Introduction

The narrative of the Anglo-Saxon verse Genesis B located in the MS. Junius 11
manuscript held at the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, is comprised of around
600 lines of alliterative meter in which the story of the Fall of Man is recounted,
though it is the unusual departures from traditional patristic accounts of the Fall that
remain the source of intrigue. One such departure is evident in the Temptation
scenes: in Genesis 3:5, the Tempter seduces Eve, enticing her to eat the forbidden
fruit by offering the promise that they will be transformed, that her ‘eyes shall be
opened, and [they] shall be as Gods, knowing good and evil’- which only conveys a
brief mention of a change in vision, interpreted by Eve as a means of gaining
knowledge. In reality, the metaphoric transition referred to the entry into sin, the loss
of fellowship with God, and the awakening of a guilt-ridden human consciousness. In
Genesis B, an actual transition of the corporeal senses becomes what I would like to
call a ‘sensory metamorphosis’ of Adam and Eve. In fact, the poet spends much time
developing and detailing the transition, as the promise from the Tempter to give Eve
a heightened sense of vision spans over sixty lines of poetry, which clearly show the
changes in Eve’s visual perception. The elaboration of this transformation is not
limited to sight only. Her innate abilities, pertaining to the other senses like hearing,
touch, and taste are also altered, existing ones replaced with the new due to her
failure in recognizing the Tempter’s underlying motives. In my thesis, I propose that
the sensory element of the Fall is what the Tempter appeals to in order to make
Eve’s mind susceptible -and by proxy Adam’s too- and it is the corrupting nature of
rhetoric he deploys, using language as a form of demonic weaponry to pervert the
senses. Many critics have discussed the sensory components in the narrative, but
have done so as isolated moments, however the basis of my dissertation will focus
on these corporeal components, analysing them as a developmental sequence. I will
also explore the accompanying iconography, viewing the series as colored with a
psychological intensity that is integral to reflecting themes of visual deception,
applying Lockett’s psychoanalytic approach of the ‘hydraulic model’ to highlight this.

Tempter/Adam’s scene of seduction

In Genesis B, there are three distinct temptation scenes as opposed to two:
Tempter/Adam, Tempter/Eve, Eve/Adam. The corruption of oral transmission begins
immediately in the Tempter/Adam scene, where the emissary starts by establishing
his own personal connection with God to account for his role as His messenger:

Langað þe awuht,
Adam, up to gode?      Ic eom on his ærende hider
feorran gefered,      ne þæt nu fyrn ne wæs
þæt ic wið hine sylfne sæt.  

(Long you for anything Adam, from God? I am on His errand hither,
faring from afar, nor was it long ago, that I sat by God Himself.)

In this passage, the Tempter presents himself as having only recently been the
recipient of God’s lar, insinuating to Adam that he is a direct carrier of God’s divine
discourse. The repetition of the personal pronoun Ic roots this claim, stabilizing it
further by calling attention to acute details of time and place to invoke a sense of
realism in his interaction with God. However, by directing the question towards
Adam, presenting his report as if the Holy Lord himself had spoken it, accountability
is slyly placed into human hands whilst carefully concealing his self-involvement, as
he tries to insert himself between the human and the divine. By creating an
intervening link in the chain of command, he signals to Adam it is a link he was
previously unaware of. Immediately, this first temptation underscores the existence
of an oral community in the Garden of Eden. However, verbal prompting is
suggestive of the fallibility of such a medium: it is prone to falsification. Also, the
exchange marks a chiasmic separation within this oral community: God is not
present, and it is in His absence the diabolical agent seeks to subvert the oral
memory of the heofoncyninges (heaven king’s) spoken word, leading to the Fall as
he urges them to eat the formerly forbidden fruit.
Continuing to strengthen his claim, he makes self-conscious references ‘ne
þæt… sæt’ (nor was it long ago…), ironically sprinkling his account with elements of
truth by recalling an aural experience and an association with God which no longer
exists (referencing his own status as former angel who had experienced such a
connection). This imagery gives the scene a stimulating charge in its direct attempts
to arouse Adam’s own senses, the fiend coercing his visitation to his own mental
experience of his memory, and of an aural experience in hearing God. His appeal
therefore functions as a reminder that this auditory and visual recollection is
grounded within a similar experience -originally with God, Adam, and Eve forming
the oral community. But taken as a whole, the statement encapsulates the ways in
which spoken word can subtly enter into ominous territory: speech acts are central to
temptation. The abuse of this, with the Tempter utilizing the original source of
authority (God’s statements) to his own advantage, exploiting the male protagonist's
own senses to suggest an illusory alliance between himself and Adam, dramatizes
the fallibility of oral transmission.
On the other hand, the recollection is reiterative of the significant role corporeal
senses play in narrative development. Clearly, Adam is reliant on auditory memory,
visualization, and his own perceptions to retain God’s lar, the strength of which is
dependent upon ‘healdan wold’ (how well) his ‘halige word’ (he holds gods word).
However, being in the Tempter’s physical presence, he is exposed to a new verbal
interaction. With this placed in context, it is established that an imminent struggle is
shown in the Garden of Eden, waged through the medium of words, and essentially
a struggle within Adam and Eve’s souls, where they’ll be constantly challenged on
how well they are able to hold onto divine teachings. Furthermore, it is certainly
indicative of the essential Christian struggle that fallen human beings will always
have: the possibility of temptations and rival words leading them astray.
Straightaway, Adam refuses to reject God’s divine discourse (hyldo) in favor of
the Tempter’s oral transmission, referencing his perception of it:

