Tag Archives: genesis

What’s with all these women and snakes? Or more precisely, what’s with all these artists painting pictures of women with snakes?

Yes, there’s a pat, comic answer, but put your inner sophomore away for a few minutes.

In Western culture, the woman most often depicted in significant art must be the Virgin Mary. Most of those paintings do not portray any specific act or episode in her life, but are devotional Madonnas — mother and child. There are episodes painted — the nativity, the flight into Egypt or the lamentation at the cross — but mostly they are icons, static and symbolic.

If we were to search for the second most painted woman, it would have to be a tossup between Venus (or Aphrodite) and Eve. I’m not going to examine the goddess here, but I want to consider Adam’s consort.

She is painted over and over, with and without Adam, but almost always with the “apple,” and usually with the serpent, although the serpent takes many forms.

I became interested in this as I began to discover many paintings. I now have images of several hundred historical paintings of the Temptation of Eve (I can only share a handful).

It interested me to watch the change in the iconography over the centuries, and the shift from one compositional pattern to a second.

The source of the imagery in the paintings begins in Genesis, but quickly adds bits from other places, none authorized by the actual words in the Bible. The Bible, for instance, does not say the serpent is Satan; it does not name the fruit as an apple; does not say that Eve “seduced” Adam into tasting the fruit.

The earliest visual representations of the Temptation are Late Roman, or early Romanesque. In these the first design is firmly established: a symmetrical disposition of the man and woman to either side of the central tree, usually with a snake coiled around its trunk.

One of the most interesting early images is from a fresco in the Plaincourault Chapel, a 12th-century chapel of the Knights Hospitaller in Merigny — at nearly the perfect center of France. In it, the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil is depicted in a very primitive way that could easily be interpreted as a giant mushroom. Indeed, there is a vein of scholarly thought that takes the forbidden fruit to be psychedelic mushrooms. Having eaten of them, Adam and Eve are able to see the deeper reality behind the surface one.

In this fresco, you see the familiar items. Adam, Eve, the tree and the serpent wound around the trunk very like the caduceus carried by the messenger god, Mercury, or the Rod of Asclepius, an insignia of healing. The symmetry of the design serves it well to becoming a kind of icon.

You see the pattern repeated over and over in Medieval prints, carrying over into the early Renaissance.

The design continues in popular arts for centuries. You find it even in plates.

But, at some point an insidious misogyny infects the standard imagery. In some paintings, starting in the Renaissance, the serpent takes on a female’s head, either Eve’s own likeness, as if the serpent were a mirror, or the head of the mythical non-Biblical figure of Lilith, styled to be Adam’s first wife.

The problem of Lilith originally arose because there are actually two stories of the creation of the first woman. In the first (Genesis 1:26 and 27), after having created all the animals, God “created humankind in his own image, in the image of God did he create it, male and female he created them.”

In the second story (Genesis 2:18-25), Jehovah, having already created Adam, creates all the animals to give him company, and when that isn’t sufficient, puts Adam to sleep and takes from his side a woman, making the bad pun in Hebrew, translatable to English as “We will call her ‘woman’ because from ‘man’ is she taken.” (In Hebrew “Ish” and “Isha.”)

Later commentators puzzled by these two different creations of Woman, decided that the first must be different from the second, and came to give the first one the name Lilith. The name may derive from ancient Semitic demons, known as “Lilitu.”

There are several examples of Mediterranean goddesses with special commerce with snakes. There is the Snake Goddess of Minoan culture, the Canaanite Astarte and even the Egyptian Isis. So, there is precedent for commingling the first woman and the serpent.

At any rate, in later Talmud, Midrash and Kabbalah texts, this first woman created is identified as Lilith and various stories get told about her, in all of which, she is evil, and a kidnapper and killer of children, and later, as a seducer and destroyer of men.

Obviously, then — at least to the Medieval minds of the interpreters of the sacred texts — this must be the woman God created first. She disappears from Eden through various versions of myth, but returns to cause havoc.

Most notably, as the serpent in the Garden. And so, many of the snakes wrapped around the Tree have a woman’s head or face. Most notable, perhaps, is the Sistine fresco by Michelangelo.

In the 15th and 16th centuries, you can hardly get away from this trope.

