In another passage from the Primary Adam Books, Satan might again assume a theriomorphic shape – this time that of a wild beast. When Eve and Seth journey to paradise in order to obtain the oil of resurrection needed to heal the dying Adam, they encounter a mysterious creature labeled, in the narrative, as a wild beast. In the Greek version of the Life of Adam and Eve, the story takes the following form:

Then Seth and Eve went toward the direction of the Garden. [And while they were going,] Eve saw her son, and a wild beast assailing him. And Eve wept and said: “Woe is me; if I come to the day of the Resurrection, all those who have sinned will curse me saying: ‘Eve has not kept the commandment of God.’” And she spoke to the beast: “You wicked beast, Do you not fear to fight with the image of God? How was your mouth opened? How were your teeth made strong? How did you not call to mind your subjection? For long ago you were made subject to the image of God.” Then the beast cried out and said: “It is not our concern, Eve, your greed and your wailing, but your own; for (it is) from you that the rule of the beasts has arisen. How was your mouth opened to eat of the tree concerning which God commanded you not to eat of it? On this account, our nature also has been transformed. Now therefore you cannot endure it, if I begin to reprove you.” Then Seth spoke to the beast, “Close your mouth and be silent and stand off from the image of God until the day of Judgment.” Then the beast said to Seth: “Behold, I stand off from the image of God.” [And the beast fled and left him wounded] and went to his hut.

An important detail in this encounter between the primordial humans and a hostile animal is the peculiar terminology of the “image of God.” This formula evokes the memory of Satan’s rebellion, when he refused to worship the image of God. As Seth and the animal struggle, the wild beast does not fear to fight with the image of God. This nexus of motifs alludes to Satan’s original protological opposition to Adam, the original bearer of the divine image. Here is the second instance of a rebellious stand against the imago. The two instances have much in common, as many scholars have noted. When commenting on Seth’s rebuke, “Get away from the image of God,” Gary Anderson suggests,

this rebuke has some rather clear resonances with another key moment in the Vita’s story-line. It sounds very much like the instructions Satan and the other angels received at the moment of Adam’s creation, “Prosternez vous devant le semblable et l’image de la divinité” (14:1).