The hermit laughed after he had explained. But the Bible never identifies the evil fruit, he said; it was the Roman Catholics who put the apple there. The Greek Church sees the forbidden fruit only as a symbol of pride and carnal desire. He pointed; these are only apples, my friend, which by God’s will are now divided into four pieces, one for each of us. He handed the wedges around with a smile.
Now eat.
Enveloped in Sweet Odor
For years after my Christmas on Mount Athos I puzzled over the hermit’s comment that the naming of the apple as the forbidden fruit was a “lie of the Pope.” I knew, of course, that the Greek Orthodox Church and the Roman Catholic Church had been bitter enemies for almost a thousand years. So his remark could have been just a spurious attack on an old enemy. But another possible explanation can be found in the maps of pre-Christian Europe. The Old World at that time can be roughly divided into two groups. South of the Italian-Austrian border lived the Mediterranean race, a dark-complexioned people who, among other things, were lovers of the grape. Worshipers, really, because the vine provided their preferred intoxicant, wine, which was used as a mystical tipple by everyone from the pagan Dionysian cults to the modern Roman Catholics. North of this imaginary border lived a bunch of barbarians often called the Celts. Since grapes did not thrive in their climate, they revered the apple. Instead of wine, their priests, the Druids, are believed to have used an alcoholic cider in their ceremonies. They even called their paradise Avalon, or Isle of the Apples, presumably with a cider press on the premises.
The Dionysian Mediterraneans merged their beliefs with Christianity to form the Roman Catholic Church. The Celts did the same with their Druid faith to create a brand of Christianity called the Celtic Church. Needless to say, the two groups loathed each other. Celtic monks would neither eat nor pray with Roman priests and considered utensils used by them to be contaminated. The Vatican, in turn, declared Celtic rituals to be heresy and threatened to execute the Celtic missionaries who were beginning to dominate western Europe. By the fourth century, the situation was threatening to split Christian Europe in half.
All of a sudden, the Tree of Forbidden Knowledge began sprouting apples.
One Apple down from all of those upon the fatal tree
Enveloped in sweet odor, recommended it
For pleasing sigh, and offered it to Eve.
This description of Eve’s first insidious bite was written by the Roman poet Avitus around A.D. 470, near the height of the Celtic/Roman conflict. It could have been coincidence that the Romans chose that particular moment to use the Celt’s sacred fruit to epitomize all evil knowledge. But there are a number of things peculiar about their selection. First, biblical writings indicated that the forbidden fruit was a fig. Second, the Romans actually invented the word that Avitus used to describe the forbidden fruit. The word is pomum, based on Pomona, the pagan god of harvest. They could have stuck with the word the earlier Greek Bibles had used, malum, which meant both evil and fruit. Ideal, really. Why change it? We’ll never know for sure, but the obvious allegory in naming the Forbidden Fruit after a pagan deity would have been to remind new Christians that the older, non-Christian religions were heresy, i.e., forbidden knowledge.
Christians are notorious for baptizing pagan deities to cash in on their good karma. This, however, does not appear to have been a typical case of assimilation, because the Romans turned the existing myths and emotions about the apple upside down. The Celts believed that apples contained the essence of a divine wisdom that transported the diner to a kind of paradise. Yet the Christian myth clearly stated that apple-inspired wisdom led straight to Hell. This wasn’t assimilation, it was attack, and apparently so successful that they repeated the stunt one thousand years later in the New World. The Aztecs of Mexico believed humanity had once lived in a paradisiacal garden where people ate flowers. The xochitlicacan flowers in the original Aztec myths were thought to impart divine wisdom in the most positive sense, just as Celtic mythology had characterized the apple. When Spanish missionaries arrived in the 1500s, however, they began suppressing Aztec beliefs and teaching a new version of the fall of man that replaced Eden’s apple with a flower. According to accounts from the time, the Indians said it was the destruction of these sacred flowers and plants, often used to make ritual beverages, that broke the heart of their culture.
