User blog:FTWinchester/Eve Mother of All and Biblical Eve Parallels

On Eve and the Biblical Eve Parallels
[Meta-theory time, first posted in my tumblr.]

So as we all Supernatural fans understand it, the Eve we have is not the biblical wife of the biblical Adam. Supernatural introduces an Eve to us that is the Mother of All Monsters, and the matriarch of Purgatory. She is considered an ancient being, far older than angels themselves, and is to all monsters as God is to us men. Even her speech in And Then There Were None indicates this, ''Your father made you and then abandoned you, so you pray. You see signs where there’s nothing. But truth is, your apocalypse came and went, and you didn’t even notice. A mother would never abandon her children like he did. You’ll see.'' So we get a character that gave life to all monsters (vampires, werewolves, skinwalkers, shapeshifters, etc.), is incredibly powerful, and rules over in Purgatory. She is basically more akin to Echidna of Greek Mythology (basically and literally Mother-of-All-Eve’s character).

However, this Eve still references a lot of things from the Eve in the Bible. Sometime during the opening of Season 8, popular fan theory went around that Purgatory as a darkened forest was probably the forgotten Garden of Eden, with Eve left within as a punishment. While this is hard to prove, but can also not be disproved yet, it reminded me of something else that lends credence to the idea that this Eve have connections with that of the Bible. In Mommy Dearest, Eve spoke of the natural order of things. This is the transcript of the episode, EVE: Relax. I’m not here to fight.

DEAN: No? Just to rally every freak on the planet, bring in Khan Worms and-and half-assed spider-men, and dragons. Really, sister? Dragons?

EVE: So I dusted off some of the old classics. I needed help.

SAM: With what? (scoffs) Tearing apart the planet?

EVE: You misunderstand me. I never wanted that. Not at first. (Sam scoffs.) I liked our arrangement.

SAM: What arrangement?

EVE: The natural order. My children turned a few of you, you hunted a few of them. I was happy.

DEAN: Okay, so what changed?

EVE: My children, no thanks to you, started getting kidnapped and tortured. Even my first borns. I was pushed into this. After all, a mother defends her children. Thing is, right after God found out that Eve disobeyed His orders and took a bite out of the fruit of the tree of life, God punished Adam and Eve, forced them out of Eden, punished man into a life of labor and toil, punished woman for childbirth, cursed the serpent to crawl into its belly forever. And then there is one more thing. This, And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her Seed; He shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise His heel (Genesis 3:15). <p style="margin-top:0px;margin-bottom:16px;">This verse indicates that the serpent will continuously attempt to bring pain and cause humans to falter and sin, and in retaliation, the son of man will strike the serpent and its young in the head. Remember Eve and the natural order she agreed to before she was dragged into a three-way war because of Heaven and Hell?

<p style="margin-top:0px;margin-bottom:16px;">She lets her children turn some of the humans into monsters (the serpent will bruise his heel), and hunters kill some of the monsters (the son of man will bruise the serpent’s head). While the Mother-of-All-Eve here is represented not by the wife-of-Adam-Eve, but by the serpent instead, it is interesting to note that this parallel is a really strong one, and it is most likely that this reference was meant to allude to this Bible verse. In addition, God punishing Eve into the pains of childbirth is very much obvious with the Mother of All as well. Remember how Crowley pointed out Eve’s body still made and laid eggs even after her death? Not even her death could lift that punishment. She is to forever bear children.

In fact, given the above parallels, the ONLY thing stopping me from concluding that the Mother-of-All-Eve is NOT the wife-of-Adam-Eve is that the former is older than the angels. If she was the first woman cursed into becoming the mother of monsters, then she would not be older than the angels, who were made before men. Bar that contradiction, then the theory that Purgatory as the monstrous Garden of Eve actually has a good chance to happen.

If we take speculation to another level, Eve was supposedly made from a rib of Adam, the first man. Guess who else belongs to Purgatory that shares a lot of characteristics with, and is most likely older than Eve? If you answered the Leviathans, you would be correct. And it is canon that at least some of the higher-ranking Leviathans knew Eve. However, the show never made the relationship clear. Who came first? How did Eve come to be? The list goes on. But if we are to work with the speculation that the Garden of Eden is Purgatory, then Eve might have sprung to life from a Leviathan—perhaps the head Leviathan. Perhaps I’d also drop a friendly reminder that the first beasts (a description used by Death to the Leviathans) also roamed in the Garden of Eden, before the highest form of beast (man, but in this meta-sense, possibly Dick Roman?) lived.

In Like a Virgin, Eve was released from Purgatory by dragons. This maybe a stretch, but dragons in literature are sometimes described to be (great) serpents. Eve was tempted out of paradise by a serpent, and Eve was summoned out of Purgatory by dragons. In other words, serpents. Also, Eve had no child (and was therefore, most probably a virgin) before she was tempted, and Eve needed a virgin girl as her vessel to manifest on earth.

The latter points are quite shaky parallels, but they aren’t without bases. Anyway, as I believe the writers will never satisfactorily answer at least our major questions on Purgatory, Eve and the Leviathans, I took it as my personal mission to try to answer them.