But as art history progresses into the Baroque, the static symmetry of the classic tree and couple gives way to moving both Adam and Eve to the same side and putting tree and snake in its own half of the frame.

The old design doesn’t disappear. You can see it in the grand paintings of Rubens, who clearly copied from Titian.

What does happen, however, is that the biblical stories are no longer able to be taken as literal fact. You find the Scripture being used as pretext for allegory or even for an excuse for painting naked women. You see the light of faith dimming and the approach of the Enlightenment.

When Eugène Viollet-le-Duc renovated the cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris in the mid- to late 19th century, he replaced weathered Medieval sculpture with modern replicas of his own design, imitating the Gothic style. The central trumeau of the central portal of the cathedral sports this wonderful take on the Temptation of Eve. It follows the old formula, and has some vigor, but you know that Viollet-le-Duc could never believe in the Fall of Man in quite the same way as the original builders of the cathedral.

Into the 19th century, the whole issue of the Fall, of the snake — for now the ambiguity of the “serpent” has been changed out for the Freudian certainty of the phallic snake — and the naked Eve have given way increasingly to kitsch.

There are some Modernist attempts at reviving the mythology, but they are few and lack the persuasiveness of the older images, perhaps because the 20th-century artists cannot actually believe in what they are painting. It is not only God that is dead.

This has been a very short overview. There is so much more I would like to share, but there is limited space. They come in all styles and media.

In the next blog entry, we will look at some other permutations of the naked lady and the snake.

Click on any image to enlarge.

The Catch-22 of animal rights

May 19, 2014

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It’s been called our next big moral challenge. Over the next century, activists say, we will come to see animals in a different way and recognize that we can no longer use them for our own ends.

Just as no one would now argue in favor of slavery, in the future no one will argue for using animals to test medicine, killing them to provide food or burdening them to do our work.

“Animal rights means that animals, like humans, have interests that cannot be sacrificed or traded away just because it might benefit others,” says PETA, or People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

In their quest for better treatment for animals, such groups make the case that animals have — or should have — legal rights. In opposition are those — many with an economic interest in the status quo — who think of PETA as a bunch of spit-gargling extremists bent on disrupting our way of life.

But no matter which side you land on, there is a problem at the heart of the issue that has not been solved.

Man and Beast

At the core of the animal rights issue is the question of exactly what, if anything, separates human beings from animals — or from other animals.

All the remaining issues, from the biblical verse giving “man” dominion over the beasts to whether Sharon Stone should wear fur, pivot on this single question. And it is a question with many gray areas and no satisfactory answer.

Animal rights activists, such as members of PETA, emphasize the similarities between animals and humans. They point out that the chimpanzee, for instance, shares more than 98 percent of its DNA with the human. Not enough of a difference, they say, to warrant treating these apes as property.

The Judeo-Christian tradition emphasizes the distinction in Genesis, when Jehovah creates Adam in his divine image and grants Adam dominion “over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the Earth.”

This has been considered as theological permission to use the animals for food, for transportation and for medical research.

Since then, however, science has had trouble with the border between human and animal. It’s been forced constantly to retreat from its definition of what distinguishes the two. Once, we were the toolmaking animal, until we learned that chimpanzees can make a primitive form of chopsticks to pluck termites out of their nests. Then we were the linguistic animal, until gorillas started learning sign language.

By now, science can only fall back on DNA: Humans are genetically distinct. That’s not much of a mandate to reign over Creation: After all, each species is genetically distinct.

This gradual blurring of the human-animal border would seem to benefit PETA. However, it could end in confounding their own argument.

Great chain of being

Traditionally, we have thought of life on Earth as a hierarchical “great chain of being,” in which certain species are “higher” or more advanced than others. PETA’s argument tacitly accepts this principle, even when others are finding it outdated or even paternalistic. PETA wants to “raise” animals to a human level by including them in our laws.

If you approach equality from the top down, as PETA does, and you see the question as raising the animals up to a human level, you get one set of answers. But you can also blur the line between humans and animals without recourse to the hierarchical principle. If you do, you get an entirely different result.

PETA’s argument, essentially, is that animals are people, too. But you make the same argument with different results if you state it in reverse: That people are animals, too.

Another problem with PETA’s paternalism is that it treats intelligence as a shibboleth. If, for instance, science can show us that whales and dolphins are intelligent, or that gorillas or chimpanzees can learn to use sign language, does that mean those animals should receive special recognition under the law, and that dumber animals should not?

