurrences were frequent in ancient times. The most famous example is Pandora's jar. During the process of translating Greek by a neighboring country, they made the mistake of rendering "jar(20)" as "box(21)," and as a result, it became mistakenly known as Pandora's box.
Persephone was also called Kore, which meant maiden in ancient Greek, but later, through the pronunciation "core," it came to mean center or core.
3.
The Greeks greatly feared speaking the name of Persephone, queen of the underworld, aloud. Through her marriage to Hades, she too had become a goddess of death, attaining sanctity and dignity.
Therefore, instead of speaking her name directly, they called her Kore, or referred to her as Despoina, meaning lady of the house.
In truth, Greek mythology often takes the form of a mixture of various primitive and indigenous myths. This is because the Greeks expanded their territory through war and plunder, absorbing indigenous cultures, and Hellenized indigenous gods and primitive beliefs (written as Hellenization, read as patriarchalization).
Here, we can find a clue as to why Persephone came to be called "lady of the house."
Arcadian records contain stories of people who came from the northeast during the Bronze Age. As this is where the Greek language first appears, it seems Arcadia was already under Greek influence from this time.
Later, in Arcadian myth, there appears a story of a goddess considered to be Demeter joining with Poseidon, god of the river, and bearing a daughter. This daughter later merged with gods symbolizing spring and animals.
In Arcadia, the original hunting goddess was widely worshipped as a mother goddess. She also signified fertility.
The popularity of the harvest goddess Demeter grew only after this. Because Demeter was a goddess of agriculture, her presence came to the fore only after the transition to agricultural culture following the Bronze Age.
One of the most worshipped mother goddesses in the Arcadian region at the time was Artemis, and she was an independent being. Many Bronze Age peoples served and followed her as the goddess of hunting and fertility.
But Greece was a powerful patriarchal state. And a mother goddess worshipped more highly than a father god? They could never have accepted that. They tried by every means to belittle the mother goddess's authority and place the father god's dignity at the very top.
Artemis was called Mistress, a title derived from the meaning of mistress of all animals.
Later, as the Greek gods arrived and established themselves, her title of mistress naturally passed to Demeter and Persephone. (This can also be seen as the result of hunter-gatherer society transforming into agricultural society.)
This phenomenon could be seen everywhere in Greece. Not only did they steal the indigenous gods' influence, but they also forcibly implanted characteristics of the Greek gods. Then they forcibly renamed them as well. Of course, with Greek names.
Thus, Demeter and Persephone were bundled together as a set and called the Despoinai (the plural form of Despoina).
4.
The reason Demeter and Persephone came to be worshipped together is connected to the mystery rites of ancient Eleusis.
At the time, mysticism enjoyed tremendous popularity in Greek society. The mystery rites were usually rituals connected to resurrection and eternal life, but originally they were part of the festivities celebrating the autumn sowing.
Therefore, it was only natural that Demeter, goddess of grain, and her daughter Persephone, queen of the underworld, became the central figures.
The Greeks of the time were reminded of life, death, and resurrection by the burying of seeds in the earth. Thus, it is hardly strange that cult culture emerged from the harvest festival.
To participate in these mystery rites, people offered so much wealth that merely for the admission fee to the ritual, they had to pay at least half a month's wages in labor.
Once one participated in the mystery rites, what was seen there was strictly forbidden to be revealed to outsiders. This was a very clever marketing tactic. Because it is in human nature, then as now, to lean in closer when curious.
In any case, through the mystery rites, Demeter and Persephone became the most important goddesses of occult culture, and Persephone became widely known by the epithet Despoina instead of her true name.
In this way, when one looks at the Greek gods, a single deity often possesses diverse symbolic meanings.
Take the most famous god, Apollo, for example. The epithets attached to his name are infinite. God of the sun, god of medicine, god of music, god of prophecy, god of archery, and so on.
Originally, Apollo came from the name Upollon, meaning gatekeeper of the wall. He is a god from the Hittite region. In Babylonia, a similar word exists, Ubullo, which meant gatekeeper guarding the threshold of the temple. (Babylonia and the Hittites were ancient states formed in similar geographical locations around the same period.)
In any case, having started as a gatekeeper, he ended up absorbing the characteristics of indigenous gods everywhere throughout the Greek cultural sphere, and ultimately became such a fraudulent character.