Pandora's Box

We might think that we know the myth. Pandora, the first created woman, arrives from Olympus in the world of mortals together with a box. The box contains all the evils and pestilences which otherwise would plague humankind, but as long as they remain safely shut away then the world is a peaceable place. In her innocence, Pandora peeks inside the box to see what it might contain. Bad idea. The terrible contents are released into the world, and humankind has been afflicted with them ever since. Pandora just has the time – and the presence of mind – to shut the lid before the last thing escapes. That thing is Hope: only Hope is preserved safely, to be nurtured for the times when it is needed.

Pandora opens the box, as imagined by John William Waterhouse in the 19th-century.

The story has a familiar echo. We need only think of that other first woman to be awake to the parallels of both stories. Eve in the Book of Genesis also had her problems with human curiosity, of crossing the line of deific instructions to release blight and death upon all of humankind. In a [1]previous post I have mentioned that this literal reading of Genesis points us towards only a superficial truth. And yet it is this ‘storybook’ truth which has dominated Western thinking – and our attitudes towards womankind – ever since. Eve the Woman is the cause of all our misery, and the active agent in releasing evil into what up till then had been blissful paradise. 

Such shapers of early church doctrine as [2]Augustine and [3]Tertullian were in their writings only too eager to hammer this particular nail home. Woman is evil. Woman is a temptress. Woman is only good for bearing children. That canonical texts appeared to support such rampant chauvinist views gave enough legitimacy to such conclusions, even to the extent that right here in the twenty-first century the ideas of guilt, shame and sin still leave their traces on the minds, not only of the ‘faithful’, but also on the minds of those who seldom if ever set foot in a church.

The sign above this languidly reclining Pandora, painted by Jean Cousin in the 16th-century, makes the parallel with Eve crystal clear. The artist is actually correct in showing this Pandora with a vase or jar. The original myth specifies that it was a jar. It was a mistranslation from the Greek that turned it into a box, and the mistranslation has endured ever since.

That the story of the Fall in Eden can be interpreted in profoundly different [4]ways, and in ways which do not weigh down all womankind with the crushing burden of guilt, has gone largely unnoticed for centuries – mainly because the texts of these other versions were destroyed by the Augustines and the Tertullians of their world. What remains of these other texts has been down to the [5]chances of history, of surviving against all the odds. But we do have them, and they are in our world. But if it is possible to redeem Eve, to come at the story from a radically different angle, might the same be possible for the story of Pandora’s box? Does the apparently over-curious Pandora, that other first woman of Ancient Greek myth, actually display a profound wisdom?

A repentant Eve portrayed by Anna Lee Merritt in the 19th-century. But is such deep and bitter contrition by Eve - and also by Pandora - misplaced? 

All we humans who have come after Pandora might have continued to live in a state of carefree bliss. But is this truly what is intended for us? How can we progress if for us sorrow remains an unknown? How can we taste sweetness if bitter regret also is not part of the human condition? So carefully, carefully, Pandora opens the box, and the world becomes as we experience it, with all its joys and its sorrows, its pains and its heartaches. It is not that we experience pain and loss. It is what we do with these emotions which potentially opens the door to growth of the spirit. But what of Hope?

Hope is left behind, sealed shut. Wise Pandora knows the folly of hope. Hope can be a false god, for so often hope can foster false expectations. Only by relinquishing hope are we truly free to act from a position of strength. With hope we might be fighting with one hand tied behind our backs. Without hope our actions are unlimited by any thoughts of ‘wishing for’, that otherwise might constrain us. As with Eve and her forbidden fruit, perhaps we instead should be grateful to Pandora for opening her box – and also for shutting it just in time.

Hawkwood

Notes:

[1] Please see my post Eve's Story.

[2] Writing in the 5th-century, Augustine said: “What is the difference whether it is in a wife or a mother, it is still Eve the temptress that we must beware of in any woman... I fail to see what use woman can be to man, if one excludes the function of bearing children.” Augustine was instrumental in propounding the doctrine of original sin specifically as being sexual sin, and the fault of the Woman for seducing the Man. Before Augustine, the sin of Eden was principally viewed as being disobedience to God.

[3] Writing in the 3rd-century, Tertullian tersely commented that “Woman is the gateway of the Devil.” Tertullian is now viewed as the originator of the doctrine of the Holy Trinity – a concept nowhere mentioned in scripture – although the idea of the Trinity is found in the pre-Christian (and therefore pagan) mystery schools.

[4] Please see my posts Adam, the God who Failed, and The Enlightened Insight of the Woman, for two of these ‘profoundly different ways’.

[5] Those chances happened as recently as last century, when many Gnostic texts, both Christian and pre-Christian, were discovered by chance, having been buried in a sealed jar in the Egyptian sands for sixteen long centuries.

The Enlightened Insight of the Woman

Adam is a pushover for the dark powers to corrupt. He is already compliant to the suggestions of the serpent. But within Adam’s innermost secret being lies a mysterious purity, a wise and essential other Self, which will prevent his further corruption. To weaken Adam further, so that he will become a willing participant in the [1]creator’s schemes, the creator knows that he must extract this pure and powerful essence from Adam, and so causes Adam to become unaware. Now with Adam in a state of unawareness his creator can, as it were, make a forced entry into Adam’s being.

