Madonna of the Pomegranates

 

 

Growing up, the way I understood all that was numinous came through the Christian lens of our New England Congregational church. Christ and God, Father and Son, were the central players. Mary appeared in passing, the way women often did.

I do not remember my mother ever saying a word about Mary, though every Christmas she brought out a blue ceramic statue of the Mother and Child and set it beside an arrangement of greens. She embroidered that image, blues on blue with low lights of purple, an embroidery that I still hang with the season.

Two weeks ago, fortuitously I thought, I discovered deep in a drawer of the dining room hutch a small plaque of Mary and Jesus with an inscription on the back that read, “Rafael. Madonna of the Pomegranates.”

Symbolically pomegranates are known to represent fertility, abundance, sweetness, and ‘the womb’. Pomegranates are the fruit of the underworld. Its sweet seeds seal Persephone’s fate.

In Rafael’s rendition Mary’s left hand rests on a book, while in her right hand she and her infant Son together hold a pomegranate. Could this be eros and logos in the hands of the Mother?

My friend says the dead have a way of communicating with us. In an imaginal world, in a world between worlds, I find a gift from my mother that speaks to all that was unsaid between us.

But more than that. As I meditate on this image morning after morning I take solace in some essential feminine mystery that like the hero’s journey of separation, initiation, and return, speaks to change and transformation in an endless cycle of death and rebirth. So much more is written from the standpoint of masculine psychology and myth. And while the masculine and feminine do and must contain each other, what I see in this body of this Mother with the darkened heart is the unbearable wisdom of loss. Suffering through and fighting through are not mutually exclusive options, nor does or should any discussion of the masculine and the feminine principles necessarily refer to anyone’s gender. And yet, when I let this image into my heart what I feel is the knowledge of sorrow that every mother holds.

The divine speaks to us through the filter of our projections colored by our personal needs and sufferings. The Madonna of the Pomegranates I imagine is a feminine Christian image of the contemplation of the pomegranate—of unspoken sexuality, of the dark days of Demeter’s rage, of the Pieta’s eternal grief. In this study of textures and light, fingers and ineffable expressions Raphael has given us the mirror that all great art gives, a taste of eternity.