GENERAL GORDON AND THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE - A BOTANICAL FOLLY OF BIBLICAL PROPORTIONS?

The Fairy smiled, and led him into a large and lofty room, the walls of which appeared transparent... In the middle of the room stood a tree, with luxuriant hanging branches, on which golden apples, large and small, appeared amongst the green leaves. This was the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, of the fruit of which Adam and Eve had eaten. From each leaf dripped a bright red dew-drop, as if the tree were shedding tears of blood.

        Hans Christian Andersen – 'The Garden of Paradise',

                              in Hans Andersen's Fairy Tales

Holding a dehusked, hollow coco-de-mer seed or 'double coconut' (© Dr Karl Shuker)

2015 marked the 130^th anniversary of the death of one of Britain's greatest military heroes – General Charles Gordon (1833-1885). Actually attaining the rank of Major-General during a long and distinguished military career, he will forever be remembered for his many acts of outstanding bravery on the battlefield. Not least of these was his valiant stand against the Mahdi's forces during the relentlessly violent Siege of Khartoum (13 March 1884 to 26 January 1885) in Sudan that finally claimed his life and those of so many of his men as well as numerous civilians while awaiting the arrival there of a tardy relief force. In stark contrast, however, it is nowadays all but forgotten that he also held a highly unexpected but passionate belief relating to a certain tropical island and its botanical wonders.

At the end of their 10-day honeymoon spent on North Island in the Republic of Seychelles during May 2011, the UK's Prince William and his bride the former Kate Middleton (now Their Royal Highnesses the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge) received from this 115-island nation's foreign minister Jean-Paul Adam a very unusual honeymoon souvenir – the enormous 'double coconut' of the coco-de-mer tree, endemic to a handful of islands in the Seychelles archipelago.  The remarkable likeness in shape of this tree's bilobed seed to a certain part of a lady's anatomy is (in)famous, so the royal honeymooners may well have been aware of it too – but would they also have been aware, I wonder, of its alleged biblical link? Specifically, would they have realised that at least in the opinion of one very notable figure, they were now the owners of nothing less than a seed from the fruit of the Garden of Eden's Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil – the very same fruit that fatefully tempted Eve and then Adam too, causing them to be banished by God from Eden forever?

Adam and Eve alongside the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Garden of Eden, together with the pre-cursed Serpent, interestingly portrayed here as a bipedal human-headed reptile or draconopides (click here for a ShukerNature blog article on the draconopides/pre-cursed Serpent concept) – this painting is 'The Temptation', by Hugo van der Goes, 1470 (public domain)

The coco-de-mer Lodoicea maldivica (sometimes referred as Lodicea sechellarum, but this is a junior synonym) is unquestionably one of the most iconic species native to the Seychelles. Today, it occurs principally upon just a single major island – Praslin, the group's second-largest member, roughly 8 miles long. It formerly existed on several smaller isles too, all close to Praslin, but today it survives on only one of these, Curieuse, situated just off Praslin's northern coast, and is officially categorised by the IUCN as endangered. Additionally, therefore, it has been deliberately introduced to certain other Seychelles islands in order to establish new populations, thus assisting in its conservation. Belonging to the palm tree family Arecaceae, the coco-de-mer is the only member of the genus Lodoicea, coined for it by French naturalist Jacques Julien Houtou de Labillardière and generally believed to commemorate Laodice, the most beautiful daughter of Troy's King Priam (although a few researchers have suggested the French King Louis XV as a possible alternative name-source, 'Lodoicus' being Latin for 'Louis').

The coco-de-mer is a dioecious species (male and female flowers occur on separate trees), it can grow to 100 ft tall or more (with male trees being taller than females), takes 25-50 years to reach maturity, lives for well over a century (its maximum lifespan is still unknown), and sports huge, fan-shaped, leathery leaves, pale-green in colour, measuring up to 46 ft across, 13 ft long, and capturing as much as 98 per cent of all rainfall. However, its most noteworthy claim to fame, earning this tree species a place in the record books, is its gigantic fruit (shaped like a normal, single coconut) containing the huge bilobed 'double coconut' seed, which is the largest seed produced by any species of plant.

