EVA, OR THE INDECISE

The image, as often happens, represents a kind of story: that of Tom Thumb, who lost in the woods, finds his way following the signs he left. In the case of this Eve, the absolute and mythical feminine principle, the signs serve to indicate a new path, almost an evolution, in the dark forest of instinct and unconsciousness. The signs are humid, aquatic: snails, shells, nautiluses, which lead to a pool of water, mother of life and from which life comes and in which lies the apple, symbol of awareness, of the discernment between good and evil, of the human mind freeing itself from the indistinct and the undefined. The revelation of self-consciousness, the construction of an individual ego, which often keeps us prisoners, but which is the human figure par excellence. In Jewish mythology, Eve is charged with this apparently transgressive task of ferrying humanity through the evolution of tissues, up to the development of a nervous system that also includes the cerebral cortex. From there the source of many dualisms such as instinct-reason, good-bad, black-white and so on up to the human illusion of rational discernment, classifying, dividing the different and grouping the similar, something that man can hardly do without. She is "undecided" because she feels the importance and irreversibility of the choice she is about to make: a path from which there is no turning back. Adam does not have the courage to "disobey" God. It is she who relates to the bearer of light, "Lucifer" who is incarnated in the serpent, symbol of wisdom and science. For this transgression, for this awareness created by the undecided Eve, Eden disappears, dissolves to make room for the reality and suffering of human existence perceived in all its tragic materiality. It is strange and makes us ask questions to note how in the myth of Eden, the figure of Lucifer, bearer of the awareness of good and evil, of the light of rationality, is associated if not even assimilated to the principle of evil, of the devil, of the pride of wanting to regulate oneself alone, without subjection to a divinity. S.B.