The Age of Consent

A collection of 21 posts

The Age of Consent Chapter Opener

The Age of Consent

Adam and Eve and the Forbidden Fruit

Aug 3, 2023 25 min read

The Age of Consent

20th Century Timeline

20th Century Timeline * 1905-6 Mark Twain’s Eve’s Diary published * 1909 Mark Twain writes Letters from the Earth (finally published in 1962) * 1910 Death of Mark Twain * 1922 T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland published * 1924 A 35-year-old Chaplin marries 16-year-old Lita Grey. They divorced two years later. * 1940

Jul 31, 2023 1 min read

The Age of Consent

Hieronymus Bosch and 'The Garden of Earthly Delights'

This is the left panel of the triptych known as The Garden of Earthly Delights, this panel being The Garden of Eden, or Joining of Adam and Eve, and it can be interpreted a number of ways. You just know the forbidden fruit is next. The full triptych is here.

Jul 31, 2023 1 min read

The Age of Consent

Dante Alighieri’s 'Inferno'

Dante’s Inferno is incomprehensible unless read as a drawn out poison pen letter. While some emphasize the implacable judgment of God, it has more to do with Dante’s own sense of betrayal and exile from his home city of Florence, to which he never returned. This is a

Jul 31, 2023 3 min read

The Age of Consent

Dylan Thomas and Adam and Eve

Dylan Thomas wrote the lines “I know the legend/Of Adam and Eve is never for a second/Silent in my service,” in Ceremony After a Fire Raid, one of his many brilliant emotional poems about the fire-bombings of World War II and one of his many acknowledgements of the

Jul 31, 2023 1 min read

The Age of Consent

Edgar Allan Poe portrait photos

The most famous photos of Poe, shown above and below were initially daguerrotypes taken in 1848 and 1849, the year before his death at the age of 40 from unknown causes. Do these photos tell us anything about Poe really? He looks best in this modern retouched version: For the

Jul 31, 2023 1 min read

The Age of Consent

Fallen angels and Milton's 'Paradise Lost'

In Western literature and art, fallen angels became a popular theme primarily after Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667). Milton depicts a memorable Satan, Prince of the Air, who commits incest with his daughter, Sin, and they have a child, Death, who then rapes his Mother! (Pictures here) Better to reign

Jul 31, 2023 2 min read

The Age of Consent

Lilith

Lilith the child-stealer is a mysterious figure. She appears only once in the Bible, in Isaiah 34:14, as a kind of screech owl demon in the desolation of Edom (the Jewish prophets repeatedly called for the destruction of Edom by God, because Edom had sided with its enemies). She

Jul 31, 2023 1 min read

The Age of Consent

Mark Twain’s 'Bible'

“Very well, Adam and Eve now knew what evil was, and how to do it. They knew how to do various kinds of wrong things, and among them one principal one – the one God had his mind on principally. That one was, the art and mystery of sexual intercourse. To

Jul 31, 2023 2 min read

The Age of Consent

Vladimir Nabokov and butterflies

This portrait above of Nabokov is by German painter Carl Spitzweg (1840). Below is another more standard portrait photo. For Nabokov as Sirin, here

Jul 31, 2023 1 min read

The Age of Consent

Rubens' 'Castor and Pollux'

Peter Paul Rubens' Castor and Pollux Abduct the Daughters of Leukyppos, alternatively known as The Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus (1617-1618). Virtually no art critics (feminists aside) are willing to address the 17th century context here of sexual violence - the abduction and rape of women by men.

Jul 31, 2023 1 min read

The Age of Consent

Satan Exulting Over Eve

What exactly is happening here? We have Satan above, Eve below, with the snake wrapped around her. This William Blake painting is from 1795, in the Getty Museum, Los Angeles. The Getty website says that "Satan hovers in malevolent glory over Eve" but this pose hardly seems malevolent.

Jul 31, 2023 1 min read

The Age of Consent

Satan in the Bible

Satan does not appear by name in Genesis at all, unless we identify him with the Snake (as many do), or we rely on mis-translations of the original Hebrew into Greek (the Septuagint). For example, in The Book of Job, chapters 1-2, what is often now translated as "Satan&

Jul 31, 2023 2 min read

The Age of Consent

Sex Orgies as Pagan Fertility Rites

The sexual orgies Twain refers to were pagan fertility rites that were connected to planting seeds in the rich earth and the hoped-for harvest, but the orgies have faded away somewhat on the mechanized and commercial farms of today. Back in ancient times there was an explicit recognition of the

Jul 31, 2023 2 min read

The Age of Consent

The Avatar Child

Every generation of parents creates its own image of the child using the tools given it by the previous generation, often by reversing it. So if once Man was in a state of Original Sin, then one day there was an innocent child posed against this (Rousseau), before sooner or

Jul 31, 2023 1 min read

The Age of Consent

'The Dead Lovers'

So much for love beyond the grave. So much for Adam and Eve. The late Renaissance German painters were not sentimentalists; they were moralists. This extraordinary oil painting is Les amants trépassés (also known as The Deceased Lovers, The Dead Lovers, and even The Rotting Pair), associated with an unknown

Jul 31, 2023 1 min read

The Age of Consent

'The Fall of Man'

It’s called The Fall of Man, and in famous paintings it's the snake’s fault and it’s Eve’s fault: “Her rash hand in evil hour…” Has there ever been a more popular subject in art history? The painting below is by Michelangelo from the Sistine

Jul 31, 2023 2 min read

The Age of Consent

Where is Edenʔ

I have my own theory of course, between the thighs of southern Iraq. Cf this Courbet painting... Serious scholars have gone further though, plotting the course of the four rivers mentioned in Genesis, motivated as much by the love of a good mystery as by the desire to authenticate a

Jul 31, 2023 2 min read

The Age of Consent

Why Snakes Know About Sex

Tiresias and the Snake Snakes know a thing or two about sex, we learn, from the story of Tiresias in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. There was no more appropriate creature to instruct Eve about it. When Tiresias encountered two snakes having sex, he rapped them with his stick but then he

Jul 31, 2023 2 min read

The Age of Consent

William Blake's 'Satan Watching the Caresses of Adam and Eve'

Another illustration for Paradise Lost, the question is: is Eve really looking at Satan? Blake was remarkable for his then-radical ideas about “sexualized spirituality” and he belonged to a similarly-minded community of New Age free-thinkers. A debate now rages over just how weird it all got and the nature of

Jul 31, 2023 1 min read

The Age of Consent

William Blake's 'Satan, Sin, and Death: Satan Comes to the Gates of Hell'

Satan, Sin, and Death: Satan Comes to the Gates of Hell: an illustration by William Blake to Milton’s Paradise Lost, circa 1807. That’s Satan on the left, Sin (she is half serpent) in the middle and her half-transparent son Death on the right. At this time, Blake became

Jul 31, 2023 2 min read

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