And so within the deepest recesses of the Man’s inner being the creator is able to locate and remove this secret Self, this enlightened Insight from Adam. The creator places this Insight inside a female form, because this is the form which most closely mirrors the perfect Self that the creator had seen in a vision. In this way this essential part of Adam is removed from him and given its own independent existence: a form which reflects the purity that once had been an integral part of Adam’s own being, a form which embodies this precious quality of enlightened Insight.

Adam now sees this shining new form standing beside him. At this same moment his state of unawareness vanishes as enlightened Insight lifts the veil that has covered his mind. In this new being Adam recognizes his partner, his equal, his true other Self. And although they are now two separate beings, together they are a reflection of the unity that once had existed, and will do so again.

*****

When compared with the widely known version in the Bible, the above story is an unfamiliar recounting of the creation of Eve. In the [2]second chapter of the Bible’s Book of Genesis Adam literally is sent into a ‘deep sleep’, during which God physically removes one of his ribs from which he then creates the Woman. The Genesis recounting of these events is literal indeed, and has the Woman being formed from the actual flesh of the Man. In Genesis, Eve is a creation from [3]second-hand material.

But the above first version of the creation of Eve concludes by assuring us that, although the Woman was extracted from the Man, it was a process of mysterious essence, and not, as the text emphasises, involving any physical modification of Adam’s anatomy, as [4]Moses describes in Genesis. This first version actually names Moses and ‘Adam’s rib’ in its striving to correct what it clearly considers to be an erroneously literal version of the creation of Eve.

In this 16th-century woodcut by Heinrich Aldegraver of the creation of Eve, a pontifical deity physically extracts Eve from the side of a sleeping Adam. However fervently we as believers might read the scriptural text, a literal depiction of the event confronts us with an anatomical absurdity.

What we notice in the above first version is that, far from being the rather condescending literalist description of Eve’s creation which Genesis offers us, it instead honours the Woman. In this version, the form of the Woman – her very body – is itself the embodiment of this precious quality of enlightened Insight. The Woman does not just ‘have’ insight: she actually is Insight. What at first seems to be an adjustment to the literalist Genesis account is actually a radical revision – a ‘re-visioning’, and we must weigh the two alternatives: the Genesis version which treats the Woman as a sort of creative [5]afterthought, and the other which, in the manner of her creation, grants her both status and dignity.

The Biblical version of the creation of Eve from Adam’s flesh is, as we know, recounted in the second chapter of the Book of Genesis. The other less familiar version related here is told in The Secret Book of John, one of the texts now known as the Nag Hammadi scriptures, after the nearby Egyptian village where they were discovered by chance in 1945. For over sixteen centuries the literalist version of scripture is the one which has had the official Church stamp of approval. Of the other, all known copies were burned or otherwise destroyed in the 3rd-4th-century purges organized by the Church. The text of The Secret Book of John discovered at Nag Hammadi is one of only [6]two known copies which we have.

  

Both of these versions of the creation of Eve are stories, not history. But stories also can be ways of transmitting greater truths, and we must decide for ourselves which [7]stories carry the most truth and meaning for us personally. But supposing that our choice of which story to take on board carries with it a moral responsibility, and with this in mind the weighing up of such a choice can have huge, even momentous significance, with consequences for our perception of womankind that will echo down the centuries. So: of these two stories of the creation of Eve, which version, the Gnostic or the Biblically orthodox, shows womankind more respect, and gives her creation – her very existence – a greater meaning and dignity?

Hawkwood  

   

Notes:

[1] The identity of this creator will be the subject of a future post. 

[2] Although it is the familiar version in the second chapter of Genesis which is featured in this post, please see my post Lilith: Spirit of the Night for a separate and conflicting version of the Woman’s creation in the first chapter of Genesis. Please also see my posts Adam: The God who Failed and Eve's Story for other alternative versions of the Eden story.

[3] ‘Second-hand’, because in Genesis 2 God already has created the Man, and then creates the Woman from the material which already has been created. 

[4] Tradition names Moses as the author of the first five books of the Old Testament (the Jewish Torah), although this attribution is unsupported by scholarship.

[5] My use of the term ‘creative afterthought’ is justified by scripture itself, which relates that God, having created the Man, then decides that he needs a ‘help meet’ (K.J.V. Genesis 2:18). In the Revised Standard Version the term is ‘helper’. Apparently it only occurs to God to create the Woman once the Man has been created - and then not as his equal partner, but merely as his 'helper'.

[6] The other copy was discovered in a monk's tomb in the 19th-century. And while I am always cautious about floating the idea of conspiracy theories, it is possible, even plausible, that other copies of these Gnostic texts (and other such texts which the Church deemed to be heretical), which have yet to be evaluated or even viewed by impartial scholarship, were kept at the time for record and archival purposes, and to this day remain under seal either in the Vatican Library or in the Vatican Secret Archives.

[7] The current resurgence of alternative spiritual views and values did not grow out of a historical vacuum, but reflects the Church’s loss of control as the arbiter of truth in such matters. Only a little less than two centuries ago the Church still could – and did – impose the death penalty for any view which it considered heretical, with the last execution for heresy being carried out by the Inquisition as recently as 1826. The breaking of the Church as a political power altered the whole game plan – but it should never be forgotten that such countries as Iran and Saudi Arabia still provide a chilling example in our own time of what happens when religion has a political power base. Under Islamic law the death penalty for apostasy is still current. Keeping the adherents to one’s faith in line through threat and fear of the consequences has long been an option for those who wield religious power.  

