There are several ways to interpret the story that can help us to re-position the messages in our collective understanding: the literal meaning, taken as the word of God and religious doctrine; the symbolic meaning of the images; and the historic-mythological meaning of what the story represents in the evolution of human consciousness.
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Interpretation 1: Literal
The first chapters of the book of Genesis in brief: a world created by a
male creator god, man created by a male creator god, woman created from
that man, and both placed in the idyllic garden of Eden. In the middle
of this garden were two trees: the tree of life and the tree of the
knowledge of good and evil. Adam was told by god not to eat the fruit
from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and if he did, he would
die. The serpent told the woman they would not die if they ate from
this tree, but would be like gods with their eyes opened. Eve ate, and
Adam ate. God found out, Adam blamed Eve, who blamed the serpent, and
all were cursed and punished. To keep Adam and Eve from also eating from
the tree of life, god banished them from the garden.
In the first analysis, the literal meaning is quite clear. This story is titled "The fall of man" and also referred to as: fall from grace, paradise lost, the temptation of Eve, and in the Christian tradition, original sin. Humans disobey god and are therefore punished. In particular the woman is blamed. The story is used as a warning to follow the rules and an explanation for why serpents crawl on their belly, why men have to work with pain and suffering, and why women have painful births and have to submit to men (all punishments doled out by god in Genesis chapter 3). And of course, now humans know good and evil - a binary, from whence to judge behavior, actions, characteristics, preferences and everything else. The moral of the story: be good, not evil or else you are punished and lose the most beautiful thing you value. As Baring and Cashford write, "Read literally, what the story says, in effect, is that Eve and Adam deserve to die because they broke their word to God....The serpent is to blame for Eve, who is to blame for Adam, who is to blame for taking any notice of either of them. Sorrow and death are a punishment for bad behaviour" (p. 502-502).
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| Benjamin West,1791, Expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise |
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Interpretation 2: Symbolic
A second interpretation is of the symbolic meaning through the images in the story. Many of the elements in the text are similar to those in myths and stories of Mesopotamia (Sumeria and Babylonia). For example, there are speculations that the people of Sumer referred to themselves as Admi or Adamu people, which is what the name Adam in the Bible referred to; the fact that "rib" and "life" is the same word in Sumerian; that the Sumerians used a word, edin or edinu, to refer to a steppe or plain with a water source, that the Semite people would have heard as "Eden"; and Adam calls Eve "The Mother of all Living" a designation used for the goddess since prehistoric times.
Moving past the literal text to the imagery, what is striking about the Genesis story is the "complete reversal of the lunar mythology of the Goddess culture" as described by Ann Baring in The Dream of the Cosmos (p. 215). For example, since the Neolithic era, the goddess was represented by a serpent or snake; now the serpent is an evil temptress and becomes likened to Satan in the Christian imaginary. In religious art, Lilith (originally a Sumerian female-demon figure), has also been depicted with a serpent's tale, much like the Babylonian primordial chaos goddess Tiamat who has been depicted as a dragon.
Gardens, groves and trees,
including the Tree of Life, are represented in images and stories
across the Ancient Near East since the Bronze Age. The symbolic meaning of that tree is much different than in the Genesis story. Campbell expresses that in mystical traditions, people seek knowledge and eternal life, and the fruits of the tree of life and knowledge are
openly offered, not prohibited as in the Judeo-Christian religions (see Goddesses: Mysteries of the Femenine Divine).
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| A clay cylinder from Sumer (modern Iraq) around 2200 BCE represents a male god with bull horns and a female god accompanied by a serpent, on either side of a tree. |
As Baring and Cashford summarise in The Myth of the Goddess, "The Genesis myth is unique in that it takes the life-affirming images of all the myths before it -- the garden, the four rivers, the Tree of Life, the serpent and the world parents -- and makes them an occasion not of joy and wonder, but of fear, guilt, punishment and blame" (p. 488).
Interestingly, the Genesis story is so influential that the image above was originally referred to as the "Adam and Eve" seal, although the meanings of the elements would have been completely different in 2200 BCE. Most people raised in Christian culture would immediately interpret the seal from the familiarity of the myth of "the Fall" even though the images of the seal represent abundance, harmony, balance and life. This inversion of meaning in the Genesis story, including the reversal of natural order with a male creator god and of woman being born from man instead of the other way around, perhaps produced and still produces a kind of cognitive discord, like looking at fire and being told it is cold. Eventually, we have forgotten the "original" meanings of the images, and have accepted what we have been taught at Sunday school. However, Jungian thought believes that symbols carry their own inherent meaning, and that we make sense of the world through these archetypical images. In this case, the symbolic meaning of the serpent, the trees, the garden and the first couple may live on inside our consciousness, contrary to what the story itself says.
