Punica granatum, the pomegranate, or “Phoenician grenade”.

Ripening in October, the month when the veil between the worlds is thinnest, pomegranates were revered as the Fruit of Death by  the Greeks, and honored as sacred by the Priests of Jehovah in ancient Judaism. 

The red juice, which is today considered by nutritionists to have almost miraculous powers, was also well esteemed by the ancients as miraculous. The juice was said to be the blood of the slain god, Adonis. Among Bible scholars, the pomegranate is one contender for the infamous “fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil,” which sorely tempted Adam and Eve.

Persephone, daughter of Demeter, tasted just a few of the ‘granate’s discrete little seeds while she was raped into the underworld by Hades, who was the “underground Zeus” or the “brother of Zeus.” But her eating apparently constituted acquiescence to the abduction. This sealed her fate, and ours. For every seed Persephone consumed, she would remain a month of the year with Hades, while winter and death would rule the world for that month.  (The number of seeds consumed, and the resulting agricultural winter, varies with the myth-region’s climate from three to six.)

Native to the Aryan plateau, and one of humankind’s earliest orchard fruits, pomegranates were cultivated in Armenia well before history began. The ancient association with death and transfiguration has made the pomegranate a potent symbol of the 1915 Armenian genocide. Southern California has a huge population of people of Armenian descent, who brought pomegranate trees with them. (Today pomegranates are one of California’s most profitable agricultural products.)

Thus It is appropriate that Los Angeles honored the Armenian dead on the centenary of the atrocity, with a deeply moving living memorial in North Hollywood Park – a grove of pomegranates, enclosed by tree trunks to make a simple temenos, a sacred space. Birds, and the homeless, dwell among and eat the fruits.