Lynn Picknett

“The curse of life The story of Man’s10 abrupt expulsion from Eden – be it fiction, metaphor or literal fact – has become etched too deeply on the collective unconscious to ignore, for it has set in stone Judaeo-Christian attitudes to men, women, original sin (and therefore children), the Creator and his opposition, Lucifer/Satan/the Devil. This all-powerful myth has imbued us all at some level of perception with a belief that life is a curse, that death is the end – a collapsing back of the body into its constituent dust, no more – that women are inherently on intimate terms with evil, that men have carte blanche to do as they please with not only all the animals in the world but also their womenfolk, and that God, above all, is to be feared. Snakes come out of it rather badly, too, as the embodiment of evil, the medium through which Satan tempts we pathetic humans. The Devil, on the other hand, is the only being in the tale to show some intelligence, perhaps even humour, in taking the form of a wriggling, presumably charming, phallic symbol through which to tempt a woman. As both Judaism and Christianity depend so intimately on the basic premises of Genesis, this lost paradise of the soul is evoked several times throughout both Old and New Testaments. The crucified Jesus promised the thief hanging on the cross next to him ‘Today you will be with me in Paradise’,11 although it is unclear how those listening may have interpreted this term. Did they see it as synonymous with ‘heaven’, a state of bliss that must remain unknowable to the living (and remain for ever unknown to the wicked)? Or did it somehow encompass the old idea of the luxuriant garden?”
― Lynn Picknett, The Secret History of Lucifer

“After the Fall It will not be an easy journey. Adam is condemned to a life of ‘painful toil’ with the brutal reminder ‘dust you are and to dust you will return’. According to Christian theology, their Fall is the original sin with which we are all burdened, even – indeed, especially – newborn babies, who arrive in this world as kicking, screaming proof of Eve’s curse, not to mention the very fact that their existence is the inevitable evidence of parental intercourse. Birth itself was shameful. (It was only in the 1950s that pregnancy was mentioned openly in polite society. Before that, euphemisms, such as being in ‘an interesting condition’ applied, and even then some blushes were expected.) However, in the biblical account, there is no mention that the snake is the Devil, Satan or Lucifer. He is simply a snake, apparently doing what snakes do best – tempting women. The sexual connotations may be cringingly obvious to the post-Freudian world, but they were not necessarily so blatant to our Bible-quoting ancestors. However, it is not much of a leap from the story of the wicked snake to the notion of its being instructed or even possessed by the personification of evil, whoever or whatever that might be: Milton makes the point clear in his description of ‘. . . the serpent, or rather Satan in the serpent.’30 (The identification”
― Lynn Picknett, The Secret History of Lucifer