The First Love Triangle Was Between...

The original love triangle was between Adam, Eve and the tempter Lucifer.


The corruption which took place in the first family, set the dynamics that wreak havoc in male and female relations to this day.

One of the most agonizing symptoms of the first love triangle is for one’s partner to be attracted to someone else and succumb to infidelity.

The premise of one being torn between two lovers fills many classic literature and films worldwide.

The story of the duchess Anna Karenina all the way to the film “Casablanca” as well as soap operas and many blues and love songs mimic the realities of being betrayed by a lover.

The original Godly family was destroyed by the first illicit sexual encounter.

In this relationship, you can see various attributes of abuse and betrayals.

Since Lucifer was very wise about God’s plan and was thousands if not millions of years older, this was the first sexual abuse by a trusted elder.

Since Adam and Eve were God’s children, they betrayed the parent’s trust and commandment.  Lucifer was a servant to King and rebelled against Him by seducing and taking away the King’s children.

Adam and Eve were the first dysfunctional family.

We may believe that dysfunction we see in today's society was brought into the family by the ‘free love’ movement of the 1960s, but humanity began in this unfortunate way.

Even though the Bible uses metaphors and hidden messages to convey the Fall of humanity, many great cultural narratives, suggest that more than just an illicit sexual relation happened between the first human couple.

Genesis shows that the woman fell under the sway of the Tempter.  She yields to his seduction and then she instigates this betrayal to her betrothed.

This pattern and other deceptive games that may occur in relationships was established from the beginning of humanity.

Christianity also alludes to a double treachery.  Not only do Adam and Eve betray each other, but they betray the Creator.

By disregarding God’s warning and concern, Adam and Eve, and Lucifer initiate sex and parenthood outside of God’s blessing and participation.

This is a heartbreaking scenario which still plays out in many families ever since.

In some depictions of the Fall, the Tempter is depicted as a servant and friend to God.

He has been trusted, but he refuses to respect his Lord’s children because he was jealous of God’s love for them.

He sought revenge by getting God’s children to follow him instead of God through tricking the children into a premature and illicit affair.

Thus, the first children were seduced by their elder and their Parent’s friend.

This is the origin of the tragedy of sexual abuse of children by their caregivers, relatives and even clergymen.

This is also the foundation for those who use sex as a weapon and a way to gain illicit power.


Another Kind of Adultery

If we take the story of our first ancestors tragedy, we can see the basis of many legendary tales.

We can compare God to a King and the woman as His bride or Queen.  Therefore, God was to be her central focus of love and loyalty.

 Thus, when the servant seduces the queen this becomes an adulterous act that betrays the King.

The European story Tristan and Isolde, the heroic Tristan, the beloved of the king, arrives to take Princess Isolde as his wife.

However, the young man and maiden take a love potion and cannot resist their passion for each other. Unfortunately, Tristan and Isolde run off together in betrayal of the king.

Similarly, the British legend of King Arthur revolved around the theme adultery between the King’s first knight, Lancelot, and his Queen.

This one act of treachery brings down the Utopian Camelot.

Folk religions around the world tell of a parallel conflict triad.

Greek myths are full of infidelities.

Oedipus Rex involves not only mortals, but a foretold incident of incest: the son kills his father to win the love of his mother.  Reverend Moon has suggested just this kind of dynamic behind the fatal dysfunction of the first family.

Adam, Eve, and Lucifer all chose to evade the moral challenge before them and misused love.

As the elder Lucifer was to attend to the immature children of God.

His position called to have unconditional love and obedience.  He knew that as Adam and Eve grew that they were destined to receive a special divine love and have authority beyond what he as a servant could ever possess.

He had the moral challenge to be content with his role.

Lucifer could look to have eternal praise and gratitude from his beloved King after he was a good caregiver to the prince and princess and they matured to assume their rightful position as God‘s heirs and Lucifer’s masters.

This duty asked for him to be humble to those who were presumably younger and less experienced than himself.

Also, the royal offspring themselves would have paid him unending respect and admiration as well as their countless descendants.

Instead, Lucifer was not able to trust and remain faithful to his lord or His children.

As he could only focus on his own situation and not see Adam and Eve from God’s point of view, it looked unfair in his eyes.  Therefore, he decided to turn away from God’s guidance and steal the affection of the young girl in order to soothe his own hurt feelings and feeling alone.

Eve, who was lonely as Adam learned about the creation, she was very flattered to have his attention and over time, lost interest in her fiance in favor of the elder more fascinating mentor.