Medieval Christians took their symbols much too seriously to have done all this while unaware of the repercussions. Particularly someone like Avitus. His poem, “The Fall of Man,” was among the first dramatizations of the Bible aimed at the general population and was so popular it earned him the nickname of the “Christian Virgil.” Since Avitus lived in the Celtic north, he would have realized with what fruit the word pomum would be identified. In fact, the Christians were so preoccupied with the hold the Celtic apple had on the popular imagination they created a bizarre series of myths that described the apple’s power actually draining into the body of Christ. In these stories, probably created around the eighth century, Christ is crucified on an apple tree. Then a “wild apple,” representing the Celtic faiths, is nailed into the same tree and its juices are allowed to seep into the Messiah. The end of the tale describes Christ growing out of the apple tree’s foliage like a nature spirit. (This kind of propaganda was not that uncommon, and, in fact, some Islamic scholars did the same thing about five hundred years later when they identified the Catholic grape as the Fruit of Forbidden Knowledge.)
The Christian defamation of the apple did not end its consumption, but it did create a valuable tool to teach new converts in northern and western Europe of the dangers of heretic thought. Every peasant munching a McIntosh from then on received a visceral reminder of how the fruit worshiped by his grandfather had damned him to earthly purgatory. Its bittersweet flavor was a lesson in how sweet and tempting the teachings of non-Catholic churches might, at first, appear. It also changed the popular perception of the apple. The Celts had associated apples with the glorious wisdom from the sun (the Celtic word for apple, abal, is believed to derive from the name of the sun god Apollo). By the time the Christians were done, scholars had assigned it to “the jurisdiction of Venus” and lust. It became a low-class love charm sometimes associated with venereal disease.
The apple’s most telling transformation can be seen in the story of King Arthur and Merlin, a myth cycle that is in many ways the aborted New Testament of Celtic Christianity. In the original version, Merlin’s supernatural powers were consistently associated with the abal. He prophesied while standing beneath a tree dripping with crimson fruit, and his most famous writing, The Apple Tree, is an ode to the apple’s crucial role in resurrecting the Druid faith after its destruction by the Romans. “The sweet apple tree loaded with the sweetest fruit,” goes an early version of the poem, “growing in the lonely wilds of the woods of Cleyddon! All seek thee but in vain until Cadwaladr comes to oppose the Saxons. Then shall the Britons be again victorious, led by their graceful and majestic chief [Arthur]; then shall be restored to every one his own; then shall the founder of the trump of gladness proclaim the son of peace, the serene days of happiness.” The apple orchard in Merlin’s poem refers to Avalon, Isle of the Apples, where King Arthur is said to lie sleeping until his countrymen’s hour of greatest need. The poem is thought to have been penned in the fifth century, around the time that the real King Arthur led a rebellion against the Romans and Avitus wrote his version of the tale of Eden. But when the official Christian version of the Arthur myth was put on paper seven hundred years later, the apple’s role was again reversed. In this version, written in the twelfth century by the devout Geoffrey of Monmouth, the Druid priest/wizard Merlin is said to have been “driven mad and foaming at the mouth” by eating apples, which are described as being full of “the poisonous delights of women.” Later versions tell of his being dragged into hell where his true father, Satan, awaited. The Vatican eventually banned the use of apple cider from its religious ceremonies.
I
n the end, however, it was the apple that had the last laugh. The Celts revered all trees—not just apples—and their priests used groves of oak and ash as places of meditation. It is these sacred groves that are the source of the trees we drag into our living rooms every Christmas, loving the forest smell that spreads through our homes, and admiring the globes that hang upon their branches: sacred abals every one of them, stylized, commercialized, but as red and green as any Pippin or McIntosh, our homage to an ancient vision of paradise.
Likeness of a Roasted Crab
All anyone can definitively say about the Celts’ sacred apple juice is that it was probably similar to the tipple called Lamb’s Wool. The name is a corruption of the Celtic lama nbhal or la mas ubhal, or Feast of the Apple Gathering, which was held in the fall, and the drink’s curious wooly texture, which comes from using mashed roasted apples, toast, and sometimes eggs. It seems to be an attempt to re-create the texture of the original drink, which might have been an alcoholic porridge similar to the fruit beers still served in parts of Africa. These are as much food as drink and, like Lamb’s Wool, are traditionally served in a bowl.
