From: "Roy C. Lackey" <rclackey@stic.net>
Subject: (urth) Dhoss bhoyes
Date: Tue, 22 May 2001 16:08:19 

Further perusal of HEBREW MYTHS yields the following wrt the fratricide of
Cain and Abel:

"Still others hold that the brothers quarrelled for love of the First Eve,
whom God had formed to be Adam's helpmeet, but who had been rejected." (16.
d)

Lilith had been God's first attempt at giving Adam a "helpmeet" (because
Adam had been envious of the coupling of the male-female pairs of the
beasts, but bestiality didn't prove to be his cup of tea), but that didn't
work out for the reason given in an earlier post. So:

"Undismayed by His failure to give Adam a suitable helpmeet, God tried
again, and let him watch while he built up a woman's anatomy: using bones,
tissues, muscles, blood and glandular secretions, then covering the whole
with skin and adding tufts of hair in places. The sight caused Adam such
disgust that even when this woman, the First Eve, stood there in her full
beauty, he felt an invincible repugnance. God knew that He had failed once
more, and took the First Eve away. Where she went, nobody knows for
certain." (10. f)

God's third attempt, using Adam's rib, was satisfactory, yielding the Eve we
are more familiar with. As I have indicated before, Wolfe has a tendency to
conflate and otherwise rearrange mythological elements to suit himself,
which is what he seems to me to have done in "Copperhead". Thus "Dhoss
bhoyes, de vhun keels de odder", I still maintain refers to Cain and Abel,
whether or not it also refers to the murdered man and Boone. Wolfe has
conflated Lilith and the First Eve of Hebrew mythology and made her the
cause of the biblical first fratricide.

-Roy


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