The Garden of Eden thing, it was a total setup.
If God made mankind in his own image and likeness, then he must have at least suspected that if you tell humans that they can do whatever they like except for one thing, just one thing...then that one thing will be the only thing they want to do.
Of course they ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Once it was forbidden, what else could they do?
And in a moment of Freudian free association, I think of the extra-scriptural wisdom of my unlikely alter-ego, Ronny Cammareri in Moonstruck:
Loretta, I love you. Not like they told you love is, and I didn't know this either, but love don't make things nice - it ruins everything. It breaks your heart. It makes things a mess. We aren't here to make things perfect. The snowflakes are perfect. The stars are perfect. Not us. Not us! We are here to ruin ourselves and to break our hearts and love the wrong people and *die*. The storybooks are *bullshit*. Now I want you to come upstairs with me and *get* in my bed!
5 comments:
I was in my teens when I realized that no-one was interpreting that story as I did.
God /deceptively/ implies that the fruit is directly lethal--poisonous. (Indirectly lethal, as in I will curse you with death if you take it, does not count here.)
The Snake sensibly and /truthfully/ points out that God's claim is doubtable, since the fruit will allow them to know good and evil and become Gods.
Which is exactly what happens, as god hisselfs admits ("they have become as us...")before cutting the humans off from the Tree of Life (which would complete their transformation into gods.)
It's just a power struggle--and note from whence Truth and Falsehood recpectivly cometh.
Having been looking at it this way for a long time, I was very tickled at the idea of some Gnostics of casting Jesus as in league with the serpent--like finding someone seperately inventing one of one's own stories, but also with extras.
(I also have an extention, involving just what the Knowledge /is/, but not here...)
"Do not your own scriptures say, 'Ye are Gods'?"
"Be ye wise as serpents."
--Nathan
Some Gnostic exegesis makes the serpent the hero, as you say, the voice of Wisdom, teaching the trapped divine sparks in AdamEve to escape the prison paradise of the demiurgic creator god.
A favorite image of mine is Giovanni di Paolo's 15th c. painting of the expulsion from paradise. If you look closely, it seems that God is motioning the couple to get back into his circle, while the angel conspiratorily urges the happy twosome to escape.
hhhhHHMMMMmmm...
The world in the circular cell looks barren, with cracked, parched earth...while the place where A&E are going is fruitful and bloomin'.
Also, it seems that the circle is ringed by the zodiacal animules. (The rings may be the various spheres of the planets.) It is a small diagram of the mediaeval physical cosmos as then conceived -- which the sapient homosapiens have exited!
It seems this image may be an unrecognized blasphenomenon.
--Nathan
Na, yhwh didn't forbid Eve to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, only Adam -- the commandment was in sarcastic falsely extreme obedience to yhwh extended to her by tradition (kabala). ... My guess is that she was supposed to eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, but in connection with Adam's ethos (Adam's eating of the tree of life?). The serpent -- God himself in Nietzsche's reading -- tempted Eve in order to get around the extension of the prohibition to Eve. (Paul resents Eve for having been deceived, thus enabling yhwh to break through the box constructed by kabala via extreme formalistic obedience. An example of disobedience as extreme obedience perhaps is working up totally separate kitchen systems for milk dishes and meat dishes, in order to suppress the rationale or substance of the prohibition of not cooking a calf in the milk of his own mother.) ... I wonder if Eve's eating the fruit would have been an objection to yhwh even apart from Adam's first eating from the tree of life, if only she had not given the fruit to Adam too. Maybe, the shame at the mode of generation occur'd in their eyes only because of the misapprehensions insinuated by placing "good and evil" in their eyes prior to the ethos from Adam. Morals became misunderstood from the beginning this way, requiring such clumsy conceits as the "shadow" which must be 'honour'd', Oedipal-Perodigal sons or egos in the will-to-power system wherein a god king or totem animal is blamed, 'scapegoated' also marry'd to the moon goddess for doing what the Adam wanted to do prior to the beginning anyway.
Also, doesn't Eve in this tableau by Michelangelo have the same face as some other famous personage in a Renaissance era painting? like maybe one of the disciples in Da Vinci's Last Supper?
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