Pomegranates

Promise and Hope

By Dr. Susan Fisher with The Lukeion Project

It’s the new year, which in modern America means resolutions and ads for gym memberships. This stark 180 degree turn we take as a culture has always struck me as rather odd. We emerge on the first of January butterfly-like, blinking at the bright light of reality, ready to fly off as new creations once we shed the cheese and chocolate chrysalis of our holiday revelries. While the practice is sort of odd, the impulse is not, and new year’s traditions are common the world round.

One of my favorite traditions is one practiced in modern Greece and has its roots in the ancient world. This is the practice of smashing a pomegranate against the door on New Year’s Day. The number of seeds that scatter is said to be proportionate to the amount of good luck and abundance you’ll have in the year to come. 

The custom varies from place to place, with some people smashing the pomegranate at the threshold, others on the door, while still other customs abound regarding when exactly the ritual is performed, how to enter the house after it is performed, and just how lucky the one is who gets splattered.  I did this for the first (and probably last) time last year. I opted for the “chucking the pomegranate at the threshold” method and let’s just say my 2022 should have been EXTRAORDINARILY lucky, in all ways except getting the stains off the porch. That sucker went everywhere. I got sprayed and my husband, who I hadn’t warned, heard the splat, and opened the door to fruit carnage. We’ve been married a long time – the dude didn’t even bat an eye.

So why pomegranates? It’s all in the seeds, or in pomegranate lingo “arils.” Pomegranates are full of juicy, bright red seeds that were associated in ancient Greece with abundance, fertility, and regeneration. The most famous partaker of the pomegranate is Persephone, daughter of the goddess Demeter. Having been abducted by the god Hades, she was compelled to remain in the Underworld as Queen of the Dead, after having eaten six (or in some accounts four) pomegranate seeds while she was first below ground. This always seemed like a stark penalty for what was a small number of seeds, but in Greek mythology it’s the thought or the symbolism that counts, and basically what Persephone had done by eating the seeds was opting in on the whole Underworld thing and what it had to offer. For her this meant marriage to Hades, who was not only the god of the dead, but also a fertility god and god of abundance – ploutos (Pluto – another name for Hades) means wealth in ancient Greek.

The pomegranate is also associated with Adonis, the exceedingly handsome, mortal-turned-god lover of Aphrodite and Persephone, who had a sort of time-share relationship with him – he spent six months above ground with Aphrodite and six months below ground with Persephone. It was said that the blood he shed when he died created the anemone flower and the pomegranate tree. Like other fruit, such as peaches, which originated in Persia, the pomegranate may have spread east with the mythology of Adonis himself. Both Adonis and Persephone are gods who die or go below and reemerge, and this regeneration, awash in abundance and fertility, is what is represented by the pomegranate. These associations were not unique to Greek mythology either; the pomegranate has symbolic importance in Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism in many of the same ways.

So, what does the “fruit of the dead,” as the ancient Egyptians called it, have to do with the new year? The pomegranate, literally “seeded apple” pomum granatum in Latin, is a fruit of promise and hope. In the modern world, death is often seen as an end, but in the ancient world, rebirth followed death in a cycle of regeneration.  The two go hand in hand and with the pomegranate, bursting with deep red juicy arils, the cycle moves on with abundance. The old year dies, the new year is born and is bursting with the promise of prosperity.

In this way, the pomegranate is not much different from modern resolutions and gym memberships. Both are rooted in the desire for part of the old self to die so that a new self can emerge, more prosperous in some regard than before. What needs to go and what should stay? Answering this question requires some introspection. What worked last year? What didn’t? What habit or thought pattern might you want to let die so that a new one can appear in its place? These questions and more are good things to contemplate, perhaps while you are munching on a tasty pomegranate.