We’ve talked quite a bit about the Two Witnesses: king and priest. Pageau points out that Cain and Abel were portrayed as a mirror of that distinction. Cain worked the ground and supported his brother, while Abel provided wool for Cain’s covering. The symbolism should be obvious. It was initially a peaceful coexistence, rather like the truce between space and time.
The conflict between the two forms a pattern that repeats down through history. Pageau sees the consequences for Cain on three levels: a loss of guidance and authority from heaven, the ground no longer supports and empowers him, he is forced to leave his familiar space and wander. The flow of Abel’s blood into the ground is matched by Cain being cast adrift on a sea of time and chaos. By paradox, the same blood then becomes Cain’s protection from any vendetta. Still, he will have to work harder in the flesh to survive.
Pageau speculates that the “mark of Cain” was likely the invention of writing. Writing had not been necessary to receive and recall the Word of revelation (structure written into Creation). Cain had departed from that Word; he no longer had access to it. He would need something else to transmit a sense of stability to his descendants, so the writing of man’s laws (artificial structure) was the only substitute, poor as it was. The calcification of human knowledge in writing, versus a living Word of the Spirit of God, means life and human society is more fragile, as the polarization between time and space becomes greater.
This fragility and tension is on top of the tension between male and female inherent in the Curse of the Fall. Pageau comes back to the early description of male as seed (meaning) and the female as soil (substance) for planting. He carries this further with the masculine portraying building and space, and the feminine as renewal and rest with time. This worked well until Eve was tempted to dominate (making a choice that affected them both), for she also carried chaos and death within her. Keep in mind that Adam was asleep when she was made.
In the ancient Hebrew mind, a child’s bones came from the seed of the father, but their blood came from the mother. The child takes their substance from the mother’s body, but the encoding of structure comes from the father. As always, this is not meant to be any kind of scientific explanation, but a symbolism of the moral order of things.
A virgin before the wedding is a bundle of chaotic flow. In conjugal joining, her husband fixes this flow, dividing the waters and creating a space for a new human to be built and born. The sex itself is a way of resting and recreating the energies, but the life conceived becomes a building of space and stability. The process itself works to reestablish the natural harmony between heaven and earth, time and space.
There are numerous parallels in all of the symbolism found in human sexual intercourse. A man bringing it home to his wife (familiar woman) is staying kosher; infidelity is eating defiled food and poisoning life. It gives birth to inconsistency, his seed perverted against his future building of a family household. She is not his woman (a foreign woman), and cannot express his identity consistently; she has more than one man. It threatens the stability of the community.
The repugnance over a woman’s menstruation was partly due to the symbolism of overflowing floods of chaos and death. As previously noted in my own writing, the issue was divided between two different prohibitions. One refers to sex during menses as a pagan ritual, shockingly common in that part of the world. The other refers to simple sex in menses without the pagan significance, which resulted only in ritual defilement, not a capital offense.
The taboo in general echoes the same taboo of eating meat with blood in it. It’s not merely a health risk, but the practice robs God of His due — all bloodshed was treated as an offering. God receives the blood portion of every animal eaten, even if it is poured in the ground. (He didn’t accept the blood of Abel from Cain’s hand.) The woman should not offer her own periodic blood flow to any mere man, husband or otherwise. In the Hebrew mind, the man wasted his seed, as the flood would wash it back out.
This is part of a larger set of moral assumptions about the tragedies of conception gone wrong. Pageau mentions four: wasted seed (children never born, infertility), aborted offspring, deformed offspring, and rebellious offspring (especially if illegitimate). Each of these could represent a tragedy and embarrassment to the mother first.
As always, this is a matter of symbolism, not mechanical facts.
‘Pageau speculates that the “mark of Cain” was likely the invention of writing. Writing had not been necessary to receive and recall the Word of revelation (structure written into Creation). ‘
This is an interesting observation. A lot of esoteric/gnostic teaching would argue this is as good fortune, because they have to invert just about everything Christianity teaches. Writing would be one way men could transmit knowledge, since as you/Pageau point out, the kind of knowledge that would mean anything, the kind coming directly from God about what He thinks is important, isn’t the kind being communicated to gnostics.