Word: cains
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Cosmic Pater. By Act III, Adam and Eve have been expelled from the Garden of Eden and Miller gets to the point that he presumably wants to make. It concerns the slaying of Abel by Cain, seen as the harbinger of man's unbroken fratricide through all succeeding ages. In Miller's version, Lucifer incites Cain in the hope of establishing dominion over men on earth, comparable to God's rule in heaven. Thus man is in perpetual thrall to a power struggle between God and the Angel of Darkness, or to the conflicting forces of good...
...African blacks are excluded from the Mormon priesthood because they are said to be descendants of Noah's cursed son Ham and his wife Egyptus, a descendant of the fratricide Cain. Supported mainly by the Mormon Book of Abraham, a document "translated" from Egyptian burial papyri by Joseph Smith in 1835, this teaching resembles the Southern Christian theology that was used to justify slavery. Historians have noted that the Mormons, who began as egalitarians, were sojourning in slave-state Missouri-and having serious troubles with their Missouri neighbors about their free black brethren-when Smith's revelation...
Even in fairly major details. Miller has departed from the precedent laid down by the Bible and Paradise Lost. Introducing Freudian psychology, he suggests that God's subconscious created the Tree of Knowledge and that Eve fell into temptation out of penis envy. He also implies that Cain was actually sired by Lucifer, and he ends the Cain-and-Abel offering scene with a chaotic and completely inexplicable orgy in which Cain starts fucking his mother" (as the Devil so delicately puts it). On the other hand. Miller remains remarkably true to Milton in his portrayal of Lucifer's character...
...early arguments with which Lucifer tries to wheedle power from God seem facile and merely clever, but toward the end he makes us question the justice of a God who, with full foreknowledge, tempts Cain to kill Abel. Played as a pretty-boy smart-ass by the top-billed Hal Holbrook, the Devil resembles a cross between a quick-talking, shifty-eyed lawyer and a slightly hip John Wayne. Holbrook appears appropriately serpentine even as he swaggers with self-esteem, but perhaps he could temper his over-confidence a little, considering he flubbed his lines at least three times...
Abel is an all-American, clean-cut, prep-school said, while his older brother, physically more elongated and with a correspondingly more attenuated sensibility, represents the introspective adolescent. Like Eve, who persists in pestering God about why they can't eat the apples. Cain asks too many questions. Miller's creation of an intelligent Cain helps explain his fate: in Biblical morality, those who seek to rival God by attaining knowledge become the sinners...