The Temptation
Unknown
The Painting
The subject of the painting is the temptation of Eve. The story can be summarised in a few
words. Jahweh creates the Garden of Eden replete with flora and fauna, creates Adam and
then takes one of Adam's ribs to create Eve. The first humans may do as they please within
the confines of the garden but are forbidden to eat the fruit of the tree of good and evil.
However, Satan, in the guise of the serpent, persuades Eve that eating the fruit will reveal the
knowledge of Jahweh's power and make the pair equal to their creator. So, Eve eats the fruit
and gives some to Adam, who, like a dutiful spouse, eats the fruit too.
The painting includes the essential elements of the story and a few extra ones. Eve stands in
the foreground, apparently in a shallow river which meanders in a serpentine curve from the
top right of the frame to the bottom left (Isis as spirit of the Nile). However, unless Eve is
much taller than Satan and Adam, we must imagine that she stands on the opposite bank of
the river, where some Iris blooms are growing. (Actually, the artist just made a mistake in
forgetting that the bottom of the river is much lower than the bank.) Satan stands beneath the
tree, triumphant at the downfall of Jahweh's ideal world, evinced by the partly eaten fruit
revealed in Eve's left hand. On the other side of the tree, the much smaller figure of Adam
reaches up to collect the forbidden fruit.
The painting is an allegory of the human condition. The figure of Satan is pivotal both
pictorially and symbolically (Osiris enclosed in the tree). On the left hand side, the figure of
Adam represents the blissful ignorance of childhood, grounded in an ideal world of
permanence and perfection. Adam is still innocent; bathed in the yellow sunlight filtering
through the leaves of the tree he reaches for the fruit which he has not eaten yet. On the right,
Eve arranges her hair and presents the fruit, not to Adam, but to the viewer. This is the key to
the meaning of the picture.
From a psychological perspective, Adam represents the conscious mind unaware of the
infinite chaos underlying the idealistic bubble of self identity grounded in the illusion of material
reality. Eve represents the Anima or soul which links the conscious self to a deeper reality
beyond immediate experience, to the spiritual or esoteric world. The essential point is that
they represent the material and immaterial aspects of creation or the conscious and
unconscious mind.
The myth purports to explain the intrusion of evil into the perfect world created by Jahweh.
The true explanation lies in the figure of Satan or Lucifer. The problem arises from Jahweh's
command "Fiat Lux" meaning "Let there be Light". We can take this to be the conjuration of
Lucifer the bringer of light or Satan himself. Lucifer is just the manifestation of God's power as
being as opposed to non-being, the son of Chaos who brings logic and order into the world.
However, this is a grand illusion (Maya) for the absolute nature of God's being is unchanging.
We can see from his crown that Lucifer is the spirit of light and from his face that he is also
the spirit of that darkness which can only have meaning in contrast to the coming of the light.
Hence his other title, the Prince of Darkness. The face expresses the self absorption and
painful joy associated with birth, procreation and death.
Although brought into being by God's fiat, the world can only be sustained by the endless toil
of the world spirit or the Mercurial dragon (The dance of Siva). This is represented in the
picture by the winged serpent which springs from the loins of Satan. There can be no light
without darkness and no good without evil. The spirit Mercurius embraces all opposites,
holding together the infinite forms released by God's command into the coherence that we
know as the world. However, we should not forget that this great spirit binds together both
order and chaos and so brings into being both knowledge and the unknowable. Mercurius is
both a male and female deity or Hermaphrodite. Some magic mushrooms are shown to the
left of the tree to indicate the existence of a more direct route to the divine than the toils of the
philosopher.
The tree symbolises all knowledge or the sum total of the possible manifestations of God's
being throughout eternity. The fusion of the tree and the Mercurial spirit expresses the coming
into being of knowledge and the potentiality of its use by mankind. From this point of view we
can understand Eve as a tutelary goddess who offers to mankind all the fruits that such
knowledge can bring, whether for good or evil. Looking directly out of the picture at the viewer,
she knowingly offers herself, both as sexual object and the spirit of wisdom (Isis, Sophia).
Thus, from an alchemical perspective we have a marriage of heaven and hell in the coming
into being of the human world with all its knowledge based culture. The sixth card of the Tarot
can be interpreted in this sense. Eve's pose is seductive, exposing both wrists to the viewer,
she preens her hair and cunningly presents the partly eaten fruit in lieu of her vulva. As the
artist well knows, the vast and complex works of mankind, both economic and artistic are
borne out of dissatisfaction and desire. The mask of female beauty and all the beauties of the
natural world that it symbolises (Maya again) makes bearable the fear and suffering that is
inherent in the nature of being. This seduction or temptation is a necessary mechanism of life.
The role of the artist is to aid the goddess in this task by alternatively hiding and revealing the
truth.
An alternative version of this biblical myth is the legend of Pandora. Prometheus, the divine
trickster of Greek mythology, stole fire from heaven and gave it to humanity (Note that
Mercurius is the trickster shown in the first card of the Tarot). Zeus (Jahweh as god of
thunder) was angry about this and commanded the artisan god Hephaestus to create a
woman, out of the earth, upon whom each of the gods bestowed their best gifts. This first
woman, Pandora, found a jar, which contained all kinds of misery and evil or, according to
some, all kinds of blessings. Out of curiosity, she opened the jar and released the evils (or
blessings) into the human world. The only thing left in the jar was hope. This is symbolised in
the painting by the Iris which means rainbow, a symbol of hope which appears to Noah as a
sign of God's promise to humanity that he would never wreak such a destructive flood again.
The Iris is also a symbol of wisdom which reinforces the idea of Eve as a goddess who guides
the destiny of mankind. Like Mercury, Iris is also a messenger of the gods, but of Juno rather
than Jupiter. The Iris also symbolises reconciliation between god and man. This idea is further
reinforced by the Ibis, a bird of the Nile, and the two birds in the tree near Eve's head. In the
Egyptian myth, Isis is guided by two swallows to the pillar hewn out of the tree in which Osiris
is encased. The birds, however, are not swallows but Yellow Ammers, the devil's birds. The
Ibis is a symbol of the moon god Thoth, a god of wisdom and inventor of Writing.
To complete this mythological synthesis we can employ Robert Graves's poetical idea that the
true myth of creation must be founded on a female god who has twin sons, one of light and
the other of darkness. After many transformations these turn out to be Apollo the sun god and
Hermes(Mercurius) as god of the underworld. In this interpretation we can understand Eve as
the great earth mother whose sons bring to humanity the twin gifts of good and evil fortune
which can never be separated.
The remaining symbol is the White structure in the background. This represents the
petrification of knowledge (The church of Peter). This applies to religious, scientific and socio-
economic institutions which tend to grow into monolithic but dead accretions of knowledge.
The shell, apart from its beauty, has no meaning beyond the living creature within. The
understanding of the artist grows out of this inner life but is obscured by the very means which
are used to express it. This symbol is an expression of the true nature of the absolute;
complete, perfect, unchanging but eternally dead.