Eve dream. Chapter one. Lilith – part one

The beast, by Janus Fall

Last year I wrote a novel, titled “Eden“. Some months ago Janus Fall, a friend, showed me her pictures expo, where she worked about some Jung’s ideas. She made me very curious and so, after having read something about Jung’s works and, above all, about his concept about Shadows, I wrote my “Eve dream” and inserted it into “Eden“. As you can easily see, the Joung’s shadow is related with my previous post about me as a demon.

Well, now, with the help of other friends (above all Shyla: I thank her so much) I’m trying to translate my Eve into English. This is the introduction and the incipit of the first chapter, titled Lilith.

A man who is possessed by his shadow is always standing in his own light and falling into his own traps…living below his own level.

Jung, C.G. The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious

 

Introduction

Therefore, some of the Firsts chose to inhabit Eden and some of them wanted to clothe themselves in flesh, to know the senses and to change along their time.
Thus, in particular, it happened that two of us went to live in the garden of Eden, a place of peace, delight and Beauty.
They were the first Men.
They were the Man and the Woman.
Man and Woman: the most ancient of the Seconds, the first of you, those who generated the lineage of Men.
The Man and the Woman, that later you knew as Adam and Eve. Clay and Life.

 

1 Lilith

On that day, when it happened, Eve was alone in the garden. The unbridled imagination of the Enemy, his skill, his capacity for evil, his perverse will generated for the second time an incredible and unequalled enormity of lies. On closer inspection, the lie was the same as the one that caused the rebellion against the Creator, but now it was addressed not to the Firsts, to the Angels, but to the Seconds.
Furthermore, this time, corruption was sown in the very roots of humanity before its becoming, so as to affect those primordial beings and their lineage — so as to be substantial and decisive from that day forward.

The warmth was dry and pleasant, as everything was in Eden. The Woman was alone, shortly after noon on a regular day, in a luxuriant garden, near a plumtree’s ripened fruit, small, purplish-blue, juicy, and very sweet. It was more or less noon on a perfect day, in an unbelievably beautiful garden: none had ever existed like it, and none would ever in later millennia, but really it was the only garden she knew.
In the perennial spring-summer time, each plant species constantly produced flowers and fruits. The intense and spicy scent of lilies overlapped with the sweet smell of ripe fruit of every variety. A mild warm breeze brought to her attention the note, pleasantly bitter and almost melancholy, of the silvery tufts of absinthe that vegetated, sated with light and heat, on a nearby more arid, sunny hill, fully exposed to the south.
Red Brown Peacocks, orange Silver-washed Fritillaries, Yellow Scarce Swallowtails and Swallowtail Birds, blue Adonis and many other butterflies filled the space with multicolour squiggles, often exhibiting splendid blue, red and black eyes on the hind wings; they were delicate and charming like beautiful dreams.
Tits, Sparrows, Leaf Warblers and other birds filled the space with chirps and whistles, while higher the larks trilled and further still Swallows, Swifts and House Martins, swarming and darting free and fast.
At the edge of the wood, the ticking of the funny and chubby Long-tailed Tit and of the minute Wrens joined the elegant warbling of the Nightingales, not yet relegated to the darkest hours.
A doe with her fawn grazed the grass in the clearing, while fox and wolf cubs playfully tangled under the sleepy and happy gazes of their mothers.

A distant Cuckoo brought a dark and dyscrasic note to the harmony of the picture, reiterating its song with particular vehemence, almost intoning a violent, imperative call, and foreshadowing an imminent usurpation.

The sky was clear and painted with an intense blue, in magnificent contrast to the bright green of the trees. The sunlight caressed her brown, tanned, silky skin of a beautiful uniform colour and without blemishes or imperfections. Her long black hair encircled her forehead and cheeks and then brushed her neck going down, smooth and magnificent, along her shoulders, to her straight back and, in front, up to her round and so proud chest, just in bloom. Her eyes were the dark, shy, naive ones of a young doe.
She was standing, satisfied with fruit, alone.
Alone.

Her hands were resting on her hips and her right foot was just ahead of the left one, her fingers were gracefully nestled in the soft cool of the short, green grass, dotted with minute red and ripe strawberries.
She was perfect. The garden was perfect. The day was perfect.
Everything was perfect.
While she contemplated that intact and so harmonious wonder, that wonder which filled every sense with itself, while she herself contemplated herself, touching and caressing her hips with her hands, gently, in a sort of pleased ecstasy, she slowly walked across a stretch of the garden, up to reach a pool of crystalline water, barely and mildly shaded by old willows with wrinkled trunks and pale, grey-green leaves.
A few steps from the bank, while she slowly walked over the soft peaty ground, with her eyes almost turned elsewhere, to a point far beyond the sky that almost kidnapped her mind, she felt a sudden movement near her feet. A movement of something dark. After recovering from her sweet dream, she saw the tail of a snake, probably a Water Snake, which fondled her ankles and preceded her towards the water. She went on, calm and untroubled: nothing bad could happen to her in the garden.
The pond was also splendid, filled with the yellow and white luxuriance of the water lilies. By the shores, the white fluffy flowers of the cotton grass shone in the sun and pleasantly tickled her calves as she approached the fresh, inviting spring pool. In the shallow water, many minnows darted, minute, tapered and elegant, with bright red bellies.

(to be continued)

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