Theodor Reik attempts to unravel the mystery of the Eve myth he bet gins with the two conflicting versions of the creation of woman in Genesis. In one passage, Genesis states that "God created man in his own image...male and female created he them," and in a subsequent passage that God made Adam first and then created Eve out of Adam's rib. Various interpretations offered by the rabbis, the poets, theologians, and Biblical scholars are examined, and the author shows how the statement that Eve was fashioned from Adam's rib is still unexplained despite the efforts of higher criticism, anthropology, and the comparative science of religion.
Dr. Reik offers a unique approach to the problem of the creation of woman, forming his own original and exciting assumptions. Using the findings of archaeology and anthropology as well as psychoanalysis, he explores the dark world of ritual, the tribal mysteries of primitive societies in which boys at puberty were supposed to die and be resurrected before they were permitted to marry Analytic comparison of the Eve myth with primitive ritual leads to the reconstruction of the primal form of the Biblical story and to the suggestion that it was not concerned with the birth of Eve but with the rebirth of the ancestral Adam. The author also suggests the possibility if a mother goddess in a still earlier phase: of the Hebrew religion.
The late Theodor Reik is the author of Listening with the Third Еar, The Secret Self, Myth and Guilt, and Mystery on the Mountain.
