The Cosmic Serpent

Lecture 4 in my Psychological Significance of the Biblical Stories lecture series I turned my attention in this lecture to the older of the two creation accounts in Genesis: the story of Adam and Eve. In its few short paragraphs, it covers: the emergence of human self-consciousness; mankind's attendant realization of vulnerability, mortality, and death; the origin of the capacity for willful evil, as the ability to exploit that newly-realized vulnerability.