Adam

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Adam is the first human being in the Hebrew Bible — formed, in the second creation account of Genesis, from the dust of the ground and the breath of God, and named with the Hebrew word for man, which is also the word for humankind. The story that follows is brief and consequential: a garden, a single prohibition, the eating of the fruit, and expulsion into a world of labor and death. From those few chapters three traditions built very different figures, and the same name carries all of them.

The plain sense of the text is corporate as much as personal. Adam is both a proper name and a common noun, and the narrative reads as the story of the human condition told once, in one body. Rabbinic and later Jewish reading kept this doubleness alive: Adam is an individual who sinned, and also the pattern of every person after him. Christian thought sharpened the personal reading into doctrine. Paul set Adam against Christ as the two heads of humanity — by one man death entered, by one man life returns — and from that contrast the Western church developed its account of original sin, the inherited flaw that baptism answers. The two figures, the first Adam and the “last Adam,” became a fixed pair.

A different Adam appears in the speculative currents of late antiquity. Hermetic and Gnostic writers spoke of an Anthropos, a primal or heavenly Man who exists before the earthly one — a luminous archetype, sometimes the divine mind’s own reflection, who descends into matter and is bound there. In this reading the Adam of Genesis is the shadow or the captured image of that higher Man, and the human task is to recover what was lost in the descent. The opening Hermetic treatise tells exactly such a story of the Man who falls in love with Nature and is drawn down into a body.

Kabbalah developed the most elaborate version. There the teaching is of Adam Kadmon, primordial Man: not the creature of Eden but the first emanation from the hidden God, the configuration through which the divine attributes — the sefirot — first take ordered shape. On this account the human form is read upward, as the diagram of the godhead, so that the body of Adam Kadmon maps the structure of all reality. The earthly Adam becomes a faint copy of this cosmic one, and his fall a rupture felt at every level of being.

These are not the same idea, and the traditions would not have recognized one another’s Adam as their own. Yet a single intuition recurs across them — that the first man is less a person than a pattern, and that what happened to him is, in some sense, still happening. Scholarship treats the figure as the meeting point of ancient Near Eastern myth, Israelite theology, and the later philosophical reworkings that read the garden as a cipher. What the name keeps holding together is the oldest of the questions it was made to answer: how the human being came to be what it is.

→ In the library: Mathers — The Kabbalah Unveiled (1887) · The Corpus Hermeticum (Mead) — I. Poemandres

→ Related: Gnosis · Emanation · Leviticus · Hermes Trismegistus