Eve
from Adam as an inversion. He refers to the ever recurring world-parent
myths of savage peoples, in which the son begets upon the mother a new
generation. He cites after Frobenius a story from Joruba, Africa, where
the son and daughter of the world parents marry and have a son, who falls
in love with his mother. As she refuses to yield to his passion he follows
and overpowers her. She immediately jumps up and runs away crying. The son
follows her to soothe her, and when he catches her she falls sprawling on
the earth, her body begins to swell, two streams of water spring from her
breasts and her body falls in pieces. Fifteen gods spring from her
disrupted body. [Motive of the mutilation of the maternal body. The
dismembered lion also naturally contains this motive. From the mutilated
body come male and female (red and white) children.] Rank supposes that
the biblical account of the world parents serves as a mask for incest (and
naturally at the same time the symbolic accomplishment of the incest). He
continues, "It is needed only that the infantile birth theory [Birth from
anus, navel, etc. The taking of the rib = birth process.] which ignores
the sexual organs in woman and applies to both sexes, be raised in the
child's thought to the next higher grade of knowledge, which ascribes to
the woman alone the ability to bring children into the world by the
opening of her body. In opposition to the biblical account we have the
truly natural process, according to which Adam came out of the opened body
of Eve. If by analogy with other traditions, we may take this as the
original one, it is clear that Adam has sexual intercourse with his
mother, and that the disguising of this shocking incest furnished the
motive for the displacement of the saga and for the symbolic
representation of its contents." The birth from the side of the body, from
the navel, from the anus, etc., are among children common theories of
birth. In myths analogous to the biblical apple episode the man almost
always offers the apple to the woman. The biblical account is probably an
inversion. The apple is an apple of love and an impregnation symbol.
Impregnation by food is also an infantile procreation theory. For Rank,
therefore, it is Adam who is guilty of separating the primal parents
[Jahwe and Hawwa] and of incest with the mother. The contrast between the
two preceding conceptions of the Adam myth should not be carried beyond
limits. That they can stan