The autumn equinox – one of two days in the year when day and night are of equal length and which, in the pagan tradition, marks the beginning of the dark half of the year, comes as Christian churches celebrate the gathering in of the crops with the Harvest Festival. This year, for me, it’s all about apples.
Six months ago, having moved to an area of the West Country
historically dominated by orchards, I took the first steps in creating my own garden-orchard by planting some saplings.
And now, the light half of the year later, the first fruit of my orchard is a single, golden Russet. It’s Applewatch! If I allow it to fall, it will bruise and get eaten; if I pick it before it’s ready, I will have bad luck till Spring!
Apples have a rich and complicated symbolism across spiritual and religious traditions. For the Celts, apples had the power of healing and rebirth; for the Druids, as host to mistletoe, it was a sacred tree like the oak.
But of course, in Britain, the most powerful story about the apple is the Biblical one, portraying it as the fruity incarnation of forbidden knowledge. The cause, along with the serpent and the weakness of Woman, of The Fall, the apple represents the power and risks inherent in knowledge. In other words, it’s the Freewill Fruit.
The idea of the riskiness of apples permeates western culture. The apple in ‘Snow White’ is the container of poison, the vehicle of the evil stepmother’s magic that places the girl into a death-like state. In ‘Cider with Rosie’, Laurie Lee chronicles his sexual awakening thanks to an illicit jar of cider under a hay wagon in a chapter entitled ‘First bite of the apple’.
I’m not sure what the apple represents in contemporary British culture, but I suspect it may something to do with an attempt to preserve community and local character in the face of
homogenizing, impersonal modernity. In a couple of weeks, my local community group is holding its annual apple pick in the community orchard, a child-focused afternoon which will result in apple juice for the rest of the year.
And it’s a quarter of a century since Common Ground launched Apple Day on 21st October,
suggesting that the apple be used as ‘a symbol of what is being lost in many aspects of our lives and shown that anyone can take positive action towards change’.
My final thought about apples takes me to Lebanon, where I once went on an apple-picking weekend with a local eco-tourism company. I was a lone foreigner among a group of Maronites, and we picked apples for a leisurely while before having lunch and a lie-down in the orchard. The Syrian seasonal workers – living in nearby tents – were the best pickers, scrambling fast up trees to protect the apples from a bruising fall. There’s a symbolism in that, too.
No presenters were sacked in the writing of this blog