Apple Tree

The flowering apple tree is our deep life. We see the psyche’s devastating underestimation of the value of the Jung elemental feminine—when the father says of the apple tree, ‘Surely we can plant another.’

Estés argues that the apple tree in ‘The Handless Maiden’ symbolizes the irreplaceable depth of the feminine soul, and that the psyche’s casual willingness to sacrifice it to the Devil constitutes a catastrophic undervaluation of the wild feminine nature.

Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph D, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017thesis

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The apple was sacred to Venus; and there were worldwide folk stories about red apples of love and magical golden apples. However, the apple has come down to us in Christian symbology as ‘bad’: either poisonous, or symbolic of earthly temptations of pleasure, sexuality, materialism, or knowledge.

Signell traces the historical inversion of the apple from a sacred symbol of the goddess religion and Venus into a patriarchal emblem of forbidden knowledge, sexuality, and the Fall, arguing this demonization was a projection of masculine anxiety onto feminine power.

Signell, Karen A., Wisdom of the Heart: Working with Womens Dreams, 1991thesis

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‘Surely, wife, we can plant another apple tree.’ ‘Oh, my husband!’ wailed the woman, and she looked as though she had been struck dead. ‘The man in the black coat was the Devil, and what stands behind the mill is the tree, yes, but our daughter is also there sweeping the yard.’

This narrative passage establishes the fateful equivalence of the apple tree and the daughter in the tale, making the tree the psychic double of the maiden whose sacrifice to the Devil initiates the story’s descent and ordeal.

Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph D, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017thesis

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The mythological Hesperian gardens were a favourite symbol in alchemy, because they contained a tree that grew golden apples. The image of the golden apples was used by the alchemists to symbolize gold and the philosopher’s stone.

Abraham establishes that the apple tree of the Hesperides served alchemists as a primary emblem for the philosophical tree and its golden fruit, encoding the transmutative goal of the opus as the harvesting of perfect golden apples.

Abraham, Lyndy, A Dictionary of Alchemical Imagery, 1998thesis

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‘The blood causes all unfruitful trees to bear fruit of the same nature as the apple.’ From the fruits of the sun-and-moon tree is prepared ‘the immortal fruit, which has life and blood.’

Jung cites alchemical sources in which the blood of the opus animates barren trees to yield apple-like fruit, linking the apple directly to the immortalizing substance of the lapis and to solar-lunar duality in the philosophical tree.

Jung, C. G., Collected Works Volume 3: The Psychogenesis of Mental Disease, 1907supporting

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Benedictus Figulus calls the fruit ‘the golden apple of the Hesperides, to be pluck’t from the blest philosophic tree,’ the tree representing the opus and the fruit its results, i.e., the gold of which it is said: ‘Our gold is not the common gold.’

Jung demonstrates that the golden apple figures in alchemical writing as the supreme result of the opus, identifying the fruit of the philosophical tree with an interior, non-material gold that transcends common metal.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Alchemical Studies, 1967supporting

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When an apple tree produces flowers, we don’t see apples yet, and so we might say, ‘There are flowers but no apples on this tree.’ We say this because we do not see the latent presence of the apples in the flowers.

Thich Nhat Hanh uses the apple tree’s flowering as a contemplative illustration of interdependence and latency, showing that apparent absence conceals the presence of future fruit and that meditators learn to see the one in the many.

Nhat Hanh, Thich, The Sun My Heart, 1988supporting

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Gotama recalled the ‘cool shade of the rose-apple tree,’ which, inevitably, brought to mind the ‘coolness’ of Nibbana. Most yogins could only achieve the first jhana after years of study and hard work, but it had come to him without any effort on his part.

Armstrong identifies the rose-apple tree as the site of the Buddha’s spontaneous childhood jhana, a recovered memory that reorients his ascetic path toward the possibility of effortless insight rather than mortification.

Armstrong, Karen, Buddha, 2000supporting

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The tree of paradise that died after the Fall. In the midst of paradise there rose a shining fountain, from which four streams flowed. Seth knew that this was the tree of whose fruit his parents had eaten, for which reason it now stood bare.

Jung reads the Judaeo-Christian paradise tree—stripped bare after the Fall and later crowned with the Christ-child—as an alchemical motif in which the death and renewal of the tree encodes the opus of redemption through transformation.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Alchemical Studies, 1967supporting

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‘Again, plant this tree on the stone, that it fear not the buffetings of the winds; that the birds of heaven may come and multiply on’ it. The tree as guardian of the treasure appears in the alchemical fairytale of ‘The Spirit in the Bottle.’

Jung traces how the alchemical tree, grounded on the philosophers’ stone and bearing fruit that represents the opus, also serves as guardian of a hidden treasure, linking the tree motif to the fairy-tale theme of spirit-in-container and to the chrysopoeia.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Alchemical Studies, 1967supporting

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The apple flies while standing still. Moreover, the sentence in which the apple flies is a sentence floating in paradoxical, paratactic relation to the sentences before it… On the one hand, you see a tree picked bare. On the other hand, an apple floats.

Carson reads the single floating apple in Longus’s picked-bare tree as a deliberate grammatical and erotic paradox, arguing that the apple’s impossible persistence embodies the triangular logic of desire, in which the absent object is simultaneously and impossibly present.

Carson, Anne, Eros the Bittersweet: An Essay, 1986supporting

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Taking Care of the Apple Tree in Your Yard

The chapter title in Nhat Hanh’s table of contents positions care of the apple tree as a contemplative practice, situating the apple tree within a broader pedagogy of mindful attention to ordinary life as a path to interdependent awareness.

Nhat Hanh, Thich, The Sun My Heart, 1988aside

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Eve’s compliance with the serpent’s advice (that is, her picking the apple from the tree) furnishes the key to the entire scene.

Auerbach treats Eve’s act of picking the apple from the tree as the dramatic pivot of the medieval mystery play, reading it as a narrative key that reveals the gendered power dynamics and theological stakes of the Fall scene.

Auerbach, Erich, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, 1953aside

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They raised many kinds of animals, sowed fields with a variety of crops, and planted and tended an orchard with great care.

Moore invokes the family orchard as an example of the soul’s deep attachment to particular natural places, illustrating how the cultivated fruit tree participates in the memory, identity, and care that bind a community to its land.

Moore, Thomas, Care of the Soul Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition: A Guide, 1992aside

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