þonne ic sigedrihten…mæðlan gehyrde’

‘strangre stemne…his bebodu healden’(525)

(When I the Victory Lord, the mighty God, heard speak in a stronger voice, he
ordered me to hold onto his decree)

and:
 ‘he het me his word weorpian wel healdan
laestan his lare’. (537-538a)

(He ordered me to revere his word, and hold onto His will to listen to his law’.

Notice, Adam’s first point of contact is in his own acoustic memory of God’s lar,
containing a stemn (voice) and bebod (command) that is significant due to its tone:
authoritative and much stronger than the Tempter’s. It is God’s own vocalisations,
enunciated, received and learned, that form Adam’s counter-attack, exhibiting a
sense of linguistic dueling, evident from the verbs used by Adam such as ‘ic…
gehyrde’, mirrored in the Tempter’s speech. A similar use of language in response to
his claim serves as an act of refutation. The Genesis B poet presents the audience
with an interesting parallel here, grounding the differences between Adam’s faculty
of perception, his response to the events transpiring before him, and the Tempter’s
deceitful discourse.
These echoes of paralleling speech acts are extended further by the poet, which
we witness in Adam’s response as he plays on the lexical ambiguities existing in the
Tempter’s speech. For example, when the emissary says:

Nu he þe mid spellum het,

listas læran. Læste þu georne
his ambyhto’

(He has commanded me to teach you skills through messages, and carry out his
desire)

he is faced with a reply in which Adam borrows words directly from him ‘he het me
his word weorðian/ and wel healdan, læstan his lare’ (he commanded me to honor
and keep his word well, to carry out his teaching). Notice, there is repeated use of
het, combined with verbal echoing’s of the similar sounding words læstan (carry out)
and læran (teachings), making clear the difference: lar (instruction/law) used by
Adam has substituted the Tempter’s list (skill). The contrast between the use of
these polysemous words, and what they connate, give the impression that Adam is
aware that he is faced with an enemy. The commands of God permeate his verbal
interactions, rooting his words with a sense of conviction and confidence, whereas
the Tempter’s speech carries an air of uncertainty. Paradoxically, these verbal
assaults do not undermine Adam’s faith as the Tempter set out to do, rather they
strengthen it. Moreover, there is clearly a great deal of emphasis on the self:
concerning Adam’s own self-perceptions, the repeated use of the first person
pronoun ic directly underscores his faith. Words and actions are fused together, and
one can see it is the performative strength of divine utterance that prevent him from
sin. His speech also reinforces his role as being part of an oral community, the
audience of God’s direct address, and it is clear Adam’s words share a
prelocutionary power of divine discourse, for his actions conform to this discourse.
Furthermore, a corollary of his perceptions -the way he views the Tempter-
comes across in comments about his appearance: ‘Þu gelic ne bist, ænegum his
engla, þe ic ær geseah’, (You are not like an angel I saw before), an aspect I will
later discuss, contrasting with Eve’s vision.
 To sum up, the Tempter manipulates linguistics to destabilize the boundaries
between reality and illusion, eager to incite the Fall of Man. But lack of tacen (proof),
his visual foreignness, and Adam's own memory of the aural experience with God
causes Adam to resist these temptations, maintaining his stance that ‘ic þe hyran ne
cann’ (therefore I cannot hear you) in the Tempter's unproven, thus baseless,
connection to God. Also, oral transmission, in reference to Adam as the direct
audience, evidently has the ability to remain unsusceptible. The chain of command,
with only one degree of separation, remains secure based on the simple reliance of
auditory memory. So then the question becomes: why did this change for Adam?
How did the Tempter intercept the chain when Adam’s speech acts, as analyzed
above, exemplified his fierce opposition to the Tempter whilst asserting his strong
sense of faith?

