The Star of Eden

Since the understanding of astronomy, travelers have used the stars in the night sky to find their paths before the inventions of the compass and GPS (Global Positioning System). What about a star that is found in an apple? Could it lead us to a lost Garden?

Apples are fruit that are produced by deciduous trees. Deciduous trees blossom in the spring and produce fruit in the fall. Trees are targets for a number of fungal and bacteria diseases and insect pests, which questions the hypothesis: an apple a day keeps the doctors away.

Our fascination with apples doesn’t have anything to do with our need of good health but more of the history behind it. Apples have come to be associated with both wisdom and sin. Is it possible that a fruit could be forbidden because it has the power to make one wise?

In the late 1600s, Sir Isaac Newton claimed to have been inspired one day, while sitting underneath an apple tree, when an apple fell and hit him on top of his head. This inspiration lead to his theory of gravitation. Newton is credited for being the first to understand gravity.

Other than its ties to history, an apple is also referenced in religion and Greek mythology. In Greek mythology, it was an apple that Paris rewarded the winner of the beauty contest he was obliged to judge against three goddess: Athena, Aphrodite, and Hera. He rewarded the apple to Aphrodite after she promised him the most beautiful human woman, Helen of Troy, if he chose her. This lead to the Trojan Wars.

The Book of Genesis, the first chapter of the Bible, begins with the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. God created Adam and Eve, who were a couple of naive humans who were not aware that they were naked until an serpent, with legs, enticed them to eat fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, in the middle of the garden. God, who had originally forbidden them to eat eat from that tree, was angry with them. He removed the legs from the serpent and cursed it to slither on its belly for the rest of its life, and he cursed Eve with menstruation, childbirth, and menopause. God evicted them from the garden and he placed Cherubim and a flaming sword at the east of the garden to keep them out forever and away from the tree of life so they could not live forever now that they had eaten from the tree of knowledge.

Although the bible doesn’t identify the fruit, it has always been believed throughout many cultures that the fruit that brought about the downfall of Eve was an apple. Although one cannot confirmed this due to the questionable evidence: the Bible but there is the Adam’s apple. The Adam’s apple is the term used to name the lump in a person’s neck that is much more pronounced in men. Why do you think it’s called the Adam’s apple and not Eve’s apple? The religious story to it is that it was caused by a piece of the forbidden fruit getting lodged in Adam’s throat.

In the Summer of 2007, when I got a red delicious, an apple, from the table and a knife from the kitchen utensil drawer, and I sat down at the kitchen table. Before I cut a slice of the apple off to eat it, slice by slice, as I normally eat an apple, it occurred to me that I haven’t seen the star since I was a kid. Instead of cutting a slice, I used the knife to cut it in half to see something that once fascinated my childish mind: How did that star get there?

As I was looking at that the star, the apple seeds made, I also thought about the link between apples and the Garden of Eden, and it occurred to me that this could be known as the Star of Eden. I wrote about all this in my journal.

The most popular color of an apple is red but the most common is green. Since we associate an apple with forbidden sin, it’s only natural we would prefer the color that sparks a double feeling in us: hatred and sexual energy. The color red is associated with war and seduction. Or is the reason we associate these feelings with this color because we believe that the color of the apple from religious, Greek mythology, and history was red?


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