The drink’s religious antecedents are clear from the accompanying rite known as “wassailing,” a custom that may have once included the sacrifice of a young boy. It’s still extant in parts of Great Britain, where people fling some of the drink on the roots of the oldest apple tree in the area while shooting guns and shouting, “Here’s to thee, old Apple Tree/Whence thou may’st bud/and whence thou may’st blow/Hats full, Caps full/Bushel bags full!/And my pockets full too!/Huzzah!”
6 apples
2 quarts hard cider, or a mix of cider and ale
Up to 1⁄4 cup honey or 1⁄2 cup brown sugar
1⁄8 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1⁄4 teaspoon cinnamon
1⁄4 teaspoon ground allspice
Core the apples and roast at 400° F for 45 minutes, or until they are soft and beginning to burst. Put the cider/ale into a large pot and dissolve the honey or sugar in small increments, tasting for desired sweetness. Add spices. Simmer for about ten minutes. Lightly mash apples and add one to each mug and pour hot cider on top. Sprinkle with cinnamon. Serves six.
Love Apple
The naming of the humble apple as the Fruit of Forbidden Knowledge is the most unlikely bit of propaganda the Christians have ever cooked up. Everyone knew that so sinful a fruit would be a voluptuous pearl glistening amid a tangle of tropical greenery, and that it would grow in a land far, far, far away where naked bodies and free sex were as common as flies. It would come from Eden, in short, which every educated person of the 1400s could find by looking at a map—there it was, right next to India. Christopher Columbus was so sure of Eden’s location that he brought two crew members fluent in Chaldee and Hebrew, the languages thought most likely spoken by the Garden’s inhabitants, just in case his ships wound up south of their destination in Asia. When he bumped into South America, Columbus mistakenly identified the Orinoco River in Venezuela as the gateway to Eden, but refused to sail up it lest the flaming cherubim God had hired as security guards attack his ships.
So when Columbus brought a particularly luscious new-comer back from the New World, everyone jumped to the obvious conclusion. We call it the tomato, but most Europeans originally dubbed it poma amoris, or the love apple. The Hungarians came straight out and named it Paradice Appfel, the Apple of Paradise. The tomato was everything the Forbidden Fruit ought to be—a slut-red fruit oozing lugubrious juices and exploding with electric flavors. Clearly an aphrodisiac. But what made it particularly terrifying to the Europeans was its similarity to a plant called the mandrake, also known as Satan’s Apple or the Love Apple. It’s basically the fruit from Hell and has the distinction of being the aphrodisiac with which Leah seduces Jacob in the Bible, saying, “Thou must come in unto me, for surely I have hired thee with thy son’s mandrakes.”
Herbalists in the fifteenth century were well aware that the mandrake had natural narcotic powers. No real problem there. What really earned the plant its ghastly reputation was the way its roots resembled a withered, shrunken human body (or penis, depending on your personal obsession). Medieval Europeans believed the roots were alive, demon sprits that whispered secrets in their owner’s ear, and Joan of Arc’s alleged possession of a mandrake root was one of the crimes that sent her to the stake. Witches claimed mandraks grew best beneath gallows trees, where the semen dripping down from executed criminals produced appropriate fertilizer, and that when cut the plant emitted bloodcurdling shrieks that drove bystanders insane. The only safe way to harvest a specimen was to tie a black dog to the stem, block your ears with wax, and lure Fido toward you with fresh donkey meat until the shrieking plant was torn from the soil. The dog, of course, expired in drooling agony.
