Oh, I am just really enjoying your blog with all of these recent posts. :-)

I have done a lot of reading by Marija Gimbutas and the Goddess cultures that existed prior to the male, monotheistic, patriarchal religions coming in (Kurgan invasions and such). What floored me was finding out that the snake is an image for the Sacred Feminine. So, what the writers of the bible did was take those symbols and make them evil - the snake, the apple (another connection to nature), and woman herself. My gosh, they even had woman come from man! That's an impossible feat...woman creates, not man. And it was a fabulous way, in a horrible sense, to cause women to think they were guilty for the whole fall of humankind. Boy, what a way to keep women disempowered, eh? Genius, in many ways.

And I think the topping glory is that women don't even know this was done to them! I didn't until a few years ago. I mean, how can women feel any kind of empowerment at all with a story like that being the backbone of modern Western culture? You can't say, "Well, it's just a story and didn't really happen," because it's there. Even as metaphor, it's there, and it speaks volumes. And it continues to speak volumes until women, and the rest of humanity, realize it was a lie put there to disempower women.

Of course, the additional part of this puzzle is that it also disconnected humanity from nature. Women have always been connected to nature, whether it's fertility symbols or other images. So here, with one fell swoop, you disempower women, make nature appear evil, and voila, man can have control over both of them, because, well, hey, you can't trust a woman - look at what Eve did - and nature is a terrible, terrifying, evil place to be.

Well, I think that the real villain was Adam. He was the one who ate the apple, then refused to accept resposibility and instead said "she made me". Eve blaming the serpent mirrored Adam's passing the buck, and the two together are a comment on the human condition rather than gender issues.

Punishment was meted out on Adam, Eve and the serpent. Men were destined to toil on the land, my neighbours still do, and when you see the exhausted hordes staggering home after long hours and an awful commute then clearly that punishment has not been lifted.

It's questionable whether the semitic peoples necessarily viewed a snake as representing women or creation. It may have been the case in some other areas, of course.

I'm not sure that this particular creation story makes creation "evil". If God created the world, implicitly it is not evil. It may be morally neutral. The view may be taken that one can find the Creator through nature (which would be an Eastern Orthodox view). The view that the created world is "evil" has appeared from time to time, the Cathars (for example) took this stance.

I think that problems started basically when men started to lead in place of God. Back in the New Testament, Jesus elevated women and took their side against men. Later, when men started to create hierarchies without female input, those hierarchies tended to be descriminatory. When the hierarchy consisted of celibate men, who had political ambitions, women had few advocates. The Roman Catholic Church at its worst moments, the Taliban and Wahabi Islam would be extreme examples. It has taken a long time to start to unravel institutional prejudice, for example the long struggle in the Anglican Church before women were permitted to be ordained. A key step was when Anglicans examined the Bible in detail and found that there were no theological objections, only tradition blocking the way. Tradition that favours the privileged, whether male, white or whatever.

I think that one of the most interesting things here between our comments is your assumption, TH, that the story is true. Because I don't operate out of the modern, western worldview, I don't believe this story to be true. I don't believe in a male, monotheistic, patriarchal god. So, it's interesting to see how our views differ based on those core beliefs.

You speak of toiling on the land as being a punishment. It may be in modern, western culture, but it's not to Indigenous cultures. The land is alive, so the whole concept of toiling on it is, in fact, a concept that isn't even conceivable to those cultures.

I was raised in the Baptist Church 60s-70s and perhaps because the Pastor was a woman, and I called her Auntie, and she was the strongest, yet softest human I've ever known--for whatever reason it just never occurred to me that Eve was the tiniest bit more responsible for the apple incident that Adam. It was my daughter who first introduced me to that view point when she had her first painful period and cried out in frustration to Eve.