On Pomegranates, Pumpkins and Cutting Through Modern Depictions of Love

“Still Life with Pomegranates" by Alexei Pal

 For thousands of years, the pomegranate has been used in many different forms of human expression – from mythology, religion, art, and nowadays even pop culture. It has entertained metaphors of devotion, eternal life beyond death, and love. The fruit has been a symbol, commonly one of goddesses like Persephone, Christ (including his   incarnation), and women and girls around the globe, for a long time. Though it is not only now that the symbolism behind different foods has raised questions within pop culture and around social media. The pomegranate has long since affected a huge part of how humans interact with different metaphors in literature, art, and even music. 

 

Recently, it has won fans through multiple trends across different social media platforms, like TikTok, Instagram, and Pinterest. With the latter being a platform driven by highly creative individuals who tend to think beyond society’s norms and structures, it is not surprising that the pomegranate trend has taken off there. TikTok, though, has seen an exponential rise in users utilizing its romantic yet stubborn aspects for all different sorts of trends.

 

To understand some aspects of its symbolism in culture, we first have to look at history and how the pomegranate has been woven into many stories across different backgrounds. One of the first times we can see the fruit gaining attention within literature is in the “Hymn to Demeter,” an old Greek tale about the gods Demeter, Hades, and Persephone. In this text, Persephone, Demeter’s daughter, is originally captured and brought to the underworld by Hades. Both of them fall in love while Demeter grieves her daughter's loss. Because she is the goddess of growth, though, the earth grows cold, and everything green begins to die. Persephone finally decides to go back to her mother, but Hades gives her a pomegranate to eat, knowing that consuming food or drinks in the underworld binds the person to stay there forever. Persephone eats six seeds and is therefore condemned to go back to her husband for six months of every year, during what humans see as the winter months.

Even though it is a story about the origin of winter, at the core stands the pomegranate. The story of Demeter and her daughter has been talked about many times when looking at the symbolism of pomegranates throughout history. Here, it is a metaphor for the indissoluble bond of marriage, a kind of maternal dependence and fertility and life cycles, including death. As seen, the fruit can take on many different meanings throughout a story, and that fact itself also reinforces why it is used in stories across the globe as much as it is. 

 

While the “Hymn to Demeter” may be one of the oldest found stories, including the pomegranate as a metaphor, it is far from being the only one. Renaissance artists were widely known to depict the fruit in paintings like still lives or depictions of biblical moments, seen, for example, in Sandro Botticelli`s “Madonna of the Pomegranate”.

In his painting, Mary is seen cradling Baby Jesus in her arms while holding the pomegranate in her left hand. Within many similar paintings of said period, the fruit is also seen at the centre. What the painter wants to express with it, though, varies for many of them. Often, it is seen as a metaphor for the church’s unity. Other meanings could also be abundance, and sometimes both suffering and resurrection. 

 

In Jewish history, the pomegranate was also tightly tied to Mary as a symbol of fertility,  but also seen in depictions of battle and its victory. Within the bible, it is also often interpreted as the forbidden fruit found in the biblical story of Adam and Eve. One could also think that this tie to the tree of knowledge of good and evil in the bible may be linked to the fruit being one of the Greek goddess Aphrodite, who is the goddess of love and beauty. 

 

As seen, over the decades, the fruit has been at the centre of many metaphors – no matter if it is about art, literature, or even faith. In recent years, though, the pomegranate has been at the core of an exponential boom surrounding its meaning in pop culture. 

“The pomegranate theory” on platforms like TikTok has long put the fruit into the essence of recent discussions. 

The theory claims that if you ask a romantic partner to peel a pomegranate for you and they accept, that their love for you is real because they would gladly go through the unpleasant chore of it all. Adding to this, the fruit tends to make a mess while preparing it, leaving stains everywhere, and it usually takes quite some time to fully get it done and ready to eat. This, for some people, might be an act of love and devotion, which the theory, originally made popular on TikTok in 2024, is based on. 

 

Although while researching for this post, I had another thought.

The pomegranate’s symbolism focuses almost entirely on what the fruit looks like – especially from the inside. The abundance of seeds connected to the metaphor of fertility, the red blood-like interior, and the interpretation of battle and victory. Almost every single one of those is somehow connected to its interior. Thinking this through, suddenly the pomegranate almost feels too easy, too simple entirely. The pomegranate metaphor surely celebrates the messy moments of love, but it does not focus properly on how violent and even full of suffering it can be. Sometimes love might not be the pretty sight we hope for, but the thing that demands force, patience, and the willingness to get your hands dirty for the right person. The pumpkin, with its less aesthetically pleasing exterior, comes across as a more efficient and honest depiction of some forms of love. It resists while trying to split it open. It requires intention. It cannot be opened without pure effort. 

This is not an attempt to discard centuries of paintings and literature centered on the pomegranate, nor am I trying to get an anti-trend rolling with the orange vegetable at its centre. What I’m trying to oppose with this mainly is one specific question: would we, as a society, still see the pomegranate as a symbol of love in the first place if it weren’t as visually pleasing, a different colour, or less beautiful entirely? 

 

In the end, maybe this thought is something to keep close to the next time we think about the concept of love and how we see it overall. Symbols like these tell us less about love itself and more about what he as humans want love to be. We, of course, tend to prefer the easy, beautiful way of things that have got some shine to them, not the ones that are held together by strength and endurance. Perhaps that alone says more about us than the overall nature of love. 

 

Maybe both symbols have their raison d'être. 

But sometimes the truest symbols are not the most beautiful ones, but those that remind us of the work we are willing to put into loving and keeping said love alive.