The Devil's Orchard

Or, Why I Have Never Entirely Trusted an Apple

There are fruits one eats, and there are fruits one ought perhaps to interrogate.

The apple belongs rather conspicuously to the second category.

I do not mean that apples are wicked. Far from it. I have eaten enough of them in my time to know that the Almighty, when He wishes to make a perfectly respectable piece of fruit, is quite capable of doing so. The difficulty begins when mankind starts putting apples into stories.

The Bible, of course, never says that the forbidden fruit in Eden was an apple.

Let us begin there, lest some zealous reader write to me from the theological faculty.

Genesis says only that Adam and Eve ate of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The species is not named. It might have been an apple, a fig, a pomegranate, or something else entirely. Indeed, Genesis has already mentioned fig leaves rather pointedly, but never identifies the forbidden fruit.

The apple acquired its Biblical reputation later.

And here Latin becomes rather mischievous.

The Latin word mālum means "apple"; malum means "evil" or "misfortune." They are different words historically, but to the medieval eye and ear they made an irresistible little linguistic trap. The fruit and the evil stood almost cheek by jowl on the page. The coincidence was not the cause of the Christian apple tradition, but it certainly helped the apple acquire its peculiar theological career.

I have always thought that Satan must have had a weakness for puns.

And then there is Isaac Newton.

The apple that fell from Heaven

The Newtonian apple story is generally told as though Providence had dropped a piece of fruit upon the head of a Cambridge mathematician and thereby invented modern physics.

This is not quite what happened.

There is, however, a genuine historical tradition behind the tale.

John Conduitt, Newton's assistant at the Mint and husband of Newton's niece, recorded that Newton, while musing in a garden at his mother's house in Lincolnshire, had considered whether the force that caused an apple to fall to the ground might extend as far as the Moon. The University of York notes that Conduitt's account was collected in 1726, the year of Newton's death.

William Stukeley subsequently recorded Newton's own recollection of the episode. His fuller memoir was written in 1752, but the conversation with Newton on which it was based took place on 15 April 1726. The Newton Project describes Stukeley's account as the first written recording of the famous anecdote in its developed form.

So the story did not originate in some Victorian schoolroom fantasy.

It was circulating among people close to Newton during his lifetime.

And that makes the symbolism considerably more interesting.

Newton died in March 1727. Stukeley was gathering reminiscences in the months following Newton's death, while Conduitt had already been collecting material for a biography. The story therefore belongs to the final chapter of Newton's life, rather than being an invention manufactured generations later.

Nor did the original story say that the apple struck Newton upon the head.

That is a later embellishment.

Newton's own version, as preserved through these recollections, is much more interesting: he saw the apple fall and wondered whether the same power might extend to the heavens.

In other words, the apple did not teach Newton gravity.

It reminded him to ask a question.

And this is precisely where I become suspicious.

For Newton was not an irreligious mechanist who had accidentally wandered into theology. He spent enormous portions of his life studying Scripture, prophecy, early Christianity and Church history. He regarded himself as a Christian and believed deeply in God. But his Christianity was decidedly heterodox. By the 1670s he had concluded that the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity was a corruption of primitive Christianity; he regarded Christ as divine and the Son of God, but not as God Himself in the orthodox Trinitarian sense.

Newton was, therefore, a curious Christian indeed.

He rejected the Trinity while spending immense intellectual energy studying Christianity.

He practised alchemy while studying natural philosophy.

He investigated ancient religions while searching for the primitive truth behind later corruption.

And he looked at an apple falling from a tree.

I find the arrangement altogether too neat.

The second apple

There is an obvious difficulty with my theory.

Newton was not consciously making a joke about Genesis.

There is no evidence that he was.

I therefore make no such historical claim.

What interests me is something rather subtler: the cultural afterlife of the apple.

A Christian culture inherited a story in which fruit becomes the instrument of temptation, disobedience and death. It then produced, centuries later, a remarkable collection of stories in which apples repeatedly become instruments of deception, vanity, violence, knowledge, false knowledge, death, rivalry and forbidden desire.

