Alpha and Omega by Edvard Munch

Like the song "Woman is the future of man" sung by Jean Ferrat with the lyrics by Aragon, woman is often associated to the "fertilizing origin" myth, like in the Pre-Columbian tradition with the Pachamama.
Alpha and Omega is an illustrated tale composed of twenty lithographs done with a soft lead pencil by the famous Norwegian painter Edvard Munch and which reinterprets in a very personal way the biblical genesis of the first man, Adam (Alpha) and the first woman, Eve (Omega).
Alpha is the first letter of the Greek alphabet and omega is the last one. The association of these two letters represents metaphysically "the principle and the creation", symbolically "the beginning and the end" (cf Book of the Revelation to John, "I am Alpha and Omega") and literally a complete table of reading "from A to Z".
Fifteen years before the writing of that tale, in 1893, Edvard Munch painted the painting, that is his most famous one, "The Scream". This date represents for the artist, the entry into a deep existential crisis, illustrated by a life full of excess and that will last for fifteen tears.

Indeed, in 1908,  Edvard Munch is seriously affected by psychotic delirium and decides to undergo an electrotherapy treatment with professor Jacobson.  This six-months treatment that will make Munch a peaceful and well-behaved man, will give him the opportunity to exorcise his sentimental disappointment. To do so he reinterprets the origin of humanity and answers to his metaphysical concerns.



Described as a "cruel and ridiculous tale" by the magazine Le Cahier Dessiné (Ed Buchet/Chastel), this tale gives us a volatile vision of woman, Eve-Omega, alternately: pure, enchantress, slob, then fornicating with all the animals of the creation.  Her blackness done, she leaves Adam, riding a deer, to reach the country of redemption " the green country", leaving Adam alone and desperate. Then Munch returns to the painting's pattern " The Scream" to show Adam-Alpha's anxiety.



Eve comes back, transfigured, purified, but only to be battered to death by Adam, who became crazy with sorrow.  Then Eve's children (her illegitimate anthropomorphic from her intercourses with animals) slaughter Adam and then, they live in the island.
- Are Men and Women doomed to suffer, to loneliness and misunderstanding?




- Are we all descended from Eve's forbidden love and from the first animals?
- Or on the contrary, does Munch invites us, like Eve, to create our "blackness": to live then to transfigure our animal urges... and then accomplish this first phase of the alchemical transmutation?

You will be able to think about this in this 43 minutes interview.