The Creation of the Man and the Woman

The first rains have fallen, turning the earth into a malleable clay. From this gravid soil the Man is fashioned, infused with all the potential for life, for the human existence to come. Much the same beginnings for humankind are related in the Popol Vu – the Book of the People – of the Maya, in which the first humans are fashioned from mud. Dust and water and a deific alchemy are the processes involved, mirroring the observation of the Roman writer Horace that in the end, we are but dust and a shadow. The end and the beginning always mirror each other. From dust we came, and to dust we shall return, as the waters of life flow into the shadows once more.

Woman, we are told in the second chapter of the Book of Genesis, is fashioned from a rib of the deeply-sleeping Man. ‘Bone of his bone, flesh of his flesh’, the rib is extracted from Man’s side, the flesh is closed over, and Woman is formed while the Man sleeps on, all unknowing. This is a fundamentally different and conflicting order of things from the events related in the first chapter, where the man and the woman are created simultaneously. In Chapter One, having created these two beings from the same prima materia, the deity blesses both of them. But the second chapter presents us with a woman who already is a generation removed from the direct creation of the man. In Chapter Two, Woman is made later, from second-hand goods: from material which already has been touched by the hand of creation. For the Woman of the second chapter of Genesis, God is a more distant star.