If recent polls are to be believed, most Americans believe that Covid-19 emerged in Wuhan in a virology lab, yet most scientists believe it emerged from a wet market. Why such a split? If you prefer more scientific language, was it a lab experiment that went wrong and was

I don't think for a moment that this world is really "fallen," but I do agree with those who warn that extinction of life on Earth is a real possibility in the Anthropocene Age. To take my mind off that, I was looking for a single

Shown below is the left panel of the triptych known as The Garden of Earthly Delights, by Hieronymus Bosch. This panel is The Garden of Eden, or Joining of Adam and Eve, by a not-yet-born Christ. But, you just know the forbidden fruit is next: look at all

I find the painting above faintly ridiculous. Or perhaps I just find Dante and the traditions of courtly love poetry faintly ridiculous. There is no irony. The woman is always meant to be unattainable. In the painting above, Dante is being ignored by Beatrice Portinari, if his La Vita Nuova

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 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

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

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)

“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

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

Why is rape ever a subject of art? Does "abduction" of women in ancient Greek myths make it any better? What was Peter Paul Rubens thinking here with Castor and Pollux Abduct the Daughters of Leukyppos, alternatively known as The Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus (1617-1618)

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.

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

Mark Twain manages to work orgies into his masterpiece Letters from the Earth (unpublished till 1962), as well as into both Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn: 'It's an awful snug place for orgies. What orgies? I dono. But robbers always have orgies, and of course we'

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

So much for love beyond the grave. So much for Adam and Eve. The late Renaissance German painters were not sentimentalists; they were moralists. These extraordinary oil paintings - shown above and below - are a pair. They are by an unknown Gothic painter, possibly "the Master of the Upper Rhine,

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

I have my own theory of course, between the thighs of southern Iraq. 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 Biblical legend. But it

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

Question: in the illustration below for Paradise Lost, 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 and non-conformist religious sects. A debate rages to this day over

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