When Apples Attack
Mike Smith
1 Comment
Share this: del.icio.us | Digg | Google | Ma.gnolia | Reddit | Stumble Upon | Technorati
Consider, if you will, that during the millions of years of humankind’s evolution, development, and dissemination thus far, a being of a much different sort has been evolving as well—on its own at first, beneath the high northern flanks of the Tian Shan Mountains of China and Kazakhstan, and then symbiotically, right alongside us. For millennia, these inhuman entities have coexisted with people in Asia and then Europe, infiltrated the Americas with the coming of the Europeans, and even managed to convince our medical personnel—the doctors and nurses we trust with our lives—of their ultimate importance to our species.
Consider also that while there may be six billion of us, there are nearly 300 billion of them, and nearly 300 billion more waiting to replace them next year. These things outnumber us, fifty to one—and they’re everywhere. Until recently, this fact has not been a particularly troubling one, and we’ve taken it for granted that their kind means us no harm—that they’re incapable of harm—and we’ve blithely allowed them into our stores, our schools, and the very homes in which we sleep.
We are talking, believe it or not, about apples.
Here in New Mexico, apples are the other “Red or Green” question. Our state, despite its more iconic branding as a place of sagebrush and snakes and open desert, is home to literally dozens of commercial apple orchards and farms, and to at least four annual apple festivals—in the communities of Hillsboro, High Rolls, Manzano, and Rio Rancho.
Also, if a story recounted in Nasario García’s Brujas, Bultos, Y Brasas: Tales of Witchcraft and the Supernatural in the Pecos Valley has any validity, New Mexico may be the site of the world’s first known apple attacks.
The story of these alleged attacks was told to Garcia in 1990, by lifelong San José, New Mexico-resident Clara S. Ortiz, and concerns a man in north-eastern New Mexico’s San Miguel County, not far south of Santa Fe and Las Vegas.
“Well, I heard it said once that this man was bewitched, and an herbalist got him well,” Ortiz said. “I understand that an apple was constantly chasing him. I’m told the bewitched man would turn into a ball, and he’d get underneath the chairs. It was witchcraft.
“...This thing would follow him, and it was in the shape of an apple, and it would really get him sick. The apple would force the man under a chair and, by turning him into a tiny ball, he’d fit under there. It was awful, according to people who talked about it.”
Apples, you might think, even sentient ones, would have a fairly difficult time doing anything more frightening than, say, rolling after somebody. Nevertheless, this story likely does have a basis in some sort of truth.
“Clara Ortiz literally meant [what she said], which is not only part of witchcraft, but also central to the whole notion of bewitchment,” wrote Nasario García in a recent e-mail. “You see, an apple in witch lore of New Mexico is a witch in disguise akin to an owl, a goat, a magpie.... The story is without question based on an actual incident.
“What gives credence to the tale is the fact that the lady who bewitched the man is mentioned, albeit not by name; the herbalist who cured him is also mentioned but also not by name. That is not unusual since the raconteur oftentimes did not wish to identify either the perpetrator or the victim for fear of self-incrimination.”
Perhaps, however, the actual incident this story sprang from entailed something mental or physiological, not something supernatural or otherworldly.
Ursina Teuscher, PhD, of the University of New Mexico’s (UNM’s) Department of Psychology, suggested via e-mail that the man’s perceptions of being chased by an apple may be a symptom of an unusual disorder known as Charles Bonnet syndrome. The syndrome, named for the eighteenth-century Swiss nature writer and philosopher who first wrote about it, is a disorder in which people with vision problems caused by brain damage make up for what they can no longer see by filling in the gaps with made-up images.
“There are cases of visual hallucinations that are caused by partial loss of eyesight (blind spots) that are filled in, in a similar way that amputees may develop phantom experiences of their missing limb,” Teuscher wrote. “…That said, I don’t think this would serve as an explanation for the case you describe, since these people are usually aware that their visual perceptions do not reflect objects out in the world.”
Ethan White, who teaches Psychology 105 at UNM, discussed the possibility that what the man may have actually experienced was an irrational interpretation of a visual anomaly—a red spot hovering in his field of vision, perhaps caused by a detached retina, the layer of cells at the back of the eye.
“A detached retina...can cause things like that,” White said. “If it chases him around, then he’s thinking of it as an active agent. It’s enough to say that he has a disorder, but it’s a little strange. ...He’s anthropomorphizing this dot and feeling threatened by it, which is definitely schizotypal.”
And Janis L. Anderson, another longtime UNM Psychology professor, offered that the explanation for the event may be an even simpler one, and that you don't necessarily have to declare the alleged apple’s alleged victim to be crazy or suffering from some weird disorder.
“I don’t think you would need to invoke an obscure neurological malady,” Anderson wrote, also in an e-mail. “A lot depends on whether the person may have come to this belief along with others in their culture. Once a person has a strongly held belief, it is not unusual for them to have sensory experiences that are consistent with that belief. There was a psychiatrist at Vanderbilt Medical Center [in Nashville, Tennessee] in the 1970s, Mark Hollander, who wrote about patients who had medical problems because of someone putting a curse on them.”
It’s interesting to explore such a seemingly folkloric story in an analytical way, but some might feel that such analyses might be, in a way, unfair to the story itself, and to the people who are a part of it—might in fact be the wrong way to look at this sort of thing.
“Myths are about the human struggle to deal with the great passages of time and life—birth, death, marriage, the transitions from childhood to adulthood to old age,” wrote Michael Shermer in Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time. “They meet a need in the psychological or spiritual nature of humans that has absolutely nothing to do with science. To try to turn a myth into science, or a science into a myth, is an insult to myths, an insult to religion, and an insult to science.”
That may well be, but before declaring any story a myth, this one included, you do have to examine it first. And, in examining such a story, you may find there is much to discover about what it offers, why it exists, and what truths might lay behind it. Among other things, such stories create important opportunities for human interaction through their telling, and serve the much-needed purpose of focusing and allaying the fears of those telling it. In their way, just so long as they don’t lead to unpopular community members being lynched as witches, such stories can be cathartic, a needed release, even healthful.
And, if witches really do turn out to be roaming New Mexico, using the state’s exports to force people under chairs—or if the apples of our already-strange-enough state have finally tired of humans having the upper hand, and if this incident was merely the first strike before an uprising—before a truly bizarre war the likes of which this planet has never seen—then this story, this incredible story, may also be a warning.
View Printer Friendly Version
Email Article to Friend
Reader Comments (1)