BIRTH UNDISTURBED

"The paradise fruit was really sexual consciousness. 'Original sin' was orgasmic experience. The snake was cosmic female energy, degraded into a symbol of vice. We have long been under a spell that life is inherently evil. Western culture has now run itself into the ground, and there is no other way but to return to the Mother who gives us life." — Monica Sjoo

Universal in culture is the image of Eve in the Garden of Eden, succumbing to the serpent's temptation of the apple and offering it to Adam, with the consequence that their human knowledge destroys God's trust. Forever thwarting the future of woman by the curse God bestows that she will suffer greatly in childbirth, the attitude of Christianity - and indeed of humankind - toward procreation and the process of birth is not untroubled.

What does it mean to picture Adam and Eve in a modern way? What does it mean to picture a man and woman fully stripped down to their naked, unashamed selves, bearing a bloody newborn baby? Adam bears his serpent. Eve bears the fruit. Is the forbidden knowledge that of our own bodies, our powers? 

Thirty species of animals gather around them, as if they are equals to them. But their deadness adds a layer of questioning that asks, does man indeed bear dominion over all other creatures? Do we feel sad at a dystopia of the last humans boarding an Ark from a dying world, or feel happy of the promise of a new utopia? Can man and woman regain their responsibility in being the earth's true biologists? Can we again be proud?

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"The snake refers to a matriarchal past, the primitive Mother Goddess who would be both giver and taker of life. The snake is closest to the Earth, always having full body contact with it, and the coil of the snake symbolised a female energy that goes against Freud’s ideas of penis envy. There wasn't a gaping hole were a penis ought to be, but a self-contained fertile power that could bring life on its own... Carole Schneemann interpreted the coiled snake as a primitive way to symbolise the uterus and vagina. It was a way to represent the energy housed there and is ascribed to the Mother Goddess figure from ancient times." (Suzanne Wegh).

"The Great Goddess was the Mother of Wild Animals. The inner recesses and womb-walls of the caverns were alive with magic pictures of her beasts. She was herself an animal, all the animals" (The Mother of Wild Animals and The Dance, p. 79, The Cosmic Mother, Monica Sjoo)

"All religion is about the mystery of creation. If the mystery of birth is the origin of religion, it is to the woman that we must look for the phenomenon that first made her aware of the unseen power." (The Cosmic Mother, Monica Sjoo, p. 71)

"When Eve gave birth to Cain after being cast from the garden, she did not say,"The Lord's curse has been fulfilled and I have suffered in childbirth." She did not say, "My sin is before me and now I have suffered because of it." Instead, she said, "With the help of the Lord, I have brought forth a man" (Gen 4.1) —Tammy Dittmore

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