While pomegranates are “all the rage” these days due to the plethora of health benefits they offer, their religious significance remains little known to even the most avid pomegranate lover.
Some scholars even go as far as to say that ”the fruit eaten by Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden may have been a pomegranate. These scholars argue that it is unlikely that apples would have flourished in the first garden.”
While this is highly unlikely to be true, it does make sense that the pomegranate with its abundance of blood red seeds would serve as the ideal symbol of everything from Persephone’s temptation in Greek mythology to the fruitfulness of the Promised Land and Abraham’s many descendants to the passion of a young maiden’s crimson lips and cheeks or the blood of martyrs to the unity of all individual believers brought together in Christ’s church.
From the famous Unicorn Tapestries to Botticelli’s Madonna of the Pomegranate (above), this fruit offers a cornucopia of religious imagery upon which to meditate.
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