Word: serpenting
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Which brings us back to Eden. Adam and Eve eat from the tree of knowledge because they have pretensions of divinity. "Your eyes will be opened," the serpent promises, "and you will be like God, knowing good and evil." Thus the original sin is often described as a kind of hubris--"the pride which sprang from [our] likeness to God," as one scholar put it. By the lights of evolutionary psychology, an essential human weakness is indeed a tendency to be seduced by our seemingly godlike rationality into thinking we can readily know good and evil; our downfall...
...painted on a white ground belongs to the Mongol Yuan dynasty (1272-1368); but it reached its finest period under the later Ming Emperors in such objects as an early 15th century porcelain vase with a furious blue dragon galumphing around it, all its spikes and scales and fierce serpent rhythms contrasting with the suave, plump profile of the vase...
Gnostic cosmologies would overturn biblical traditions. The God of the Old Testament became evil incarnate. For if Satan could tempt Jesus with earthly power and riches, did that not mean that the world was Satan's to give? In time, Jesus would be the spirit of the serpent in the Garden of Eden, giving Adam and Eve a chance to escape from their dastardly creator with a taste of the fruit of the tree of knowledge...
...liked the snake," said Burney's roommate Kate D. Nash '99, referring to the 40-foot, Chinese dragon-style serpent that a float bearing Saint Patrick chased down Mass...
...counts herself a conventional believer. In The Gnostic Gospels, about the early Christian sect whose members aimed at mystical communion of the individual with God, Pagels set out a scriptural alternative that was shunned from the outset by the institutional church. In 1988 she published Adam, Eve and the Serpent, a study of the influential way St. Augustine read the Garden of Eden story as a symbol of man's fall, though some earlier Christians had seen it as a parable of human freedom...