At some point one begins to wonder whether the apple has become Western civilisation's favourite theatrical prop for doing things to Christianity without mentioning Christianity.

I shall call this, for want of a better phrase, the Devil's Orchard.

The serpent's apple

The first apple, naturally, is the one that isn't an apple.

The serpent approaches Eve.

The fruit is seen.

The desire begins.

The fruit is taken.

The eyes are opened.

Paradise is lost.

The crucial point is that Scripture never tells us the species.

Yet Western art repeatedly gives us an apple.

This is one of those instances where tradition becomes more visually powerful than the text from which it supposedly derives.

The apple consequently becomes a shorthand for the Fall.

And once that has happened, the stage is prepared.

The fruit need only appear in another story and I begin looking over my spectacles.

Snow White and the counterfeit Eden

Then comes Snow White.

A Brothers Grimm tale, published in the nineteenth-century collection though based upon older European oral traditions, gives us perhaps the most deliciously suspicious apple in folklore.

The Queen disguises herself as an old woman, prepares a poisoned apple, makes it beautiful, and offers it to Snow White. The apple is deliberately attractive: white and red, resembling innocence and blood. Snow White eats it and falls as though dead.

Now, I should be careful.

There is no scholarly necessity to declare Snow White a coded Christian allegory in which the Queen is literally Satan. Such readings exist, but the historical development of the tale is more complicated than that.

I, however, am not writing a doctoral dissertation.

I’m just drinking tea.

And from the Pavilion, the resemblance is difficult to ignore.

In Eden, a beautiful fruit conceals death.

In Snow White, a beautiful fruit conceals death.

In Eden, temptation arrives through deception.

In Snow White, temptation arrives through deception.

In Eden, the fruit is associated with the knowledge of good and evil.

In Snow White, the beautiful fruit becomes an instrument of evil.

And in both cases, the innocent person reaches for something beautiful which has been prepared for her destruction.

The Queen even changes her appearance.

She becomes an old woman.

A harmless peddler.

A respectable-looking visitor at the door.

There is something positively serpent-like about the whole business.

The Devil, I would say, has always understood the importance of packaging.

Eris and the apple that starts a war

Then we must travel backwards to Greece.

Eris, goddess of strife, throws a golden apple into the wedding feast of Peleus and Thetis. It bears the inscription "for the fairest." Hera, Athena and Aphrodite quarrel over it, and Paris is appointed to judge between them. The ensuing choice becomes part of the chain of events leading to the Trojan War.

There is no Christianity here.

Obviously.

Eris is not Satan.

Obviously.

Yet I see a remarkable structural resemblance.

A beautiful object.

A seductive promise.

A contest of desire.

Pride.

Jealousy.

Division.

And finally destruction.

The fruit does not cause the catastrophe by physical force.

It merely introduces temptation into a human or divine community already capable of choosing wrongly.

That, I would say, is rather Satan's preferred method.

The Devil rarely needs to push.

He merely needs to place the apple where someone can see it.

The mandrake's counterfeit man

The mandrake gives the orchard a more sinister botanical corner.

Its peculiar root, often divided into human-like limbs, encouraged a great body of European folklore concerning human-shaped plants, magical properties, fertility, medicine and witchcraft.

Here I see a counterfeit Creation.

God forms man from the dust of the earth.

The mandrake seems to offer mankind a grotesque parody: a human figure apparently growing out of the earth.

And its fruit became entangled with names and traditions involving apples and magic.

This is precisely the sort of thing I regard as a Satanic signature—not because medieval people consciously designed the plant as an anti-Biblical joke, but because the folklore repeatedly turns God's symbols upside down.

Life becomes sleep.

Fruit becomes poison.

Creation becomes caricature.

Knowledge becomes sorcery.

The resemblance is not proof.

But I have never required proof before becoming suspicious.

The Devil's apples beneath the soil

The potato presents another curious case.

European folklore and language sometimes associated the potato with the "devil's apple" (devil's apple and related expressions), especially because the unfamiliar tuber grew underground and belonged to a botanical family containing several poisonous species.

