Through coition came cognition,
so we're told.
From serpentine perdition,
to the eve of our condition,
is a line of pulchritude.

The serpent was lascivious.
Tempting Eve to coitus,
by offering an apple
to consume.

His squirming, so voluptuous,
slithering, conceptuous,
lured her to
perfidy and sin.

From thus, homo erectus
was hetero in his genius,
until, through nostra damus,
came il papa's mighty plan.

By immaculate deception,
came the godhead
to reception
as a naked babe in straw.

Lacking sign of all suspicion,
or hint of malefaction,
the lord had sired offspring,
but no genitals engorged.

Through countless generation,
from Adam and creation,
had the genesis of
humankind been drawn.

By fervent copulation,
foregoing masturbation,
the race had been
expanded and preserved.

In coitus emeritus,
no interruption hindered us
and life was passed
by orgasmagic down.

From primeval broth evolving,
through complex myths contriving,
the human creature
comes to speculate.

No! It surely is apparent,
that our knowing was descendant,
and did not come
from falling to a snake.

All the love and joy
in breeding, should be guiltless,
not conceding any merit
to the fantasists of god.

Deus non magnificat,
and coitus cum laude.
Shagging is not sinful,
but bonding beautiful.

I've always thought, like Malcolm, that the whole point of the apple and snake story is about the discovery of sex! The great knowledge was surely how to create life or have some fun trying

Malcolm is the guy who wrote the original poem!

Sophie, we're talking about the biblical story of Adam & Eve and what the "tree of knowledge" allegory is about.

Er, Sophie, I was actually having a spot of fun standing up for the serpent (who can’t stand up for itself since it is somewhat legless). But if you want a theological argument (not in the sense of ‘come outside and say that’ but just in the context of a particular stance) then the sense of ‘nakedness’ is, in Christian theological terms, the idea of self-knowledge. Hence ‘Christ Naked on the Cross’ or ‘The Holy Rood’ – Christ, being The Son of Man, has to replicate the sense of self-knowledge – nakedness – that Adam underwent, the sheer force/shock of knowing all that he was – the lack and the faults et cetera, so that when Christ calls out to God, asking why God has forsaken him, he is suffering the most terrible doubt – a doubt that had begun first in the Garden of Eden, then in the Garden of Gethsemane (again a doubling of gardens – one paradise, the other a place of skulls) the night before, a truly human moment of absolute despair and isolation and loss and diminishment, before he is suddenly able to find belief, faith, and accept – from the self-knowledge he has – and through this offer the possibility of resurrection and the life everlasting. The ‘nakedness’ s absolute-self knowledge – nothing of yourself is hidden from yourself – which is why Christian depictions of Hell are filled with naked bodies – they have an everlasting horror of knowing their sins, faults, evils, whilst the souls who ‘win’ redemption are depicted rising naked into heaven where they are ‘clothed in the Glory of God’ – i.e. they become one with the Godhead, and their divine nature is part of their self-knowledge. But, according to the Bible, sex was instigated outside Eden. And, if you read the Bible, God does actually ‘create’ it by condemning women to the pains of childbirth. Which is why there is a Christian church service which actually ‘cleanses’ the women after she has given birth – in old church law, a woman could not return to church or take Holy Communion/mass until she had received a form of absolution for replicating the act of original sin. That is also why every child born was said to be born into guilt/evil – except for sects like the who maintained that children were born in innocence since there had never been a ‘fall from grace.’ That is also why the act of Baptism is seen as important since it ‘corrects’ the concomitant evils of birth and places the child into God’s awareness. Then you have the Born Again Christians… but enough’s enough! Oh, and that is why there are churches that are called The Dormation of Mary The Mother of God – which is about the traditional ‘lying in’ time prior to birth when the mother is about to recommit the first transgression against God. Enough. I’m going to have a cup of tea.

Sorry Sophie -- I hadn't realised my first posting had come up as 'anon'! That was me.

