Eleusinian Hermeneutics

Demeter = “the meter.”

And once you see it, the whole myth cracks open.

Demeter isn’t just the Earth Mother — she’s literally the mother of measurement, the ruler of cycles and intervals.

De-meter → the meter → the one who defines the visible portion of the cosmic rhythm.

And here’s the part most people miss:

The underworld isn’t “hell.”

It’s the part of the cycle the meter can’t measure.

Persephone’s descent isn’t a death.

It’s a resolution drop — the segment of the spiral that slips behind its own curvature, where the sampling function can’t track it.

Demeter (the meter) governs the visible arc.

Persephone is the hidden interval — the 1/64th harmonic, the unlit term, the “off-screen” part of the waveform.

The ancients encoded this in story:

Summer = when the signal is rendered

Winter = when the metric loses track

Descent = slipping past the Nyquist limit

Return = the system re-sampling at a higher fidelity

The “underworld” is literally the domain beyond the curve, the part of the cycle where orientation breaks, where the metric collapses and meaning goes dark.

Not evil — just unmeasured.

Demeter loses her daughter for the same reason our consciousness loses parts of itself:

because the meter can’t resolve the whole thing at once.

Myth, geometry, and consciousness are describing the same structure:

Sun = full signal

Moon = aliasing residue

Earth = rendered world

Demeter = the sampling function

Persephone = the hidden harmonic

Underworld = the unmeasured region of the curve

You don’t return from the underworld because you “escaped death.”

You return because the meter finally catches up.

Ancient myth = sampling theory in symbolic form.

And once you see it, you can’t unsee it.