Work in Progress

Siblings In The Hands Of An Angry God

Incest, Exile, and the Nightmare of Adam and Eve

Copyright© by Wilson Jeremiah Moses, January 26, 2024

“Adam and Eve were like babies,” announced Professor George Naknikian in his Introduction to Philosophy at Wayne State University in the fall of 1960.  I was unaware at the time that he was echoing the opinion of a second century Father of the Church and Doctor of the Christian faith, St. Irenaeus of Lyon, who wrote, “Adam and Eve were naked and were not ashamed, for their thoughts were innocent and childlike.”  But Nakhnikhian did not need any ancient authority to show that the narrative of the temptation and fall in Genesis 3:1-24, is reminiscent of furtive infantile behavior.  Adam and Eve disobeyed their Father out of naive curiosity and made a childish attempt at hiding their shame.  The story is associated with the nakedness taboo, with the ambiguous word “knowledge,” and with punishment – archetypal children’s nightmares and elements of “Tales of Abandoned or Exiled Children” that folklorists place in the Aarne-Thompson-Uther Categories 327 and 450.

“You cannot predict whether a child will really understand the moral or the message of a particular tale,” says, Jack Zipes, the rightly celebrated authority on myths, legends and fairytales. How true!  How true!  And the meaning of a tale can be just as mystifying to adults, especially when it has survived over countless millennia, and has been retold in numerous languages and adapted to divers cultures and civilizations.  There is an extensive body of scholarship discussing cognates and analogue to the story of Adam and Eve in Greek Mesopotamian, Egyptian, and other mythologies, which addresses far more than childish disobedience.  Small children are titillated, even when the word “naked,” is expurgated – as it was in the Benziger Brothers Bible History of 1881, with its letter of approval from Pope Leo XIII – which relates how Adam and Eve discovered their nakedness and “Covered with shame they sewed together fig leaves and made garments for themselves, and trembling hid among the trees.” 

As children, we found the story of Adam and Eve fascinating; it required little imagination to relate their nakedness to our dawning consciousness of sexual morality.  The unfashionable Dr. Freud echoed Aristotle and Aquinas, perhaps inadvertently, when he pontificated that the nuclear family imposes the civilizing rules that are necessary and proper for society to function, for “there would be no prospect of curbing the sexual life of adults if the ground had not been prepared for it in childhood.”  The distinguished literary critic, Henry Louis Gates has written candidly about his own furtive infantile eroticism “with cousins and neighbors.”  Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World alludes to “the bad old days,” when childish experiments led to corporal punishment and other varieties of Pavlovian negative conditioning.  The Sisters of Saint Dominic warned their pupils that they could go to hell for “sinful curiosity.”

But not every sibling exile narrative contains the idea of an “original sin” a felix culpa, or “happy fault,” nor do all contain the element of shame that Adam and Eve discover in their nakedness. The Grimm brothers’ Hansel and Gretel are innocent of any such “original” sin, although throughout the narrative their behavior is furtive and defiant.  They make repeated attempts to thwart their parents’ will by returning from the forest.  When they are unsuccessful in these attempts, they survive by stealing sweets, and lying about it.   The serpent in their garden is a wicked stepmother, and it is due to her spite that the siblings are exiled.  In every variant of this story, those of the Grimm brothers and its antecedent by Giambatista Basile, the siblings are victims of a serpentine influence, a Satanic stepmother, a witch, a Lilith, or a Lamia.  In some of the Grimm variants the witch and the stepmother turn out to be identical, and the fathers must not be forgiven for infesting his Garden with these serpents.  We rejoice when Gretel pushes the bad mother’s Doppelganger, into the oven.  Witches are wives of God, sharing power with the Old Testament’s “Jealous God,” and the New Testament’s Jesus who commands “eternal fire.”  

In previous works, I have surveyed the social and literary interpretations of classical, Biblical, Germanic, and Afrocentric mythologies whose function is to reconcile contradictions. The contradictory sibling-lover relationship of Isis and Osiris foreshaddowed the ambiguous consortship of Artemis and Apollo, as implied by Plutarch and suggested centuries earlier in the so-called Homeric Hymns.  Homer, whoever he was, described Zeus and Hera as furtive siblings who “had dalliance together in love, their dear parents knowing naught thereof.”  Homer also recounted the legend of Aeolus, “favored of the gods,” who married each of his six sons to each of his six daughters.  Ovid told a different tale —the wrath of Aeolus against his incestuously erring children, and this was retold in the Middle Ages, by John Gower, again with a tragic ending, but in Hartmann von Aue’s Medieval German Gregorius, the siblings are redeemed through suffering – the child of their love grows up to become the pope who gives them absolution, and they are perpetually united in heaven.  The sister-spouse of the Song of Songs was seen by the medieval mystic St. Bernard of Clairvaux as the Blessed Virgin Mary – at once the mother, the sister, and the bride of Christ.  The sister-bride reappears in Montesquieu’s tale of Apheridon and Astarte.  The sibling lovers of Percy Shelley’s Laon and Cythnia are sanctified by martyrdom and ascend into Elysium, but Wagner’s Siegmund and Sieglinde’s springtime of joy must end in tragic exile.  Thomas Mann reinvented their pathetic-lonesomness in Wälsungenblut, but in his Der Erwählte, he told a tale of redemption, in which the sibling lovers were configured first as Adam and Eve, then later as Mary and her Savior Son.  The sibling-lover trope of ancient poetry, survived in the literary traditions of Medieval romance and modern fiction and continues to reverberate in the pagan mysticism of Roman Catholic theology.