Apple

The apple is Malus domestica, and the correspondence attached to it rests on something genuinely observable: cut an apple across its equator rather than through the stalk, and the seed chambers form a clear five-pointed star.

This is not a coincidence or a stretch. The Rosaceae, the rose family, are characteristically five-parted, five petals, five sepals, and the apple's carpels follow, giving five locules arranged in a regular pentagon. Any apple will do it. Renaissance writers read the figure as the pentagram of Venus, and the association of Venus with the number five has an independent astronomical basis: successive inferior conjunctions of Venus trace an approximate five-pointed figure against the zodiac over eight years, a pattern known to Babylonian astronomers.

So the chain here is unusually solid at both ends. The apple really does contain a pentagram; Venus really is associated with five; Culpeper places the apple under Venus and Taurus takes it as her earth sign. What does not follow is any pharmacological or medicinal consequence, and that is where the doctrine of signatures stops being observation and starts being inference. A visible five-fold symmetry is a fact about the flower's developmental genetics. Reading it as a message about the fruit's virtues requires a theory that the universe writes labels, which is the doctrine, and it is false.

It remains one of the better-motivated correspondences in the material, in the narrow sense that the thing it points at is actually there.

The apple's mythological career is large, and one of its most famous appearances is a mistranslation.

Genesis does not name the fruit of the tree of knowledge. The Hebrew says only fruit. The apple entered through Latin: malum means apple, and malus means evil, and the pun was available to Latin-speaking commentators and artists from late antiquity onward. By the medieval period the apple was fixed in Western art, and Milton uses it. Eastern Christian and Jewish traditions variously suggest fig, grape, pomegranate or wheat. The apple is a Western European accident of vocabulary.

The genuine apple myths are elsewhere and are consistently about immortality or discord. The golden apples of the Hesperides, guarded at the world's western edge, are Hera's wedding gift and the object of Heracles's eleventh labour. The apple of discord thrown by Eris, inscribed to the fairest, sets off the Judgement of Paris and the Trojan War. In Norse tradition Idunn keeps the apples that hold the gods' youth, and their loss ages them immediately. In Irish and Welsh material the otherworld is repeatedly an island of apple trees; Avalon, Insula Avallonis, is generally understood as the place of apples, from a Brittonic word cognate with Welsh afal.

The domestic apple's actual origin is genuinely remarkable and was only established by genetic work in recent decades: it descends principally from Malus sieversii, a wild apple of the Tian Shan mountains in Kazakhstan, and moved west along the Silk Road. Apples do not come true from seed, so every named variety is a graft, and orchards are clonal.