CW: The Bible. Treating it as myth. But treating it much more seriously than I ever did when believing it true or was the Word of God.
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I've been thinking about the Garden of Eden, the Serpent, and art.
When God pronounces the curse, the Serpent is doomed to crawl on its belly forever.
So what did it look like before? Art has traditionally pictured the pre-curse Serpent as a snake. But that raises questions such as how a snake would get around in other ways. Was it a flying snake? Or did it hop?
Logically, it must have had legs that it lost when it took pity on Eve and Adam in the ignorance of morality that God had meant them to have. Or it must have moved in a way no creature does today.
Obviously the story, like many others, is a myth story written and compiled by people with a very different world view to our own. It's not history and cannot rationally be taken as factual for all the lessons we may or may not choose to draw from the story, ideas, and images. Anyone taking it literally has to dump pretty much all we know about genetics, the evolution of humans, and much else that we've learned.
Obviously there was no Serpent convincing the unreal Eve to eat any literal fruit. The question of its appearance is a mind game, a bit of fun rather than a serious scientific quest.
Like many things in many religions it should only be taken as storytelling with a purpose, and a purpose we mostly don't share. You have to play very confusing mind games if you can't believe it's literal truth because you know humans and apes had a common ancestor but the entire story of salvation and Jesus you've been taught falls apart if it's metaphor or myth. You end up telling yourself that your only hope lies in something that you know deep down isn't true. So you hide from knowledge to avoid despair and end up hiding misery too.
But what if it were all real?
What would the Serpent have looked like before the curse?
If you were employed to make a movie of the first chapters of Genesis, what images would you choose? The saccharine Eden of children's books or something else?
The Serpent was not a snake. Then again, seeing it as a proto-snake brings up lots of problems and implies that God didn't just want the righteous drunk Noah to survive global genocide and ecocide but the Devil in snake form too. And it talked, something that a snake can't do due to lacking almost every essential piece of anatomy to develop the skill.
I found a sculpture. A modern piece, created in 2014 by Mark Dion. It's like nothing from any book I've seen. "The Serpent Before the Fall". The photo is taken from "When Snakes Could Walk: Contemporary Artists Take on the Garden of Eden."
It's an artist's idea of course, a visualisation of a story or myth that gives little physical description. But I rather like a quadruped Serpent. A Serpent walking makes as much sense as God walking in the garden.
Imagine Eden. Place yourself in the story. Be Eve. Be Adam. Be the Serpent. Be the walking around not knowing where the only humans were God, far from the omniscient deity of Christianity.
What would it feel like to be them? Would you act as they did? Would you tempt? Would you eat? Would you curse and banish? Would you hide good and evil from beings made in your own image?
What would Eden be like were you the characters, the designer? And would the rest of the book have been any different if it had been you?
Mind games. Meditations. Lectio Divina. Enquiries into yourself. They're all possible paths into myth. Perhaps the story can't shine lights on a god or on facts or on what our species has learned. But maybe, just maybe it can still illuminate something of who we are today. So can Greek myths, Tolkien and Maya Angelou although there's far more truth-fact in the latter.
Mark Dion, “The Serpent Before the Fall” (2014), installed in ‘Back to Eden’ at the Museum of Biblical Art (photo by an author for Hyperallergic)
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