Peering into Eden
A strange allegory of the genesis of humanity, and of consciousness
Looking back to my mythologized origins feels very similar to looking deep into my subconscious and first becoming dimly aware of that huge and hidden ocean of meaning within us all, active but opaque
As we move back into early religious literature we are confronted with an increasingly murky and alien picture. Certainly there are constants: family love and loyalty and pride and ambition and grief are recognizable to us but their beliefs and motivations and the cultural context through which they move becomes deeply strange, bloody, stark.
If you had to pick one the Bible would be the religious book for humanity. I don’t say that as a man who was raised attending Protestant Christian church services-it’s merely a fact. Disregarding any book’s claim to truth or fidelity or accuracy, there are many factors which, combined, yield a conclusive advantage for the Bible: span of time described; proximity of most recent included events to present day; number of events and personalities described; detail of descriptions; degree of scientific and historical corroboration; number of people alive today and through history who subscribe to its messages; influence on world events and human ideas; mythological and moral profundity (although that last one is fairly subjective).
At various times I’ve been amazed by the historical corroboration of many Biblical passages… and astounded that people could literally believe certain (other) stories. It’s not as if they are all valuable in elevating their characters or edifying their readers. I will forego listing examples of the stories which only exhibit (and celebrate) brutal and cruel actions-you can find them yourself. They are numerous. When I read the earliest stories of the Bible I do not feel awe and reverence (well, some awe). Instead I feel a creeping unease. Try reading some of the earliest stories (the Nephilim, or the Angels of God visiting Lot, or Noah punishing Ham… off the top of my head) and taking the meaning of their words plainly. Picture the events as they’re being described. This is a hideous world-yet it is ours. It is us… with the artifice of cultural parochialism and comfortable distance of modern supply chains stripped away. The people in these stories are more violent because they lived a in world closer to the prospect of desperate starvation or rape but they are not necessarily more wicked. It’s not just the bronze age values though… there is a feeling of closeness to something very strange in these stories. When I was younger I wrote the strange feeling off as deriving from the brutal morality but now I don’t think that’s it. I’m reluctant to name my suspicion that the originator and source of the strange feeling may be God and loathe to go into too much detail but I will clarify my meaning for the faithful who regard the concept of God with reverence and love. Strangeness?
The biologist J. B. S Haldane famously said that if the world had been fashioned by a creator then he must have had an “inordinate fondness for beetles” (beetles represent the most zoological diversity and number and biomass than any other order, by far). It’s a funny line and I’ve brought it out a few times myself (citing the author, of course) but I want to make this point before proceeding farther because it’s a point that seems almost completely lacking in the worship of the faiths that I’ve encountered or their language around divinity (for good reason I suppose). God is imagined as a benevolent father figure, anthropomorphic himself somehow, chiefly concerned with human affairs. If there is a being or force or intelligence that created all of this it is FAR, FAR vaster and stranger than we could ever comprehend. I will restrict myself to the terrestrial: there are 8.415 million pixels on an 8.5” x 11” sheet of paper. If we imagine that a period is 4 pixels, then a period represents 4.7 x 10^-7, or ~.00000047% of the paper’s area. The period since the death of Christ until today represents ~4.34 x 10^-7-about the same. Print a period and then gaze at it. That is the entirety of Christian history (and the span of agriculture might be 5 or 6 periods, clustered together). The whiteness on the blank page represents the rest of time in the history of our planet, time when the creator presided over great volcanic eruptions or a half-frozen planet or seas full of archaea and asexually dividing and budding creatures. There was an immense period of time before humans emerged on this planet and God is the God of all of those years as well. He’s the God of parasitism and fungal nets and natural venom. My point is that imagining religious ideas in their traditional contexts with their didactic embellishments and their anthropocentricity might be most useful to religion but it requires a simplified and untrue picture of even those narrow events or people being described. Even in the narrowest sense in which we can understand the will and nature of God, imagining him as a comprehensible, ethical patriarch gently guiding us along the paths of common sense must be incomplete and wrong.
Having said all of that, I will now give you the story of Adam and Eve and their temptation in the Garden, according to the New International Version (or verbiage which is plainly understandable to modern American English-speakers):
Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the LORD God had made. He said to the woman, "Did God really say, `You must not eat from any tree in the garden'?"