Eve/Tempter Scene of Seduction

The Tempter, after a heated rejection from Adam, immediately adapts his approach
as he moves to beguile Eve. Doane perpetuates an absolutist characterization of
Eve as the archetypal “nagging wife”, “deceived by lies in that she began to believe
his words”. This is not out of loyalty to Adam or God’s word, since she has been
informed by the Tempter himself that Adam rejected his claims (which should serve
as an explicit sign). Rather, he relates that her prideful nature led her to being easily
seduced, veering in the direction of “evil”, citing it an inherent fault. He argues that
her manifested reaction comes from a source of “self-willed delusion”. In my view,
whilst Doane’s argument discussing language successfully argues that the sense of
“narrative confusion” occurring is a deliberate “strategy” on part of the GB poet, in
order to cause arbitration amongst the audience, instigating their participation in the
predicament's of the protagonists’- he does very little to understand the situation
from Eve’s experience, especially the psychological impact on her character. Clearly,
the flux of language provokes the audience’s senses, forcing them to experience
dilemmas of their own, yet Doane does not connect the same principle to Eve, not
showing how this may also apply to her. Instead, he has a tendency to follow the
same, outdated, traditional interpretation of Eve we are accustomed to of Eve,
instead of urging a new understanding of her.
Preoccupation with accurately contextualizing the history of the text seems to
have led him to view the relationship between the protagonists in a feudal light as
well: Adam is espoused as the perfect Augustinian man, fitting perfectly within the
Christian religious construct, whose “integrity and logic demand the immediate
rejection of these stupid appeals”, whereas Eve is branded the “vassal of the devil”,
the original cause of the Fall. These charges against Eve materialize only in the
Tempter’s seduction of Adam when he alluringly says “þin lichoma, leohtra micle, þin
gesceapu scenran”- not in her own seduction. Rather, when seducing Eve, he
immediately begins his appeals with threats, intending her social and biological
programming to invoke a strong emotional response, feeding from her maternal
instincts. As the poem progresses, it becomes clear these threats had given her
cause to enter a state of being hyper-alert, undergoing bodily changes as she
attempts to cope with this new instability. With Eve propelled by fear, the orders
given previously suddenly do not seem to have fixed meanings at all, and now
their meanings can change according to many different criteria. By
extension, the source also changes. This may explain why the audience hears
elements of refrain from the Tempter’s words in Eve’s own speech when she
seduces Adam. In parroting the Tempter very closely: ‘forhele ic incrum herran, þæt
me hearmes swa fela, Adam gespræc, eargra worda’ and ‘þæs þu gebod godes, lare
læstes’, she effectively acknowledges that the details retained from the Tempter’s
corrupted language catalogue played an instrumental part in her own persuasion, the
encounter by then ingrained in her psychic state. In being made to imagine, visualize
God’s wrath, the incantatory power of linguistics is accentuated, and with the
emissaries embedded in deceit, he is able to construct a new reality for Eve.
Evidently, corrupted oral transmissions may not only occur between God and his
loyal followers, but also within the oral community of humans.
However, to establish Eve’s re-conditioning and how it came to be, I will
examine her base mechanics, pinpointing the exact moment where her sensory
nerves are subverted. In Genesis B, the Tempter explicitly draws Eve’s attention to
the forbidden fruit, using imperatives (æt þisses ofetes! þonne wurðað þin eagan
swa leoht /þæt þu meaht swa wide) as a vehicle of persuasion, followed by an
amalgamation of promises: a heavenly vision where she will see Gods throne; a
rosier beautified Eden; and her eyes becoming even lighter. Confirmation is received
that the emissary has delivered on at least one promise of amplifying her
perceptional abilities. The narrator informs the audience:

þa meahte heo wide geseon 

þurh þæs laðan læn      þe hie mid ligenum beswac, 
dearnenga bedrog

(The might she widely see, through the gift of the enemy, who betrayed her with lies,
cunningly deluded)

Two different stimuli’s coincide here: the fiend who dearnenga (deluded) her with
rhetorical trickery, and Eve’s ‘þa þæs ofætes æt’ (she then ate that produce).
Disturbingly, she in her misguided thinking ascribes the new powers presented to her
(her renewed visions, even hearing sounds of hymns) to the apple itself. Having now
succumbed to the Tempter’s lar -driven by anxieties of further wrath from God’s
gingra- Eve devastatingly abandons the commands of God, accepting and complying
with a new source of authority. I shall determine that this fundamentally takes places
within her mind, through no fault of her own.