Sources:

The Secret Book of John, translated from the Coptic by John D. Turner and Marvin Meyer, can be read in its entirety with all textual notations in: The Nag Hammadi Scriptures, edited by Marvin Meyer. Published by Harper One for Harper Collins, 2008. The story retold in my post is only one episode in this text, which contains both further narrative events regarding the expulsion from Eden and the Flood, and advice about the soul's journey. The entire book is in the form of a first person narration by Jesus.

No illustrated version of The Secret Book of John exists. The first, second and the last images suggesting the events from this text have been painted for this post by Hawkwood for the David Bergen Studio © All Rights Reserved.

Please see my post The Ecstasy of Eve for several other versions of the creation of Eve by different artists.

The Mystic Marriage

Is all which I now see around me truly the result of my brief presence on Earth? Has all this truly been done in my name? I came among you with a single intent. Not, as you seem to think, to win redemption for all of you for the sin in Eden (how could you imagine such a thing?). There was no Fall in Eden. The Man and the Woman remained unblemished. So how could there be such a thing as universal redemption when there is no such thing as universal sin? No, the only sin is the personal sin of not being true to one’s own self. That is the greatest betrayal, for if we betray ourselves, then we also betray our true Selves.

But you do not need me to redeem you, for I tell you truly that each and every one of you has the spirit to redeem yourself, because each and every one of you is me, and I am each and every one of you. Why have you forgotten this? I will tell you why: you have forgotten this because you have placed me outside of yourselves. In your frenzy to banish bronze idols you have merely replaced them with another idol. And the idol which you have created is a monster, not of bronze, but of ideas, of doctrines and of dogmas which have served only to divide you against yourselves, and therefore from me also. That idol is myself as you have created me. You have so occupied yourselves with building a towering plinth for me to stand on that you have forgotten that if I am standing high above you then we no longer can look each other in the eye.

And this is not the only idol which you have created in my name. You have built another idol to worship: an idol of words. You have transformed something that shone with the light of my being, something bright with radiant change, into something harder than stone. For even stone, which seems unyielding, changes its form over time. You have taken it upon yourselves to decide what is or is not ‘holy’, and yet I say to you now that all which is thought or said or written with a pure heart is holy in my eyes, and whether something is or is not holy to me is not something for you to decide. And yet this is what you have done. I speak with many voices, and yet how many of my voices have lain in the dust of centuries, or which you even have consigned to the flames, because of the choices which you have claimed to make on my behalf, because of your folly in believing that such choices were yours to make?

Look at the footprints I leave behind in the soil. They are the footprints left by a mortal form who wore only simple woven sandals. And yet many of the footprints left by those who deign to place themselves nearer to me have sunk deep into my earth, weighed down by the finery of their wearers. Their footprints are heavier than my own, and I tell you that their weighty apparel, their jewelled rings and resplendent robes, distances them from me more than the pure of heart who must walk barefoot, for such earthly show is a greater barrier to drawing close to me than the simplest garments worn by those who leave footprints as light as my own. The footprints of the meek have trodden where I also have trodden, and their footprints and mine are therefore the same. Lightness is a virtue, and a crown of thorns weighs less than a crown of jewels and gold, both in this world and in the one to come.

But these robes of earthly glory are not all that in my eyes truly weighs down mortal flesh. If the blood of even one individual is shed in my name, I say to you that the death of that single individual is a matter of greater weight to me than my own mortal death, which was no death but a mere revealing of my true nature, as it is for you all. And yet the lives of millions have been offered up in my name. Where is the kingdom of heaven for those who have swung the sword, or caused conversion in my name by fear or by force, or torched the pyre beneath the stake? How can it ever be attained when all which I truly am has become so misshapen?

How could it have come to pass that so many innocent young souls so precious to me have been damaged by those who actually make claim to represent me, but who in truth only represent their own darkness? I, who have entrusted to the Woman the most difficult and the most sacred task of all, and who should only be honoured, now find Her damned by you. Do you seriously imagine that I will return in triumph when so much that has been done in my name has served only to create damage and division, and even a loss of life itself? Only a fool would think that I one day shall return. The pure of heart know that I have never left.

But why did I come to you at all, if not to redeem a sin of your own imaginings? If redemption exists in each and every moment (and it does), then my descent to earth, my entry into this world of coarse matter, must have been for another reason. And it was. Such events move on a stage greater than your imaginings. They arc across all of time and space, and from time to time these events emerge into your world, become momently visible to your histories, and you create messiahs and mythologies: stories and writings which are mere faint echoes of far larger truths.

So why did I come? Why, if not to redeem, did I descend into this flesh? I had been waiting. I had been waiting for my beloved Other Self, waiting for her arrival in the world so that I might join her and so on earth complete the sacred union of soul and spirit. I came, not for all, but only for one. You, my beloved one, who in these greater realities take the form of the clear voice of wisdom, my bride Sophia, were that One. You, who are the Ocean holding all life within your sacred womb. You, who trod the soil in the same place and at the same time as my own brief sojourn. You, who witnessed my mystic death and resurrection. You, who took me as husband at Cana in a marriage that was the earthly echo of our union which already had found place in the luminous Beyond. Mary, I came for you.

Hawkwood

Sources:

The drawings and paintings in this post have been adapted from the late 19th-early 20th-century works of Odilon Redon. From the top: Closed Eyes, Reflection, Christ, The Golden Cell, and Melancholy.

Adam: The God who Failed

The story of the Garden of Eden in the Book of Genesis, as with all such texts, was inherited from earlier oral traditions: stories that were handed down by word-of-mouth. And since all stories begin somewhere, and must have varied with subsequent retellings before they were committed to writing, we need not be so surprised if we come across variations of these now-familiar stories.

