Having explored the motif of the woman and the dragon in ancient Greco-Roman art and culture, in the current chapter I turn to examine the question of its endurance and transformation over time in the Christian culture of Western Europe. The following discussion will center on the evolution of Eve's image from late antiquity through the medieval period to early modernity, with an emphasis on the split between the traditional iconography of the Fall, which is based on the biblical narrative, and the iconography of a hybrid female-dragon that I identify as Lilith. As this discussion will demonstrate, the dualistic split between good and evil within Christianity, which consigned the dragon to the role of a hostile creature associated with the devil, cast a negative light on the relationship between women and dragons, which came to be similarly associated with evil. Nevertheless, as the following examples will reveal, the ambivalent nature of this union as both positive and negative persisted, particularly in folk traditions and beliefs, as given expression most notably in apotropaic images.

This analysis begins with a reading of the narrative of Eve and her visual representation in the context of the biblical creation myth and the story of Eden. This story, whose origins go back to the beginning of the first millennia BCE, appears to have arisen in opposition to serpent cults, particularly those with female goddesses associated with genesis or fertility, which were popular in the ancient Near-Eastern and Greco-Roman worlds.