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Consider the apple tree and its ways.

Early in summer, it sets as much fruit as it can.

Later on, it drops many—even most—of those hard little unripe apples.

With what it can draw from Earth, Sun, and Thunder—the Deep Gods of the witches—the tree has only so much main—energy—at its disposal. The resources available to the tree to nurture its apples are limited. With what it has, it can produce either many small, or a few select, apples.

As I rake up fallen green fruit, I reflect. The Craft is an apple tree. Why do so many leave?

Don't get me wrong: I love apples.

But when's the last time that you bit into an apple and had juice run down your forearm and drip from your elbow?

A good pear is truly a full-body experience.

Pears. I just ate my first one of the season. OMGs.

The Witch Goddess's sacred flower is, of course, the Rose, but the Rose family is a large one. Apples are roses. So are pears. Cut one with the stem. Like an apple, it will show forth the Flower of Life. And cut across the stem, behold: the Fivefold Star of Rebirth.

We've been eating pears for a long time: since, apparently, the Neolithic, if not before. They ate them in the Lake Villages of Stone Age Switzerland. They're mentioned in Linear B inscriptions from Mycenaean Greece. The name pear comes ultimately from Latin, which got it from Greek, which got it from the Phoenicians (p'ri = “fruit”).

And every pear's a little goddess. Hold one in your hand. It's like one of those big-hipped Mamas that the ancestors made to make the garden grow. It irks me when people say that a situation has gone “pear-shaped” to mean that it's gone wrong. Is the implication really that perfection = round? Round things roll away and break. Low centers of gravity mean stability.

Cut across the core, the Star of Life.

Cut with the core, the Gate of Life.

If witches have a sacred fruit, it's the Eternal Apple. Even our afterlife is the Apple-Tree Island, where the dead eat of the Fruit of Life and grow young and full of sap again.

Asked why there were so many witches in Basque country, Pierre de Lancre—the Inquisitor who spearheaded the Basque witch-trials—replied: Are you kidding? That's Apple Country up there. Those people eat nothing but apples. No wonder they're all witches.

Indeed.

Fasting on the day of November Eve is my oldest personal custom. The last thing that I'll eat before I begin my fast at sundown tonight is an apple.

All night and all day I'll fast. The dead do not eat.

When you see the Tree, you understand right away that this is the Mother Tree of All Apples.

A farmhouse, now long gone, once stood here. Nothing remains but a pile of old foundation stones.

But the Three Springs still bubble from the creek-bed, and feral apple trees fill the Secret Valley.

The Mother Tree is oldest, and biggest, of them all.

Orchard trees are pruned, bred low for easy picking. This tree has known neither pruning saw, nor the shade of other trees. Three with outstretched arms could barely span its girth.

Approach, and understand. Three sister trees—sprung, maybe, from a single apple—have grown up together, merging, in mutual embrace: the Three that are One, the One that is Three. You'd go far to find a better image of the Triple Goddess.

Life for life: the Old Covenant.

(The Old Oneness, we would say in the old Witch language.)

And the sign and seal of the Old Oneness—“There's a oneness between us”—is the apple.

The apple is deep, deep. At its heart, cut one way, the Gate of Life (i.e. yoni). Cut the other, the fivefold Star of Birth, Life, Love, Death, and Rebirth.

They say that Elfhame's Queen took a mortal man to be her bard and lemman: Thomas Rhymer he was called.

Seven years he served her: and all his payment was an apple.

Life is a contract with death, annually renewed.

At Samhain, we renew the contract.

At Samhain we stand before the great black void of Non-Existence.

She offers us an apple.

Others die; we eat. Some day, we will die and others eat.

The ancient story: feed and feed.

I asked a friend what family wisdom he felt he'd inherited from his ancestors.

“Work hard and live frugally,” he said. “And when times are good, set aside a little something for when they're not; for hard times will certainly come.”

Well, it's October in Minnesota, and that means that hard times are certainly on the way.