The Book of Symbols 3...

Pomegranate

Pomegranate Seed, by Elizabeth J. Milleker, 

gouache and sumi-ink painting, 2003, United States

A maiden kneeling on half a pomegranate holds her cloak in a gesture that signifies epiphany. The presence of winged Eros at her shoulder denotes that the one who discloses herself is divine- here, the goddess Persephone (Kerényi, 144). The smooth, hard, rosy shell of the pome granate, or "seedy apple," crowned by a golden aureole, opens up to reveal blood-red fruit and numerous seeds, the basis for the pomegranate's mythic dynamism throughout the ancient Mediterranean. According to a Phrygian myth, a fertilized stone phallus engendered a hermaphroditic being, Agditis, who, castrated by the gods, became the goddess Cybele (Daniélou 90); from the blood of the castration sprang the first pomegranate tree. The priests of Attis, a castrated son-lover of the earth goddess carried pomegranates in their hands or wore them on their heads in wreaths (Kerényi, 136). Along with the fig and apple, the pomegranate is associated with the underworld and the mysteries of the death, conception and rebirth of vegetation, personified by divine young men or maidens. The pomegranate's seeds and blood-colored flesh were emblematic of this eternal renewal of the life of the world in which the human initiate might also participate. The pomegranate was sacred to Hades, who seized Persephone, the daughter of the grain goddess Demeter, into the land of the dead. When Demeter in grief withheld the grain from the earth, Zeus agreed to have Persephone returned to her mother. But Hades gave the maiden "a single sweet pomegranate seed," which meant that she must spend a third of the year with him as his spouse and the Queen of the Dead (ibid, 133). The pomegranate played a part in the Eleusinian Mysteries, honoring the two goddess as the feminine source and continuity of life, and also in the phallic, Dionysian Holoa festival and the Thesmophoria. In some rites, the initiate was allowed to eat nothing except this seeds of the pomegranate; in others, the eating of this fruit was forbidden. As a votive offering to the subterranean aspect of the Great Goddess in particular, the pomegranate suggests, in the psychological sense, the bitter depths and majestic forces of the unconscious encountered in the taking of the fertile, dreadful seeds of the self. 

A girl with Eros kneeling on a half-pomegranate, 

terra-cotta, ca. 400-323 B.C.E., Greece.

~Bella