To honor Eve is to undo a lot of damage.Even before we come to an intentional misreading of the story, we have to acknowlege the story is mistotld. We all know it. There is no need to rehash it, Eve is the mother of all living, but she is the mother of wisdom and the mother of paying a price for that wisdom. She heeds the snak'es voice, but the snake's voice is her own and she takes up the fruit to gain wisdom, yes, but she also takes up because she wants. Having taken it up, her eyes having been open, she gives it to her husband. The price they pay is having to go out in live in the world. The price they pay is that they leave paradise and unconsciousness and life begins.
But they are already leaving consciousness when they "sin". They are leaving it when God says do a thing, and the think on this and the nsay now. Rejection of the divine will, a pushing back, is the beginning of consciousness.
The people is semi[-mythical. That is the compromise the Hebrws made. We all live in myth, even the Buddhist who tried to escape it, in the end clothed the Buddha in all manner of myth. But to get more from this story, maybe we have to change it from semi myth to total myth. In a total myth, God is not God, but a God, and the one who creates these people and tells them t ostay away from the fruit. But while we are talking about semi things, at the moment they are only semi people. it is only Christian writers like C.S. Lewis in his wodnerfully awful Perelandra who think that perfect obedience is perfect humanity. While the two people are living a sort of Golden age or being groundskeepers, its sort of hard to say, for not much is going on, another god arrives, a serpent in tree God, in fact the very God of this tree, and he beckons to the woman, no the man to eat the fruit and be wise, and the woman becomes wize and offers this fruit to the man. The other God, who will prove himself to be quite flawed, punishes the snake god and sends the man and woman out into the world. The lesson we learn is the lesson of obedience to a very capricious deity who, the Hebrew Scriptures tell us, is good by dent of being the only game (God) in town.
But what if this is a massive misreadying? What if Eve is telling us we must leave the Garden and a god who would keep us there is roundly to be disobeyed. What if, after all the time of demonizing women's voices and the voices in our heads Eve is saying, no, no, listen to the voice in your head. Heed the uncomfortable snakes.
I read Perelandra by C.S. Lewis for the first time when i was a freshmena in high school. Twenty years later i found it almost unbearable to finish. In this novel a character is taken to the planet Venus awhere a new race is starting and God had made a new version of Een's test fro the eve of that planet. She msut decide if she will obey God's arbitray command or disobey to do what seems right. This book veers off into a lot of the man character talking to hismelf and to a devil and the devil points out that it was Even's decision to take the fruti that started the ball rolling. Ransom, our main character si fully ocnvinced that the ball would have got rolling anyay if only Eve had not taken the fruit if only she had been in perfect obedeicne. He doesn ot know how we would have gotten out of the garden and into a better world and canot conceive of what that world would be, but he looks back with bitterness on what the world is and what it has been and thinkgs how htings would have been..... somehow... different.
The blaming of Eve is the impotent blame game qhich recieves a lot theological attention in Christianity. It is the disatisfaction with how thigns are that verges on disgust and swears it could have veen, somehow, easier, different, painfless, and then finds a way to blame someone for why things are as they are. True enough things are far from perfect, they are absolutely fucked up. But it is this idea of Lewis that looks to put that blame on one person's feet and say, none of this would have happened without her. It is the ultimate blaming your mom for life. The reverence of Eve acknowledges the pain of existence while also acknowledging that it is better, far better, to exist than to not be here at all, which, from my reading of the story, is the true alternative.
Every week in the seasons is devoted to something or someone, a deep alchemical mystery, and that means we cannot exhaust the meaning of our weekly devotion. The story of Eve had layers we do not even know or simply begin to fathom. She is, of course, not only the mother of wisdom, but the mother of humanity and human consciousness. He name, Chavah, after all means living because she is the mother of all living, but also because she is the life force that makes us more than animals. She is the breath that makes man a living soul. She is potent life. The meaning of woman, serpent and tree is endless and had endless permutations, but we cannnot doubt that in this story a nameless creature, called on Woman, of From Man, comes, naked and lush to a tree and meets the serpent, the very emblem of sensual knowledge, and when she leaves the tree she is Eve, and everything is changed,
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