Mardi: Herbal-Wise

Pomegranates are often referred to as a "winter fruit." Nicely wrapped boxes of these beautiful, dusky orbs are often available for giving during the Holidays. Most people who see them these days are probably thinking more about anti-oxidants than Hades, but the reason pomegranates are associated with winter has to do with Greek mythology. Persephone, kidnapped by and held in the gloomy realm of Hades, swore she would eat nothing until she was restored to her mother, Demeter. Overcome with hunger as the long days dragged into months, she ate three blood-red seeds from a pomegranate. This sealed her fate; though restored as she requested to the sunlight for most of the year, she was judged by Zeus to spend three months with Hades as his bride. Those three pomegranate seeds, then, inadvertently brought on the season of winter.

Though not an herb of any note in hoodoo, there are many old wives tales about the magickal properties of the pomegranate. Women who wished to know the number of children they would have were instructed to throw, not just drop, a pomegranate to the ground. The force had to be enough to break open the skin and the number of seeds that tumbled out foretold the size of the woman's future brood.

Women with troubles conceiving were told to eat pomegranate seeds to increase fertility. The like-makes-like reference here seems almost painfully obvious.

Along that same thought process, Scott Cunningham tells us that the pomegranate is lucky. Pomegranate branches in the home, or trees in the yard, are thought to attract wealth. The dried skin of the fruit is used as an incense to do the same. Cunningham also notes that the fruit's juice can be used as a magickal ink and as a substitute for blood should your magicks require same.

In Mediterranean countries, pomegranate branches are hung above doors and windows to repel the evil eye and jinxes.

Finally, when you're eating your Yuletide pomegranate, be sure to make a wish before you do. Your wish, it is said, is sure to come true. And what better luck could I wish you at this happy season? Perhaps health, which the pomegranate will also grant. Or so they say. Bonne chance ~

Header: Proserpine by Dante Gabriel Rossetti via The Pre-Raphealites

Vendredi: Chthonian Histories

Most people have a passing knowledge of the Hellenistic underworld that was embraced by the Romans when they conquered Greece.  At the very least we know the name of the place and the god who ruled it: Hades.  The actual evolution of Ancient Greek chthonian beliefs bears looking at as it heavily influenced Jewish, Christian and Islamic portraits of what becomes of a soul after death.

Originally, Greek mythology envisioned an underworld similar to the realm of the Mesopotamian goddess Ereshkigal.  Here the dead had diminished to nothing more than shadows.  They could not speak, hardly moved and ate dust.  There was no real outline of what the underworld looked like and there were certainly no specific areas with names and functions.

This changed with the widespread availability of the works of Homer.  In the Odyssey, Homer has his hero travel to Hades which he finds by sailing to the west.  Here, what remains of the dead are called eidolon, which is perhaps clumsily translated as “shade”.  They chirp quietly and flit from place to dark place like injured birds.  Everything good about life is denied them, and they long for even the most difficult existence on Earth.

When Odysseus slaughters two sheep and pours out their blood in a trench to appease the needy shades, they leap forward:

From this multitude of souls, as they fluttered to and fro by the trench came a moaning that was horrible to hear.

Contact with fresh blood would give the sad shades a momentary memory of the life they so desperately longed for.

In Hades, Odysseus also found a grove of poplars sacred to Persephone the underworld queen, a field of the pale lilies known as asphodels (which were, interestingly enough, a staple of the peasant diet in Greece) and the rivers Acheron and Styx.  The three headed dog Cerberus is at the gate, keeping the unfortunate eidolon from trying to escape, and Eurynomus, an indescribable creature that would tear off men’s skins, crouches in the shadows.

Homer also tacked on other features to the classical Greek underworld that were more in keeping with the way the average Greek imagined things might be in Hades.  Odysseus witnesses three men tortured eternally for crimes against the gods.  There is Tantalus, forever hungry and thirsty but unable to reach the food and water just in front of him.  Sisyphus hefts a huge bolder up a hill, only to have it roll back down so that he must return to the bottom and begin again.  Homer also writes of Tityus, whose punishment is the same as that of Prometheus the fire-bearer; vultures appear each day and rip Tityus’ liver from his side only to have the wound heal and the torture repeated over and over again.

As time went on, other writers added to the list of tormented souls in Hades until the pit of Tartarus, where those who had done evil were tortured in all manner of gruesome ways, became a staple of Greek belief.  Along side Tartarus grew the Elysian Fields, where the righteous dead would know the joys of life for all eternity or until they were called to drink the waters of the river Lethe, “forgetfulness”, and be reincarnated on Earth.

The fact that what we would now call Heaven and Hell were within sight of one another in Greek mythology did not escape early Christian theologians.  Certain authors, including Augustine, speak of the damned having to watch the joys of Heaven as part of their torment.  Medieval writers and artists, whose sadistic depictions of Hell border on the psychotic, added to this idea by picturing the souls in Heaven enjoying the suffering of the damned.  That, of course, is a very wide leap in philosophy from the days when all that stood ahead of us was eternity as an eidolon.

Header: Orpheus in the Underworld by Pieter Brueghel the Younger, 16^th c