We might consider this or that version of a story definitive, as being the ‘right’ version, simply because it might be the version which has become the most familiar to us. In reality, definitive versions of these stories seldom exist. With the stories in scripture, the reasons behind why one is accepted into scripture and another is left by the wayside have had more to do with the arbitrary happenstances of history and individual opinion than is usually realized. So it is with the story of Eden.

In the morning of the world, on the slopes of Ararat, the gods El and his consort Asherah live in an idyllic garden. All is peaceable, and would have gone on being so were it not for the dark ambitions of the evil god Horon. The dark god has his sights set on El’s position as the supreme creator god, and might have made his ambitions a reality were his schemes not discovered by El. Horon finds himself cast out and hurled down the mountain. Seething with jealous rage and thwarted ambition, the dark god cloaks the world in a poisonous fog, and turns the beautiful Tree of Life that grows on the lower slopes into a black and twisted Tree of Death. As a final measure, he transforms himself into a terrible serpent and twines his glittering coils around the Tree’s branches.

Horon. Jealousy and thwarted ambition can poison the mind. When that mind belongs to a god the world as well can become poisoned.

Seeing the terrible transformation, and wishing only to restore his creation to its former pristine state, El dispatches the god Adam to set things to rights. Accompanied by his wife Eve, Adam journeys down into the world to confront Horon. Reaching the Tree of Death, Adam, it seems, seriously underestimates the evil serpent’s intent. Instead of persuading Horon to leave, Adam finds himself attacked and bitten by the serpent, and so relinquishes his immortality in the tree’s twisted shadow. The precious task entrusted to the god Adam by El has failed, and the world is changed forever. From that moment, Adam and Eve must live in the world as mortals, knowing death as the end of their days.

We recognize the principal characters and elements in this story. What we experience as its strangeness emerges from those other elements unfamiliar to us. Whether the story is more or less ‘true’ than the [1]version in Genesis is a question with little hope of an answer. It is, after all, a story, not a historical event. What we instead can say is that, being centuries older than the Genesis version, and therefore having gone through fewer retellings, it is closer to the [2]original source. The story is found on recently-deciphered clay tablets from the site of the Canaanite city of Ugarit, and the tablets have been dated to the [3]late 13th-century BCE.

The influential port city of Ugarit was centrally situated among the surrounding kingdoms and empires.

But how could this be a story of the Canaanites and not the Israelites? In a previous [4]post I mention the likelihood of the Israelites emerging from the Canaanite diaspora displaced by the Egyptian conquest of Canaan. In other words: the Israelites originally were the Canaanites. When the Israelites made a drive to assert their own identity as a people, they changed the name of El to Yahweh (Jehovah). But this happened over an extended period of time. The word appearing in the original Genesis text as [5]elohim is plural: ‘gods’, referring to El (the first syllable of Elohim) and Asherah. Thus the first words of Genesis correctly read:

“In the beginning the gods created the heaven and the earth.”

As with all goddesses, Asherah was eventually banished from the Israelite pantheon to be replaced by a single male-only deity, although her shadowy presence survives in these plural terms. Through our familiarity with Genesis we are aware of the similarities in the older Canaanite version of the Eden story. It is the differences which are momentous.

The goddess Asherah, mother of life. The rise of the new all-male monotheism left no room for any female presence of authority, and Asherah - and Eve the goddess - were among its victims.

In this world of gods and goddesses no blame falls upon Eve. Eve the goddess is not a woman who succumbs to temptation and taints the whole of humanity with sin. Rather, she is a victim of her husband’s reckless mishandling of the situation. It is Adam who drops the ball. But in the all-male preserve of later Israelite beliefs, such a scenario would not wash, and the story was subsequently changed to become the scriptural version which has damned womankind ever since.

Hawkwood

Notes:

[1] Two Creations in Scripture: In fact, there are two different versions of the creation in the first two chapters of Genesis. The first chapter has an unnamed first man and woman being created simultaneously from the same prima materia. This unnamed couple appear after the creation of the animals. The second chapter contains the familiar version of Eve being created from a rib of the sleeping Adam, with Adam now being created before all the animals. From a scholastic perspective, this is a clear indication that the texts of Genesis were compiled from at least two different sources. Unlike science, there are no mechanisms in place within scripture which allow for correction and revision. Scripture is immutable, and contradictions and discrepancies in these texts, however obvious, remain unchanged for centuries.

[2] Stories from Exile: Original sources of scriptural stories often-enough lie in the lands of Hebrew exile, which principally were Egypt and Babylonia. Such stories would have been exported from these lands with the exiles’ return. The story of Noah’s Ark is Babylonian, the original version, as with the Ugaritic Eden story, pre-dating the scriptural version by several centuries. The clay tablets which relate the Babylonian epic of Gilgamesh contain the story of Ut-napishtim, who is chosen with his family by the gods to be the sole survivor of a great flood. He builds a huge vessel and takes his animals on board with him. To discover whether the waters have abated, he releases in turn a dove and a raven to find signs of dry land. Coincidence? I think not. 

[3] As current scholarship dates the texts of Genesis to the 6th-5th-centuries BCE, the Ugaritic version of the Eden story is twice as old as these.

[4] Please see my post The Butcher of Canaan.