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| The serpent in the Garden of Eden. Illustration for Histoire Sainte Illustree (Blondel La Rougery, 1933). Joseph Porphyre Pinchon, French (1871–1953) |
Of course, these messages were not by chance, but rather a deliberate strategy to replace one set of beliefs with another. As Baring writes, the shift from a lunar to a solar mythology starts around 2000 BCE. This is a change from a lunar worldview based on the feminine principle, inherent sacred connection with all creation, cyclical regeneration, a sacred order, and with the main protagonist the Great Mother. A new solar worldview takes precedence with a linear view of time, the battle of light and dark / good and evil, and the separation of soul from matter and humans from nature, with the idealization of the warrior or hero and the Great Father deity. Baring and Cashford write that the Garden of Even story "is in part the story of the displacing of the mother goddess by the father god", also calling it "deposing" or "demythologizing" of the goddess. (p. 492).
If the literal messages of the story that the tree of life, the serpent,
and the woman are causes of pain, suffering, guilt and evil, then the
disconnect between the words of the story and the symbolic meaning of
the images would indeed cause grief, pain and suffering in our
collective unconscious from the time the story was originally told until
today. And the conclusion, that humanity has been exiled forever from
that idyllic garden, is in a way a banishment of the old (lunar /
goddess) religious beliefs and meanings.
The version of the stories found in Genesis was developed starting around the 5th century BCE and recorded in Hebrew (not exactly "In the beginning" as the text itself says). Therefore the stories were imbued with centuries of oral tradition and a mix of Mesopotamian, Semite, Egyptian and other influences. The interpretation of the text into religious doctrine continued and expanded on this project of establishing a dominant solar ideology, for example under the Greek and Roman empires. In The Dream of the Cosmos, Baring describes the integration of this story into church doctrine up to the fourth century through the early church Fathers, like St. Augustine, where sexuality, the body and woman is also increasingly associated with sin (and therefore belief in Christ is the only path to redemption from that original sin). Baring writes, "The myth can be read as a story of the deliberate and effective demythologizing of the hated goddess by the priesthood of that time and her demotion from a goddess to a woman, Eve, who was blamed for bringing suffering, death and sin into the world." (p. 214).
Referring to the Inquisition, but equally applicable to the lessons
extracted from the story of Adam and Eve's exile from Eden, Baring
concludes: "The Church demonstrated how a carefully thought out and
minutely organized policy using intimidation, censorship, torture and
terror as its tools of power could offer a model of ensuring conformity
of belief among vast numbers of people. Nothing reflects the pathology
that had such an iron grip on the Christian psyche more than these
sacrificial rituals executed in the name of God" (p. 226).
This can feel like a historic battle from a long time ago, that does not bear weight on how we see the world today. But for the Western / Christian cultural inheritance -- which is the dominant culture until today in geopolitics and social norms -- it feels important to identify what was this "paradise lost" and what the new order was meant to be. Baring writes of these myths, "Their relevance to us today is that the deeper layers of the soul which, for tens of thousands of years had known a life of participation in the life of the Earth and the Cosmos through an instinctual awareness of the unity and sacredness of life, were now abruptly deprived of that experience. The older lunar mythology where all life was imagined as the creation of the Great Mother, born from her cosmic womb in a great web of relationships and connections, was suppressed" (p. 210).
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Interpretation 3: Mythological
A third interpretation adds another level of complexity to this story. Reading the "fall of man" as a myth provides insight into the mental state of the people who were living at this time and who developed a story to explain what happened to them and why, using symbolic language.
This requires us to consider the shift happening in the ancient Near East beginning around 2000 BCE and collected in the story of Genesis around 5 BCE. Historians tell of the settled, peaceful agricultural society being invaded from all sides by tribes bringing male gods -- and with them, war, conquest, violence, death, terror and cruelty. The so-called rise of civilization of Babylonia was the development of an empire with city-states, a more urban population defending themselves against invaders and fighting among themselves for power and territory. More people moved away from the land and agrarian cycles. More defense was built up. People lived war, destruction, suffering, fear, pain, death and crisis like never before -- and they had to make sense of it.
