經過Laurie的提醒, 我查到了Pomegranate 和希臘神話的關係, 有興趣的人不妨看看...
(From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomegranate)
The wild pomegranate did not grow natively in the Aegean area in Neolithic times. It originated in the Iranian east and came to the Aegean world along the same cultural pathways that brought The Goddess whom the Anatolians worshipped as Cybele and the Mesopotamias as Ishtar. The myth of Persephone, the dark goddess of the Underworld also prominently features the pomegranate.
In Greek mythology, Persephone was condemned to spend time in the Underworld every year because Hades tricked her into eating a pomegranate seed — or several — while she was his prisoner. The pomegranate evoked the presence of the Aegean Triple Goddess who evolved into Olympian Hera, who is represented offering the pomegranate. According to mythographers like Carl A.P. Ruck and Danny Staples, the chambered pomegranate is also a surrogate for the poppy's narcotic capsule, with its comparable shape and chambered interior. On a Mycenaean seal (illustrated in Joseph Campbell's Occidental Mythology 1964, figure 19) the seated Goddess of the double-headed axe (the labrys) offers three poppy pods in her right hand and supports her breast with her left. She embodies both aspects of the dual goddess, life-giving and death-dealing at once. Is that why Persephone found the pomegranate waiting, when she sojourned in the dark realm? The Titan Orion was represented as "marrying" Side, a name that in Boeotia means "pomegranate", thus consecrating the primal hunter to the Goddess. Other Greek dialects call the pomegranate rhoa; its possible connection with the name of the Earth Goddess Rhea, inexplicable in Greek, proved suggestive for the mythographer Karl Kerenyi, who suggested that the consonance might ultimately derive from a deeper, pre-Indo-European language layer.
In the sixth century BCE, Polykleitos took ivory and gold to sculpt the seated Argive Hera in her temple. She held a scepter in one hand and offered a pomegranate, like a royal orb, in the other. "About the pomegranate I must say nothing," whispered the traveller Pausanias in the second century A.D., "for its story is something of a mystery." Indeed, in the Orion story we hear that the Hera cast pomegranate-Side into dim Erebus — "for daring to rival Hera's beauty", which forms the probable point of connection with the older Osiris/Isis story. Since the ancient Egyptians identified the Orion constellation in the sky as Sah the "soul of Osiris", the identification of this section of the myth seems relatively complete. Hera wears, not a wreath nor a tiara nor a diadem, but clearly the calyx of the pomegranate that has become her serrated crown. The pomegranate has outlived the Mother Goddess, to turn up in the hand of the Blessed Virgin Mother Mary.
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