[5] Preserving Belief: In their annotation to Genesis 1:1, the editors of my King James Study Bible (pub. Zondervan) acknowledge the plural term, but explain that it indicates “intensification rather than number”. No, I don’t really understand what they mean by this either. Attempts to demonstrate the term as singular by coupling it to the singular verb (as the Zondervan editors further mention) offer little traction, as the term would then still refer to 'the god El'. Since academic opinion now accepts that early Hebrew beliefs, having been derived from Canaanite beliefs, were polytheistic, the Zondervan editors provide an unintentional example of the way in which a belief can at times only be preserved by wilfully omitting known evidence. 

Sources:

Marjo Korpel & Johannes de Moor: Adam, Eve, and the Devil: A New Beginning. Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2014. The text of Professors’ Korpel and de Moor’s book provides the basis for this post. This earlier version of the Eden story, deciphered by these authors, and retold by myself here, is not a ‘what if?’ situation. The clay tablets exist, they have been deciphered, and they say what is said here.

The 'Horon' serpent is based upon a photo by Steve Gooch. The 'Tree of Death' background is my own. The map has been compiled from various sources. Other images of the gods Adam and Eve and Asherah are painted by Hawkwood for the © David Bergen Studio. All Rights Reserved.

Lilith: Spirit of the Night

She is a demon. She is a monster, a wraith, a vampire. She is everything you fear when the sun dips down below the horizon and your world slides into darkness. Both scorned and feared by men, her name is Lilith, the spirit of the night.

Lilith: Spirit of the Night

This is the way in which Lilith has traditionally been portrayed in folklore, and it is an image which endures into popular culture even today. Goth, metal and post-rock bands continue to get mileage out of referencing her in lyrics, and she has reached our own age via the Romantics of the 19th- and early 20th-centuries, who were happy-enough to turn her into an alluring Victorian femme fatale. At times her identity has been blended with that of Lamia, that other predatory being of legend, half serpent, half female. But how did this legend begin?

One of the most intriguing aspects of the Book of Genesis is that, in just its first two chapters, it relates two separate and conflicting accounts of the creation of the first humans. Chapter Two is the familiar version of God forming Eve from a rib of the comatose Adam. But in the previous chapter the first couple, who now remain unnamed, are created at the same time, and from the same prima materia. It might at first seem like a minor adjustment to this story, for such stories already were an inherited oral tradition, and must have varied with subsequent retellings. But this difference has impacted folklore, and spawned a legend.

This Babylonian relief carving of a winged and bird-footed female is a reminder that Hebrew texts were influenced by the lands of Hebrew exile. In Babylonian beliefs lilitu were a class of female demons.

Later Jewish folklore names the nameless woman in Chapter One (which also is the first chapter in the Jewish Torah) as Lilith, the first wife of Adam. Since Lilith is created in the same moment as Adam, she is not, as Eve was, formed from a part of Adam’s flesh. Eve, who was Woman, already was a second-generation product. Lilith contrastingly is an autonomous being, and as such is in every way Adam’s equal. Adam expects his new mate to be subservient, also in her sexual role. Lilith has other ideas, and protests mightily both to God and to Adam that she also has rights and expectations. Having scorned both man and deity, Lilith storms off into the night. Unlike Eve, Lilith is not ejected from Eden. Instead she keeps the power to herself, and leaves of her own volition.

Two Victorian lamias (left, by John William Waterhouse, and right, by Herbert Draper) both draped in the shed skins of their serpent selves.

In her wanderings and in legend, Lilith becomes a creature of the darkness associated with vampires, monsters and night spirits: associations which have endured into contemporary popular culture. But whatever she has become since, in folklore she originally was Adam’s equal partner – a state of affairs about which both God and Adam apparently had regretful second thoughts. The all-too-masculine deity did not make that mistake twice, and with the feisty and assertive Lilith out of the picture, Eve was created to be subservient to the man.

This serpent-entwined version of Lilith by John Collier would seem to be little more than an excuse for some exotic Victorian titillation.

Lilith’s punishment for doing nothing more than assert her equal gender rights was to be transformed in folklore into a predator of the darkness. It seems that what men feel threatened by, what invokes male insecurity, is not so much a woman’s sexuality, as a woman’s sexual autonomy. What also seems to be underscored by Lilith’s story is another simple but stark reality: that although we might not know the identities of the writers of these ancient texts of scripture and folklore, their pro-male story lines are in themselves enough to persuade us that they were written by men.

Hawkwood

Sources:

Lilith: Spirit of the Night painted for this post by Hawkwood for the © David Bergen Studio, All Rights Reserved. For those interested in the sources of such things: the geomantic symbols which are painted on the body of my model are those meaning 'great good fortune' - a visual statement which I feel in itself redresses in some small measure the gender injustice of these pro-male stories which have become so entrenched in our culture, whether or not we are 'believers'.

Babylonian carving: British Museum, London. The blue on the manes of the two beasts is the original surviving pigment with which this carving was painted. Lamia, by John William Waterhouse, 1909 (collection untraced). Lamia, by Herbert Draper, 1910 (collection untraced). Lilith, by John Collier, 1892, in the Atkinson Art Gallery, Southport, England.

Coats of Skins

“Unto Adam also and to his wife did the LORD God make coats of skins, and clothed them.” This statement (Genesis 3:21) is made immediately after Adam has named his wife Eve. Before this we read of the terrible consequences of the Fall, of the eating of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and God’s curse upon the Eden couple and the serpent. What follows is the expulsion from Eden, before Adam and Eve can reach the tree of life, eat its fruit (which apparently is the antidote), and so regain their immortality.