Fruit on female coco-de-mer tree (public domain)

[NB - strictly speaking, a nut is defined as a specific category of fruit - one that possesses a hard shell (the husk) and a seed inside. However, in general parlance the term 'nut' is also often used in reference to a hard-walled edible seed (as is the term 'kernel'). Consequently, in this chapter I have completely avoided using the ambiguous term 'nut', in favour of the non-interchangeable terms 'fruit' for the combination of outer shell and inner seed, and 'seed' for the seed itself. As for 'double coconut', this is a term applied specifically and famously to the coco-de-mer's bilobed seed, so I have employed it here with this same meaning.]

Exquisite engraving from 1897 depicting various palm trees, including the coco-de-mer at right of image together with its unmistakeable double coconut and catkin-like male inflorescence (public domain)

Produced by female coco-de-mer trees, the fruit measures 16-20 in across, weighs 33-66 lb (up to 39 lb of which is the weight of the seed inside it), and takes 6-7 years to mature, plus a minimum of  two further years to germinate. The seed's bilobed shape infamously lends it more than a passing resemblance in form to a woman's buttocks on one side and to her stomach and thighs on the other side (resulting in it becoming a potent fertility symbol in the Seychelles and also nurturing a traditional belief there that its pulpy white meat possesses powerful aphrodisiac properties).

And as if this wasn't sufficiently suggestive, male coco-de-mer trees produce very sizeable catkin-like inflorescences (measuring up to 3 ft long) that are decidedly phallic in shape.

Beautiful painting of the coco-de-mer's male inflorescence and its ripe fruits, produced in 1883 by Marianne North (public domain)

Not surprisingly, these distinctive features have given rise to some very colourful local legends concerning this unique species of Seychelles palm.

Indeed, one particularly popular folk-belief here is that on wild stormy nights, the male trees uproot themselves, pair up with the still-rooted female trees, and engage in passionate love-making under the cover of darkness.

Inflorescence on male coco-de-mer tree (© ViloWiki/Wikipedia CC BY-SA 3.0 licence)

The coco-de-mer's fruit is so heavy that whenever one falls into the sea, it is unable to float, sinking straight to the sea bottom instead, where it gradually rots, the husk falling away and the internal seed breaking down and releasing gas, which enables this now-hollow, bare, and much lighter structure to rise to the surface of the sea and float great distances, carried by the current. Because the seed is no longer fertile, however, even if it reaches land it cannot germinate and give rise to a tree (thus explaining this species' extremely limited distribution).

However, so spectacular is its outward form that several centuries ago these seeds would command enormous prices as greatly-prized curiosities among the more wealthy collectors, or were given as gifts to royalty (a tradition upheld with William and Kate!).

A bilobed de-husked hollow nut or double coconut of the coco-de-mer tree (© Dr Karl Shuker)

The Seychelles first became known to the West via Portuguese explorer Vasco de Gama's recorded sighting of these islands in 1502, and the coco-de-mer tree itself was formally discovered in 1768 by a French engineer named Barré, who was sent to explore Praslin following France's acquisition of this archipelago during the 1740s. Long before these events, however, this tree's spectacular seed was already well known to fishermen in such diverse localities as the Maldives, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, and India. This is because hollow, internally-rotted specimens were sometimes carried by the sea from the Seychelles to the shores of these and other countries with Indian Ocean coastlines. Indeed, it was the finding of such seeds around the Maldives that led to the mistaken belief among some early naturalists that the tree which produced them must exist somewhere here, thus earning it the maldivica portion of its binomial taxonomic name.

Moreover, the seeds' presence on the sea surface led the fishermen to believe that they must have originated from some majestic form of underwater tree ('coco-de-mer' is French for 'sea coconut'), growing in stately splendour beneath the waves. Some even believed that a griffin-like monster-bird deity called Garuda lived in this subaquatic tree's mighty branches, from where it would periodically rise up to hunt elephants and tigers – all complete fantasy, yet still being reiterated, albeit sceptically, as recently as the 1700s by the likes of German botanist Georg Eberhard Rumpf (aka Rumphius) in his 6-volume magnum opus, the Herbarium Amboinense, which was published posthumously in 1741 (almost 40 years after his death).

My wooden statuette of Garuda, from Bali (© Dr Karl Shuker)

Strange as these notions might seem, however, an even stranger one would not only be aired but also be fervently supported by a very notable historical figure during the late 1800s.