Here, again, I find the symbolism irresistible.

The apple grows on a tree.

The potato grows beneath the earth.

One presents itself openly to the heavens; the other hides underground.

It is almost as though somebody had designed an anti-apple.

I hasten to add that the historical reasons for suspicion of the potato were practical, botanical and cultural rather than evidence of a coherent Satanic conspiracy.

But I am not arguing that European peasants held clandestine theological conferences about potatoes.

I am just observing the recurring literary instinct to call unfamiliar or dangerous fruits and tubers "devilish apples."

And that is quite another matter.

The tomato: blood in the orchard

The tomato acquired similarly sinister associations in parts of Europe. It was called pomme d'amour in some contexts, while other traditions associated it with the "wolf peach" and devilish imagery. Its relationship to the nightshade family did not help its reputation.

Again the symbolism is almost embarrassingly convenient.

Red fruit.

Juice.

Blood.

Desire.

Nightshade.

Temptation.

One begins to suspect that the tomato was born merely to give medieval imagination another reason to mistrust salad.

William Tell and the apple upon the son's head

Then there is William Tell.

The father is commanded to shoot an apple from his son's head.

The apple becomes a target.

That is a peculiar transformation.

The fruit which once symbolised temptation is now balanced upon the head of an innocent child, while a father is compelled to send an arrow through it.

The story is not a Christian allegory, nor should it be presented as one.

Yet I notice the inversion.

In Eden, the fruit is associated with the knowledge that brings death into the world.

In Tell, the fruit becomes the object which must be destroyed to save the innocent.

The apple is no longer eaten.

It is executed.

And William Tell's son, poor lad, has the unenviable distinction of being perhaps the only child in European legend to have a piece of fruit placed upon his head for purposes of national mythology.

Robin Hood and the archery of the orchard

Robin Hood is more complicated.

The apple is not nearly as central to his legend as it is to William Tell's, and I would not pretend otherwise.

But the medieval and early-modern Robin Hood tradition is saturated with archery contests, forest encounters, feasts, fruit, woodland abundance and the inversion of social order.

I therefore place Robin beside the apple rather than inside it.

Robin Hood takes from the rich and gives to the poor.

Adam takes what he has been forbidden to take.

The contrast is almost too tempting:

one transgression is celebrated as justice; the other is remembered as the Fall.

The apple, in my private mythology, is becoming less a fruit than a grammatical particle in the language of inversion.

Newton again

And then the apple returns.

Newton looks at the fruit.

Gravity, God forbid, is considered.

The heavens become mathematically intelligible, or so they say.

Now we have an almost perfect inversion of Genesis.

Adam reaches upward—or outward—for knowledge and falls from Paradise.

Newton watches something fall downward and supposedly discovers a law governing the heavens.

Adam's fruit produces a knowledge that accompanies exile.

Newton's fruit produces a knowledge that appears to unify Earth and Heaven.

Adam's fruit is traditionally represented as an apple.

Newton's fruit is traditionally represented as an apple.

The same fruit.

Two men.

Two trees.

Two kinds of knowledge.

Two falls.

One from Heaven.

One toward Earth.

I would not say that Newton intended any of this.

I would say that whoever invented civilisation's later symbolism seems to have possessed a rather wicked sense of humour.

And then came Apple

The story becomes positively indecent in the twentieth century.

Steve Jobs names his company Apple.

The first Apple logo, designed by Ronald Wayne in 1976, actually depicted Isaac Newton beneath an apple tree. It was soon replaced by Rob Janoff's famous bitten apple. Janoff has explained that the bite helped make the fruit recognisable as an apple rather than another round fruit.

Thus Newton's apple becomes Apple's apple. And the apple of Newton becomes a brand.

Then the brand becomes one of the dominant symbols of modern technological civilisation.

Forbidden knowledge?

I had better pause.

For here the apple has undergone a complete cultural metamorphosis.

