Feeling Crabby in January?
- Annie
- Jan 17, 2016
- 2 min read
As we've been blessed with an exceptionally mild and beautiful autumn, we still have these little wild fruits abundant here in mid January. They are a fabulous, sugary energy snack for wildlife but also apparently for my two very own Black Shucks.
The oldest Neolithic crab apple remains have been found in southeast Poland. Wild apple fruits were gathered and dried for storage, as was the case in several other sites in Europe but it's the Romans, (of course) who populised the cultivated varieties here. To them, the apple was a symbol of eternity.
The apple is misrepresented as the Forbidden Fruit of Eve because the bible text only mentions the fruit of the 'tree'. Apples were unknown in Eygypt and Palestine at that time. It was however, a beautiful Pagan symbol of love and fetility and of course, we can't be having that sort of nonsense and wickedness at the bottom of the garden! The Malus then became the tree of witches and a symbol of the devil.
If you cut the apple horizontally, the symbol of Venus is revealed in the five-pointed star, the same as her eartly orbit. It is an ancient tradition amongst gypsies to cut an apple in this way to reveal the mystical sign of the Goddess.
Apples could even tell your fortune in 1952.
In China, the apple symbolisies peace. Thus presenting someone with an apple is to say: 'peace be with you'.
More locally, Tudor Norwich in the reign of Elizabeth I was described as 'either a city in an orchard or an orchard in a city', so equally were houses and fruit trees planted.
But why are they called crab apples anyway? Opinion is divided on whether it's her wayward branches or from Scandinavian Etymology - A kind of apple. Swe krabbäple (a crab-apple). Perhaps allied to 'crab' in the sense of 'pinching, sour'. I prefer and suspect the later.
Where does the saying being crabby come from? It could be from our ancient, humble little hedgerow apple trees with their sour flesh. However, I do hope that you're actually currently feeling rather rosey instead.
© Norfolk Psychics 2016
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