The figure in question was none other than the celebrated British army officer and diplomat Major-General Charles George Gordon – Gordon of Khartoum – and his avowed if highly eccentric belief was that the coco-de-mer tree was in fact the Garden of Eden's Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil as alluded to in the Bible. But how and why did he come to believe in such an extraordinary notion?

Major-General Charles George Gordon (public domain)

Spurred on by his deeply-held religious beliefs as an evangelical Christian, Gordon had long been passionately (some would even say obsessively) interested in attempting to track down present-day localities that might correspond to various significant sites described in the Bible – in particular the Garden of Eden.

Traditionally, the favoured sites among those who believe that the Garden of Eden truly existed have been in the Middle East, two of the most popular suggestions being a location at the head of the Persian Gulf or one close to Tabriz in Iranian Azerbaijan. As for the Tree of Knowledge: scholars considering it to have been real rather than merely symbolic have typically supported conservative, non-controversial identities for it, such as a species of fig tree or apple tree. Gordon, however, nurtured radically different ideas – ideas that concerned a location far removed from the Middle East, and an exotic tree that bore a fruit much more extraordinary than any fig or apple.

'The Garden of Eden', Thomas Cole, c 1828 (public domain)

During the early 1880s, Gordon spent time in Mauritius as Commander of the Royal Engineers, and in 1881 he visited the Seychelles archipelago (then part of the Crown Colony of Mauritius), about 1000 miles further north, on a military engagement. This was of particular interest to him for non-military reasons too, however, because his Kabbalistic scrutiny of the Bible's Book of Genesis, coupled with his knowledge of geography and place-name etymology, had indicated to him that here may be clues to Eden's location.

Gordon subscribed to what was then the popular theory that a once-mighty but long-since-sunken continent called Lemuria formerly spanned the Indian Ocean from Madagascar to India, and when he entered a lush green valley on Praslin known today as the Vallée de Mai (May Valley), he became convinced that this idyllic tropical location was a last surviving remnant of the Garden of Eden, with the remainder now lying beneath the waves near to Praslin. Moreover, as he gazed up in stupefied awe at its forest of magnificent coco-de-mer trees, present in great profusion and towering above him on every side in this magical, secluded place, Gordon felt certain that these wondrous plants were the direct descendants of the original Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil created by God and present in Eden at the very beginning of the world.

Vallée de Mai (public domain)

Indeed, Gordon deemed it likely that the coco-de-mer seed's suggestive form would have contributed to the temptation that the Tree of Knowledge's forbidden fruit represented. For as he was later to comment to leading British botanist Sir William T. Thiselton-Dyer, at that time the assistant director at Kew's Royal Botanic Gardens:

The fruit is shaped like the human heart, the bud or stem which attaches it to the branch like the male organ of generation. When the husk is taken off, the inner double nut [i.e. seed] is like the belly or thigh of a woman...In a word, its lines are those of the male and female organs of generation, and it is a fruit which cannot fail to attract attention by any one seeing it.

Evidently warming to his theme, in his records Gordon also wrote:

Externally the coco-de-mer represents the belly and thighs, the true seat of carnal desires...[which] caused the plague of our forefathers in the Garden of Eden.

Lending further support to this grandiose notion, at least according to Gordon, was the fact that these trees even possessed their very own Serpent – a 3-ft-long species of green snake that can frequently be found living amid their foliage. This is almost certainly the Seychelles wolfsnake Lycognathophis seychellensis, an endemic species that is variously green or brown in colour.

Nor was that all. Gordon also considered the breadfruit trees Artocarpus altilis present on Praslin to be descended from Eden's original Tree of Life, whose fruit had sustained Adam and Eve during their time in the Garden. For as he already knew well, breadfruit was a staple food not only in the Seychelles but also in Mauritius, as well as in many other locations around the world.

Breadfruit, painted by Marguerite Girvin Gillin, c.1884 (public domain)

Yet if Praslin's Vallée de Mai was truly derived from the Garden of Eden, how could its presence in the middle of the Indian Ocean be explained? Easily, in Gordon's view – because he considered Praslin and the other Seychelles islands to be remnants of the vanished continent of Lemuria, which, he believed, had existed at the world's beginning but had sunk forever beneath the waves during the Great Flood.

