Few fruits carry as many contradictions as the Punica granatum, better known as the pomegranate. It’s played the role of culprit, imprisoning a beloved goddess; an emblem of lovers and the underworld; a vessel for divine mystery; and a cure.
The Pomegranate in Medicine
The pomegranate has been used as a remedy for many ailments. According to Pliny the Elder, a first-century naturalist, the plant was a cure-all and had the power to alleviate a wide variety of health concerns. Pliny listed it as a key ingredient for twenty-six different remedies. In a similar vein, authors of early modern herbals such as John Gerard(e) instructed their readers to use different parts of the plant—its juice, flowers, rind, and seeds—to address stomach concerns, dysentery, dental health, wounds and bleeding, and menstrual health.
This versatility becomes even more interesting in light of humoral theory, which explains illness as an imbalance of hot, cold, wet, or dry qualities in the body, treated through plants of the opposite nature. However, across herbals throughout history, the pomegranate was used in seemingly contradictory ways. Dioscorides (40–90 CE), in his De Materia Medica, marked the sweet pomegranate’s ability to produce heat around the stomach and warned against using it to treat a fever, a belief which continued into the early modern period. On the other hand, the sixteenth-century herbalist, Rembert Dodoens, lauded the cooling effects of its juice on the stomach.
These contrasting uses don’t appear to be antithetical to one another. Hieronymus Bock, in his Kreüter Buch, puts both heating and cooling effects in context by building finer distinctions between types of pomegranates. In a recent study, A. R. Ruis highlights the numerous invocations in early modern medicine of the pomegranate as a plant capable of restoring balance between such opposing states or qualities, a characteristic that persists in the fruit’s symbolism.
The Pomegranate in Myth
On the island of Cyprus stands tall a pomegranate tree, holy and unique. In Deipnosophistae, Athenaeus records a dialogue on the pomegranate, noting that “Venus [Greek: Aphrodite] did herself plant this the parent tree on Cyprus.” Because it was the only tree that the goddess cared to plant, the pomegranate became closely linked to beauty and love, which she represents.
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Likewise, in Athens, one encounters the fruit again on a sacred representation of a deity. In Pausanias’s account, a statue of Hera, the goddess of marriage and family, stands with a scepter in one hand and a pomegranate in the other. Pausanias writes that he’s unable to elaborate on the fruit since it’s meant to be a holy mystery. As Carl Kerényi explains in Eleusis: Archetypal Image of Mother and Daughter, this omission is an aporrhetoteros logos, a story “told under strict injunction of silence,” allowing it to gain even more significance in the life of the goddess. Kerényi shows how the pomegranate goes beyond a mere religious symbol, noting its role as an object of worship as evidenced by votive offerings of terracotta pomegranates in one of Hera’s sanctuaries. Thus, a fruit already bound to love through Aphrodite now takes on the sanctity of marriage, motherhood, and childbirth through Hera.
In the Homeric “Hymn to Demeter,” written in about the seventh century BCE, Hades kidnaps Persephone with Zeus’s permission (or at his behest) and flees with her to the underworld. Demeter, Persephone’s mother and the goddess of agriculture, is consequently struck by a deep grief and leaves the fields barren, making that year a “most terrible one for mortals, all over the Earth.” Zeus decides to intervene and let Persephone return to her mother on the condition that she hadn’t eaten anything from the underworld. Hermes is sent to inform Hades and Persephone of this decision. As he hears that Persephone would be allowed back, Hades gives her the seeds of a pomegranate, and, in tasting the honey-sweet fruit, Persephone unknowingly binds herself to him as his wife in the underworld.
The seeds seal Persephone’s fate as one who must spend part of every year with Hades among the dead. As she describes this damning moment to Demeter, Persephone says that Hades “put into my hand the berry of the pomegranate, that honey-sweet food, and he compelled me by biē [force] to eat of it.” In this telling, the ruby-red seeds become synonymous with imprisonment. Despite this, it’s difficult to separate the fruit from its previous symbolic associations with love and marriage through Aphrodite and Hera.
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A close reading of the account reveals that the seeds of the pomegranate were “stealthily” given to Persephone but not forced on her. When paired with the enticing epithet “honey-sweet,” one must reconsider Persephone’s agency and perhaps regard the fruit not only as imprisonment but also as temptation. Analyzing the word choice around Hades in the broader context of the Homeric tradition, John L. Myres, in “Persephone and the Pomegranate,” suggests that Hades might have used the pomegranate as a love charm, drawing Persephone to himself. When Persephone partakes of the fruit, she begins to be attracted to her husband and feel love for him. In the layered interpretation of such myths, the fruit encapsulates love and beauty through enticement, the sanctity of marriage through consecration, and the idea of imprisonment, manipulation, and the underworld.
