Forbidden fruit

"A Gnostic interpretation of the story proposes that it was the archons who created Adam and attempted to prevent him from eating the forbidden fruit in order to keep him in a state of ignorance, after the spiritual form of Eve entered the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil while leaving a physical version of herself with Adam once she awakened him.

However, the forces of the heavenly realm (Pleroma) sent the serpent as a representative of the divine sphere to reveal to Adam and Eve the evil intentions of their creators.

However, Yadin-Israel argues that Latin Christian writers from Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages rarely used mâlum to refer to the forbidden fruit.

[9] Azzan Yadin-Israel argues that the identification of the forbidden fruit with an apple first appears in medieval French art of the 12th century.

[13] The Zohar explains similarly that Noah attempted (but failed) to rectify the sin of Adam by using grape wine for holy purposes.

"[20] Since the fig is a long-standing symbol of female sexuality, it enjoyed a run as a favorite understudy to the apple as the forbidden fruit during the Italian Renaissance, Michelangelo Buonarroti depicting it as such in his fresco on the Sistine Chapel ceiling.

[21] Proponents of the theory that the Garden of Eden was located somewhere in what is now known as the Middle East suggest that the fruit was actually a pomegranate, as it is one of the earliest domesticated plants on the Eastern Mediterranean.

[6] Although commonly confused with a seed, in the study of botany a wheat berry is technically a simple fruit known as a caryopsis, which has the same structure as an apple.

[23] A fresco in the 13th-century Plaincourault Abbey in France depicts Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, flanking a Tree of Knowledge that has the appearance of a gigantic Amanita muscaria, a psychoactive mushroom.

[24] Terence McKenna proposed that the forbidden fruit was a reference to psychotropic plants and fungi, specifically psilocybin mushrooms, which he theorized played a central role in the evolution of the human brain.

In Nathan HaMe'ati's 13th-century translation of Maimonides's work The Medical Aphorisms of Moses, the banana is called the "apple of Eden".