How Love burns through the Putting in the Seed
On through the watching for that early birth
When, just as the soil tarnishes with weed,
The sturdy seedling with arched body comes
Shouldering its way and shedding the earth crumbs.
Robert Frost, “Putting in the Seed”
Of nature’s manifold works, none is more mysterious in form and function than the seed. Seed as symbol touches upon the most primeval meaning of life itself – undeveloped possibilities and new beginnings, growth, birth, death and renewal. Like egg, the seed is a resurrection and fertility symbol crucial to basic life rhythms such as seasons and the transformation from one phase to another.
The sowing of seeds evokes every form of procreation. Primitive fertility rituals in which couples copulated in the fields on their wedding night or at the time of sowing were sympathetic magic to assist germination in good soil, or, in other versions of such rites, abstinence was thought to concentrate potency in the sown ground.
In Egyptian mythology, the dismembered but restored god Osiris impregnates the earth which then bears its crops. Seed thus carries also the symbolism of sacrifice with spiritual renewal as a possibility. In this aspect seed symbolizes consciousness as the highest potentiality of matter. The union of opposites: sperm/egg, seed/earth, occurs only after the seed has passed through the underworld, dies to itself, is nourished and reborn in new combination.