As Baring writes, "The coming of the solar era reflects the formulation of an entirely new perception of life and with it the rise of a new meta-narrative or worldview, whose theme is the cosmic battle between light and darkness, good and evil" (p. 180).
The people of this time lived through a massive shift in consciousness from believing they were part of a sacred order and connected intrinsically with nature to now understand why they were subjected to the reality they were going through, and integrating a new world view from invading tribes and migrating populations that saw life and death in a totally different way. In the history of the evolution of consciousness, this has been called the "Phase of Separation" (Barfield, quoted in Baring, p. 176), described as such: "...the solar era tore us out of the matrix of nature as the developing ego lost the deep instinctive sense of its connection to nature and the cosmos" (Baring p. 176). And she goes on to say that "the Myth of the Fall of Man is the most dramatic and influential myth or meta-narrative of the solar phase of Separation" (p. 206).
The interpretation of the story, then, would be more like this: two humans, created by a male god, are placed in an idyllic sacred garden, in harmony and at one with nature. This is our original or primordial existence. The humans eat the fruit of knowledge -- they gain consciousness of their human state. They are now aware that they are mortal, they are in distinct bodily form, they are separate from nature. This eye-opening knowledge meant they were expelled from the idyllic garden of Eden, from their past state of innocence and connection, never to return. And they were exiled into the reality of toil, suffering and pain.
In short: humans chose to gain knowledge, but in doing so, lost our instinctual connection to and participation in the sacred natural order. This loss -- the "fall" or separation from nature and our natural state, and the ensuing grief -- is the consequence of becoming conscious or aware.
The story of Genesis read as a myth tells of the tragic and painful separation of humanity from the sacred order, the split of nature from spirit, soul from matter, the
loss of our "innocence" of our instinctual nature, the exile from our
primitive and peaceful existence into a new phase of consciousness,
awareness, individuality, and rationality.
Indeed, as Baring and Cashford write, "If, however, the myth is understood symbolically -- not as an incontrovertible statement about human nature but as an expression of humanity's own experience of itself at the moment of initiation into consciousness -- then the meaning changes totally" (p. 504). Baring and Cashford continue to explain that "a symbolic reading of the story may restore it to its rightful place at the beginning of our cultural tradition as a myth of the birth of consciousness. The guilt Adam and Eve suffer from, which characteristically reappears as any new stage of awareness is reached, must then be seen not as moral guilt, in the sense of having done something wrong, but as tragic guilt, in the sense that what was done had to be done, because its ultimate roots lie in the very structure of existence itself" (p. 506). Put in that light, there is no blame, the story simply describes the shift in consciousness that this society had begun to experience since 2000 BCE, and preserves the sense of sadness and loss of the existence prior to that time, characterised as an idyllic garden.
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| https://letterpile.com/religion/Gods-Salvation-Because-of-Adam-and-Eves-fall-from-the-Garden-of-Eden |
Baring provides a beautiful alternate interpretation of the myth from this perspective, also integrating Jungian analysis, saying that while the way we interpret the myth traditionally is that Adam and Eve made the wrong choice and are to be blamed for causing suffering and pain on humanity, we can also see it as the exercise of free will, or responding to "the prompting of instinct" (represented by the serpent), "to move into a new phase in our evolution, losing touch with the participatory consciousness of the earlier time." The birth of something new entails the loss of something old, and the separation from nature creates a sense of duality and opposites, like good and evil, life and death. The loss of the old "creates feelings of guilt and disorientation", leading us to conclude that they made the wrong choice, "But, in reality, there is no primordial sin, no ongoing moral guilt. We did not make the wrong choice." Instead, Baring says, we carry forward as a "tragic burden" the interpretation of the myth as causing moral guilt "without comprehending how and why it arose nor of being able to recognize it as a metaphor" for the birth of consciousness (p. 216).
Hopefully this humble attempt to comprehend and interpret this myth in a new light will contribute to lightening this burden.
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Impact and implications
Over time, and integrated into religious tradition, this myth describing the split with the sacred, became a warning message to instill fear, guilt and shame and control human behavior and sexuality. Here in this text, we find the Biblical basis for misogyny and of women subjected and submitted to men. We can trace the violent and exploitative treatment of nature today back to the "moral" of this story.
