he first Obeah man; and then comparing the experiences
of that hapless pair in Eden, with their own after certain orgies not yet
extinct in Africa and elsewhere, would be only too well understood: so
well, indeed, that he might run some risk of eating himself, not of the
tree of life, but of that of death. The sorcerer or sorceress tempting
the woman; and then the woman tempting the man; this seems to be,
certainly among savage peoples, and, alas! too often among civilised
peoples also, the usual course of the world-wide tragedy.

But--paradoxical as it may seem--the woman's yielding before the man is
not altogether to her dishonour, as those old monks used to allege who
hated, and too often tortured, the sex whom they could not enjoy. It is
not to the woman's dishonour, if she felt, before her husband, higher
aspirations than those after mere animal pleasure. To be as gods,
knowing good and evil, is a vain and foolish, but not a base and brutal,
wish. She proved herself thereby--though at an awful cost--a woman, and
not an animal. And indeed the woman's more delicate organisation, her
more vivid emotions, her more voluble fancy, as well as her mere physical
weakness and weariness, have been to her, in all ages, a special source
of temptation which it is to her honour that she has resisted so much
better than the physically stronger, and therefore more culpable, man.

As for what the tree of knowledge was, there really is no need for us to
waste our time in guessing. If it was not one plant, then it was
another. It may have been something which has long since perished off
the earth. It may have been--as some learned men have guessed--the
sacred Soma, or Homa, of the early Brahmin race; and that may have been a
still existing narcotic species of Asclepias. It certainly was not the
vine. The language of the Hebrew Scripture concerning it, and the sacred
use to which it is consecrated in the Gospels, forbid that notion
utterly; at least to those who know enough of antiquity to pass by, with
a smile, the theory that the wines mentioned in Scripture were not
intoxicating. And yet--as a fresh corroboration of what I am trying to
say--how fearfully has that noble gift to man been abused for the same
end as a hundred other vegetable products, ever since those mythic days
when Dionusos brought the vine from the far East, amid troops of human
Maenads and half-human Satyrs; and the Bacchae tore Pentheus in pieces on
Cit