So taken was Gordon with his identification of Eden as having existed just offshore of Praslin, with the Vallée de Mai its last surviving portion, and the coco-de-mer as the Tree of Knowledge, with its immense fruit the still-existing instrument of humanity's fall and expulsion from Eden at the dawn of time, that he wrote various articles and corresponded with a number of authorities, including those at Kew in 1882, as well as William Scott, director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Pamplemousses, near Port Louis, Mauritius, concerning his eccentric beliefs.

Vallée de Mai palm forest (© Brocken Inaglory/Wikipedia CC BY-SA 3.0 licence)

He also sent specimens of the coco-de-mer and breadfruit tree fruits to Kew, and even prepared a detailed map in which he linked Praslin to the four rivers mentioned in the Bible as landmarks for Eden. Unsurprisingly, however, his beliefs were not greeted with enthusiasm from contemporary scientists and writers. In particular, Gordon's concept of the coco-de-mer with its gargantuan double coconut as a plausible contender for the Tree of Knowledge was swiftly and robustly dismissed by his critics.

After all, as pointed out very reasonably by writer and onetime Seychelles resident H. Watley Estridge, for instance, how was Eve meant to climb to the top of a 100-ft-tall tree and carry down with her a fruit almost 2 ft across and weighing up to 66 lb (heavier than 3 bowling balls!), and then take a bite through its immensely hard, 4-in-thick husk before offering it to Adam? True, she might have sought one that had already fallen to the ground; however, the Bible specifically states that Eve had stretched out her hand and plucked a fruit – clearly implying that she had taken it directly from the tree.

Eve stretching out her hand and plucking a fruit from the Tree of Knowledge, as portrayed in 'The Garden of Eden With the Fall of Man' by Jan Brueghel the Elder and Pieter Paul Rubens (public domain)

Alternatively, as Gordon deftly represented in a detailed drawing prepared by him, the afore-mentioned green snake associated with coco-de-mer trees on Praslin could have made its way up the tree to fetch one for Eve. Yet this option has to assume of course that such a modestly-sized reptile actually possessed the strength and dexterity to carry it back down to her (or even to bite through its sturdy stem so that it would then fall to the ground) after securing one!

However, the considerable problem posed by Adam and Eve lacking the necessary density of dentition to avoid breaking their teeth when attempting to bite through its rock-hard exterior and equally firm kernel inside seemingly defied all attempts at resolution. Even the resourceful Gordon himself was at a loss to provide a satisfactory response to this particular obstacle.

Breadfruit tree in the Seychelles (public domain)

Equally, how could the breadfruit tree be descended from Eden's Tree of Life when it wasn't even endemic to the Seychelles? This species' ancestral, wild homeland was New Guinea (and possibly the Moluccas and Philippines too), from where it was subsequently introduced to many Polynesian islands, beginning around 3000 years ago, and from these to the Caribbean by the French during the late 1700s, and thence to the Maldives, the Seychelles, Mauritius, Madagascar, Africa, much of Asia, Central and South America, northern Australia, and southern Florida.

As for Lemuria, what physical proof was there to support the theory that this supposedly lost continent had ever existed to begin with? None, at least as far as the scientific world was – and still is – concerned, with no known geological formation under the Indian Ocean corresponding to Lemuria, and with the discontinuities in biogeography that the concept of Lemuria seemed to explain during the 1800s later being rendered superfluous and obsolete by modern theories of continental drift and plate tectonics.

Map of Lemuria superimposed on the modern continents, from William Scott-Elliot's book The Story of Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria, 1896 (public domain)

Following Gordon's tragic death in 1885, his idiosyncratic theories regarding Eden, its Tree of Knowledge, and their supposed link to the Seychelles fell into disrepute and were swiftly discarded, scarcely even referred to, let alone documented in detail, within modern-day publications – until now.

Nevertheless, the magic and mystery surrounding the coco-de-mer lives on. For with ultimate, bare-faced irony, the species whose female trees notoriously produce enormous, unashamedly lewd seeds that impersonate a woman's pelvis and whose male trees infamously yield huge, decidedly phallic inflorescences laden with pollen has never revealed the modus operandi by which its pollination is actually effected in the wild state.

