Eve and Adam

Nothing much changed: Eve’s life hadn’t been easy for a long time. Her burdens were heavy. Her back ached from carrying what felt like the weight of the world. And for the longest time, no one even noticed. She just kept on doing her work, taking care of the children, planting, feeding, weeding, harvesting, preserving, birthing, nursing the babies, washing diapers, ironing his shirts, kneading bread, carrying groceries, working at the diner, wiping up vomit, weaving cloth, cleaning the toilet, carrying water, cooking, cooking, cooking, cleaning, cleaning, cleaning, cleaning

Adam moved forward in life. He hunted bear and then he followed the cattle. Later he made weapons and traveled by ship to trade them in far places. After that he built churches. He fought in the war and then he came home. They called him a hero and they gave him a fine office at the top of the tallest building with an administrative assistant to do the repetitious work. Later on he built himself a laboratory equipped all the latest machines and made brilliant technological advances. He bought himself an airplane and practiced flying every weekend. The world was his chessboard. In the evening, he watched the war on his big screen TV from his recliner.

Who is Eve? She, a modified rib stolen in the night from Adam’s own body, she, who offered him that sexy apple which graced us, their ever-after, with suffering? She, who was formed to be Adam’s “help meet,” and who fell for the whiles of the “subtil” serpent?
Why should the first woman in the mythology of our Judeo-Christian culture be portrayed at best as such a clear second, the necessary but unfortunate “other half” of a perfect man?

Eve enters the room unsteadily. It’s odd, but she hasn’t felt truly herself since that snake bite. Though the doctor said it was nothing. “It isn’t a poisonous snake, you see,” he said, reading from his medical text. So maybe she’s just tired. Recently Eve made a certain number of advances herself – she got a college degree and now she works nights at the power plant. But she still does most of the housework and cooking, not to mention driving the kids everywhere. Adam knows she hates that huge Chevy Suburban, but he says small cars aren’t safe. The drinks and snacks she carries tremble a little in her hands.

“Here,” she says, handing Adam a beer. “What’re you watching?”>

This world, where we believe the soul is carried by words – written words, said words, where meaning resides sound – is Adam’s world, Man’s world. Its very language is structured from his point-of-view, shaped by his perspective. Why should it be that the move to speak of “humanity” instead of “mankind” has taken life only recently? Why is it so difficult it is to shift from “he” to “he and she,” or worse, for it falls off the tongue so awkwardly, to “she or he” ? History is truly his-story. The Bible’s words tell Man’s version of the Creation, and words carry in this world – especially the Word of God. Indeed, what words could be more powerful? For over five thousand years, the Word of God, in the words of Genesis, has been lived out literally. Simultaneously, most cultures of the world have treated women remarkably badly. Some still do.

The OED defines literal:
[(O)Fr. litéral or late L lit(t)eralis, f. lit(t)era LETTER] A adj. Designating or pertaining to a sense or interpretation of a text, orig. esp. the Bible, obtained by taking words in their primary or customary meaning, and applying the ordinary rules of grammar, without mysticism, allegory, or metaphor; designating or pertaining to the etymological or primary sense of the word (1604)

Adam and Eve, progenitors of Western civilization, did not fall from the garden; they were written down.

“War,” he said, not moving his eyes. “Look what that guy’s using! Why, you can hardly call it a gun. It’s more like a computer than a gun. Fabulous technology! Whoa! Did you see that guy fall? A perfect shot! Beautiful!”

But there is another side to Genesis that is less apparent. When one reads between the lines, the images in the story will work their own magic. It is a mistake to discount Eve as she appears at first reading. Eve’s world is the world of serpents, the organic world of signs, cycles and circles. The story related in the first books of Genesis carries esoteric information that is recognizable to adepts in all mystery traditions. As the adepts would tell us, the telling is of its time; its truth is eternal.

Eve’s eyes widen. She stars at the screen. What’s happening? The man on the screen is leaning forward clutching his chest. She can see his eyes fill with anguish. She feels the pain that rushes through him. I’m shot, she hears him thinking. I’m shot! This is it. The pain becomes agonizing. The camera goes into slow motion.

His head falls forward.

His knees give.

He sinks slowly downward.

The myth of Eve has been exceptionally well dissected and interpreted since its inception. When words were fewer and everything said or written carried proportionately greater power, the language, the story, and the interpretation of so primal a myth necessarily had a multileveled and complex impact.

Eve sees the soldier’s wife holding their infant son, her features suddenly paralyzed with shock. Their daughter, at the kitchen table, looks up from her school work abruptly, the color draining from her face. The soldier’s mother, alone behind a small rundown house, stands very erect for a moment and then collapses into her apron crying. He is her last living child.
And now the man falls, blood spurting from his chest, to the dusty earth.

Many interpreters believe that the first two books of Genesis tell two different versions of the creation story. In Genesis 1, Adam and Eve are created together: “So God created man in his image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them” (Genesis 1:27). In Genesis 2, Eve is created after Adam, out of his rib. In the Iroquois oral tradition, traditional stories are told in cycles rather than chronological narratives. The first two books of Genesis fit together in much the same way as Iroquois stories. One might give the framework, or larger structure, from which the other more specific telling hangs. Genesis 1 provides the framework, Genesis 2, one version of the detail. In the Iroquois tradition there would be many such versions. It seems likely that the stories in Genesis are two parts of a story cycle, recorded at different times and in different contexts, thus accounting for their differences.

