Read In the Devil's Garden: A Sinful History of Forbidden Food Online
Authors: Stewart Lee Allen
Tags: #Cooking, #History, #General, #Fiction
First Bite
It was still dark out when we left the monastery. Dawn was breaking a midnight blue etched with icy rain. Ocean waves crashed against the cliffs below. To the left and farther up the trail loomed the solitary Mount Athos.
“Some Christmas,” I grumbled when George and I finally found a sheltering cave. I handed him a soggy cracker. “It is the twenty-fifth, right?”
“Yes,” he said. George was a Greek fellow I’d met in a refuge run by an exceptionally grumpy monk. “But don’t wish any of the monks here a good Christmas! The people of Mount Athos believe Christmas doesn’t come until January, and they don’t like to be reminded that the rest of the world is celebrating it on the wrong day.”
Mount Athos is a six-thousand-foot-tall mountain that stands at the tip of a peninsula near the Greek-Turkish border. Surrounded on three sides by the Aegean Sea and on the fourth by roadless forests, it’s controlled and run by the Greek Orthodox Church, which has kept out almost all foreign and modern influences since the eleventh century. Military patrols search all visitors. Non-Greek males are allowed in on a strictly limited basis, and there have been no females, human or animal, allowed on the mountain for a thousand years. The only inhabitants are hundreds of robed monks who live in cliff-hugging monasteries exactly as their predecessors did twelve hundred years ago. There’s no electricity, no roads, no cars. Foods not specifically mentioned in Christian writings are avoided. Even time is different on Mount Athos because the monks follow the ancient Julian calendar, which, among other things, places the birth of Christ in mid-January instead of on December 25. Aside from farming, which is done by hand, the main activities are chanting, prayer, and creating illuminated manuscripts.
It’s a perfectly preserved slice of medieval Europe, the ideal place to find out how the apple came to grow in the Garden of Eden. The Old Testament does not reveal the exact identity of the Fruit of Forbidden Knowledge, and how the apple came to be identified with the evil fruit remains a mystery. George and I were trying to reach a monastery on the other side of the mountain where I’d been told there was a monk with opinions on the subject.
After our breakfast, George and I continued up and over the sea cliff, then headed toward the mountain. The rain turned to snow, and soon we found ourselves hiking through a landscape covered in silver ermine. Bunches of crimson holly berries encased in ice glittered on the leafless trees. It was like walking into a Noël fairy tale, so perfect and clean and clear, Christmas before all the lies. But as morning progressed, the snowfall turned into a blizzard. The trail disappeared, then the trees, then the mountain. All I could see were whirling flakes of snow, and even they dissolved into a surreal void as my glasses became encased in inch-thick ice. The snow was up to our knees. Then my head bumped into something. It was George. He was clawing at his face and shouting. It took awhile for me to realize he was saying that his eyes had frozen shut.
I defrosted them by cupping my hands over his sockets, but it was clear that the mountain did not want any visitors that day, and so we turned around and started back the way we had come. We were, of course, hopelessly lost, and it was only by chance that after some more wandering we discovered a rundown shack with a plume of smoke rising from its chimney. In a few minutes we were warming ourselves by a little coal stove and being clucked over by two grandpa monks with their beards tucked into their belts. They were hermits—the so-called “crazy of God”—who refuse the comfort of monastic life and live alone in the crudest of conditions. These two had “married” when they had grown too old to survive alone. I’ve never met a cuter couple. The quiet one prepared us a meal of raw onions, bread, and a homemade sherry while George explained our quest. The other monk pulled out a tiny red apple.
All of nature, he said in Greek (George translating), reflects the intent of the Creator: the shape of the clouds, the sound of the leaves, the flavors of the fruit on the trees. The monk thrust a knife into the apple. He pointed to the green opalescent drops dotting the tarnished steel. Come, he said, please taste. George and I dabbed our fingers into the liquor and placed it on our tongues. The first flavor was a scintillating, honeylike sweetness, followed by a tongue-curling tartness. Sweet flavors are lures meant to distract the faithful from the word of God, said George. That’s why every meal in Mount Athos is accompanied by a reading from the Bible, to keep the brothers from dwelling on the pleasures of the food before them, and treats like chocolate are avoided. So the apple’s initial sweetness was a sign of seductive intent. The tart aftertaste indicated diabolic influence, because bitter flavors indicate poison, and all poisons were thought by medieval scholars to be the work of the Devil. Some view the apple’s bittersweet savor as a literal allegory of the temptation of Eve; the sweet first bite represents the Serpent’s “honeyed tongue” while the astringent aftertaste foreshadows humanity’s ejection from paradise.
The monk sliced two thin wedges from the apple and handed them to George and myself. See how the skin is red like a woman’s lips? he said. And the flesh, how white it is, like teeth and skin. He told us to take a bite. Crisp and delicious. This, too, was considered an evil sign, because most fruits soften as they grow ripe. The apple, however, actually grows harder, an “unnatural” behavior that alchemists like Vincent de Beauvais claimed was “a sign of great deviltry . . . and of an immoral, cruel and misleading nature.” Our friend sliced the apple in half, vertically, and pointed to the seeds. You see? he said: There, within the heart of the fruit, is the sign of Eve. There was no doubt that from this angle the apple’s core looked vaguely like female genitalia. Hardly compelling, I thought. But the monk was not finished. He pulled out another apple and cut it in half, this time horizontally. Do you see the star? he asked. Sliced this way, the seeds that had looked like a vagina now outlined a five-pointed star, the pentagram, the ultimate symbol of Satan. The design was no larger than a dime but unmistakable. Even more alarming, at least to a religious fanatic, was how the seed design was highlighted by minute cavities of browned, charred fruit surrounding each pip. This is simply the result of iron-containing chemicals reacting with the air, but it really did look as if someone had magically burned the sign of Lucifer into the apple’s heart.
“In the fruit trees are hidden certain of God’s secrets,” wrote the famous medieval mystic St. Hildegard von Bingen, “which only the blessed among men can perceive.” Hildegard was describing the scientific philosophy of the Dark Ages, a discipline derived from the Platonic belief that all earthly objects are shadows cast by the true beings in the World of Ideas. Plato had been speaking in abstractions when he laid out this scenario, but medieval Christians had assumed his World of Ideas referred to their Heaven. They reasoned, therefore, that all earthly objects were symbols sent by God to communicate His intent. The priests’ job was similar to that of a Jungian psychiatrist: they interpreted God’s hidden “messages” and explained them to the unenlightened masses. The apple’s seductive colors, its two-faced flavor, its suggestively feminine core, and, above all, the hidden pentagram, were interpreted as signs that it was the fruit that had grown on the Tree of Forbidden Knowledge.
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.
In 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.