How ironic it would be if the Seychelles' 'Tree of Knowledge' were found to be pollinated by a serpent! (public domain)

Is the male tree's pollen simply dispersed by the wind (anemophily), or is pollination a zoophilous process (i.e. involving animals, perhaps insects, or birds, or bats, or even reptiles)? How deliciously delightful (not to mention supremely ironic) it would be if the coco-de-mer's pollinator proved to be none other than the green snake that lurks amid its foliage – or the Tree of Knowledge propagated by the Serpent, as Gordon might have described such a discovery.

Yet not even Gordon, surely, could ever have imagined anything quite as Fortean as that!

An extremely unusual portrayal of the Tree of Knowledge – 'Tree of Knowledge (Initiation)', by Mordecai Moreh (copyright free)

SELECTED REFERENCES

ANON. (n.d.). Coco de mer. Botanic Gardens Conservation International, https://www.bgci.org/ourwork/coco_de_mer/

ANON. (n.d.). Coco-de-mer. 3am Thoughts, https://3amthoughts.com/article/miscellaneous/coco-de-mer

ANON. (2010). Study of coco-de-mer – Lodicea sechellarum. Kew Royal Botanic Gardens website, http://images.kew.org/study-of-coco-de-mer-lodicea-sechellarum/print/7899198.html 3 February.

ANON. (2011). I should coco… Wills and Kate are given rare aphrodisiac 'love nut' as honeymoon gift. Daily Mail (London), http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1389748/Kate-Middleton-Prince-William-given-rare-aphrodisiac-love-nut-honeymoon-gift.html 23 May.

ASPIN, Richard (2014). Spotlight: General Gordon's Tree of Life. Wellcome Library Blog, http://blog.wellcomelibrary.org/2014/04/spotlight-general-gordons-tree-of-life/ 17 April.

BLACKBURN, Julia (1995). The Book of Colour: A Family Memoir. Jonathan Cape (London).

EMBODEN, William A. (1974). Bizarre Plants: Magical, Monstrous, Mythical. Studio Vista (London).

LEY, Willy (1955). Salamanders and Other Wonders: Still More Adventures of a Romantic Naturalist. Viking Press (New York).

POLLOCK, John (1993). Gordon: The Man Behind the Legend. Constable (London).

SCOTT, Tim (2011). Royal honeymooners' 'erotic' Seychelles souvenir. BBC News, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/9538059.stm 16 July.

An almost dream-like portrayal of Eve being tempted by the Serpent alongside the Tree of Knowledge and a sleeping Adam in the Garden of Eden, by William Blake (public domain)

A BIPEDAL SNAKE IN THE GARDEN OF EDEN? WHAT DID THE PRE-CURSED SERPENT LOOK LIKE?

'The Temptation' - Hugo van der Goes, 1470

This thought-provoking subject has always been one of my favourite zoo-theological mysteries, so when I was preparing the text for my eventual book Mysteries of Planet Earth (2001), I penned a very extensive account devoted to it, but unfortunately this had to be edited down in order to fit the space allocated to it in the book. Now, however, for the very first time anywhere, I have great pleasure in presenting here - as a ShukerNature world-exclusive - the hitherto-unseen, original, unedited version of this account, which also includes some additional illustrations not published in the book.

An early passage in the Bible is responsible for one of the classic serpentine sources of theological speculation and controversy among scholars of Scripture. When God learnt that the serpent in the Garden of Eden had successfully tempted Eve and thence Adam to eat the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, He cursed the serpent (Genesis, 3: 14-15):

"And the Lord God said unto the serpent, Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life:
And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel."

According to this account, therefore, the serpent only acquired its present-day form, as a limbless creature slithering upon its undersurface, after it had been cursed - which begs the oft-posed theological question: "What did it look like before it was cursed?".

The Bible itself offers little in the way of clues. Apart from revealing that it could converse directly with Adam and Eve, the only reference to the pre-cursed serpent (Genesis, 3: 1) states: "Now the serpent was more subtil [sic] than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made". Even so, theologians and artists have offered many putative answers.

