This is a companion post to Essential Aromatica — Season 5, Episode 10 “Demeter, Ritual and Aromatherapy for Early Autumn”

The Season of Demeter

Autumn invites us to hold the tension between seeming oppositions: harvest and nourishment alongside waning light and rot. As I write this, it is the beginning of the end of harvest season, when yang energy continues its slow contraction giving way for slowly expanding yin. Out on New York’s North Fork wine region I enjoy watching as the grapevines are in senescence: energy withdrawing from the leaves and concentrating in the fruit as sugars gather inward. Then the sudden tipping point of peak ripeness quickly turns to rot and fermentation.

This is Demeter’s season.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been approaching her as the older, sovereign goddess of grain, humus, and the threshold between life and death. This is closer to the whole mother‑goddess principle, before Demeter became a fragment of the great feminine and reduced to the template of nurturing or grieving mother.

Beyond “Love and Light”: The Work of Descent

Descent and rot have bad reputations, often resisted and seen as obstacles to overcome. Which is impossible. Resistance goes against the truth of descent and return. Myth gives us metaphors and narrative devices that let us explore these challenging, complex subjects without collapsing into fear. When I strip away the cultural fear that positions upward, forward‑moving words as positive — ascent, growth, “love and light” — and their downward counterparts as negative — decline, darkness, sinking — it becomes clear how one‑sided and simplistic this fear is. This is the real Hymn of Demeter where abundance and ripeness are on the cusp of rot, where death must occur for life to continue. This holds true psychically and ecologically.

Myth as a Way of Seeing

One of the reasons I turned to myth and fairytales in this season of Essential Aromatica is how they offer a way to meet the world in an unflattened way. As in previous episodes, I am approaching mythic figures as forces, not characters. Demeter represents cycles, including the relationship between nourishment and decay. Directly through her, and in relationship to Persephone the goddess of the underworld (see season 5 episode 4 for more on Persephone), we see that truth that death is necessary for life.

Aromatherapy, for me, is part of this same conversation. Essential oils aren’t lifestyle accessories, they’re volatile, chemical expressions of plants responding to season, soil, stress, sunlight and several other factors. They’re companions for the inner and outer climates we move through. Autumn asks for warmth, digestion, grounding: coriander, cardamom, carrot seed. Essential oils that literally and figuratively help us metabolize change.

Where Have Our Initiation Rites Gone?

Working with Demeter brought me back to a question I’ve been circling for years: where have our meaningful initiation rites gone? Across cultures, rites of passage once marked thresholds: adulthood, marriage, death. They shaped character, offered belonging, and created meaning. Initiation, in its true sense, transforms an individual on a social, psychological, and existential level. Today, we have driver’s licenses, voting, graduation ceremonies. Milestones, sure, but they don’t reorganize the psyche or mark the soul the way a genuine initiation does. My own Confirmation in the Roman Catholic church was a perfect example: a formal rite, yes, but hollow in practice without community, meaning, or transformation.

A recent Wall Street Journal article about a campuswide cocaine ring fueled by fraternity hazing at Penn State (Wong & Mitovich, 2026) struck me as a symptom of this absence. When healthy initiation disappears, shadow forms rush in to fill the void. People still seek belonging, transformation, identity. Without ritual, they find it in questionable and often harmful places.

The Necessity of Meaning Making

As social creatures, we seek connection and meaning making. Lacking any meaningful support or felt sense of initiation, I chose to get a tattoo when I moved to NYC many years ago. The move marked a major threshold, and the tattoo became a way to acknowledge the meaning — a permanent signal of the shift. My psyche knew I needed something that said: I was there, now I am here, and there’s no turning back. I wish I’d had a more meaningful rite to honor that threshold, but at least I understood that something had to be done.

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A Poem: The Rotting Return

I wrote the following poem to observe the season’s threshold, Demeter’s rites, cyclicality, the decay-return relationship and the mystery of it all.

Part I. Grain 
Sun-fat, full, bursting at Autumn’s edge. 
Life exhaling as senescence begets nourishment. 
Descent gathering in the seed’s quiet, darkly.

Part II. Rot
But first, the transformation. 
Mortification — the holy rot, 
With death folding inward into its own slurry.

Part III. Humus
Black soil breathing, the hinge between worlds, 
Where what respired drifts into replenishment, 
And return moves through the hands of the Mysteries.

Demeter’s Reminder. Episode 10, season 5 of Essential Aromatica centers on Demeter’s archaic identity, her rites, her season, and why initiation matters for earth-bound psychological grounding. If you’re curious about myth, aromatherapy, seasonality, the Eleusinian undertones of autumn, I invite you to listen.

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Sources:

Wong, A., & Mitovich, J. (2026, September 28). Penn State’s campuswide cocaine ring was fueled by fraternity hazing. The Wall Street Journal. https://www.wsj.com/us-news/penn-state-cocaine-ring-fraternity-hazing-3813d85b