'Mysteries of the Garden of Eden' | History Channel | In Latin Apple Means Evil
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‘the apple of my eye’ by young British photographer Eleanor Hardwick
Genesis, the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve, the patriarchy, guilt and sensuality have always been front and center in my thinking. As a young woman, I launched a journal called ‘The Gospel According to Lilith’. At NYU, my senior thesis was focused on women in fifth-century BC Greece.
I’ve spent my life trying to understand why dolphins were so honored in Greece at this time that killing them was a capital crime, but today — when we know more about dolphin brains and consciousness than ever before — we ritually kill them in Taiji, Japan.
The History Channel show ‘Mysteries of the Garden of Eden’ is without question the most important hour of TV I’ve ever watched.
While ‘Mysteries of the Garden of Eden’ doesn’t focus on why the patriarchy rose to power, it shatters the Genesis myth once and for all in my eyes, showing how the exact stories of the Bible are traced back to Sumerian culture, when women were first veiled.
Religious scholars — not heathen liberals as Rush Limbaugh would suggest — explain that the Garden of Eden story is almost identical to the Sumerian creation myth.
Lilith, Adam’s first wife in the Old Testament, was once known as a Sumerian fertility/agricultural goddess before she became demonified by later religions. HC gives Lilith a much more central role than I’ve ever experienced on TV.
Every religion known to mankind has some kind of “evil woman” myth, writes The Lilith Library. Quite a few of them bear a startling resemblance to Lilith, who has many different names, such as Marilith or Lilitu, but all of them connect with the common theme: A demon woman, often with wings, who kills men and sometimes children.
One of the most startling facts in the History Channel presentation on the Garden of Eden isn’t that apples didn’t grow in the Mediterranean, leaving many historians to argue that the apple was really a pomegranate.