“Before the appearance of the Old Testament, sexuality played the central role in virtually all creation stories. Tiamat and Apsu, Uranus and Gaia, El and Asherah all coupled. Even the Egyptian god Atom masturbated in order to create the world. But Yahweh went about His act of creation with no mention as to how He did it. No kneading of raw material, no conjoining of sexes: it was a creatio ex nihilo – a creation from nothing.
All the words and metaphors associated with creation—conception, gestation, ingenuity, labor, prolific, seminal, prodigious, genesis, genius, profligate, and productive—evoke sexuality or a woman giving birth, but Yahweh replaces sexuality with an act of will encoded in words. The very first lines of the very first lesson of this revolutionary religion, when Yahweh commands, ”Let there be…” concern the overarching importance of logos.”
~Leonard Shlain, The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image
Painting by Elisabeth Slettnes
A place of trees
ReplyDeleteThere had to be a woman before Eve,
a goddess before the god.
She could have taught Eve a thing or two.
First of all, apples belonged to her (although
some say it was a fig)
and there was no sin in knowing.
She never would have made Eve lie
under Adam or pretended that woman was
created from a man’s rib (what, no blood?)
In fact, in this story, Eve gives birth to Adam
because she is the Mother of all Living
Oh well, pick the story you like better.
But this Eve has a new face
and Paradise means
a place of trees.
from A Place of Trees, chapbook about Eve and Lilith, Jennifer Boire, OvertheMoon Press