Both the tomato and the mandrake belong to the nightshade family. Both have bright red or yellow fruit. But although people have bred them together to produce narcotic tomatoes, they’re quite different from each other. The general population, however, considered them one and the same, and called both love apples for centuries. This confusion was reinforced by a maze of stories that seemed to connect the two plants to Eden. For instance, medieval writers believed that mandrakes were God’s first attempt to make humans (hence those weird roots). This meant they originally came from Eden, which the popular imagination by the 1600s had firmly located in the tomato’s native South America. This fit rather nicely with the belief that the Italian name for the tomato, pomodoro (literally, golden apple), referred to the golden apples that grew in the Pagan Greek Garden of the Hesperides. It seems Christian scholars had decided that The Garden of Hesperides—a walled enclosure guarded by spirits—was actually Eden, and that its magical fruit was actually Eve’s famous snack. One popular tale even told how two elephants representing Adam and Eve were thrown out of paradise for eating mandrakes. Some people went so far as to claim that the tomato was actually Eden’s other forbidden fruit: When an obscure Jewish-Portuguese immigrant named Dr. Siccaary brought tomatoes to North America in the early 1700s, he peddled them as being from Eden’s Tree of Eternal Life, claiming that “a person who should eat a sufficient abundance of these apples would never die.”
Medieval people believed the mandrake root was the first attempt to create humanity and came from the Garden of Eden.
So cautious Christians snubbed the tomato for at least 150 years, and it wasn’t until the early 1700s that it began to gain acceptance, mainly in Italy, as a decorative puree or garnish. But the rest of the West continued to drag its feet. They claimed tomatoes made your teeth fall out. Its smell was said to drive people insane. Many Yanks thought them just too ugly to eat. In the 1880s, the daughter of a well-known British botanist named Montague Alwood wrote that the highlight of an afternoon tea at her father’s house had been the “introduction of this wonderful new fruit—or is it a vegetable?” As late as the twentieth century writers like Henri LeClerc still classed tomatoes with mandrakes as an “evil fruit … treacherous and deceitful.”
Christian trepidation did not derive solely from the love apple’s connection to the mandrake. The fruit’s intrinsic morality was also in doubt. Consider the potato. Both it and the tomato arrived in Europe from the Americas at the same time. Both were associated with the mandrake. But what a different reception the potato received! Dull, brown, heavy-on-the-belly, the elite immediately fell in love with it—but only for the peasants. They spent the next two hundred years shoving it down the throat of every proletarian they could lay their white gloves on. This was particularly true in Catholic countries, where the tuber seemed to have a halo floating over its scrubby little head, possibly because its Inca name, papa, is also the word for “pope” in Italian. Literally translated, papa, the potato, became “the pope’s fruit,” or the “pope-ato,” and everybody sang its praises, like the Catholic officials who pleaded with the Vatican’s morality czar to make the peasants “try and try again this delectable food.”
Meanwhile, their brethren were putting the tomato on their lists of “disapproved dishes.” “There is nothing more evil,” wrote the well-known Catholic moralist Abbot Chiari during the tomato sauce naissance of the mid-1700s, “than [the growing habit] of foods that are covered in drugs [spices] from America.” The fact that the tomato first gained wide acceptance as a sauce was another strike against the fruit. That it was often not meant to be eaten, but only to glorify a dish, was even worse. “Man is, by nature, not a sauce eater,” wrote the influential St. Clement of Alexandria in the third century, and he wasn’t referring to a lack of spoons. Sauces were considered insidiously Satanic because they glorified the act of eating, which led to gluttony, which in turn led to every one of the deadly sins of lust, pride, greed, etc. The tomato’s unearthly brilliance, its zesty flavor, its lugubriously dripping succulence, were all anathema to the clergy. It “inflamed passions” in ways that the grubby brown potato could hardly be accused of doing. The potato’s chaste nature was further proven by its method of asexual reproduction: it has no seeds but instead creates offspring directly from its body. Botanical Immaculate Conception. The Love Apple, dripping unctuous juices and seeds, soft and delicious, inviting the unwary to bite deep into its harlot-red flesh and let the juices flow, was an entirely different class of being: immoral, lascivious, and decidedly un-Christian. This was serious stuff back then. When a foreign princess introduced the fork to Venice in the eleventh century, local religious leaders called divine wrath down upon her for the nicety. When she died of a particularly vicious disease, prelates sermonized that it was the “punishment of God” for the way she’d tried to glorify eating by conveying “morsels to her lips by means of little golden forks with two prongs.”
In the Devil's Garden: A Sinful History of Forbidden Food Page 2