The Garden of Eve

In the myth of the Garden of Eden, we find the goddess hidden in plain view. The serpent who spoke was the oracular python from the goddess temples. Eve is the goddess. Her long blonde hair; her nudity, and her seductiveness identify her as the love goddess. Her garden is that of Spring or Ceres, and also the sacred grove of the goddess, in which grew her tree of wisdom, the apple.
The very name "Eve" is significant. The consonant V is a female glyph (that is, it is a pictogram of the female pubic patch); and the vowel E has a meaning of 'death'. The greek word 'evouia' is translated by Plato as 'life'. Thus Eve is the female archetype; woman writ large, the goddess. She is, in senses beyond that given in the bible, the mother of us all.

The story of Eve and the Garden of Eden comes from the Book of Genesis, the first chapter of the Old Testament. In this interpretation, we view the myth as not so much a story of the origin of the world and of the human species, but a story about the origin of Judaism and its successors, Christianity and Islam, in the temples of the Great Goddess. The bible has many subdued references to these origins, notably the description of Moses, his ascent of a holy mountain, his converse with a glowing tree, his preaching within a circle of stones, and his summoning of miraculous springs, all of which infer rites of the goddess temple. The Song of Solomon, often pointed to as the most poetic passages of the Bible, is also referential to the goddess, and a reminder that she was the original inspirer of poetry, music and dance.

The suppression of the goddess religion by Judaism was made explicit in the second of the Ten Commandments. The original Hebrew version read (in translation): "Thou shalt have no other gods before Me. Thou shalt not make unto thee a graven image, nor any manner of likeness, of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth; Thou shalt not bow down unto them, nor serve them; for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God....", the thing that is in the heaven above is the goddess as represented by the moon and stars; the thing that is in the water being the goddess as Venus, the sea-goddess; and the thing in the earth beneath is Persephone, queen of the underworld. The original intent of the second commandment, the outlawing of goddess-worship, was apparently lost in later years, with the Roman Catholic version now being an injunction against taking the Lord's name in vain (swearing) and the Muslims taking the reference to the making of graven images as a forbidding of representational art in general. Not so in Judaism, perhaps because anti-goddess sentiment was revived when the Romans (whose state deity was the goddess Minerva) destroyed the Jewish Second Temple.

The story of Eve and the Garden also appears in Milton's "Paradise Lost". In Book IX, Milton has Satan approaching the earth and gives the direction from which he came, in these lines:

SATAN in likeness of an Angel bright
Betwixt the CENTAURE and the SCORPION stearing
His ZENITH, while the Sun in ARIES rose:
Disguis'd he came, but those his Children dear
Thir Parent soon discern'd, though in disguise.
Hee, after EVE seduc't, unminded slunk
Into the Wood fast by....

The centaur referred to is Sagittarius, and the scorpion, Scorpio, both familiar to us as signs of the zodiac. Less familiar is the forgotten thirteenth sign, which lies "betwixt" them, Ophicius, the Snake-Holder, the symbol of which was a goddess or priestess brandishing two snakes, and which connoted the most important new moon in the goddess' lunar calendar.