Genesis, the Bible’s creation story, is a retelling of a Sumerian myth from 2500 B.C. that includes the goddess (i.e., the Divine Mother), a tree, and a serpent. In the original, the serpent, in its skin-shedding, represents death begetting new life, not evil, and there is no eviction from paradise. But in the Old Testament version many of us hold sacred (scholars believe Genesis was written between 950 and 500 B.C.), God the Father replaces the goddess as the lone creator, and a woman becomes the symbol of sin and the cause of man’s fall. Meanwhile, the snake, a symbol of the fertility
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