ROOT SCIENCE | The Apple at the Equinox: Medicine, Folklore and the Science Inside Autumn’s Most Symbolic Fruit

Photography by Valeria Boltneva

Before the apple became an emblem of autumn, it traveled thousands of miles with human beings, crossed with wild species, fed communities through winter and accumulated centuries of mythology along the way.

By September, the apple begins appearing everywhere. It sits in wooden baskets at farm stands, disappears beneath cinnamon and pastry, ferments quietly into cider and becomes part of the visual vocabulary of autumn almost without explanation. For those who observe Mabon, the modern Pagan celebration associated with the autumn equinox, apples have also become familiar symbols of harvest, abundance and the changing season. Yet the apple's relationship with autumn is considerably older and more interesting than any contemporary seasonal altar. Beneath the mythology is a remarkable botanical history involving migration, hybridization, preservation and human selection. Inside the fruit itself is another story, one written in fiber, acids, sugars and polyphenols. The apple is simultaneously ordinary and ancient, which may be exactly why human beings have spent so much time turning it into a symbol.

The domestic apple, Malus domestica, did not originate in the orchards of Western Europe with which it later became so closely associated. Genetic research points primarily toward the wild apple Malus sieversii of Central Asia, particularly the Tian Shan region of modern Kazakhstan, as its principal progenitor. The story becomes more complicated as the apple moves west. Genetic studies show that domesticated apples hybridized with other wild Malus species along their journey, with the European crabapple, Malus sylvestris, making an especially significant secondary contribution to the genome of modern cultivated apples. Rather than a single moment when humans transformed a wild plant into a domestic one, the apple appears to have emerged through a long relationship among trees, landscapes, trade routes and people. (PubMed Central (PMC))

That history makes the apple an unusually appropriate fruit for a harvest season concerned with transition. Its domestication was itself a journey. Apples and their seeds moved across Eurasia, while desirable trees could eventually be maintained through grafting rather than relying upon genetically unpredictable seedlings. Researchers studying apple evolution describe hybridization and gene flow as central to the fruit we recognize today. The apple in a grocery store is therefore not simply the descendant of one ancient wild fruit. It carries genetic traces of encounters that occurred as apples moved through different regions and came into contact with other wild populations. (PubMed)

Long before refrigeration, however, the significance of an autumn apple was practical. A harvest was not simply an abundance to admire. It was food that had to be eaten, dried, stored, cooked or fermented before it spoiled. Archaeobotanical research suggests that humans gathered wild apples for millennia before the development of the modern cultivated apple, and drying small, tart fruits may have been one way of preserving and making them more palatable. Apple-based fermented drinks also have deep histories across Eurasia. (ScienceDirect) The autumn harvest therefore represented something much more serious than our modern appetite for seasonal aesthetics. What could be preserved in September and October could become part of what sustained a household when the landscape stopped producing so generously.

This is where Mabon benefits from a little historical clarification. The autumn equinox itself is ancient; human attention to harvest cycles is older still. Mabon as the name of a Pagan autumn-equinox festival is modern, however. The term was introduced into the modern Pagan Wheel of the Year in the twentieth century and references Mabon ap Modron from Welsh tradition. It should not be treated as the documented name of an ancient pan-European equinox festival. Modern Pagan practice has subsequently developed its own traditions around the equinox, often emphasizing harvest, thanksgiving, balance and preparation for the darker half of the year. (Wikipedia) Recognizing that modern history does not diminish the observance. It simply allows us to distinguish between historical agricultural practices, older folklore and traditions created within contemporary Paganism.

The apple fits comfortably among all three because human beings have been assigning meanings to it for an extraordinarily long time. Apples and apple-like fruits appear throughout European and Mediterranean stories connected with beauty, desire, knowledge, fertility, immortality and the otherworld. Over centuries, those stories have accumulated and overlapped so thoroughly that the apple has become one of those objects capable of carrying almost contradictory meanings. It can represent temptation and wisdom, mortality and immortality, sensuality and nourishment. That symbolic flexibility may partly come from the fruit itself. Cut an apple horizontally and the seed chambers often produce the familiar five-pointed shape that has acquired its own significance in modern magical imagery. Leave an apple untouched, however, and its meaning is much simpler: it is a fruit designed by evolution to make itself attractive enough to be eaten so that its lineage can continue.