“Adam,” she says, wiping the grease from the chips off on her jeans, “did you see that?”
“What, hon?”
“When they showed the guy’s wife and his mother. How could they do that? I mean, how could they have the cameras in there, right when he died?”
“What guy is that, hon?” Adam takes another sip of his beer without letting the can interfere with his line of vision.

Eve is still watching the screen, too. The soldier is looking at his weapon. My god, he thinks, what have I done? He lets it fall to the ground where it thuds noisily. He holds his empty hands before his eyes. Breathing rapidly, he stares, wild-eyed, at his fingers. They tap at invisible keys. Am I a murderer now?
Then she sees him lying in his narrow cot, sobbing.

Eve’s story was most fervently explored and interpreted during the Middle Ages. The sinful and fascinating First Woman was a topic of passionate interest in the last outposts of literacy in Europe for many centuries, the monasteries, where the Bible was the only acceptable reading material. As Elaine Pagels argues so convincingly, the implications that Augustine draws from the Adam communing with God while Eve communes with a serpent alone had a remarkable influence on history. James Hillman also speaks of the body-mind split engendered by the myth historically and of the “doubly negative cast” projected on the human body in its wake. Joseph Campbell writes of “heart” and “brain” being set against each other by the myth. The Dark Ages were truly dark for the women of the western world. It seems that the creation story in Genesis well suited the needs of the Church and the patriarchal power structure that established itself in Europe after the fall of Rome. The myth of Eve, like any great myth, both reflects and is reflected by its times.

Another man is running toward the crumpled body in the bloody dust. He calls out, “Amar! My friend! What have they done?” and he falls onto the body, sobbing. Amar’s blood soaks into his hair and the sleeve of his jacket. He cries out, “My friend! My brother!” His tears mix with the blood in the dirt.

A number of contemporary interpreters have explored the treatment of the feminine as personified in Eve by the culture that followed her appearance. Between them they systematically and convincingly discuss interpretations of Genesis that range from Eve as the gateway to hell, sexuality incarnate from evil to essential to ecstatic, from the Fall as eternal damnation to the fall into consciousness.

Eve’s eyes widen still further. She sets the tray down and collapses into her chair.
Then, “Adam,” she says, sitting up taller. “You didn’t see it, did you?”
“I’m watching the TV, hon. Of course I saw it.”
“No, dear, you didn’t. You’re only looking straight ahead.”
“That’s where the info’s coming from. Where else should I look?”

Joseph Campbell uses his understanding of Indian cosmology, kundalini yoga, and other world mythology to give a succinct interpretation of the story of Adam and Eve. He sees the fall as a shift in consciousness from timelessness into time. In The Power of Myth he says,

"It started with the sin, you see — in other words, moving out of the mythological dreamtime zone of the Garden of Paradise, where there is no time, and where men and women don’t even know they are different from each other. The two are just creatures. God and man are practically the same. God walks in the cool of the evening in the garden where they are. And then they eat the apple, the knowledge of opposites. And when they discover that they are different, the man and the woman cover their shame. You see, they had not thought of themselves as opposites. Male and female is one opposition. Another opposition in the human and God. Good and evil is a third opposition. The primary oppositions are the sexual and that between human beings and God. Then comes the idea of good and evil into the world. And so Adam and Eve have thrown themselves out of the Garden of Timeless Unity, you might say, just by that act of recognizing duality. To move out into the world, you have to act in terms of pairs of opposites.
There’s a Hindu image that shows a triangle, which is the Mother Goddess, and a dot in the center of the triangle, which is the energy of the transcendent being entering the field of time. And then from this triangle there come pairs of triangles in all directions. Out of one comes two. All things in the field of time are pairs of opposites. So this is the shift of consciousness from the consciousness of identity to the consciousness of participation in duality. And then you are in the field of time." (48).

“Look around you, dear.” Eve is scanning her surroundings slowly. Something seems to be wrong. Each thing her eye lights upon takes on a most peculiar character, a depth she has never noticed before. What is behind that, she wonders, staring at the wall. The wall shimmers at her slightly and flashes translucent for the blink of an eye.

The association of Adam with language and Eve with image is explored by Anne Baring and Julius Cashford and James Hillman, among others. In The Myth of Analysis Hillman points out that Eve was extracted from Adam in his sleep – from his unconsciousness (217), thereby linking her directly to the imaginal world. Baring and Cashford write,

"The ‘nervous discord’ between the image and the word can be overcome if the myth is read symbolically as a tragic myth that treats one dimension of human existence, the kathados or going down, but not the anados, the coming up into the mythic vision. But read concretely, the image is sacrificed to the interpretation of the word, and so the inherent joyousness of the images cannot reach the feelings they exist to move." (518)

If Adam (and men) write history in words, what imaginal tale emerges from Eve’s womb?

She steps toward the wall. Suddenly lightheaded, Eve reaches out to catch herself. Her head is spinning. Vertigo, she thinks, as blackness begins to descend from above. She leans into the wall, but it fails to resist. Its atoms loosen, they separate into space, and she falls, spinning, through the wall, through the floor, and then she is out.

Eve blinks her eyes and then again, and again. She cannot seem to focus. Yet she is not alarmed. She senses that the world is which she finds herself is alive in a way that she never experienced before. She is not alone. This is her family, her network, her ecology, and she is being welcomed home. Joy ripples through her; it has been a long journey.

“Adam, you would never believe what just happened to me. I don’t even have the words to tell you.”