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So Cuvier says; – and then shall come againUnto the new Creation, rising outFrom our old crash, some mystic, ancient strainOf things destroyed and left in airy doubt (9.38.297-300).This is largely a comment on the obscurity of history, although it does serve to raisethe existence of Cuvier’s cyclical model as a competitor to a linear reading of the“sacred history” of the Genesis account. 232 Such jocular references to religious beliefand particularly to sacred narratives rarely make any particularly definite claims aboutreligion in themselves, but their very frequency demonstrates the significance ofreligion as a topic of common discourse. Throughout Don Juan, references toorthodox religious ideas and to the value of religious belief construct a positiverepresentation of faith, provided that it avoids hypocritical behaviour. Within thisdiscourse, as presented by the poem, the Fall is repeatedly represented as “true”(14.23.179), and thus provides a historical analogue for a description of Gulbayez:Her form had all the softness of her sex,Her features all the sweetness of the devil,When he put on the cherub to perplexEve, and paved (God knows how) the road to evil (5.109.865-8).Once again, “God knows”, and the text is describing here as incomprehensibleprecisely what occurred in the Fall, an event which the Bible represents as the worstchoice of history, a decision incomprehensibly wrong. In another biblical referenceJohnson tells the hero, who is now dressed as a woman, “Keep your good name;though Eve herself once fell” (5.84.670): there is a serious edge to advising vigilanceto a pretty young man, enslaved and dressed as a woman, in Ottoman Turkey. This isthe general pattern of the references to the Fall, cloaking seriousness in jocularity sowell that it can never be clear which is more significant to the poet.232 The linear reading is actually a non-literalist one, since the sequences of Genesis 1 and Genesis 2contradict one another, which makes the idea of an “orthodox” reading quite problematic.149