Pomegranate Seeds
Solstice, Myth and the Soul Meaning of Winter
Greetings, these remaining shortest days and longest nights of season and year.
The Winter-Solstice shift back toward the light in the Northern Hemisphere begins Wednesday, 12.21.22, at 4:47 PM EST. The winter day will have up to a whopping eight hours and 46 minutes of daylight, depending how near you are to the Southern Hemisphere’s Tropic of Capricorn latitude. (There it is Summer Solstice, with the sun directly overhead at noon before making its shift back toward winter there.)
Recent and past editions of newShrink have discussed more clinically the psychological and physical effects of increased darkness and winter. These range from depression and habitual disordered sleep contributig to obesity, Type-2 diabetes, heart disease and even cancer.
Today’s psychological focus is from the soul-depth perspectives, including archetypal — universally human — themes expressed through myth, story and ritual of many cultures across time. A pervasive, recurring image among these, those pomegranate seeds of the title, show up in many examples. Readers among us who lean most avidly Jungian may find this a special treat, or a chuckle: The title image arrived last week with an unceremoniously mundane dream-snippet… about eating pomegranate seeds!
On the news-front this week, in addition to your own preferred usual sources I recommend Heather Cox Richardson’s December 15 Letters from an American (www.heathercoxridhardson.com). It’s a thorough one-stop recap and connecting-of-dots across several of the week’s highest-profile stories.
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Looking first at winter’s arrival on Wednesday,
Solstitium: Sol (sun) + Sistere (to stand still)
Expressing its Latin roots, Solstice thus describes how the sun seems to stand still in the sky directly overhead at the Tropic of Capricorn, before the earth’s movement makes it seem to shift back in the other direction. (That’s Fact 2 on this list.)
6 Facts About the Winter Solstice (from metoffice.gov.uk)
The others include “the magic moment” of a perceived pause when the shift of direction is experienced at the Tropic of Capricorn. The list includes some less well-known nuances about the Solstice as the official beginning of winter, the Northern Hemisphere’s longest night, shortest day and earliest sunset. Its proximity and integration with Christmas also show in celebration and ritual across many cultures.
In story, myth, the arts and traditions Solstice represents and honors the symbolic death and rebirth of the sun, the waning of the daylight reversed. Ancient monuments including Newgrange Gathering in Ireland, England’s Stonehenge and the Cahokia Woodhenge archaeological site near Collinsville, IL, are aligned with the sunrise or sunset on Winter Solstice.
Here’s a photo tour of a few of the 13 described in:
13 Winter Solstice Traditions Around the World (Reader’s Digest)
The article has interesting and less well-known rituals of celebration. Until turning up the well-illustrated piece I hadn’t thought for a long while about whether the once-ubiquitous Reader’s Digest was even still around. It was in about every adult home I recall from childhood. For a time decades ago I shared a Gaston Bureau office of The Charlotte Observer with a fellow reporter during his late-career days. He’d been a longtime senior RD journalist in the magazine’s print-era glory days.
(In vertical columns from top left:)
Stonehenge gathering, England (Photo by Matt Cardy, Getty Images)
Burning the Clocks in Brighton, England (Photo by Andrew Matthews, PA & Getty Images)
(center) Soyal, Hopi Tribe of Northern Arizona (Photo by Malachi Jacobs, Shutterstock)
Capybaras and humans enjoy citrus baths in Toji, Japan. (Photo by Taka4332, Getty Images)
Winter Lantern Festival in Vancouver (Photo by Sirakhat Tananchai, Getty Images)
(at right) Santo Tomas Festival in Guatemala (Photo by Esteban Biba, EPA Shutterstock)
And finally, a handful of those pomegranate seeds: Shab-e Yalda in Iran (Photo by Alina Bitta, Getty Images)
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Pomegranate Seeds?
At left and center-column here are more selected stock-art photos depicting the pomegranate, rich with symbolism across many cultures and religious traditions. According to an assortment of online data sources: In Buddhism it is honored as one of the 3 sacred fruits, along with the peach and citrus.
The medieval pomegranate represented fertility… and signaled the end the unicorn hunt!?! (The source wording is unclear on whether this was one, or two unrelated, celebratory occasions for the fruit…)
In Islam and Christianity the fruit represents fertility, abundance, and is included in wedding celebrations. Judaism’s 613 Biblical commandments are said to be represented by 613 pomegranate seeds. And in the Old Testament’s Song of Solomon the pomegranate is likened to the “cheeks of a bride.”
In both Greek and Roman mythology, the pomegranate is associated with the goddess of love, beauty and transformative life-force, Aphrodite (Greek) and Venus (Roman.)
