The secular angel in contemporary children's literature: David ...

act is what brought sin into the world, which ultimately also brought pain, hunger, shame, fear
and a self-awareness that was not there before. 20 Adam and Eve were said to be in complete
peace with everything around them in the Garden of Eden. They felt no cold, no pain, and no
shame of their own bodies, so there was never a need to cover them up with clothing. 21 Thus,
they harmoniously coexisted with nature, animals, and each other. The Devil, in the form of a
serpent, is able to deceive Eve by telling her that the fruit contained divine knowledge, which
God did not wish to share with them for selfish reasons. However, whether this was accurate
was not the issue. God’s punishment was a result of their disobedience. Although He has given
them everything they could ever need in order to be safe and happy, and asked for one thing in
return —or deprived them of one tree— they are still ungrateful enough, curious enough, and
rebellious enough to ignore everything and succumb to temptation. God punishes Adam and
Eve by depriving them of everything except knowledge. He takes away security, safety,
harmony, but opens up instead the entire world to them, as if reversing the rules, or state, of
paradise.
This is exactly where Pullman applauds and praises Adam and Eve. For him, this is
humanity’s first great deed, the first step towards knowledge, the shedding of ideological
ignorance. But if Eve ‘fell’ by biting the apple —thereby defying God’s rules and
restrictions—, how does Lyra ‘fall’? By giving into her feelings for Will. Pullman describes
the Fall —consequently the new Eve’s giving in to temptation— not as something that is bad
for humanity; not a fall from grace but a liberation, the first step towards the acquisition of
knowledge, or in Pullman’s words “…the best thing, the most important thing that ever
20 See the following for a more detailed discussion of these aspects of Genesis. Neil Forsyth, The Satanic Epic,
2003; Martin Kessler and Karel Adriaan Deurloo, A Commentary on Genesis, 2004; George W. Coats, Genesis
with an Introduction to Narrative Literature, 1983; Robert Atler, The Art of Biblical Narrative, 2001; Martin
Buber and Nahum Norbert Glatzer, On the Bible: eighteen studies, 2000.
21 2:25 And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed (Genesis, Chapter 2).
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