Firstly, connecting this theory to the prominent models of the mind discussed within
medieval psychology, which was experiencing on-going shifts in thinking within the
time period ranging from the classical period to the late fifteenth century, shows that
the GB poet's text was concurrent with the emergence of psychoanalytical concepts.
I find this a sophisticated way of analysis, as it best accounts for the human
experience: shaped by and reacting to social and cultural contexts. The GB text is
fraught with Old English poetic references such as mod, hyge and wageþoht: the
poet’s lexical choice of mind-vocabulary subtly opens up opportunities to cross-
section medievalist philosophy of thought, to show how writers gesture towards and
approach theories of the mind, expressing them through the worda in their texts.
Godden adopts a mainly psychoanalytical approach, claiming “many linguistic and
literary traditions commonly present the mind as a container or enclosure”. This
imagery is employed by Anglo-Saxon writers to interact with the interplay of the
emotions between mind and body, as well as the understanding of memory, leading
one to form the opinion that the container is likened to divided parts of the mind,
making up a unified self, and each element is responsible for a certain mechanism.
Phillips talks about mod in more detail, exploring the term through relationships
of control. To him, the mod is responsible for ‘controlling the body’, as well as the
thoughts that occur within it. Referring to the protagonists, he defines mod,
describing it as the “ruling” source where Eve is presented as one who is inclined
toward emotional functions (in taking the fiends ill-intentioned lar into her mod) while
Adams’ predisposed to intellectual functions (for he actually thinks and doubts in his
decision-making, and to him ‘gram wearð him se goda on his mode’). With this in
mind, I return to the notion of Eve’s innocence -implicitly excused even by the GB
poet himself- seeing her as essentially blameless for the change in her senses
because it was God who created her with wacran hige, predestining her with a
reduced agency. Although the intellectual components present in Adam’s genetic
assemblance do exist in Eve’s gender construction, its stated internal weakness
implies they are not as potent. Therefore, in the divided parts of her composition, and
her unified nature, emotionally-focused responses are to be expected, for that trait is
pre-programmed to take precedence, fitting in with popular allegorical readings
where Eve is representative of Sense, and Adam Reason. Her senses are thus
‘unavoidably accessible to temptation’, making her lapse ‘subjectively innocent’.
Also, note it is highly significant that Adam, the representative of Reason, is
commonly described as the male who ‘should have followed his own judgment rather
than trusting the promise of Eve’. Employing the trope of irony, Adam rallies against
the Tempter during the first temptation scene, specifically reiterating he does not
accept the Tempter’s message for lack of tacen, and his dis-angelic appearance, yet
he is ultimately contradicting himself by offering him the very tools which could not
have been more explicit, setting in motion Eve’s fall. With her genes proven
comparatively weaker, a ‘matter of biology’, the poet himself directly undermines the
typically anti-feminist, patriarchal narratives Doane is interested in. Subtle subversion
of this popularized literary tradition is suggesting that it is actually God and Adam
whose motives should be questioned. Underscoring her virtuous intentions and
intellectual oversight, the poet states:

dyde hit þeah þurh holdne hyge,      nyste þæt þær hearma swa fela, 
fyrenearfeða,      fylgean sceolde 
monna cynne,      þæs heo on mod genam 
þæt heo þæs laðan bodan      larum hyrde
(708a-711b)

(She did it though, out of loyal intention, did not know such harm would
pursue mankind, because she absorbed in her soul what she from that horrid
herald heard as lessons)

