R& – FS
The Garden of Eden allegory is not what it seems to be on the surface. The god is in the narrative to explain the otherwise unexplainable…that’s obvious…it’s a deus ex machina…a McGubbins.
THE BIG PICTURE
The Garden of Eden is about four major issues the ancient patriarchy concerned itself with.
- Disempowering Women
Men of old saw themselves as all-powerful. But the power of life was in The Womb of Women.
How to manage this, to calm the male psyche? Easy: Just say the first Man was created from ‘dust’, and the first woman from the first man’s ‘rib’. Mission accomplished, Woman had nothing whatsoever to do with the creation of the first human beings…see can easily see how that marginalizes the awesome womb!
2. Man’s Fear of Women’s Sexuality…and Being Cuckolded
Ancient Man inevitably saw his sexual urges as the primary form of sexuality. Women were there as receptacles for his lust…indeed, were not agents of sexuality in the same way as men, in their primacy, saw themselves. Solution? Easy: Have the woman, Eve, seduced by a snake [phallus, anyone!], and thus bring down Humankind because Eve has been seduced…Adam’s eternal Life, sold out by a woman who gave into her sexuality.
3. The Dawning of Human Consciousness
The fruit in the Eden narrative is an allegorical representation of the dawning of human consciousness. A tree was created by the deus ex machina [the McGubbins], the eating of which gave we humans our very own consciousness, quite different–as far as we know–from the “beasts of the field”.
4. The Price We Paid For Human Consciousness
Ancient humans suffered greatly…short lifespans, in the main…awful, incurable diseases, wild animals running off with their newborn, volcanoes erupting, earthquakes quaking…bad, bad stuff. And it was our awareness of these awful life conditions that became enhanced by human consciousness. Our mind’s capacity to think ahead gave us the terror of thinking ahead…what terrible catastrophes lie in the morrow? Without human consciousness, we would only have to deal with the immediate…no fear of the morrow.
As the Zen saying has it: “The bird on the branch does not contemplate its own death”
When the allegorical narrative has the first humans in Eden, there’s none of that to worry about…life is perfect, and “we” will live forever.
But bite into that fruit? Become self-aware…be able to think about the future? Oh, the terror…oh, the horror.
And no longer can we get our daily sustenance by reaching out in Eden’s lush vegetation to eat as we will, for:
“In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return“–Genesis 3:19 KJV
Now, we must labour for our living; now, we face the conscious awareness of our death.
And then, all of an instant, the woman is told her womb is empowered Lo! But she will suffer for that, oh will she ever suffer now that she’s received recognition of her awesome, life-giving power:
“Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee“–Genesis 3:16, KJV
So…a little recognition of the power of the womb…but nothing kind comes from this recognition. For the woman will suffer the deep agony of childbirth. And that little morsel of recognition for the awesome womb? A little downside to that: “…and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee”
OK, Ancient Patriarchs…got it! You needed to explain consciousness, so you picked up on earlier ideas of an all-powerful god, so you brought that into the allegory as the agent for human consciousness [via the fruit]. Then, you were fearful of women’s sexuality, and above all by the life-giving awesomeness of the Womb of Woman…so you nixed that power by suggesting “dust” as the de facto womb first, and then, man’s rib became the womb. It’s only when things go really bad that the woman’s agency~empowerment is recognized…and even then, there’s a couple of huge downsides [pain in pregnancy, man’s your boss…forever]
Questions:
A. What does this OP miss from the allegory? What other ideas do YOU have that could fill in the missing elements?
B. The Garden of Eden allegory runs from an idyllic place–the Garden itself–to a tale of horror. What symbolism do you yourself take from this?
Very Simile Tude