Artists' interpretations can have a profound influence upon our thinking. This 20th-century version by Stephen Gjertson of the expulsion from Eden perpetuates the misinterpretation of the original Hebrew texts and keeps the coats of skins determinedly literal.

In all different versions of the text in English, the phrase is either ‘coats of skins’ or ‘garments of skins’. And in this single three-word phrase is a world of difference: the difference between a pedantic [1]literal reading of scripture and a seeking for deeper meanings, for a greater understanding of what is actually being expressed. A pastor’s comment which I came across on a [2]webpage makes it clear that the pastor is left rather puzzled about what kind of nakedness is being referred to. He presumes that, being post-Fall, God covers their shame with those coats of skins before sending the couple out into the hostile world. But this puzzlement arises from a literal reading of the words – and from ignoring what the original Hebrew text says.

This picture postcard of the expulsion from Eden also follows the literal scriptural text.

If we take the phrase at its most literal, what we are asked to believe is that God slaughtered one or two of the animals which he had recently created (thus promptly making them extinct, because this was before they went forth into the world and multiplied), dressed the hides, and did a spot of bespoke tailoring in order to clothe Adam and his wife in suitable cave-man attire. Really? But ‘coats of skins’ is not what the original Hebrew texts actually say.

The 19th-century symbolist Franz von Stuck shows us a line in the sand which cannot be recrossed, and an Eden couple wearing their own 'coats of skin'.

The original Hebrew word used is not ‘coats’. It is kethorneth, conveying the idea of an all-covering tunic-like garment of some description. The word lavash implies an act of covering. Already things are looking rather different from the cave-man clothes scenario. The couple’s own solution to the awareness of their nakedness – the ‘aprons of fig leaves’ (Genesis 3:7) – apparently was an inadequate penance for their transgression (think about it: fig leaves are pretty scratchy things with which to cover one’s genitals). God’s solution was infinitely more final, and more profound. He equipped the couple with some sort of all-covering apparel that was fundamentally different from their appearance while in Eden. Their actual appearance – their very state of being – was altered in some way.

Another 19th-century symbolist, Max Klinger, powerfully conveys the expulsion as it is intended: a stony road into the world which now must be trodden. Radically original as always, Klinger shows us an Adam supporting a swooning Eve as they both struggle to come to terms with their new bodies of flesh.

Eden was not in the world. It was a state [3]beyond the physical realm, in which Adam and Eve were immortal as long as they did not eat of that forbidden fruit. Their transgression denied them their immortality. They now had no option but to live out an earthly life, with death waiting at the end. The bodies which they had in Eden were now changed. But what was this change? Only one letter’s difference separates the Hebrew words for ‘light’ (rut) and [4]‘skin’ (rug). The first couple’s transgression in Eden ensured their descent into the world of matter, of an incarnation into an earthly existence. Their non-material light bodies became transfigured into material bodies covered in skin, and all the joys and sorrows, all the pains and ecstasies of a life on Earth were now theirs to experience.

Hawkwood

Notes: 

[1] When it comes to uncritical statements of faith on which I can shine a questioning spotlight, my Zondevan King James Study Bible is a gift which just keeps giving. In the editors’ annotation to Genesis 3:21, page 9, they explain that: “God graciously provided Adam and Eve with more effective clothing to cover their shame. God’s act of clothing them with skins, thus requiring the deaths of innocent animals, is symbolic of the merits of Christ’s future sacrifice… It is possible that it is here that God instructed Adam and Eve concerning the need of animal sacrifice as a part of worship.” WTF?? So let’s get this straight: God actually appreciates us killing the animals he has created, as long as such killing is done as a needful part of an act of worship to him. We know this, because God himself set an example of animal sacrifice when he clothed Adam and Eve in animal skins. Seriously?

[2] http://m.kingjamesbibleonline.org/Genesis-3-21/

[3] Whole books have been written about the possible location of Eden, and many theories have been put forward. Scripture appears to tease us with a specific geographical location. The four rivers which flow out of Eden are named, two of which are given as the Hidekel (Tigris) and the Euphrates. It must then be somewhere in the Middle East. Other theories place it in the Hindu Kush, or in a location which is now underwater, or in the Persian Gulf region, or even in the Americas. Still others (clinging to literalism) reason that it cannot be found because it would have been covered by the waters of the Flood. I would maintain that it cannot be found because it never was an earthly location in the first place. One cannot have a non-corporeal immortal body and live a life in the material world.

[4] The familiar phrase 'coats of skins' is therefore more accurately translated as; 'covering of skin', and the change from the plural ('skins') to the singular ('skin') becomes critical.


Sources:
The top image is a detail from the painting So He Drove The Man Out, by Stephen Gjertson, private collection, 1982. The artist with the initials R.L. for the postcard is unidentified. The Expulsion from Paradise, by Franz von Stuck, 1891, is in a private collection. The work by Max Klinger comes from his Eve and the Future cycle of etchings of 1880, appearing in Graphic Works of Max Klinger, Dover Publications.

Shame

Where did the idea come from? How did this notion begin that the human body is something to be ashamed of, and can we identify who was involved in perpetuating such a mindset? I was already flowing along on this stream of thought after writing my [1]previous post about the story of the Fall in the Book of Genesis, and was given further impetus by being reminded (in a quiz panel program that I happened to be watching) that evidence for the [2]wearing of clothing can be traced back to some 170,000 years ago – but no further.