Some theologians have been in no doubt that the serpent was physically transformed by God's curse. Thus, in their Biblical Commentary on the Old Testament, Vol. 1 (1866), Carl F. Keil and Franz Delitzsch unequivocally stated:

"The punishment of the serpent corresponded to the crime. It had exalted itself above the man; therefore upon its belly it should go, and dust it should eat all the days of its life. If these words are not to be robbed of their entire meaning, they cannot be understood in any other way than as denoting that the form and movements of the serpent were altered, and that its present repulsive shape is the effect of the curse pronounced upon it, though we cannot form any accurate idea of its original appearance. Going upon the belly (=creeping, Lev. xi. 42) was a mark of the deepest degradation; also the eating of dust, which is not to be understood as meaning that dust was to be its only food, but that while crawling in the dust it would also swallow dust."

Notwithstanding the above authors' claim, rabbinical tradition formulated a number of ideas regarding the serpent's appearance before it received God's curse. According to the Zohar (Book of Splendour), which constitutes the main text of the Jewish Qabalah (Kabbalah) and provides a vast commentary upon the Pentateuch, in its pre-cursed form it had stood upright on two hind legs, just like humans, and was as tall as a camel. Similarly, certain ancient Egyptian carvings depict the pre-cursed serpent as an exceedingly slender biped with a long neck and tail, a pair of lengthy arms, and standing slightly taller than a human on two elongate hind legs, offering Adam a fruit with one of its paws. When it was cursed, however, God (or St Michael, according to St Barnabas's apocryphal gospel) cut off its arms and legs, thereby yielding the limbless snake known today. God also took away its power of human speech by splitting its tongue, so that it could only hiss thereafter.

Antiquarian engraving of a winged snake

Another school of thought favoured the idea that the pre-cursed serpent was a winged snake. In his Commentary Upon the Whole Bible (1708-10), Matthew Henry opined:

"Perhaps it was a flying serpent, which seemed to come from on high as a messenger from the upper world, one of the seraphim; for the fiery serpents were flying, Isa. xiv. 29. Many a dangerous temptation comes to us in gay fine colours that are but skin-deep, and seems to come from above; for Satan can seem an angel of light."

Other scholars have speculated that the serpent's transformation may not have been physical at all, but merely figurative. In his Commentaries on the First Book of Moses Called Genesis (1948), John Calvin suggested that there is:

"...no absurdity in supposing, that the serpent was again consigned to that former condition, to which he was already naturally subject. For thus he, who had exalted himself against the image of God, was to be thrust back into his proper rank;...he is recalled from his insolent motions to his accustomed mode of going, in such a way as to be, at the same time, condemned to perpetual infamy. To eat dust is the sign of a vile and sordid nature. This (in my opinion) is the simple meaning of the passage."

And Frank E. Gaebelein, editing The Expositor's Bible Commentary (1990), opined:

"This curse does not necessarily suggest that the snake had previously walked with feet and legs as the other land animals. The point is rather that for the rest of his life, as a result of the curse, when the snake crawls on his belly, as snakes do, he will "eat dust." The emphasis lies in the snake's 'eating dust,' an expression that elsewhere carries the meaning of 'total defeat' (cf. Isa 65: 25, Mic 7: 17)."

Yet another facet of this biblical event that has engendered considerable theological contention is whether the serpent was indeed merely a reptile, i.e. a corporeal animal, or whether it was Satan in the guise of a snake, or even a snake controlled by Satan. Leading on from this line of thought is whether, therefore, God's curse was indeed imposed upon the serpent, or whether it was actually imposed upon Satan. Quoting theologian Winterbotham:

"1. I lay down the position that no punishment in the way of physical degradation was inflicted by God in His sentence upon the serpent tribe.
2. I lay down the position, which I think no one will seriously dispute, that the real tempter was not the serpent at all, but the devil.
3. I conclude from the foregoing positions, and conclude with confidence, that the serpent was not really cursed at all, while the devil was."

A comparable diversity of views have manifested themselves in artistic representations of the serpent too. As already noted, early Egyptian carvings portrayed an erect, bipedal being, whereas early European painters tended to depict it as a normal, limbless snake coiled around the Tree of Knowledge. By the 12th Century AD, however, a shift in opinion had occurred, and European artists began portraying a somewhat more humanoid version - often with a snake's body but the head (and sometimes also the arms) of a woman - a trend that crossed from art into literature too. One famous early example is artwork by Benjamin the Scribe, produced in c.1280, portraying Adam and Eve flanking a serpent with the head, arms, and upper torso of a woman.

