Persephone
Persephone was the lovely daughter of the Greek goddess Demeter.
One day, while carelessly wandering away from her parent in the deplorable manner of young girls everywhere, Persephone was seen, captured and ravished away to Hell by Hades, God of the Underworld. There she became his wife and his Queen and was treated with great honour and respect by all, and yet still she pined to be returned to her mother. At length, showing that iron perseverance in gaining her own way that is so common a trait in maidens of her age, Persephone stubbornly began to refuse all food (for as is well known, the soul who touches food in Another Place is doomed to stay there forever). No delicacy her impassioned captor could offer would tempt her to eat - or, at least, none until at last he tricked her into tasting some few seeds of a pomegranate.
Her distraught mother Demeter, meanwhile, had unceasingly petitioned the gods to have her only daughter restored to her - and since Demeter could prevent the growth of all vegetation on earth, she was in a good position to carry her point. Crops failed; Famine stalked the earth; Mankind dwindled and starved, and soon all sacrifices to the gods ceased. Weary of this, the angry divinities at length ordered Hades to let his wife return to her mother's embrace and he very reluctantly consented - but he stipulated that, since she had eaten some of the pomegranate, she must dwell with him for as many months as she had eaten seeds. The force of this argument is not readily apparent to human understanding but the gods judged this only fair; and so henceforth for part of the year Persephone stays with her mother, and for part she stays with her husband - and during those bitter months her mother so grieves that the Earth again loses its fruitfulness, and humankind must face autumn and winter...
It seems Persephone yet retains her weakness for the pomegranate, for at one point the gentleman with the thistle-down hair proudly offers Stephen Black pomegranates "from Persephone's own orchard"[42].