#ChthonicThursday: the pomegranate
Pomegranates have a certain significance in my book, as they’re connected to the realm of the dead through Greek Mythology. My main character decided their blood had to taste like Pomegranate for a reason. Today let’s dive a bit into the origin of the myth and some lesser-known variations. The ancient Greek city of Side, […]
Pomegranates have a certain significance in my book, as they’re connected to the realm of the dead through Greek Mythology. My main character decided their blood had to taste like Pomegranate for a reason. Today let’s dive a bit into the origin of the myth and some lesser-known variations.
The ancient Greek city of Side, in Pamphylia, featured a pomegranate on its coins and its name is believed to come from the name of the fruit itself in the local language, as a testimony that the fruit was well-known around the Mediterranean way before the Romans boasted “discovering” it in Carthage and brought it home from their pillagings.
According to Carl A. P. Ruck and Danny Staples in their compendium on classical myths, the pomegranate is connected to Persephone just as much as the poppy seed is connected to her mother Demeter: both have a chambered seed and both have secret properties. It’s a bit of a stretch but it’s fascinating.
The hunter Orion was said to have married Side, generating Metioche and Menippe, and it’s interesting because the minor deity was eventually thrown into Hades by Hera when she heard she rivalled her beauty.
Persephone eventually ends up staying in Hades with her husband for a number of months connected with the number of pomegranate seeds she plucked in a moment of hunger and weakness. Was this an act of divine cannibalism?
When Polycleitus sculpted Hera in ivory and gold for the temple at Argive, he decided to enthrone her and give her two royal emblems: a sceptre in one hand, and a pomegranate in the other, akin to the royal orb you might see in more recent royalty. Pausanias in the second century was freaked out by this depiction and said he wouldn’t dare to whisper anything about that: the connection between Hera and the pomegranate was a forbidden history.
An early Christian chapel was discovered near the archaeological site of Heraion at the mouth of the River Sele, and it’s consecrated to Our Lady of the Pomegranate. This is believed to be an attempt to convert the cult of Hera into a cult of the Virgin Mary.