So here comes the Apple Paradox:

· In Genesis, the fruit gives knowledge—and knowledge brings the Fall.

· In Newton, the fruit inspires observation—and observation brings knowledge.

· In Apple, the fruit displays knowledge—and knowledge becomes technology.

And suddenly the forbidden fruit has acquired a touchscreen.

I cannot prove that Satan designed the iPhone.

I merely observe that he has always shown an interest in user interfaces.

Steve Jobs and the bite

The bitten apple is especially provocative.

One bite.

Not the whole apple.

A bite.

Someone has already eaten from it.

The Biblical association is obvious enough that generations of observers have made it, though there is no evidence that the bite was deliberately intended as an allusion to Adam and Eve. The designer's stated reason was practical recognition: without the bite, the silhouette might be mistaken for a cherry.

I nevertheless regard the logo with the expression of a man who has just discovered a suspicious footprint in a freshly polished library.

"One bite," he says.

"How economical."

The apple is no longer merely forbidden.

It is advertising the fact that it has already been bitten.

Bill Gates and the rival apple

Then enters Bill Gates.

Here the symbolism becomes almost comic.

Apple represents one technological kingdom; Microsoft becomes its great rival. In 1997 Gates and Jobs appeared together to announce a substantial agreement between Microsoft and Apple, including Microsoft's continued support for Mac software and a $150 million investment in Apple stock.

The rival who once stood outside the orchard eventually walks into it and purchases a piece of the tree.

I would call this "a splendidly modernised version of the Fall."

No serpent required.

Just a software licence.

The Big Apple

They tell us that New York became “the Big Apple” through horse-racing in the 1920s: John J. Fitz Gerald heard the expression from stable hands in New Orleans and applied it to the great New York racing circuit. Innocent enough, one might think.

But I have spent too many years contemplating apples to be so easily reassured.

For an apple has already appeared in Eden, fallen upon Newton, travelled with Robin Hood, entered the hands of Mr Gates, and established an entire corporation bearing its name. Now New York has been quietly inserted into the same orchard.

The official explanation is horse-racing.

Naturally.

New York was not the apple, you see. It was the prize. Because there is a rather nice irony to it: In the racing slang, winning at New York's tracks meant getting the Big Apple.

And I have begun to wonder whether we have been following the wrong race altogether.

My Satanic orchard

I would therefore formulate my theory rather carefully.

He do not claim that every storyteller who has ever used an apple secretly worshipped Satan.

That would be absurd.

I do not claim that Snow White was written as an anti-Christian tract.

I do not claim that Newton deliberately mocked Genesis.

I do not claim that Steve Jobs designed the Apple logo as an attack upon Christianity.

I claim something more literary—and considerably more unsettling.

The apple has become one of Western civilisation's favourite instruments of symbolic inversion.

Good becomes dangerous.

Life becomes death.

Beauty becomes poison.

Knowledge becomes temptation.

A gift becomes a trap.

A wedding becomes a quarrel.

A fruit becomes a weapon.

A scientific discovery begins beneath the same tree from which the traditional forbidden fruit supposedly came.

And finally the forbidden fruit becomes the emblem of the technological age.

Perhaps none of these stories knows anything about the others.

Perhaps they are merely coincidences.

But I have never been particularly frightened by coincidence.

I am frightened by repetition.

And when the same little red fruit keeps turning up wherever mankind wishes to tell a story about forbidden knowledge, temptation, pride, rivalry, death, discovery or the overthrow of an old order, I find myself inclined to leave the orchard by the nearest gate.

Not because I believe every apple is Satanic.

That would be unfair to apples.

But because, as I have often remarked, the Devil has always been rather fond of disguising theological arguments as perfectly innocent fruit.

And if you doubt me, consult the Latin.

Malum.

An apple.

Malum.

An evil.

Two words, technically.

One unfortunate coincidence.

And an astonishing amount of Western civilisation hanging from the same branch.

Perhaps the Almighty did not put an apple in Eden.

Perhaps mankind put it there afterwards.

Which, in its own way, may be the more interesting story.