A young Muslim woman contemplates her world. What are acceptable standards of dress in a culture generally turn out to be standards which are considered acceptable by men about women. The more that men fear a woman’s autonomy, the more strident is the call for a woman to cover herself, and clothing becomes a means of control, whether in Islam, or in Jewish Orthodoxy, or elsewhere.

Since this period in human history also relates to a follow-up on ice-age climate conditions, it is a reasonable assumption that the introduction of clothing into human society had a lot more to do with basically keeping warm than it did with any notion of modesty. Protection and insulation against the cold would also have allowed an expansion into more northern latitudes, and the wearing of clothes also would have opened up new areas of culture, as specific styles or choices of dress evolved to denote social status, group identity and other cultural markers.

Neanderthalers return from a successful winter hunt: a scene which took place in what is now France over 35,000 years ago. When considering the origins of clothing, the basic need to keep warm and survive seems to have taken precedent over any connections with modesty. Painting by Zdeněk Burian.

This is compelling stuff, because it is, after all, about us. Whether we are African, European, Indonesian or some other ethnicity, this is our common story, our shared history. All of the diverse cultures which exist and have existed have evolved over time. All have a worthy story to tell, and the way things are now became that way over many succeeding generations, and either evolved further or were preserved as traditions, with these two processes often running parallel with each other. Our clothing can define us, whether that is a specific regional style or the global ethnicity of a pair of jeans. And when clothing is the social norm, discarding it can even become a powerful statement of protest.

Protesters in Brussels are forced to the ground by police during a visit by the Russian President. Nudity can be, and is, used to make a political statement. I can think of any number of ways to conclude this courageous young woman’s painted-on slogan. Who is really being shamed here? Pussy Riot’s Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyokhina are still behind bars in Moscow.
(But see my added note below about their release.) 

So clothing – or the lack of it – can make a compelling statement, and send signals to others about who we are and what we stand for. And it does not necessarily follow that covering the body in some way is always modesty-driven, because many styles of covering actually serve to emphasise what is covered. But what about shame? If you who are reading this believe that you are a creation of God, how is it possible that you then presumably feel a sense of shame about what that same God has created? By inference it suggests a sense of shame in your God. This sense of shame is not a natural thing. It is not something which we have as young children. It is something that we have to learn, something that we are taught, something that is instilled into us by the authority figures and the society in which we live.

Xingu dancers before and after being included on the tourist route. Shame has to be learnt, and tourism as well as earlier missionary activity has played its part in teaching shame to indigenous cultures. The Xingu are now under considerable pressure from a variety of external forces.

This sense of shame is something other than a natural modesty. In the language of science humans are habitually bipedal – we walk upright on two legs. This simple fact means that, when naked, our genitals are ‘on view’. To avoid sending potentially confusing signals, it’s just socially more comfortable to keep things covered when sex is not the order of the day. So an appropriate degree of modesty makes social sense. It is the feeling of [3]shame, of feeling that what we have is in some way intrinsically ‘dirty’ and ‘sinful’ that is so crippling to the human psyche. Shame has to be learned, and the teacher, apparently, is religious belief.

What constitutes acceptable standards of dress can be both cultural, regional and belief-driven. Bathers (left) on a beach in Rio de Janero, and (right) on a beach in Gaza.

When it comes to our attitudes to sin, few individuals have coloured Western thinking more than Augustine, the bishop of Hippo, now located in Algeria, but then a province of the Roman Empire. Augustine lived in a world in flux: the Christian Goth Alaric had previously led his conquering army into the Roman Forum. The centre of Western civilization had been penetrated, and the society of that time had been shaken to the foundations. In his writings of the 4th-5th-centuries, what Augustine set out to do was to give early Christians a sense of their own identity, and the formulating of doctrine was the course which he set for himself.

The Temptation of Adam and Eve. Masolino de Panicale’s 15th-century fresco before (left) and after (right) restoration. The strategic wisps of foliage were added by unknown prudish hands at a later date. Evidently the artist – and his Church commissioners – had less qualms about the element of nudity.

Augustine devoted years of contemplation to the subject of sin. His conclusion was that the original sin committed by Adam and Eve was actually present in the human seed at the moment of conception. So in Augustine’s vision of things, there was no such thing as the innocence of childhood, because a new-born baby was already born [4]corrupted with the taint of the Fall, and all humanity was contaminated. Shame, therefore, was the right and proper reaction to this condition, and the phrase ‘naked and ashamed’ is now a familiar one.

This 1954 film poster assures us that Garden of Eden was ‘Photographed in COLOR at a REAL Nudist Park under the supervision and with the approval of THE AMERICAN SUNBATHING ASSOCIATION’. Apparently this eager reassurance was not quite enough, and Hollywood sensibilities demanded an extra added palm frond and the removal of the racy tag line before the poster was distributed.

These ideas of Augustine’s were radical for their time. Before this, such commentators as Clement of Alexandria were actually connecting the Fall in Eden, not so much with carnal desire and an awareness of being naked, but with the more fundamentally moral question of disobedience to God. It was Augustine who placed the emphasis on the shame of the flesh.

A spread from the May 2009 National Geographic, which was distributed in Islamic Indonesia only after the board of censorship had busied itself with a felt pen. Don’t tell me that the members of the board didn’t keep one or two uncensored copies for themselves. Photo by Mike Cheong.

For my friends in Indonesia: the uncensored spread from my own Dutch edition. When a black felt pen hides something this innocent, there is an added sense that such petty censorship also robs these women of their dignity.