The science inside that fruit is just as interesting as the folklore surrounding it. Apples contain soluble and insoluble dietary fiber, including pectin, along with numerous plant compounds broadly described as polyphenols. Researchers have identified compounds including quercetin glycosides, catechin, epicatechin, procyanidins, chlorogenic acid and phloridzin. Their concentrations vary according to cultivar, ripeness, storage, processing and which portion of the fruit is examined. Apple peel is particularly rich in several phenolic compounds; studies summarized in scientific reviews have found substantially greater concentrations of some phenolics and flavonoids in peel than flesh. (PubMed Central (PMC))

This is where Root Science requires a distinction between a plant containing biologically active compounds and a plant being medicine. Those statements are not interchangeable. Laboratory, animal, observational and human research has investigated possible relationships between apple consumption and cardiovascular, metabolic and other health outcomes, but individual phytochemicals should not be transformed into miracle claims simply because they demonstrate interesting biological activity under experimental conditions. An apple is a nutrient-containing whole food, not a pharmaceutical dose of quercetin. Scientific reviews themselves note questions surrounding bioavailability and how compounds behave within the human body, which is very different from observing their effects in a test tube. (PubMed Central (PMC))

Pectin offers another example of how traditional observation and modern science can meet without needing to become identical. Anyone who has made apple jelly understands something about apple chemistry even if they have never used the word polysaccharide. Pectin is a structural carbohydrate found in plant cell walls. Under the appropriate conditions of acidity, sugar and heat, it contributes to the gel structure that allows fruit preserves to set. Long before anyone could describe its molecular structure, cooks were already exploiting its properties. Preservation knowledge was empirical science practiced in kitchens: observe what happens, remember what works, repeat it at the next harvest.

Fermentation worked much the same way. Apples that could not remain fresh indefinitely could become cider, and microbial activity transformed their sugars into products capable of lasting differently than the original fruit. Drying removed enough water to slow spoilage. Cooking changed texture and flavor. Storage varieties were selected partly because some apples survived longer than others. Harvest culture was therefore filled with chemistry whether the people performing it used scientific terminology or not.

This practical knowledge complicates the romantic way we sometimes imagine historical harvest celebrations. The harvest was beautiful because abundance is beautiful, but it existed beside an approaching threat. Winter meant scarcity. A successful harvest created security; a failed one could create hunger. Gathering fruit was therefore simultaneously celebration and preparation. The baskets needed to become stores. The fruit needed to become preserves. What was ripe needed to be used before decay claimed it.

Perhaps this is where the apple becomes most meaningful at the equinox. Not because we need to invent an ancient universal doctrine surrounding it, but because the fruit itself already tells the story.

An apple tree spends the growing season turning sunlight, water and nutrients into leaves, wood, sugar and fruit. By autumn, what began months earlier as blossom has become something that can be gathered. The fruit contains both nourishment and seed, an ending and a beginning occupying the same small body. Humans have carried those fruits across continents, selected them, grafted them, fermented them, dried them, stored them, baked them and written them into stories. Modern science has simply given us another language through which to understand what generations before us already knew in more practical terms: the apple is worth preserving.

For Mabon, that may be enough.

The equinox does not need the apple to prove anything supernatural. Place one on the table and it already contains migration, agriculture, chemistry, memory and survival. Slice it open and you are looking at a fruit shaped by thousands of years of relationships between humans and the botanical world.

Eat it, preserve it, bake it or press it.

The harvest was never only symbolic.

It was how people prepared to survive what came next.

Sources & Further Reading

Cornille, Amandine, et al. “New Insight into the History of Domesticated Apple: Secondary Contribution of the European Wild Apple to the Genome of Cultivated Varieties.” PLOS Genetics, 2012. Genetic analysis of 839 accessions across Eurasia demonstrated the importance of Malus sieversii and substantial secondary contribution from the European wild apple, Malus sylvestris. (PLOS)
Read the study at PLOS Genetics

Cornille, Amandine, et al. “The Domestication and Evolutionary Ecology of Apples.” Trends in Genetics, 2014. A review of apple domestication, hybridization, gene flow and the evolutionary history of cultivated apples. (PubMed)
View the research at PubMed

Boyer, Jeanelle, and Rui Hai Liu. “Apple Phytochemicals and Their Health Benefits.” Nutrition Journal, 2004. A review of apple phytochemicals, including quercetin, catechin, chlorogenic acid and other phenolic compounds, as well as differences between peel and flesh. (PubMed Central (PMC))
Read the full review

Spengler, Robert N. “Origins of the Apple: The Role of Megafaunal Mutualism in the Domestication of Malus and Rosaceous Trees.” Frontiers in Plant Science, 2019. Examines the long relationship between humans, wild apples, dispersal and eventual domestication. (Frontiers)
Read the study at Frontiers