Greek paradise, Persephone’s heaven for heroes, also called the Isles of the Blest, [was] located either in the Underworld, or in the far west, like the Hesperian apple orchards of Mother Hera… It became a common synonym for paradise.
Barbara Walker, The Women’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Symbols
Elysium was a land, surrounded by water dotted with the Isles of the Blest. Like Avalon and Eden, it was a prototype for paradise which later became the Christian heaven. Paradise was a garden where the Tree of Life bore apples, the fruit of immortality (Walker 768). As a dual metaphor, paradise is both a garden, and a woman’s body, so entering paradise becomes a metaphor for sexual union. In Persian mythology, Pairidaeza is the name of the divine virgin who gave birth to the messiah (Walker 768).
Many early churchmen (St. Thomas Aquinas for one), made Paradise a real, physical island in the west like the Hesperides. So, in the early parts of my story, Paradise is an actual place which became a legend, and was then mythologized - a very common pattern. A big, fertile island in the middle of the River of Life, it becomes a beautiful orchard as grateful new mothers plant fruit trees there to celebrate the birth of a daughter. In the center of my Paradise, the Mother Tree is a wild apple, sacred to Artemis where midwives hang sections of umbilical cord in the boughs in thanks for a safe birth, and hopeful women pray while tying a strip of linen to the branches - dyed red (the color of life) with her own menses. Trees like these exist throughout ancient mythologies.
Metaphorically, if you read the holy books of patriarchal religions, paradise can seem like an all-encompassing form of perfect infancy where one is held, provided for and loved unconditionally – the land of milk and honey. But who wants to become a perfect infant? That’s why so many people joke that since all the fun people end up in Hell, that’s where they’d rather go. The fantasy is, of course, that what is lost to us at birth will return after we die and that will be Paradise – our mother’s love.