Hello Sophie, I live the quiet life, you know. Reading...reading a bit more, considering being ordained and then remembering I am an agnostic veering towards athiesm, and back again, then having a cup of tea and a go on my hula hoop.
Ah well, as Milton wrote in Paradise Lost we were exiled from Paradise for' Man's first disobedience...' not for sex. That is why in the Christian marriage service the whole stress is on the union producing children -- the bride is exhorted to join the 'holy matrons.' It is, after all, 'matrimony.' So sex is like a signifier, a mark that we have fallen, but not a sin unless it happens outside the prescribed bounds as stated in the Bible. And, yes, Adam is cursed to labour and get his food by the sweat of his brow. Then you have the medieval 'holy' poem of Piers Plowman by William Langlad -- a poem I find absolutely beautiful -- which is about someone living as God commanded --a ploughman, grafting by the sweat of his brow. But you can use any set of ideas/facts to any purpose by interpretation -- the thing I love about it all is the rich net of connections that the human mind construes. The thing is not to get caught in them! And I think that's what Malcolm's terrific poem is about.
It would be lovely to see you again for a big chat -- not sure I know much, I just mull. And hula hoop. I don't get the chance to perform much but will be part of the Foreword ebook launch on September 4th at Central Library at 6:15pm if you happen to be in Manchester. There are about 4 poets (out of the 12 in the anthology) from WOL reading a poem each.I hope to do more readings (well, just doing one or two would be more). Isn't life fun ;-) !

What a fascinating discussion thank you all for that.

I won't try to answer all the points. It would take forever and I am just about to go to France wehich is even more important than than religion and snakes. No doubt it is obvious, but I should point out that I am very firmly atheist. Where I challenge and mock beliefs which I do not share I do not intend to hurt anybody who holds those beliefs.

The Abrahamic concept is that God's creation was perfect. Eden was the whole world for the perfect Adam and his perfect, though derivative and therefore subordinate, companion Eve. Their perfection included immortality and consequently no need to reproduce (i.e. have sex). There was no requirement of labour in this state of perfection and there was no self awareness. Perfection did not include knowledge which waas entirely the province of God and his heavenly host. Heaven had conflicts and hierarchies. Cutting it very short, the devil (a fallen angel) represented by a serpent tempted Eve to disobey God's only rule. She succumbed, and the pair of them acquired knowledge of good and evil. One of those evils was sex and they suffered the end of immortality. As punishment, women suffer pain in childbirth and all children are born in sin. This was the fall from the state of grace distorted a bit by brevity.

In fact it is the adoption and distortion of preceding pantheistic stories in which snakes are phallic metaphors and fruit represents fertility. By this, Eve falls to the temptation of the phallus and as a result bears fruit.

I am doing several things in the poem. Firstly I am ridiculing the idea that pain of childbirth is divine punishment rather than the evolutionary price paid for walking upright and having a brain large enough to acquire the self awareness that gave rise to religion as well as language and all the other developments that distinguish humans from other mammals. The idea that children are born in sin is what the whole poem challenges.

Long before Jesus and Christianity (which was actually created by Saint Paul not Jesus) there were stories of virgin birth. These desperate desires to have a human untainted by originating in sex have long obsessed people. To me there is a contradiction between saying that God is love and tainting sex with association to the fall from grace. (This even applies to sex within marriage although I think Moxy would disagree. For many religious, sex must only be undertaken to procreate. A necessary evil consequent on the fall. Anything else is self indulgence and therefore sinful)

Although sex often takes place without love and there are many views about that, the love of two people for each other usually includes sex as an integral part of that love. I am therefore saying, perhaps mischievously, that if God os love there is a more genuine god to be found in the act of intercourse between two loving people than there is to be found in the liurgy and tenets of Abrahamic religion.
Humans evolved and were not created by a quarrelsome God engaged in war with part of his own heavenly dominion.

My reference to nostra damus is a double one. It is 'Our Lady', the virgin giving birth to God who is the son of God! It is also, of course, a reference to the dotty prophet who wrote lots of strange nonsense (much like I do, so people should be referring to Malpoet in a few centuries) and which gullible moderns like to try to attach to coming and future events.

The end point is that God is not great, but love is. Beware of miracle and false prophets. Snakes are nice.

I bet Notre Dame de Paris and Lourdes are top of your itinerary.

Funnily enough no. I'm off to the chateaux of the Loire. Just rework the 100 years war with a more satisfactory outcome and correct the recent problem of there being too much blood in my alcohol stream.

It's already more of a dier than a liver actually Sophie.

It is nice to have enquiries about the poems. I appreciate it. Anybody who did follow what I was getting at in Original Sin, and many of the others, would probably be as odd as me.

I like 'things' and playing around with them. However I like the words and how they sound just as much. There might not be much meaning in there and what there is is only my meaning.

Sorry to send you to the dictionary on a wild goose liver chase Sophie.

Anyway it's died now and I am on my way back.