Blood Of Eden

I sent this in an email a couple of years ago, after listening it and Peter's thoughts on it...I was thinking of Adam and Eve. I always wondered what they where like. What do you say to each other after a thing like that? I often wonder what went through Adam’s mind when he realised what Eve had done. Did he even consider his options. Did he even look at the creature before him in a different way. I mean defying God isn’t your average awkward moment around the coffee machine. And sometimes I wonder what the world would have been like if he hadn’t taken the apple. What a dull world, no big slurpy kisses, no songs of wooing, no sonnets, no Casablanca. And sometimes I wonder if all this occurred to Adam as he stood before her and perhaps he choose to bite the apple because he couldn’t bear to be without the woman he loved. That perhaps love does conquer all and sometimes, and I will tell you people that this, this is my point, that love, love conquers all, even God and maybe that’s the point. I love that big goofy bastard, I really do. Fuck, maybe Adam couldn’t take losing another body part. But what about that idea, that the fall of man was God’s greatest achievement. Hey, he’s the one who says he’s a man with a plan…

how beautiful. this ranks right up there with "Red Rain" and "Mercy Street" as being one of peter gabriel's best kept secrets.

a modest song about a fail relationship, which seems to be a recurring theme throughout this album. it would almost appear that the narrator is reaching, even longing, for simplicity in the already failed relationship. he may even be seeking love in it's purest form when Creation still was very new, the legacy of the Garden of Eden.

Adam and Eve were banished from the Garden of Eden for defying God's only request. it seems possible the narrator could have royally screwed up that led to the split.

he appears to be brooding over his regrets. and just as i am sure adam and eve wished they could have gone back and corrected their severe error in judgement, so the narrator wishes the same thing.

hey the toolshed...would you be opposed to me using the idea of your post in a movie script someday? i'd totally credit you for it...i mean, that's just amazing...i totally agree with you...it really puts the idea of "original sin" in a new perspective...

I really like what the toolshed has to say. The "moment of forgetting--a moment of bliss" is what makes us feel alive. Sure, the price of heartbreak is a great price, but for those moments of floatiing in ecstasy, soaring above the pain and "shocks that flesh is air to" (as Hamlet would say) is worth it. Each of those blissful moments to which tollshed alludes gets its sweetness from the very fact that death and suffering and heartbreak are on the other side of the coin. The Red Hot Chili Peppers would agree, as they sing: "I like pleasure spiked with pain." If there was no pain, no lapse of judgement and fall--there would be no TRUE bliss. That's the irony of life (at least for the Christian) because we want to get back to the garden, but would life be interesting. We need "imaginary gardens with real toads in them"--this is how Adrienne Rich defines poetry, and this is at the crux of what makes art so powerful--what makes this song so powerful.

As for the allusion to Macbeth in "is this a dagger or a crucifix I see," I consider the speaker in the song as one confused by guilt and the destructive force of the subject of the poem. I heard that Gabriel's divorce was a direct result of an affair on the part of his wife. I could be wrong, but I suspect, as in "Digging in the Dirt," that the shame of this cross has been devastating and destructive--after all, in Macbeth it was Lady Macbeth who brought about the fall of Dunsinane, as Eve brought man the knowledge of earthly power.

In any case, it was all worth it. It was all "for the union" which God wanted anyway--the union of love.

Please do...I genuinely touched, thank you.

The whole album the song comes from ("US") centers around his divorce. It makes for a lot of great sad songs like this one, and angry songs like "Digging in the Dirt"

Hey, I like they way you guys are thinking. ... cant wait for the film "syncicate88"! I would add, that we can only define The Garden before for the fall (i.e. oneness with the creator) in our own human and flawed terms. The very definition of "The Fall" is that life and love that we experience now are just a shadow of what they can be. And maybe the union on man and woman gives us the strongest hint of this - but its still just a shadow. ( ... and talking in metaphor - Im not a creationist!) Saw PG in Morrisons supermarket last month - in the frozen section with his son!

Hieros-Gamos.

"The knotted chord untying" is the destruction of marriage.

I think "The heated and the holy" is a reference to the Catholic Church.

This is a song about trying to patch up emotional and existential holes with consumerism. The point is that the heated and the holy are just as vulnerable to emotional turmoil, as well as to doing evil, as were Adam and Eve. In the end, wealth proves unsatisfying, and he only trully finds redemption in the embrace of his love. The blood of Eden, which flows through him and takes over in the end, is that powerful longing for connection between "the woman and the man".

"I saw the darkness in my heart" "And the darkness still has work to do "The knotted cords untying"

In this song and many others by peter gabriel, the themes of the intertwining and interpenetration of opposites can be found: the polarities of woman and man, light and darkness, insight and insanity, kindness and cruelty, agony and ecstasy, divinity and humanity, silence and sound, signal and noise. I'm sure this song has many personal meanings to him, probably related to a specific relationship and the difficulty and growth it afforded him, but he writes in a mysterious enough way that each of us can draw our own associations and meanings from the songs.

In centering this song around images of Man, Woman, Eden, Darkness, Uncertainty, Unheard Souls, Distant Thunder, Tenderness, Stillness, Bliss, and Union, there is fertile ground indeed to spawn so many meanings, one for each listener. For me, the lines I quoted initially, about darkness having to the work of untying knots is particularly interesting and meaningful. The myth of Eden is commonly called The Fall, and this connects with darkness and death (blood) and curses, but I believe peter is implying that there is something useful going on here, that these tragic separations can bring higher and more refined unions down the line. Here is my own speculation about the meaning of Woman and Man in Eden:

Maybe in the standard fall of man garden of eden myth, what was really going on was this: God told Adam and Eve not to eat of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, but this was just a kind of test to see if they had the spunk, courage, autonomy and initiative to become equal Gods with him someday. They passed, and in fact "The Fall" was really graduation from Divine Elementary School. History has been like Secondary School, in which humanity attains the awareness, social, ethical and technological sophistication and power to link together in a higher level of synergistic harmony, in which each autonomous human individual is also holonically linked and synergistically co-creating with all the others. So once we pass this test, in other words, once we figure out the social systems and psycho-spiritual development patterns to create this higher synergistic network of powerfully creative, equal, loving, harmonious, autonomous and freely interconnecting individuals then we graduate to full Godhood, and together create our universe and our own creatures. And only as we awaken to our collective Divinity will we realize that the Fall was in fact a graduation and our misperception of it as a fall was a kind of childish longing for the protection, safety and lack of responsibility of innocence. We have to get over our species-level Mother Complex, our desire to have some beneficent parental authority figure take care of us and make the tough decisions for us so we can play in innocence. Once we do, we'll realize that God as a Father has a truth to it, but now that we are mature we are equal to Him, and don't have to cower in fear from his wrath or enjoy the protection of his "omnipotent" but patronizing care. We take our place as adults in new relationship to our Creator, just as we as humans eventually take our place as relative equals with our parents once we completely grow up.