The deprecation of Adam as Eve’s serpent rather than protector, with the Tempter
luring her to abdicate power over her mod, stresses the patriarchal framework the
text works within, highlighting the subjection of the female sex. This ideology sees a
continuation, for Eve experiences it with each and every character encountered.
Obedience is a direct result of control, as Phillips mentions, and with Eve’s mod in
question, evaluating the influence others have over it shows her corporeal senses
are shaped, colonized from within. Consequently, deception correlating to Eve’s
altered vision –for both the emissary and the GB writer- must also take place from
within. While this effectively problematizes the analysis of Adam in the first
temptation scene, it allows for interpreting the text in agile, flexible ways,
not fixing or defining the work with any finality. By bringing an
awareness to the patriarchal character of language, a different view, the narrative
itself seems hysterical as the indeterminable ambiguity implies an inability to tell itself
clearly. Similarly, these anxieties are reflected in Eve’s inner self. From this,
language is understood to demonstrate an excessive gap between words and
significance, indeterminacy, growing into a chaos of interpretation, which Eves
struggles with to determine the heavenly lar from the devilish. All the same, the
hypermetrical line ‘heo dyde hit þeah þurh holdne hyge’ interrupts the intensity of the
passage, breaking up the rhythm in which all is moving in the direction of Adam
consuming the ofet unfæle, forcing us to pause with the narrator as he re-establishes
Eve’s innocent nature. Her exoneration is bestowed upon her through the narrator’s
words, leaving no room for vagueness in his, nor in her intentions.
Furthermore, critics like Rosemary Woolf and John F. Vickrey are also on the
fence in regards to the language signification; especially the þiclice (thick) tone
Eve’s voice adopts, with Doane saying “the idea that Eve dogged Adam with her
words until he gave in is traditional”. Having consumed the fruit, what is traditionally
interpreted as Eve’s damning language, superimposed by notes of seduction (a
quality found in the fiend’s linguistic register, which she draws on to replicate the
mediated account presented to her) can be construed as an act of intimacy. Her
ceaseless verbal persuasion is only that, because it is harmonized with desperate
intentions to maintain human companionship. In this, the fictive influence of speech
acts is stressed. Spoken waerlice, Eve consumes the words, thinking she is only
consuming the apple- taking it to be the truth. But this truth, remaining unchecked, is
characteristic of the oral transmission as shown in the text. The corruption of Eve’s
senses is equal to the corruption of language: malleable, and always in process.
The touchstone of how effective and functionally superior the fiend's verbal
persuasion is becomes manifest in the result clause: ‘þa meahte heo wide
geseon þurh þæs laðan læn’. (600-601) Eve has eaten the fruit, and its purpose is
revealed exactly sixteen lines later: ‘Sæge Adame, hwilce þu gesihðe hæfst’.
Evidently, the Tempter was corrupting the weaker part of the whole. Having now
obtained the ability to extend truth-like transmissions through her to achieve the Fall
(echoed in the imperative language Sæge Adame) a new oral chain has been
created, which translates into a new reality, whilst implicitly pointing to the fact that
the following persuasive arguments will be mediated, directed by him, not her,
showing that Eve's senses have been renewed to preserve his narrative- an
observation I would like you to keep in mind during the analysis of the Eve/Adam
temptation scene. Very subtly then, the oral dynamical structure in the garden has
changed. In the same way, subtle phrases reflecting these shifts like pinum wordum
(your words), to minum wordum (my words), and the key noun sceaða (stolen) used
by the poet grounds the coinciding subverted mechanics of Eve: her primary senses
have been taken, the first Fall completed the very moment she ate the fruit. These
were then replaced with two fresh senses, fashioned through her oppressor's
crafting: the apple thus is acting as a smokescreen, the overt sense, whilst the
Tempter’s rhetoric works on a subterraneous level, functioning as the true sense.

With a view to locate meaning in narrative, these examples offer that all lines
of communication are imbued with ambiguity, operating on subsurface levels where
rhetoric and its signification acts as determiners of power, life, and instruments of
both domination and liberation- the former for the humans, the latter for the fiend. So
where speech is seemingly obvious, integral to it are secret, disguised, tainted
meanings (mirrored in the powers granted to Eve, for reality remains hidden to her in
her realm of innocence until line 723). In being deliberately ambiguous, the theme of
dualisms integrated in language signification holds devastating consequences for
her: with Eve’s senses in the perverted hands of the Tempter, she is stripped of her
cognitive faculties to register, understand, and correctly react to the stimuli around
her. With perceptional abilities in jeopardy, what she receives in form of a visual
tacen (“her vision”) is equivalent to the Augustinian narrative in which the ‘devil
cozens the soul with a spiritual vision’. Proof rooted in falsities are dominating her
senses, and it is in this we see a continuation of false oral tradition, maintaining of
the emissary’s ligen (lies). Therein, corruption takes place gradually, first with the
weaker counterpart, spreading to the whole.

