The Apple Stores Will Be Temples Where We Will Go To Burn iCandles

Does the apple of Apple refer to Alan Turing, who would have celebrated his hundredth birthday today, or not? Just as much or as little as the cross of the church refers to Jesus, Maarten Keulemans, science editor of the Volkskrant, discovered.

To celebrate the hundredth birthday of the founder of informatics, Alan Turing, I bought an iPad today. A rubabble computer! If only the man who gave computers their digital language knew.

Turing’s eye would also be stuck on the logo on the backside. An apple with a bite out of it? That is the last thing he saw before he closed his eyes forever. Alan Turing committed suicide in 1954 by taking a bite from an apple injected with cyanide.

And so now that logo. A tribute! To him! Jesus his cross; Turing his apple.

That would be nice — albeit not true. It’s an old misunderstanding that immediately started to float around when the Apple logo came to light in 1976.

Scalable

Apple initially had a different logo, of Isaac Newton sitting under the apple tree. But then Steve Jobs decided it should be more modern and graphic designer Rob Janoff was engaged.

In an entertaining interview with the major designer site Creativebits, Janoff recounted a couple of years what happened then: “If I tell you the real reason why I added that bite, it will be a bit of a disappointment. But I will tell you. I designed it with the bite out of it to make the logo scalable, so everyone would still see that it was an apple and not a cherry.”

Janoff told the trade website something else. Something, that got me thinking: “As a designer — and you probably have experienced this — one of the striking phenomena is that, when you have designed a logo for whatever deliberations, you will hear years later why you have apparently made all sorts of choices. And it is all BS. Someone starts about it, and then everyone suddenly yells: of course, it has to be that.”

An interesting observation; the same thing happened with the cross of Jesus. In any event, archaeologists frequently encounter the vertical cross with the short top in religions that are centuries older than Christianity. The Roman god of wine, Bacchus, wore crosses on his adornment; the Greek goddess of hunting regularly has a cross above her head; and the Vestal virgins of Rome wore little crosses around their neck, just like Catholic nuns.

What is more, “there hardly is a pagan tribe where the cross has not been found,” the Scottish priest Alexander Hislop realized already in 1853.

The Egyptians, Aztecs and Hindus had crosses; the Babylonians used the cross to indicate their god of fertility Tammuz; and in the famed Parlor of the Bulls, in the caves of Lascaux, primitive people already drew crosses on the ceilings 35,000 years ago.

Meanwhile, it is highly questionable whether Jesus really hung on a classic cross. The Greek word “stauros,” with which the New Testament refers to the cross, mainly means “stake” (the resemblance between both words is not accidental) and historians know that the Romans rarely used the cross as we know it; more often, the condemned was tied or nailed to a T-shaped pole, or simply to a vertical stick.

Holy bite

That means there is still hope for Turing. In Christianity, it took about three centuries before the cross became generally accepted. The most likely scenario is that it was a concession to the “pagans”’ of those times, who used the sign of the cross already in a different symbolic context.

So really, it’s just like the Christmas tree (initially a harvest symbol), the fish at the back of Christian cars (already fashionable among the Phoenicians and identical to the Greek letter alpha) and the last supper (an identical copy of the last supper of the Persian God of the Sun Mithra 2,000 years earlier). Cultural history is so much fun!

Maybe in a couple of centuries, we will worship the bitten apple after all. Through him and with him and in him, Alan Turing, he who died in name of the byte, the holy bite, the apple of iWisdom, now and until eternity, amen.

The Apple Stores will be temples, where we will go to burn iCandles. Look around you when you happen to be in an Apple Store: we are well on our way.