The pomegranate: seeds of love from Persephone and Hera to the Song

The pomegranate is striking for its structure: beneath a hard, leathery rind hide hundreds of shining red seeds, pressed tightly together. It is no surprise that the cultures of the Mediterranean and the Near East made it a symbol of fertility, abundance and union. Over the centuries the fruit has accompanied myths of marriage and separation, cults of goddesses, love poetry and works of sacred art.

Persephone's fruit

The best-known myth involving the pomegranate is that of Persephone, told in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter. Hades abducts the goddess's young daughter and carries her to the underworld to make her his bride. When Zeus orders Persephone to return to her mother, Hades gives her a pomegranate seed to eat. Whoever has tasted the food of the dead cannot leave their realm for ever: for this reason the maiden must spend part of each year beside her husband.

The tale explains the cycle of the seasons, because during her daughter's absence Demeter leaves the earth barren. But the pomegranate also takes on a nuptial value here: the seed she eats seals a marriage bond that can no longer be undone. In this double role, as a bond of love and a boundary between life and death, the fruit has passed through the entire classical tradition.

Hera's pomegranate

The pomegranate was also linked to Hera, goddess of marriage. Pausanias, in his Description of Greece, describes the great gold and ivory statue of the goddess in the sanctuary at Argos, a work by Polykleitos: Hera held in one hand a sceptre topped by a cuckoo and in the other a pomegranate. Pausanias adds that the story connected with the fruit was secret and that he would not relate it, a sign of its mystic character.

In Cyprus and the Levant the pomegranate was also associated with deities of love and fertility, and its many seeds made it a natural good omen for newlyweds. In many parts of the Mediterranean, even in modern times, the fruit appeared in popular wedding customs as a sign of prosperity and children. In some traditions a pomegranate was opened or broken at the wedding, and the number of scattered seeds was read as an omen of the household's future abundance.

From the Song of Songs to Botticelli

The pomegranate appears several times in the Bible. In the Song of Songs the bridegroom compares his beloved's temples to a slice of pomegranate and describes her body as an orchard of pomegranates. Golden pomegranates also adorned the hem of the high priest's robe and the capitals of Solomon's temple, according to the biblical account. The fruit thus became a symbol of beauty, abundance and blessing.

Christian art turned the pomegranate into an image of the Church, which gathers many faithful into one body, and of the resurrection. Sandro Botticelli, in the Madonna of the Pomegranate in the Uffizi, painted around 1487, places the open fruit in the hands of the Virgin and Child. The Spanish city of Granada also bears the pomegranate on its coat of arms, and its very name recalls that of the fruit.

From the seeds eaten by Persephone to Hera's hand and the pomegranates painted in the Renaissance, the fruit has joined the idea of love to that of fertility and the indissoluble bond. Its seeds pressed together beneath a single rind remain one of the most eloquent images of union: many distinct elements living together, protected by the same casing, like the members of a family.