Kabbalah

Adam and Eve as Cosmic Archetypes, Not Only Individuals

The Zohar treats the first human couple as a template containing every soul that will ever exist and mirroring the sefirotic structure of the cosmos, not as two people whose story ends when they leave the garden.

Zoharic anthropology works with a figure often called Adam Kadmon, "primordial Adam," a configuration that precedes and contains the individuated human couple of the Genesis narrative and that is used elsewhere in Kabbalah as a name for the complete arrangement of the ten sefirot themselves. On this reading, "Adam" in the Eden story functions simultaneously as a proper name and as a technical term for a totality — every human soul that will ever be born is understood as originally contained within this single cosmic figure, later differentiated. Eve, correspondingly, is read as embodying the feminine sefirotic principle rather than functioning only as one historical woman. This double reading lets the Zohar treat the Eden narrative as operating on two registers at once: a specific ancient story, and simultaneously a description of the structure and fall of consciousness that every subsequent soul, carrying a fragment of that original Adam, still relives.

Zohar