The woman said to the serpent, "We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden,
but God did say, `You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.'"
"You will not surely die," the serpent said to the woman.
"For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil."
When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it.
Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves.
Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the LORD God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the LORD God among the trees of the garden.
But the LORD God called to the man, "Where are you?"
He answered, "I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid."
And he said, "Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from?"
The man said, "The woman you put here with me--she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it."
Then the LORD God said to the woman, "What is this you have done?" The woman said, "The serpent deceived me, and I ate."
So the LORD God said to the serpent, "Because you have done this, "Cursed are you above all the livestock and all the wild animals! You will crawl on your belly and you will eat dust all the days of your life.
And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring [1] and hers; he will crush [2] your head, and you will strike his heel."
To the woman he said, "I will greatly increase your pains in childbearing; with pain you will give birth to children. Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you."
To Adam he said, "Because you listened to your wife and ate from the tree about which I commanded you, `You must not eat of it,' "Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life.
It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field.
By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return."
Adam [3] named his wife Eve, [4] because she would become the mother of all the living.
The LORD God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them.
And the LORD God said, "The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever."
So the LORD God banished him from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken.
After he drove the man out, he placed on the east side [5] of the Garden of Eden cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life.
What are we to make of this? I will avoid naming the (few) common elements with the Gilgamesh epic of the King in the Garden (Tablet X) because I actually do not find the parallels to be that compelling. There is a vast and busy industry of pop historians who try to reduce or analogize the content of different Bibilical sections to other religious or civilizational mythologies but when you dive in you generally find the the Bible is more comprehensible and more compelling. Perhaps that is due to it being a substrate upon which so much of our culture and literature has grown but I do not think that is entirely it.
Nevertheless… what are we to make of this account? If you understand the current orthodoxy of paleontological anthropology and the well-established corpus of neo-Darwinian theory as to the development of species variation on Earth you must perform impressive intellectual gyrations to maintain that there was a period without suffering and death on Earth, and that there were two original humans who made a single choice in a garden. Humans developed gradually, and split off into perhaps dozens of transitional hominids who probably had language and possibly culture in the past several hundred thousand years: Neanderthals, Denisovans, Homo Floriensis, and more. If you haven’t explored this dynamic and daily-shifting body of knowledge you might begin: it gives a feeling as awe-inspiring and eerie as reading the stories of Exodus.
If the story of the Serpent tempting Eve isn’t literal, what could it represent? It could represent the development of “modern” human consciousness: the sense of identity with its constant unmet desires, its fears, its social anxieties and insecurities, and its vast and unlit subterranean caverns and corridors of subconsciousness. These are features which seem to be unique (to some extent) to humans and their development probably was fairly coincidental with more vivid and stranger dreams, the development of religious stories and the fear of death, and the whole taxonomy of symbolic thought, which is now much bigger and more real to us than our material surroundings (money, texting, marriage, driving, jobs, government: all symbolic edifices).
To be more descriptive, “knowledge of good and evil” means a departure from the natural and instinctive simple sentience of lower order mammals and entrance into our reality, with its constant worries about the future and regrets in the past, its constant unmet (or, met and then quickly replaced) longings and cravings-what the Buddha called dukka. The emergence of something like modern consciousness and symbolic thought was followed by the development of civilization, which depended upon agriculture. Anthropologists are certain that agriculture allowed (and indeed, forced) human groups to remain in place and build and collect surpluses but it was a much harder (from 2-3 hours of work per day to up to 12) and less free and less healthy lifestyle than hunter-gathering. Agriculture was quickly followed by walls, and armies, and slavery. The skeletons of the early primary agriculturalists in Mesopotamia and Central China and Egypt are smaller and beset by weak bones and rickets and reduced lifespans. Looking back upon that transition, it becomes clear why God says “Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life. It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return." And while the acquisition of the “knowledge of good and evil” didn’t create death it did probably create mortality salience, or the constant nagging awareness and fear of death which animals seem to be blissfully free from. That fear tugs upon and deforms all human thought, today just as much as 300,000 years ago.
There might not literally be a flaming sword guarding a garden, but the garden of our collective innocence is just as surely lost to us forever-there is no finding it again. The angel of time and its destruction blocks our way. All we can do is peer back through the mists of time and try, for a fleeting instant, to apprehend what has been lost.
It’s a theory anyway…