"And do you not know that you are each an Eve? The sentence of God on this sex of
yours lives in this age: the guilt must of necessity live too. You are the devils
gateway: you are the unsealer of that forbidden tree: you are the first deserter of the
divine law: you are she who persuaded him whom the devil was not valiant enough to attack.
You destroyed so easily Gods image, man. On account of your desert - that is, death
- even the Son of God had to die. And do you think about adorning yourself over and above
your tunics of skins?
"Come now; if from the beginning of the world the Milesians sheared sheep, and the
Serians spun trees, and the Tyrians dyed, and the Phrygians embroidered with the needle,
and the Babylonians with the loom, and pearls gleamed, and onyx-stones flashed; if gold
itself also had already issued, with the cupidity which accompanies it, from the ground;
if the mirror, too, had license to lie so largely, Eve, expelled from paradise, already
dead, would also have coveted these things, I imagine!
"No more, then, ought she now to crave, or be acquainted with (if she desires to live
again), what, when she was living, she had neither had nor known. Accordingly these things
are all the baggage of woman in her condemned and dead state, instituted as if to swell
the pomp of her funeral."