Pertinent to today’s themes it is associated symbolically in Greek mythology with winter, the alternating seasons and the underworld via the story of Persephone, Hades and Demeter described and pictured below.
First, about that dream… After this range of colorfully varied and, um, juicy range of traditions it seems especially mundane-vanilla:
On my kitchen counter the seeds are near my standard daily frozen blueberries [frozen for preferred texture]. I realize that, oddly for a depth psychologist, I have never eaten storied pomegranate seeds or been drawn to drink the juice. Since the seeds are there, I add a few to my blueberries with plain nonfat Greek yogurt, a spoonful of granola and splash of honey, and I like how the strong color turns the yogurt a little pink. Then I eat a couple of the seeds, first plain and then mixed with my existing custom concoction. I like them mainly for the crunchy texture and color. Otherwise they just taste vaguely fruity and fine but bland. In the dream what I really like is all of the imagery, lore and various meanings ingested with the fruit. It feels ceremonial.
After the dream, of course I had to have a pomegranate, get help cutting it, and try the seeds — to animate it in waking life. The taste etc. was pretty much like in the dream. Then I was captivated by arranging it visually with the strong colors and textures on the plate for the photo at right above. I included the separating-out (and eating) of the 6 seeds as described by versions of the Persephone myth. It was powerful in that way of physically repeating ritual things with a sense of being in the company of millions having done the same over millennia. That has a lot more flavor than the fruit!
Two things struck me after arranging and shooting the photo. First, this was odd because I dislike photos of food. When professionally staged, they seem fake and inedible. And when natural and spontaneously, even deftly, shot, they’re just unappetizing; it seems pointless, since they can’t be smelled or tasted. And second, this turned out to be the first photo from the new replacement iPhone.
Then there is the idea of eating pomegranate seeds — at Winter Solstice…
Persephone, Hades and Demeter: Why We Have Winter
(Here are the Greeks. Roman versions are Proserpina, Pluto and Ceres. Source, Britishmuseum.com).
Many versions, with different readings and emphasis, of the ancient myth have been recounted through the ages. The most highly regarded earliest sources were the Greek Homer’s Hymn to Demeter in the 6th Century BCE and the Roman Ovid’s later Latin Metamorphosis in 8 CE.
The story begins in a field of flowers with maiden goddess of spring Persephone, beloved daughter of the powerful Demeter — goddess of motherhood, grain, all of the earth’s crops and seasons. Hades is ruler of the underworld (can be understood as either the unconscious or hell) and brother of Zeus, god most poswerful over all of the gods. Hades wants Persephone for his wife and queen of the underworld, and Zeus agrees but warns that Demeter will never willingly permit the marriage. So with Zeus’ OK Hades abducts the unsuspecting Persephone as she reaches to pick a flower. The earth opens to plunge her into his chariot, and he takes her to the underworld. Persephone by all accounts resists, and has been warned fiercely by her mother Demeter never to eat even one of Hades’ pomegranate seeds, for eating the food of one’s captor under Greek law of the time meant never being freed.
Here is where the seasons and winter come in. Demeter was so distraught at the abduction and loss of Persephone that in her mourning and rage she withdrew the sun, rains and growth of all of the grain and crops as she focused only on searching for her daughter. With the country starving and freezing in perpetual winter, Zeus intervened to have Persephone released to Demeter, but as Persephone was leaving Hades she hungrily ate the pomegranate seeds he gave her — 6 of them, by some readings. With Persephone thus legally doomed to stay with Hades, Zeus negotiated for her a deal with Demeter: Persephone would be returned to be with her mother for 6 warm months of the year as Demeter would return the warm spring and summer seasons of grain, crops and fertility. And for the other 6 months of fall and winter, Persephone lived forever-after as Hades’ wife and powerful, often-feared goddess of the underworld.
Of course, as is the way of myth as allegory for all extremes of the human condition, the story invites pondering of many ambiguities and paradox. The abduction was violent, a union by force and rape. Persephone resisted, wanted and tried to return to her mother and peaceful life in the sunshine. Yet knowing the consequences of eating the seeds, and with that long-sought release back to her mother at last imminent… she ate them.
From a psychological standpoint the story captures an important aspect of individuation — certainly for young women but also for men and the non-binary. The story dramatizes a challenge posed to all of us for psychological maturity: First, to separate from the internalized (archetypal) mother figure whom we all have, regardless of the personal particulars or even if we never knew her. And then second, to be capable of forming and maintaining both that individual autonomy and deep psychologically intimate mutual adult relationship.
It’s a growing-up story, and a grown-up one.
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Shifting focus now to the current holiday week and its final frenzy that’s upon us: Perhaps in your area, too, you can relate to a lot about this particularly rainy-dark season that’s more jangled-nerves than jingle bells.