Adam, Eve, and draconopides version of Eden serpent - Benjamin the Scribe, c.1280

This hybrid serpent-woman monster also gained its own name, the draconopides (other variations upon this name include draconiopides, draconcopedes, and draconipes), which is actually a decidedly inappropriate name for a serpent-bodied entity lacking hind legs, bearing in mind that 'draconopides' translates as 'dragon-footed'! Intriguingly, moreover, the draconopides image was sometimes utilised by artists depicting Lilith.

Rabbinical lore claims that Adam's first wife was not Eve, but Lilith, made by God from dust like Adam (rather than from one of Adam's ribs, like Eve), and who therefore refused to be subjugated by Adam. Instead, she deserted him, becoming an evil demon, and in some texts she is made synonymous with the serpent - tempting Adam and his new wife, Eve, with the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge and thereby causing humanity's Fall.

Adam, Eve, and draconopides version of Eden serpent in relief at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, France

By the 15th Century, certain painters had created even more complex, elaborate serpents. Dating from c.1473, François Fouquet's painting 'Le Péché Originel' ('The Original Sin' - a title also used by several other artists for their versions of this same scene) depicts the serpent with a typically elongate anguiniform lower body, wrapped around the tree, but also with the upper body, arms, and head of a woman, and a pair of extended bat-like wings. A comparable depiction of this enigmatic reptilian entity but without the wings also occurs in the temptation scene portrayed in one of the panels comprising Michelangelo's glorious series of paintings on the ceiling of the Vatican's Sistine Chapel (1508-12).

Temptation scene, Sistine Chapel Ceiling - Michelangelo, 1508-12

Other draconopides portrayals were produced by the likes of Masolino da Panicale, Raphael, and Cornelius van Haarlem.

'The Temptation of Adam and Eve' - Masolino da Panicale, c.1425, fresco in Brancacci Chapel at the Church of Santa Maria del Carmine, in Florence, Italy

'The Original Sin' - Raphael

'The Original Sin' - Cornelius van Haarlem, 1592

During 1425-38, Jacapo della Quercia had meticulously sculpted a stunning relief of Adam, Eve, and a draconopides Eden serpent for Bologna's San Petronio.

'Peccado Originale' ('The Original Sin') - Jacapo della Quercia, 1425-38

There have also been some very spectacular draconopides depictions portrayed in stained-glass windows. One particularly impressive example, dating from 1420, can be found in Ulm Cathedral, Germany.

Even more striking, however, is the Eden serpent as portrayed in 'The Temptation' in 1470 by 15th-Century Flemish painter Hugo van der Goes, constituting the left-hand panel of a diptych now housed at Vienna's Kunsthistorisches Museum. As seen here at the beginning of this blog post and also below, van der Goes conceived it as a bipedal, web-footed lizard with a long tail and a woman's head, whose hair was plaited into horns, leaning against the Tree of Knowledge alongside Adam and Eve.

Postage stamp from Ajman depicting 'The Temptation' by Hugo van der Goes, 1470

Back in the days before Charles Darwin's explanation of limblessness in snakes - as a natural and advantageous evolutionary process - was accepted by the scientific community (which currently deems that snakes evolved from marine limbed lizards called mosasaurs), some naturalists offered their own input into the long-running discussion as to the pre-cursed serpent's likely morphology. One of the most memorable suggestions was proffered by enthusiastic amateur naturalist Frank Buckland, who was very intrigued that boas and pythons possess vestiges of hind legs beneath their skin, as well as two hook-like claws near their tail. In his book Curiosities of Natural History (1858), he explained these as follows:

"Supposing, then, the pre-Adamite [i.e. pre-cursed] snake to have gone on four legs, we might explain the passage by saying that after the curse the legs were struck off, but that the undeveloped legs were left (concealed, however, from casual observers) as evidence of what it formerly had been, and a type of its fallen condition."

In other words, these were remnants of earlier fully-formed limbs, exactly as postulated by evolution - thus providing an example of science and Scripture in full agreement.