The Pomegranate in the Abrahamic Tradition
When the fruit appears in the Abrahamic tradition, it remains in conversation with its ancient pagan connotations. In the Song of Songs (sometimes referred to as the Song of Solomon or the Canticle of Canticles), a poem in the Hebrew Bible about two lovers, the fruit remains connected to beauty, love, and enticement.
“Your temples behind your veil are like the halves of a pomegranate,” reads Song of Songs 4:3. Significantly, the lovers question whether pomegranate trees are in bloom as they talk of their love. Here, the maturing of the fruit implicitly symbolizes the possibility of their love being realized, suggesting marriage or a loss of chastity and recalling the function of the fruit in Persephone’s story. However, to better understand the fruit’s role in this story, one must remain open to other conversations and how their meanings imbue the fruit.
Asaph Goor suggests that the pomegranate is unique, because unlike other biblical plants, its main role is an aesthetic one. However, its aesthetics go beyond simple beauty; its use in religious imagery throughout the Bible suggests the presence of a resonant symbolic association related to its form. For instance, the fruit’s holiness is signaled in the Pentateuch. It appears in Exodus 28:33–35, which calls for the ornamentation of an ephod (a priest’s robe) with pomegranates stitched in blue, purple, and scarlet along the garment’s hem. The pomegranate appears again in the decorations of the bronze capitals in 1 Kings 7:17–21.
Moses de León, in his thirteenth-century cabalistic text Sefer Ha-Rimmon (The Book of the Pomegranate), characterizes the pomegranate as a sign of the Shekhinah, or the presence of God. The pomegranate contains all the commandments of God in its seeds; the divine inhabits it. In this realization of sanctity and wisdom, de León establishes a link to the Song of Songs and suggests that even those who are empty are filled with the commandments, like the pomegranate. This connection between the fruit and inherent holiness adds new meaning to the Song of Songs, where the love between two people can unknowingly be a divine revelation.
The Pomegranate in Art
The pomegranate has appeared in art across millennia, writes Hope Johnston. In sixteenth-century England, it ornamented royal charters, illuminated manuscripts, and book bindings. Its inclusion in the badge of Catherine of Aragon (1485–1536) referred “specifically to her upbringing in Spain,” notes Johnston, where the granada (pomegranate) was seen as an emblem of the victory of “Catholic monarchs” over the Moors. Even though she became queen of England when she married Henry VIII, Catherine retained the pomegranate as her personal emblem, marking her as a Spanish princess in perpetuity.
When the fruit shows up in art of the Italian Renaissance in the same period, it proves again to be a multi-dimensional symbol. This is the case one encounters in Sandro Botticelli’s Madonna della Melagrana (Madonna of the Pomegranate), which depicts a recurring motif in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italian art. At the center of the tondo, the Virgin Mary holds both a pomegranate and an infant Jesus Christ. The title that has become attached to the painting over time curiously characterizes the Virgin Mary by the fruit, perhaps in recognition of her chastity, especially when considered in the context of Persephone’s myth. Yet, the fruit carries a broader meaning as well, as the Christ child also intimately interacts with it, grasping and contemplating it.
To unpack this symbolism William Suida analyses the Dreyfus Madonna, a painting sometimes attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, sometimes to Lorenzo de Credi. Though the figures are disposed differently than in Botticelli’s painting, the motif is similar, showing Mary holding an open pomegranate in one hand while propping up the baby Jesus with the other. Here, however, the child offers a kernel to his mother. Suida suggests that Christ’s interest in the seeds was rooted in Pope Gregory I’s invocation of a simile in which a pomegranate is used to express the unity of the Church. On the other hand, James Hall, tracking the history of the pomegranate as a symbol, proposes that it represents the Resurrection of Christ. This latter interpretation recalls Persephone’s yearly return from the underworld or another myth in which a pomegranate sprouts from drops of Dionysus’s blood after his death, heralding his resurrection.
Thus, Botticelli’s Jesus, who stares at the fruit in deep thought, perhaps prophesies his own death and return, as opposed to the child in the Dreyfus Madonna, who proudly shows the unity of his church to his mother. Yet as she faces the kernels and feels the rind of the fruit—in both paintings—the Virgin Mary is forced to contemplate her motherhood and her chastity.
The pomegranate, used heavily in early medicine and at times for opposing aims, can resolve this contradiction by having a balancing quality. To consider the plant’s symbolic associations as separate or opposing is misleading, however; through the plant, different myths, religions, and art traditions can coexist, making the pomegranate one of the most complex cultural symbols one can study.
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