“Still, Still, Still…”
By about this time I’m appreciating the quip from Maya Angelou:
I’ve learned that you an tell a lot about a person by the way he handles these three things: A rainy day, lost luggage, and tangled Christmas lights.
So this post, from former journalist friend Katherine, struck the right humor chord. (I prefer the dark-spooky George C. Scott version of A Christmas Carol to the more sunny-chipper-toned ones, too.)
and yet…
That darker edge here brings to mind — and beyond Solstice a longing for — that other celestial passage this week: The last dark-of-the moon, or new moon, of the year arrives at 5:17 AM Friday, 12.23.22.
What Is a New Moon?
(from the Old Farmer’s Almanac)
As pictured on the left below, factually the new moon is no moon (or the slightest sliver) visible in the dark sky. It’s the opposite of the full moon, with roughly two weeks betwen them. New information for me, the word moon shares Latin origins with metri, which means ‘to measure.” Aptly it has been used across millennia and cultures to measure, to structure time in calendars.
From the depth-psychological perspectives of soul the new or dark of the moon symbolizes and embodies regular and natural cycles of introspection, stillness, contemplation, planting of seeds, generating the new, and gestation. It’s associated with the receptivity of psychological femininity (not biological or physiological) in women, men, and non-binary people.
The visual at right above depicts these opposites of full and new moon, summer and winter, yang and yin. Some new observations came in a revisit with the image shared last spring by friend and reader Ann Ahern Allen (newShrink of 4.24.22,“Imprints and Blindspots: A Bifocal Take on American ‘Wokeness’“:
It’s a nature-image variation on the yin/yang symbol from Chinese Taoism, the opposites normally shown in simple black and white. The symbol also has significance in Jungian psychology, aptly depicting the vital dynamic tension between opposites that is at the core of transformative change and creativity. The additional smaller circles illustrate how each contains a bit of its opposite counterpart.
A lovely bifocal view of things!
The yin/yang shown again here was in honor of last spring’s Earth Day. But the second look brought a new detail applicable to the Solstice, which I hadn’t noticed then. One side of the earthy opposites of the stylized yin/yang image here depicts the lush leaves, watercolor pastels and blossoms of spring and summer. By contrast, on the other side are the stark, nearly black bare branches of this week’s short Winter Solstice days.
There are many associations and ways to think about that dance between the “yin” receptivity of the new moon and the full moon’s overt “yang” outward push… the intuitive-creative-Eros of right brain (predominant with left side of the body) and logical-Logos left brain (dominant right side of body)… also the “upper” waking world of ego consciousness and the “under” world of the unconscious. (For the latter, of late more apt for me is an image something like the ancient, excavated and re-animated city of Petra in Jordan vs ones like underworld, hell, or such buried entombed spots.) I will likely be writing sometime soon in other contexts about Petra, which remains an indelible “energy-vortex” memory some 20 years after my having been fortunate to experience it.
Meanwhile, the words that most simply express that new moon darkness state of inwardness and receptivity are to be both wide awake… and still. Meditation, contemplative prayer practice, intentional periods of silence, yoga and dreamwork all can help us get at this nourishing inner space. So can attentively chosen, intentionally heard music (in contrast to ubiquitous background noise that drowns out silence in anxious resistance to it.)
The meditator’s mantra of “don’t just do something, sit there” is not nearly as easy as it sounds.
For awhile I had forgotten how, especially at this time of year, the lifted voices of an enormous choir — preferably without overpowering instrumental and over-produced sound diluting the effect — can paradoxically create that inner still-space. I’ve never had a solo voice, but a reliable joy of high school was geting to sing in an acclaimed 92-member choir — including singers who did. Singing in that silent inner-space created by those 92 voices, holding you up, is sublime!
Some years seasonal spirit doesn’t quite arrive in full force for me. But when it does, it is likely to come with the Mormons — the older, more classical sacred-music versions (sort of like the one below). Not the made-for-TV-specials glitz and overlays.
I’ll leave you today with what I hope is the preferred, nearly a capella, version. I recommend up to about 4:20 minutes, after which it transitions to livelier, louder medley. (I don’t try this often, because specific song-shares are tricky with Apple Music, Spotify or Amazon etc. By the time they switch versions or require steps to sign up before listening, the intended message and tone can be lost.)
This one says new moon to me, so was worth a try,
“Still, Still, Still (… the night is cold and chill…”)
And, that is all I have! Talk to you next week.
🦋💙 tish
… it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give — yes or no, or maybe —
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.
— William Stafford, “A Ritual to Read to Each Other”
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Love the background on mythology.