Finally, and still on the subject of the original Eden serpent, several years ago a truly extraordinary claim attracted worldwide media interest - namely, that a mysterious sample of scaly skin preserved in a certain American institution reputedly originated from this selfsame reptile of biblical ill-repute! Here is what I wrote about this remarkable allegation and the facts behind it in my book Karl Shuker's Alien Zoo (2010):

"One of the most enigmatic yet hitherto-obscure zoological relics held in any scientific establishment must surely be the 8-inch by 4-inch piece of scaly rusty-red leathery skin contained inside Archive Box #1920.1714 within the very sizeable collection of the Chicago Historical Society. For according to its yellowing French label, this is supposedly a genuine piece of skin from the very serpent that tempted Eve in the Garden of Eden! Indeed, the label goes on to say that the serpent was killed by Adam on the day after its treachery to Eve, using a stake whose traces can be seen on this skin sample, which was preserved by his family in Asia. Affixed to the skin is a document written on velum or similar hide in an Asian script. The society purchased this mystifying exhibit, along with many other items, in 1920 from the eclectic collection of Chicago confectioner Charles F. Gunther - a grand collector of curiosities. Although the society's chief curator, Olivia Mahoney, has no doubt that it is a fraud (as opposed to a bona fide piece of snakeskin dating back to the dawn of time), no research has ever been conducted on it to ascertain what it really is. Moreover, Mahoney is very reluctant to permit any, in case the skin is damaged, and also because in her view it is so evidently a fake. That may well be, but it still doesn't answer what - if not a sample of skin from the Eden serpent - this anomalous object is.

"As noted by the Chicago Sun-Times newspaper's religion writer, Cathleen Falsani - who viewed and wrote about this biblical(?) relic in a 10 October 2003 report - after watching it being carried back in its box to the society's archives: "I couldn't help thinking about that scene from ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’, where the Ark of the Covenant, and all of its power, is crated up and wheeled into a military warehouse among thousands of other generic crates. I wonder what else might be hiding anonymously in a quiet corner of a museum archive somewhere else, waiting to shock us with its mystery". What else indeed?"

To conclude this account, here are a selection of paintings depicting 'The Original Sin' that feature the Eden serpent as a draconopides, but whose respective artists are currently unknown to me. So if anyone can identify any or all of them, I'd love to hear from you!

Interestingly, this last version depicts the Eden serpent not as a serpent-bodied woman but rather as a serpent-bodied male devil, thereby providing a more direct visual link between this reptile and Satan.

UPDATE: 12 August 2017

I've just discovered that on 18 October 2012, this entire ShukerNature blog article of mine was copied verbatim, together with all of its illustrations, by someone with the username FallenAngels TV onto their own blog, but without even doing me the courtesy of including a credit or link to my article - instead, it is actually attributed to this person ("by FallenAngels TV"). Moreover, it is currently still online (here), but does not include any means of contacting them without having first to become a member of their website, which I have no wish to do. It is often said that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, so perhaps I should feel extremely flattered, but I don't. As far as I'm concerned, this is theft of my work, blatant infringement of my article's copyright, pure and simple, so if anyone reading this update has any suggestions as to what steps I could take, I would greatly appreciate them.

 

 

UPDATE: 6 November 2023

 

Today I visited a village called Rubery on the far side of Birmingham, England, from where I live on the recommendation of a friend, Tim, who had noted the abundance of its charity shops and the quality of their contents. He wasn't wrong! Here's what I purchased for just £2 - a very heavy 30" x 23.5" framed, glass-fronted reproduction of a detail from Raphael's famous 'Adam and Eve' painting in one of his frescos, c.1508. What makes it especially interesting to me is that he has portrayed the Serpent as Lilith (Adam's first wife according to certain theological writings and beliefs) in draconopides form (half-woman, half-snake). Not sure where exactly it will be accommodated within my house, as free wall space is at an absolute premium here now), but having written a great deal down through the years about the draconopides representation of the Eden Serpent, including this present ShukerNature blog article, there was no way whatsoever that I was not bringing this wonderful item back home with me! And here it is:

 

 

 

My framed, glass-fronted reproduction of a detail from Raphael's 'Adam and Eve' painting (photograph (c) Dr Karl Shuker / original Raphael painting in public domain)