After all, we don’t give more legal rights to smart people over dumb ones. Why should animals be different?

Is intelligence the determining factor in deciding what animals have near-human legal rights? And if we decide that is not the case, then why are humans accorded special distinction among the animals, unless by divine fiat?

Animals are people and people are animals

More important, if you erase the line between human and non-human, you may end by making the case for the opponents of legal rights for animals.

For since the case can be made that human beings are also animals, one species among many, we have no reason for assuming our laws — the recorded customs of our species — can work for animals but not the other way around. Turnabout is fair play: If we start applying our laws to animals, why is that preferable to applying animal laws to humans?

Why should humans not be asked to conform to the moon-baying, alpha-male pack organization of wild dogs?

In fact, the chief reason humans exercise dominion over other animals has less to do with Scripture or law than it does with sheer power: Humans dominate other animals because we can. No rational person doubts that, say, mastodons or sabertooth cats would dominate the Earth — including humans — by force, if they could.

Further, animal rights activists talk about “species-ist” behavior — parallel to racist behavior — in which we favor our own species over others.

“I care about animals,” the late former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop once said, “but I care about people more.” It’s a common sentiment.

Species-ist dominance

Yet, in the animal world, each species favors its own over other species. Our own species-ist behavior is something we share with other animals, and if our behavior underlines the distinction we draw between ourselves and the beasts, it weakens the argument that animals should be treated like people.

Call it the animal rights Catch 22.

In other words, if there is no distinction between animal and human behavior in species-ist behavior, then there is a valid line between humans and animals and no logical reason to grant animals the legal rights we grant ourselves. To do so is to deny our animal natures and pretend that human beings are different from animals. And if we do pretend that humans are substantively different from animals, we again make the case against smudging the legal line between animal and human.

“Alle Menschen werden Brueder”

Of course, all this reflects only on the legal question — and underscores the point that the treatment of animals is properly a moral, not a legal, issue. PETA may be barking up the wrong tree.

Still, PETA may be on the right side historically.

One must remain humble about the possibility. Before the Civil War, there were intelligent, moral-minded people who defended slavery on logical, historical, religious and ethical grounds. And in the 1850s, abolition often seemed championed by crazy-eyed radicals and fringe elements in society. If you were a moderate then, you would probably have considered abolition “crazy,” or at least, precipitate, even as you recognized the need to treat slaves humanely.

Now the question of humane treatment of slaves seems entirely beside the point. Slavery itself seems patently inhumane and indefensible.

So instead of merely condemning animal rights apologists out of hand, we might consider that we, ourselves, could be in the same moral position: That in 100 years, animal rights may seem as obvious as emancipation seems to us now.

Obviously, we cannot know if this will occur, but whether we worry about the historical argument or not, we can still do our best to function ethically and morally on all fronts in the present.

One does not need to make the legal case that animals are humans to recognize the fraternity of Creation. We need only see all that is not ourself as equal to ourself. In other words, recognizing the aliveness, existence and independence of the teeming individuals on the planet, we see in them the mirror of ourselves.

This is the basis of human morality: To see, as theologian Martin Buber has put it, the other as a “thou” rather than an “it.” It has always been easier to see family, or clan, or tribe, or nation as “thou,” and easier to see strangers or foreigners or different races as “it.” But that argument is just as compelling when you look into the eyes of a dog, or a horse or a canary.

We easily see our pets as “thou.” But just as moral action requires we see other people as “thou,” we shall have to begin considering animals other than our pets as “thou,” also.

Life feeds on life

This may not make PETA entirely happy, because even when we recognize other people as “thou,” we may still find just cause to end their lives. And even when we take animals as “thou,” we may find it acceptable to eat them.

Many tribal cultures have done just that, revering the animals they kill and eat. All life is a smorgasbord, with one species eating another. Even if we become vegetarians, we kill plants. Life feeds on life; life is not gentle. There is a certain sentimentalism to the PETA point of view.

The moral action is not necessarily to refrain from causing injury, but to take responsibility for it, and never to cause injury blindly and blandly. Making a law to enforce action — such as proper treatment of animals — tends to take away our personal responsibility and lets us obey blindly and blandly. This might be just as bad.