t w o
Perhaps you know this story?
A fair maiden was picking flowers when the very earth cleaved open and the King of the Underworld abducted the girl. Her mother, the goddess of the harvest, was bereft. In her grief and torment, she forbade the earth from producing. Her father, the sky god, was moved by the cries of starving people and forced the abductor, his own brother, the lord of the depths, to relinquish her. Before releasing his prize, however, he tricked the young maiden by giving her pomegranate seeds to eat. Having eaten the food of the underworld, she must henceforth spend a portion of every year by his side, reigning as his queen. During these months, her mother is in mourning, the earth becomes cold and barren, the crops will not grow.
You may recognize this as the bones of the myth of Persephone. In Greek myth, she is unique as a figure that divides her time, as it were, between the land of the living and the land of the dead. In depth psychological terms, she commutes back and forth between the surface world of consciousness and the underworld of the unconscious.
What accounts for her unique dual life? Yes, she was abducted by Hades. But had she not eaten from the pomegranate, the pomum granatum, the apple of many seeds, she would have returned to the surface world. It is these seeds, these pregnant shrapnel of meaning, that keep returning her to the depths.
Sometimes an image – be it a poem, a painting, a piece of music – hits us with unexpected force, detonates inside of us. In these moments, we can ingest the seeds and choose to share the fate of Persephone, who some say knowingly ate the pomegranate to remain tethered to the depths as well as the surface. These seeds of image want to draw us down, down to the underworld, down to the realm of the unconscious, down to the night world, a realm in which image and metaphor is the lingua franca.