Eve/Adam Temptation scene, linked with the MS. Junius 11 illustrations

Developing the discussion of psychology, a key figure in the field of Anglo- Saxon
cognitive studies is Leslie Lockett, who proposed the integrative ‘hydraulic-model’ of
the mind. Her cephalocentric model confirms the mind’s physical site is in the head,
and subject to physiological stresses and emotions resultant from ‘increased heat
and pressure’. She notes, ‘the contents of the mind may seethe and boil…
sometimes an insidious thought works on the mind slowly...over a space of time’,
referring directly to the heating of fluid in correlation to mental events. This process is
witnessed in the narrative: ‘lædde hie swa mid ligenum….oðþæt hire on innan
ongan, weallan wyrmes geþeaht’. (So he led her with lying, until within her began to
well up the worms thought). However, while the extensive analysis of the OE corpus
Lockett provides only seems to give a strong basis for textual sources, I feel there is
great potential in examining the applicability of the ‘hydraulic model’ to the
supplementing iconography in Genesis B, with a view to show the gradual seething
effect is visually realized, reflecting the changes in senses. I will also discuss the last
temptation scene of Eve/Adam in line with these illustrations.
Appendix 1 begins the iconographical selection, sketching the fiends appearance in
the Garden in the form of a serpentine body. Entwined around a branch in close
proximity to the protagonist’s, Eve’s palms are gesturing in the direction of Adam,
signifying an intimate connection, yet in the same moment her head is turned in the
direction of the Tempter. She is attentive of the serpent. Yet, in Appendix 2, the
serpent’s body as he carries out Eve’s seduction shows his form as altered, with him
now materializing with the aesthetic qualities of an angel; he has transformed from
bestial to celestial, physically portrayed with two delicate wings protruding from his
shoulders. This is puzzling as there is no explicit reference of the Tempter assuming
an angelic disguise after appearing as a snake to Adam. He seems to be proclaiming
something to Eve, which she is listening to dutifully, and as the figures wing floats
above her head, he is representative of an unfettered source of inspiration,
something that is a direct transmission entering her mind. In this, the transition from
a symbolically charged animal, notably associated with poisoning, to her strangely
assigning angelic qualities to the agent in the Eve/Adam temptation scene: ‘ic on his
gearwan geseo’ (he is wearing angelic apparel), is reflective of the change in Eve’s
faculty of sight. Her description would be non-sensical if she sees a serpent in front
of her, so I connect this change as central to the theme of her gradually distorting
reality, which ‘seethes’ slowly, feeding into the visual deceptiveness. Since cognitive
linguistics links to how one discerns the world around them, an explanation is
provided for this visual change.
With her extraordinary sensory perceptions, Eve moves to carry out the
purpose clause. The top frame in Appendix 4 is significant because while oral
transmission sees words as generating meaning, it also considers those words as a
physical thing. Eve says:

Nu hæbbe ic his her on handa,      herra se goda; 

gife ic hit þe georne.      Ic gelyfe þæt hit from gode come, 
broht from his bysene (680)

(Now I have it here in my hands, God’s very own: I give it to you, believing it comes
from God, brought by his bidding).

Eve holding the apple really seems emblematic of the apple holding her. In her
temptation of Adam, she displays her belief in that words are like articles, able to be
broth from one source to another, instead of regarding them a temporary flow of
words that come from speakers in the oral chain. Further, as noted in the field of art
history “when a figure points in a certain direction, our look will follow the figures
direction”. Adam is visually directed towards Eve, his eyes and palms holding
physical object of the apple. However, in the very same frame, top-left, the angelic
wing now appears over Adams head. He himself remains out of sight, but still
maintaining a meditative presence. With Eve presenting Adam with the apple,
offering testimonials to its divine powers, a cyclical effect is produced: the tacen
missing from the first Temptation, indirectly generating a semiotic ruse in the second,
is now presented in the final temptation. Once Adam effectively swallows her oral
transmission, the bottom frame visually speaks to the audience: Eve’s changed
senses, stemming from the tacen, is dramatically revealed as untreowa (false), and
her visual abilities melt away, before working with infernal methods, revealing the
infinite which was hid. Similarly, the Tempters disguise unravels gradually, his
apparel discarded as soon as the Fall is completed.