The Doctrine of Signatures was part of the worldview by which early doctors, herbalists, and apothecaries transformed an organism into a specific medicinal resource, an alchemy we present-day capitalists surely understand. It’s strange to us now, this sort of anthropomorphizing that dismembers plants into humanlike parts instead of giving them humanlike personalities-tooth-shaped tooth fixers, not The Giving Tree. The word “garnet” comes from “pomegranate,” as does “grenade,” so named for the way a shrapnel-scattering grenade imitates the seed-scattering explosion of a smashed pomegranate. On closer inspection, the wounds don’t bleed-they weep seeds. The unicorn appears to be bleeding from wounds of the hunt that chained him to this tree. He looks content in captivity, a symbol of fertility and marriage and the fertility of a soul’s marriage with Christ.
In The Unicorn in Captivity, a medieval European tapestry one can inspect before touring the quince grove at the Met Cloisters in Manhattan, a unicorn sits within a low-fenced pasture beneath a pomegranate tree. For millennia across Europe, Persia, and Asia, in Buddhist, Islamic, Judaic, and Christian traditions, pomegranates have been invoked as a symbol of fertility and sometimes smashed in bridal chambers to encourage the birth of many children. “The voice is paler than the lips it leaves,” says Demeter in Edith Wharton’s retelling, her joy fading to confusion.Īccording to Jewish lore, the pomegranate contains 613 seeds, one for each mitzvah. A married girl who hears and speaks of a world Demeter can’t understand. Her mother, the harvest goddess Demeter-having been flattened by grief, having refused to let new crops grow until her daughter returns, having starved mortals until the gods fear no one will survive to leave offerings, having, in another version of the myth, convinced Zeus to make Hades give Persephone back-welcomes home a changed girl, wizened and spooky, uneasy in her mother’s empire of green.
Persephone has seen the dead, married their king, eaten three or four or seven seeds of his pomegranate. The fleshy, multicolored fruits, pretentious and insolent. In one version of this mythic reunion, Yannis Ritsos writes:Īnd my name was strange and my friends were strange strange the upper light with the square, pure white When Persephone returns to her mother, the underworld is still on her.
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