What The Fire Said: Eve

What The Fire Said

What The Fire Said is the portal for my own art and writing. It is necessarily a work in progress, and you are welcome to return anytime to see what has been added here.

In my header you will see both contemporary calibration dials and centuries-old symbols used in the practice of alchemy. My art tends to operate at the interface between such extremes: between our shared distant past and an unknown far future, between the realities of history and the at-times greater realities that lie over the threshold in the world of myth. At these extremes science and magic, myth and history turn into each other, become indistinguishable from each other – as in the far future they well might. ~ Hawkwood (David Bergen)

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What The Fire Said by David Bergen a.k.a. Hawkwood is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License covering all written and visual material at: http://whatthefiresaid.blogspot.nl/.

These personally created artworks remain the property of the © David Bergen Studio. The terms of my above Creative Commons License allow for re-posting of these works on the express condition that they remain unaltered (that is: with my embedded © credit attached) and that the context is non-commercial. Please respect my art.

Hawkwood (David Bergen)

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Copyright of any material credited to Hawkwood remains with the author. The registered creative commons license below permits further use and distribution of Hawkwood's work subject to the three conditions: (1) The user attributes the work to 'Hawkwood', (2) The context is non-commercial, (3) The work remains unaltered. A link back to this weblog is appreciated.

"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." So wrote Augustine on the subject of Eve. Tertullian, another early Church father, described womankind as "the gateway of the Devil." That in Genesis it is the actions of the woman that leads man astray and has them both expelled from Eden has been taken as a Biblical nod of approval to blame womankind for the fall from grace ever since.

But this ploddingly literal reading of the text misses much which a more profound Gnostic version of events reveals: Eve (the spirit) in her wisdom causes Adam (the soul) to fall. Not into 'sin', but into time, into the incarnation of a corporeal body, so that the soul can experience all the joys and sorrows of an Earthly existence that it otherwise would be denied in the steady-state of paradise. In this version there is no sin, there is no awakened shame in the human body, there is no major guilt trip to lay at the feet of the woman. I'll leave you to choose which version of the story you consider to be the healthier for the human psyche.

"Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee." Genesis.3:16

You can read more about Eve on: Eve's Story and Coats of Skins.

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