Baring and Cashford show through examples of religious texts, chuch doctrine, literary works and artistic renderings "how a myth, if literally conceived and literally understood, can create a prejudice (or sanctify an already existing one) and become a doctrine that declares itself to be divinely revealed truth" (p. 513).
Eve comes to represent all women, and is associated with the serpent, the devil, inferiority, evil, sexuality, a temptress and sin. Above and beyond that, Eve becomes associated with the body and nature. The authors state in their 1991 edition, "There are now more urgent implications of the consistent misreading of this myth through the last 2,000 years of our mythological tradition. And these affect, quite crucially, our present attitudes to nature and the 'body' of the Earth" (p. 543). Baring continues with this belief in her 2020 edition: "Nature, woman and the body became closely identified with each other; for this reason all had to be subject to the will of man. ...The unconscious identification of woman with nature was the origin of the negative projections onto her that were incorporated into the social attitudes and customs -- fused with religious beliefs -- that endure to this day." (Baring p. 192)
While Baring (and surely many others) analyze in great detail the development of misogyny, hero-worship, good-evil battles, glorification of violence and domination in the Western culture stemming from the literal interpretation of the myth of "the fall" and the unconscious projection of the guilt indoctrinated from it, here suffice it to say that woman, the body and nature went from being sacred to being sinful. And this has had a profound and longlasting impact on the Western psyche for the past 2,000 years, as Baring writes: "the idea that a woman, Eve, was responsible for bringing death, sin and suffering into the world and that all humanity carries the bitter legacy of the Fall...have deeply wounded the Christian soul. Indeed, I wonder whether it is possible to exaggerate the wounding effect they have had on the Western psyche and Western civilization as a whole" (p. 208).
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| https://keytruthsministries.com/2019/12/the-sin-of-eve-and-adam/ |
In both books, the authors explain that this myth originates from such a long time ago, and is diffused in all three patriarchal monotheistic religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam), and is a primary religious text taught to young children, that is has become part of "our cultural inheritance" and deep collective unconscious. Therefore, "it is very difficult to become aware of the assumptions derived from them, let alone disempower them" (Baring p. 210). Indeed, the authors write, this story "has haunted the Western imagination for over 2,000 years" (Baring and Cashford p. 501). Perhaps, by learning about this cultural inheritance, exposing and investigating the shifts and interests at play that led to it and has perpetuated its literal interpretation for generations, we can put its ghost to rest. And empower a new myth with a set of assumptions that better serve us for the generations to come.
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Reflections
Understanding this story, that I have heard since childhood, in these different ways, brings a new set of questions to my exploration.
One is: why in the Judeo-Christian tradition, is knowledge and immortality forbidden? In most other religions, these are exactly the characteristics that are sought through spiritual practice. However, in the patriarchal mentality of Judeo-Christianity, humans should not be like gods -- also meaning that we are not sacred, another step of separation from previous human consciousness.
It also brings into question the whole idea of sin. This is an exclusively Christian concept and has surely been the root of much suffering for many, many people over many generations. In the reformed tradition they even refer to "total moral depravity". What a leap from viewing all creation as beautiful and sacred! Now babies are born with original sin, because a woman took a bite from a piece of fruit in a garden! This doctrine is instilled in children from a young age, who are taught to listen to their parents and church fathers, to be good and shun evil. Children who are still in the stage of innocence and interconnection with nature and their natural instinct learn to ignore this in order to "behave" or else are punished. Slowly they lose their Eden, their connection with nature and their natural comfort with their bodies, instincts, intution and relationships.
So now I wonder, what would our society be like without this myth? Or, unable to produce that counter-factual, what could our society be like if we could overcome the literal meaning of this story and re-read it to understand the historical context, symbolic references and the mythological meaning instead? What if we could do that with other religious texts as well, to put them in their proper historic and mythological context? Could we ameliorate the profound impact this story (and many others) have on our collective consciousness and emotional inheritance, for future generations?
How can we unlearn and heal from being told again and again a story of sin, blame, guilt, mysogony and punishment?
We know we cannot go back to "innocence" -- the gates to Eden are fiercely guarded. We cannot un-do the separation or return to a time before this birth of consciousness. Indeed, human consciousness has brought many developments and advantages. Therefore how do we live into a conscious unity?
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Principal sources (and recommended for further, in-depth reading):
The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image. Anne Baring and Jules Cashford. 1991: Arkana Penguin Books.
The Dream of the Cosmos: A Quest for the Soul. Anne Baring. 2020: Archive Publishing.
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