Once Eve replaced Lucifer as her god, he believed that if he could seduce the girl he could possess all her love and beauty for himself.

At the same time he could act out revenge to his ‘unjust’ Creator by stealing the Heavenly Father’s most precious treasure, thus destroying His whole purpose for creating the universe.

As a final nail in the coffin he placed God in a deep grave and he humiliated his would-be master by degrading him through the Fall and become his rival.

Eve gave too much of her heart to the charming elder.

Once Eve succumb to his seduction, she was ridden with extreme guilt and realized that the act was wrong and that her lover had taken advantage of her.

To add to her painful feelings, she had deeply betrayed her loving Father and her mate and violated her own purpose.

Out of desperation and to ease her guilt and fear, she went to Adam for comfort, therefore re-enacting the same selfish act of seduction which Lucifer used to trap and destroy Eve.  Adam also abandoned His Father’s will for the allure of his fiancee’s premature love.


Disastrous Template

These corrupted relationships that happened at the beginning of humanity, explains why infidelity and promiscuous sex has such a hold to enslave humanity to this moment.

Because humanity inherited this fallen history, a relational template so deeply embedded
within the human psyche and soul, people are inclined towards it as second nature.

Reverend Moon teaches that this adulterous relationship in the beginnings of human ancestral family life has set a pattern for the profound and pervasive disorder of love that we have witnessed ever since.

Freud had a sense of this when he proposed that the family tensions which arise from the ‘Oedipus complex’ were based on some primordial event that caused the disorder of  family love.

Research shows that infidelity is indeed passed on from generation to generation: One study found that eight out of ten cheating spouses also had a parent that did the same.

The study may find more such cases because the parent may have kept their indiscretion secret.

Adam and Eve’s mistake implied more than just an act of infidelity.

This act was the remote source of all the destructive patterns of interactions between males and females which plague our society today.

For example, Lucifer and Eve both refused to use their resources of unselfish love and remain faithful to whom they were responsible and entertained their infatuations instead.

Instead, they sought to please their immediate gratification and comforting embrace of the opposite sex.

This plays out in sexual involvements in contemporary society today.

 

Males act like Peter Pan and flee responsibilities in favor of maternal acceptance from girlfriends and gain reassurance through sexual conquests, thus escaping paternal rules and requirements.

Women and girls do the same when they overly indulge in the intoxicant of sex and promise and romance and use the closest male audience.

They do this at the cost of fully maturing into daughters of God.

Because the first couple introduced the disorder of love, this led to another phenomenon - the allure of ‘forbidden love’.

There is an insidious attraction to people who are off-limits or out of reach: another woman’s husband, the sister’s boyfriend, the blossoming daughter, celibate priest, ‘bad boy’, the same-sex friend.

A syndrome that has men honoring the purity of a woman, but at the same time pursue the fallen, loose woman at the bar or have a provocative mistress on the side.


Distorted Gender Relations

Psychologist David Kasbow also sees as Reverend Moon has the negative male-female ‘war of the sexes’ played out in the Genesis story.

He describes the three characters, Lucifer, Adam and Eve, involved are the archetypes of masculine and feminine forms of irresponsibility, exploitative on one hand and the foolishly naive and yielding on the other hand.


Predatory type

Lucifer plays the Don Juan, Playboy role surrounded by the compliant Playboy Bunnies.  He is the immature man who uses and discards the opposite sex in order to prove his worth.

Another dynamic is the man who dominates other men through conquering and winning their women.

This is almost like a parasite, a rapist and the vampire who feeds off of what other people possess.  The Eveic figure is the seductress who uses her sex to dominate men for money, security.  She may be thought of as a man-eater.

Lilith is another myth, the first wife of Adam is portrayed as a demonic feminine.

He is under the influence of the foxy counterpart of the male ‘wolf’, the Siren, Samson’s Delilah.

She is the woman who keeps a list of boy toys for her amusement and delight to show off her power by stealing men from other women.  The incestuous father, the pedophile and the aging man who takes on a younger trophy wife.

Lucifer was the trusted teacher and parental figure who preys on the fresh, virginal individual of the opposite sex in order to compensate for his own failures, frustrations and inner deadness.

Christian writer Sarah Hinckley says the virgin is so attractive to the worldly one because of the “lightness of heart that is the companion of sexual innocence”.


Return for Tomorrow’s Post: The Impact of Sex Without Commitment 


This post was rewritten and derived from the religious textbook “Educating for True Love” written by a team of writers to explain the philosophy of Reverend Sun Myung Moon.