For nearly two thousand years, Eve has carried the blame for humanity's downfall.
Throughout Western literature and art, her story appears again and again as a warning about temptation and the danger of wanting what we have been told not to want.
But strip away two thousand years of interpretation and ask a more interesting question:
What did Eve want? Eve wanted to know.
In the Garden of Even™ we celebrate her hunger for knowledge.
In this portrait, Eve's reaching for the apple is an awakening. She chooses consciousness and the difficult path of getting to know herself and what it means to be fully human.
The serpent changes meaning, too. Long before it became fixed in the Western imagination as an embodiment of evil, serpents appeared across ancient cultures as symbols of wisdom, transformation, regeneration and the divine. Like Eve, the snake sheds its skin and emerges anew.
Above her, the universe opens.
The stars become a navigational system inviting Eve beyond the boundaries of the world she has been given. She steps toward them and begins a classic hero's journey: leaving the familiar, crossing a threshold and being transformed by what she discovers.
We celebrate that journey when the hero is a man. Eve answered the call and we made hers a cautionary tale.
That mattered. Interpretations of Eve helped shape Western ideas about women for centuries. Female curiosity and independence became associated with danger while obedience and submission became virtues.
Her desire to know became something women inherited as shame.
