The drawing is by Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones (1833-98). You'll really need to click on "view larger" to see this fine pencil drawing. Hades emerges from the Underworld through a chasm in a four-horse chariot. Winged figures bear Persephone away from her friends who tear their hair in grief. Note the many-headed snake also emerging from the cleft!
Recently in Cynthia's Journal, Sorting the Pieces, she wrote of how the myth of Demeter and Persephone is relevant to her life.
Since reading her entry, I've wanted to write more about Persephone. I mentioned Persephone briefly in an earlier entry called "Underworld Seed."
Her first name was Kore, or "Maiden." In one account of the story, Demeter hides Kore, her first-born daughter away from the Gods in a primordial cave.
I want someday to do an entry on the symbolism of the cave.
Here, I think the cave is a reference to womb. Demeter places her maiden child into the cave in order to protect her from the dangers of the world. This is an action we can all relate to.
But we can never completely protect our children, not from life's horrors, life's ugliness, life's many abductions, and certainly not from death.
Persephone's time in the underworld is a symbolic withdrawal. The meaning of her withdrawal to the underworld can be found in the stories of other holy ones who had to "die" to the mortal world in order to be reborn, transformed.
Persephone is in a continual state of death and rebirth. She is the goddess of both life and death. (Many gods and goddesses are a juxtaposition of opposites: Demeter rules over both plenty and famine; Apollo over plague and purity; Dionysus over ecstatic genius and drunken, wild rage, and so on.)
Of all the goddesses, Persephone is probably the one I most identify with (along with her other incarnations, such as Inanna and Isis).
As we mature, we all must eat the seeds of the pomegranate*, knowing that something will have to die in us, something will have to change. Sometimes we are tricked into eating the seeds; sometimes we eat them willingly.
As the Queen of the Underworld, Persephone represents the human condition, which is the journey from "womb" to "tomb." I look to her to understand the nature of my mortality.
Persephone's journey is the journey our physical body takes, even as it sheds cells and renews them, and finally when our physical body dies. Her journey symbolizes the journey of our psyche as we move toward individuation.
*I found the following observation on a strange website called Dissecting Hannibal. Earlier in this entry, I mentioned the dual domains over which the gods and goddesses ruled. Note that the Pomegranate's symbolism is also dual:
Pomegranate is an important symbol in Old Testament. It has dual symbolic meaning as fruit of condemnation and forgiveness. Pomegranate can be compared with the apple (pomme) eaten by Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. The price of knowledge of good and evil is death, Adam and Eve became mortal. In the whole Bible price of knowledge is death. On the other hand from the early Renaissance pomegranate appeared in paintings of Mary and Holy Child (one of Botticelli's or his school paintings presents Jesus with pomegranate in his left hand, Giovanni Bellini also painted Holy Child holding this fruit and sometimes as in Joos van Cleve painting bitten pomegranate is placed on a plate near apples).
Jewish tradition says that human body includes 613 nerves and pomegranate fruit 613 seeds as Torah includes 613 commandments. To eat a pomegranate is to eat human flesh...
4 comments:
Theresa, wow!! I love how you tied in the themes of duality to death and rebirth,as well as knowledge and forgiveness. Isn't it provocative that knowledge is risky in the Christian paradigm while it teaches to seek wisdom? This is yet another paradox for me. The image of the pomegranate has always been a powerful and a personally resonant one for me. Years before I'd ever seen the fruit, I was compared to one, basically because so much of me is inner and not revealed by the surface. I'd never heard of the comparison of the pomegranate to the human body, and again, I have to tie this back to Christianity with communion -- "Take, eat, this is my body." The theme of death and rebirth is so powerful through all mythology and life. It always leaves me wondering what has to die so what can live.
One problem has developed.... I see my promegranate sitting on the table and I am now wanting to count the seeds........
Beautifully explicated, Theresa. I asm enjoying reading as I sit at home, unable to speak because of laryngitis!
The theme with which I am most identifying at present is the letting go of one's children, and the inability to protect them forever. I wrote a fairly strident response to Cynthia's entry about Demeter and Persephone, pointing out my belief that Demeter did a poor job of letting her child go. But maybe I need to be a little more charitable, since I am in a similar position myself right now. My older son is about to graduate from college (next June) and is in the process of job-hunting. He has some difficulties which I shan't go into here, but they hold him back from selling himself as the brilliant indivdual that he is. There is a part of me that wants to go out and shield him from the rejections (mini-deaths) that will inevitably come, a part that wants to mother him forever. But there is, I am happy to say, another part that is willing to let him go and experience the world for himself, so he can grow and learn. To mother and protect forever is a disservice to our children. But. of course, I will ALWAYS be available to love and and understand. That is the way of the world.
PS - Pomegranate means apple with grains (seeds). The "granate" part is also the root of the word "grenade" which I find fascinating, if you want to play with that. Metaphorically, eating a pomegranate may cause an explosion within the individual, thereby occasioning a forced shange - there's your transformaton, Theresa. Or am I getting too tied in knots here? I feel like Borges in his Garden of Forking Paths!
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