The pomegranate and Persephone

Some preliminary thoughts on the west Asian inspirations for a Greek myth

The other day a student of mine wondered about the origins of the Demeter-Hades-Persephone story.

If it isn’t a tale that explains why we have seasons, what is its reason for being?

I have talked about this extensively in another post, but that word “origins” got me, especially since I am writing a book about the origins of Greek mythology and have been thinking about the subject for something like 30 years now.

From where did the author of the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, our main early source for the story of Hades and Persephone, draw his or her inspiration?

Did he or she just make things up on the spot?

As I have written in the past, we’re always looking for the roots of musicians’ styles, lyrics, and melodies. Why not Greek mythology’s as well?

I had to admit to the student that I had no idea from where the story would have come. I have always taken it for granted that this was a Greek story created by Greeks for Greeks.

But there is a key to this question that is sitting there plain as day: the pomegranate.

The pomegranate is a vitally important symbol for the myth, since this is the method by which Hades binds Persephone to him for at least part of the year.

And the pomegranate is not Greek.

A long time ago, my wife and I relied on the Kurdish owner of a plant nursery. Kurds’ native land is northern Iraq and eastern Turkey. He was a reliable expert on landscaping, and he helped us in our quixotic quest to do something, anything, with our desert of a back yard.

A pomegranate tree on the island of Cyprus (photograph mine).

At one point he suggested a pomegranate bush, which I thought was terribly romantic. We planted it, it struggled, and ultimately it died—because everything in that space died or was eaten by deer.

But pomegranates are very familiar to Kurds, as indeed they are to most folks in west Asia. Pomegranate molasses is a favorite condiment for food items like shawarma. The fruit apparently originates in Persian lands, modern Iran, around the Caspian Sea. It migrated west in the Bronze Age (3000-1200 BCE), to Mesopotamia (modern Iraq), Assyria (modern Syria), the Levant and Phoenicia (modern Lebanon and Israel), Anatolia (modern Turkey), the island of Cyprus, and Egypt.

The pomegranate was not cultivated in Greece at this time. Apparently it came as a fruit already harvested, a luxury item for those who had the right trade connections.

According to Professor Sarah Immerwahr, a former beloved professor of mine in graduate school, “While the pomegranate was cultivated in Greece in the time of Theophrastos [a thousand years after the Bronze Age], clearly it was not a staple and required a certain amount of pampering.” Shades of our backyard.

Pomegranates only show up twice in Homer’s poem, both in the Odyssey, and both in exotic locations (once in the Underworld, in a description of the beautiful fruits that the punished Tantalus could see but never taste).

So why would Hades use a foreign fruit to bind Persephone to him?

Probably because the whole idea of gods with personalities comes from this west Asian area of religious and mythological production (Egypt, too), and Greeks owe a debt of imagination to that area.

But wait, there’s more. Quite a bit more.

There is no story in the myths of these lands that has come down to us where someone uses a pomegranate in a kind of wedding cake ritual. But there are two stories that fall in the neighborhood of the Persephone story, one of which I’ll describe briefly here.

I am talking about the descent of a goddess into the Underworld, Inanna or Ishtar, the Sumerian-Babylonian goddess of sexuality and battle. In this story she intends to become queen of the Underworld, overthrowing her sister Ereshkigal. This parallels Persephone’s status as queen and wife of Hades, though without the conflict.

Unfortunately, Inanna/Ishtar fails in her quest and is struck dead, even though she is a goddess. The details are gorgeous, though the story is sad.

The goddess’s death spurs activity in the upper world, as Inanna/Ishtar’s allies seek to bring her back to life, similar to Demeter’s actions in trying to retrieve Persephone. These efforts ultimately fail, and a substitute is found in Dumuzi or Tammuz, a human king and husband of Inanna/Ishtar, who dies in the goddess’s place so she may rise again.

Now everyone is sad that Dumuzi/Tammuz has died, and eventually a deal is reached whereby Dumuzi/Tammuz’s sister Geshtinanna splits time with him in the Underworld, half the year down below, half the year above.

That sounds a bit like Persephone’s tale, too.

One can see how Greek poets may have been fascinated by this incredibly imaginative story and decided to refit it to a Greek context.

And the introduction of the pomegranate makes for a particularly attractive variant detail in the story, as the exotic fruit gives a whiff of eastern sophistication, while at the same time doing its duty as a symbol of marriage bonding and new life.

This is a simple and rough sketch. Many other elements must have gone into the Persephone-Hades-Demeter story. But it should serve to underline that creativity does not happen in a vacuum. I always say that if there had been no snakes, we could not have imagined a dragon.