Augustine’s extended attention given to this subject in his book [5]City of God makes for some weird reading, preoccupied as he seems to have been with the subject of physical sexual arousal. Augustine is clearly disturbed by the notion of genital autonomy, which he concludes is part of God’s punishment for man’s disobedience, and he laments the fact that sexual arousal apparently cannot be controlled by the intellect. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that if Augustine were alive and writing today as an unknown author, we probably would conclude that he should seek counselling as a matter of [6]urgency.

In this anatomy reference work for artists published in 1920, the model’s classical pose in general and her Grecian hairstyle in particular signal that the intentions of the photograph are academic and respectable – intentions which are emphasised by the determinedly technical caption. The result is an innocuous flesh-and-blood version of a marble statue.

Instead, as we know, it has not been Clement’s ideas, but Augustine’s, which down the centuries have gone on to exert an influence upon Western society more wide-reaching and profound even than the borders of belief, and upon those who might not even be aware that their behaviour and attitudes are being influenced by what Augustine thought and wrote. That a broadcast glimpse of Janet Jackson’s ‘wardrobe malfunction’ can send a nation into an uptight spin is example enough of our troubled mindset about bodily exposure, and of the way in which the human soul has been scarred by the legacy of [7]scriptural doctrine.

Whether you believe or not that the human body is created by God does not make it of itself intrinsically shameful, otherwise we would not have to be taught that it is. That we not only have to learn this, but perpetuate the idea in our turn by teaching it to impressionable others – with all the centuries-old baggage of guilt and sin which go along with such a notion – is the true reason for shame.   

Hawkwood 

Notes:

[1] Please see my post Eve's Story.

[2] No clothing exists from that distant time, but this date can be surmised from the time that head lice evolved into lice which live only on the body underneath clothing. Even humble parasites can be useful to anthropology.

[3] Launched with the interstellar spacecraft Voyager in 1977, this now-famous plaque (above) depicts humans of both sexes. Designed by astronomer Carl Sagan, and drawn by his wife Linda Salzman Sagan, it brought howls of protest from both sides of the American religious morality divide, with one side protesting the ‘indecent’ display of nudity, and the other pointing out (which cannot be denied) that the man’s penis is shown, but not the woman’s labia. Not only has the woman been coyly de-sexed: she has been reduced once more to the passive role, while it is the man who raises his hand in greeting to possible unknown alien discoverers. Now travelling beyond our solar system, Voyager will reach the nearest star system in some 40,000 years. Apparently not content with laying our religious guilt trips and sexual stereotypes on our fellow earth-dwellers, we are now transporting them to the stars.

[4] The doctrine behind this conclusion will be the subject of a future post.

[5] Augustine's text can be read online at: City of God.

[6] Note added September 7 2013: Apparently I am not the only one to view Augustine in this way. The author Laurence Gardner describes these doctrines of the early Church as 'an unhealthy sexual paranoia'. It is worth remembering that nowhere in scripture is the concept of Original Sin actually mentioned.

[7] The connection of guilt with religion is ruthlessly underscored in the language of my own country of the Netherlands. Due to the influence of Calvinism here, the Dutch words for pubic hair and a woman’s labia are schaamhaar (shame hair) and schaamlippen (shame lips) respectively, with schaamstreek (literally: region of shame) being the term for the groin. Language can itself have a powerful influence upon our attitudes and the way in which we perceive things.

Sources:

Melissa A. Toups, Andrew Kitchen, Jessica E. Light and David L. Reed: Origin of Clothing Lice Indicates Early Clothing Use by Anatomically Modern Humans in Africa, in vol. 28, issue 1 of Molecular Biology and Evolution journal. 

Robert Metcalf: Unrequited Narcissism: On the Origin of Shame. University of Colorado, Denver, September 2006. Studies in the History of Ethics.

Elaine Pagels: Adam, Eve and the Serpent. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1988.

Alfred Fripp, Ralph Thompson and Innes Fripp: Human Anatomy for Art students. Seeley, Service & Co., 1920.

Josef Augusta and Zdeněk Burian: Prehistoric Man. Paul Hamlyn, 1960.

Mike Cheong’s blog is at psytiphic.blogspot.com. Garden of Eden artwork by John J. Lomasney.

‘Putin protest’ photos by FEMEN. In this second photo of the sequence (right), one policeman kneels on the woman's back while another prepares to force her hands behind her back to cuff her, which is what a third photo shows. I thought that my neighboring country of Belgium was a democracy. The Ukranian-based protest group FEMEN also protests against such religious issues as church dogma and sharia law, which has in turn prompted counter-protests against FEMEN's demonstrations by Muslim women wearing determined smiles and signs which say DO I LOOK OPPRESSED?. But oppression can at times move in subtle ways. How did such clothing cover-up doctrines originate in the first place, and who introduced them? If anyone can conclusively establish for me that these religious dress codes were not originated by men (either independently or in the name of their god), then I will publish their comment here. The current Iranian law for adultery specifies that prior to stoning men are to be buried up to their waists (thus leaving their arms free), and women up to their shoulders (with their arms also buried). Anyone who can manage to extricate themselves before dying is spared. Do the math.

Note added January 2014: Pussy Riot’s Maria Alyokhina (seated left) and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova (seated right) were released late last month, but as they only had two months of their sentence left to serve, they concluded (as I do) that their 'early' release was a sop to the West in the light of the coming winter Olympics in Russia. Pussy Riot have now disbanded but plan to continue together to raise awareness of injustice within the Russian political and judicial system.