Detail of a pillar on the portal dedicated to the Virgin Mary in the Cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris, dating from about 1210. The scene represents the Original Sin, showing Eve while extends to Adam the forbidden fruit, whereas among the branches of the tree the serpent is sneaking out. The serpent is represented with the upper part of the body in human female form. It is commonly believed that this depiction referred to the female demon Lilith, who, according to a tradition which is found in Jewish folklore, was Adam’s first wife. She was regarded as a wild woman, greedy for sex, without knowledge of good and evil. She had generated with Adam all the demons haunting the world, and afterwards she fled herself among them. Since then, she accomplished nocturnal misdeeds: killing newborn babies and arousing in men dreams of a sexual nature. Lilith was a female demon, the “grandmother of the Devil” of folklore, and also the Devil’s concubine, who incarnated the original demonic nature of the woman (Flasch 2007, p. 28). The Original Sin, which in Genesis is described as a sin of pride and a challenge launched from man to God, became during the Middle Ages a sexual sin. The body thus became, in the medieval world, the great defeated, the symbol of the condition determined by Adam and Eve’s fault (Le Goff–Truong 2005).

[Image: http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cath%C3%A9drale_Notre-Dame_de_Paris# mediaviewer/File:Temptation_Adam_Eva.jpg