Parallel Myths (15 page)

I often wonder where lie hidden the boundaries of recognition between man and the beast whose heart knows no spoken language. Through what primal paradise in a remote morning of creation ran the simple path by which their hearts visited each other? Those marks of their constant tread have not been effaced though their kinship has long been forgotten. Yet suddenly in some wordless music the dim memory wakes up and the beast gazes into the man’s face with a tender trust, and the man looks down into its eyes with amused affection. It seems that the two friends meet masked, and vaguely know each other through the disguise.

—Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941),
Indian poet, ‘The Gardener”

T
he serpent was the most subtle of all the wild beasts that Yahweh God had made. It asked the woman, “Did God really say you were not to eat from any of the trees in the garden?” The woman answered the serpent, “We may eat the fruit of the trees in the garden. But of the fruit of the tree in the middle of the garden God said ‘You must not eat it, nor touch it, under pain of death.’” Then the serpent said to the woman, “No! You will not die! God knows in fact that on the day you eat it your eyes will be opened and you will be like gods, knowing good and
evil.” The woman saw that the tree was good to eat and pleasing to the eye, and that it was desirable for the knowledge that it could give. So she took some of its fruit and ate it. Then the eyes of both of them were opened and they realized that they were naked. So they sewed fig leaves together to make themselves loincloths.

The man and his wife heard the sound of Yahweh God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from Yahweh God among the trees of the garden. But Yahweh God called to the man. “Where are you?” he asked. “I heard the sound of you in the garden,” he replied. “I was afraid because I was naked, so I hid.” “Who told you that you were naked?” he asked. “Have you been eating of the tree I forbade you to eat?” The man replied, “It was the woman you put with me; she gave me the fruit and I ate it.” Then Yahweh God asked the woman, “What is this you have done?” The woman replied, ‘The serpent tempted me and I ate.”

Then Yahweh God said to the serpent, “Because you have done this,

Be accursed beyond all cattle,
all wild beasts.
You shall crawl on your belly and eat dust
every day of your life.
I will make you enemies of each other;
you and the woman,
your offspring and her offspring.
It will crush your head
and you will strike its heel.”

 

To the woman he said: “I will multiply your pains in child-bearing, you shall give birth to your children in pain. Your yearning shall be for your husband yet he will lord it over you.”

To the man he said, “Because you have listened to the voice of your wife and ate from the tree which I had forbidden you to eat,

Accursed be the soil because of you.
With suffering shall you get your food from it
every day of your life.
It shall yield you brambles and thistles
and you shall eat wild plants
With sweat on your brow
shall you eat your bread
until you return to the soil
as you were taken from it.
For dust you are
and to dust you shall return.”

 

The man named his wife “Eve” because she was the mother of all those who live. Yahweh God made clothes out of skins for the man and his wife, and they put them on. Then Yahweh God said, “See the man has become like one of us, with his knowledge of good and evil. He must not be allowed to stretch his hand out next and pick from the tree of life also, and eat some and live forever.” So Yahweh God expelled him from the garden of Eden, to till the soil from which he had been taken. He banished the man, and in front of the garden of Eden he posted the cherubs, and the flame of a flashing sword, to guard the way to the tree of life.

The story of Genesis, chapters 1-3, if taken as a myth, can guide our description of the transition from essential to existential being. It is the profoundest and richest expression of man’s awareness of his existential estrangement and provides the scheme in which the transition from essence to existence can be treated. It points, first, to the possibility of the Fall; second to its motives; third to the event itself; and fourth, to its consequences …

… If the transition from essence to existence is expressed mythologically—as it must be in the language of religion—it is seen as an event of the past, although it happens in all three modes of time. The event of the past to which traditional theology refers is the story of the Fall as told in the Book of Genesis. Perhaps no text in literature has received so many interpretations as the third chapter of Genesis. This is partly due to its uniqueness—even in biblical literature—partly to its psychological profundity, and partly due to its religious power. In mythological language it describes the transition from essence to existence as a unique event which happened long ago in a special
place to individual persons—first to Eve, then to Adam. God himself appears as an individual person in time and space as a typical “father figure.” The whole description has a psychological-ethical character and is derived from the daily experiences of people under special cultural and social conditions. Nevertheless, it has a claim to universal validity. The predominance of psychological and ethical aspects does not exclude other factors in the biblical story. The serpent represents the dynamic trends of nature; there is the magical character of the two trees, the rise of sexual consciousness, the curse over the heredity of Adam, the body of the woman, the animals and the land.

These traits show that a cosmic myth is hidden behind the psychological-ethical form of the story and that the prophetic “demythologization” of this myth has not removed, but rather subordinated, the mythical elements to the ethical point of view. The cosmic myth reappears in the Bible in the form of the struggle of the divine with demonic powers and the powers of chaos and darkness. It reappears also in the myth of the Fall of the angels and in the interpretation of the serpent as the embodiment of a fallen angel. These examples all point to the cosmic presuppositions and implications of the Fall of Adam …

—Paul Tillich,
Systematic Theology

So far as I know, childbirth is generally painful in only one of the millions of species on Earth: human beings. This must be a consequence of the recent and continued increase in cranial volume. Modern man and woman have brain cases twice the volume of
Homo habilis
. Childbirth is painful because the evolution of the human skull has been spectacularly fast and recent. The American anatomist C. Judson Herrick described the development of the neocortex in the following terms: “Its explosive growth late in philogeny is one of the most dramatic cases of evolutionary transformation known to comparative anatomy.” The incomplete closure of the skull at birth, the fontanelle, is very likely an imperfect accommodation to this recent brain evolution.

—Carl Sagan,
The Dragons of Eden

One of the earliest consequences of the anticipatory skills that accompanied the evolution of the prefrontal lobes must have been the awareness of death. Humans are probably the only organism on earth with a relatively clear view of the inevitability of his own end. Burial ceremonies that include the interment of food and artifacts along with the deceased go back at least to the times of our Neanderthal cousins, suggesting not only a widespread awareness of death but also an already developed ritual ceremony to sustain the deceased in the afterlife. It is not that death was absent before the spectacular growth of the neocortex, before the exile fom Eden; it is only that, until then, no one had ever noticed that death would be his destiny.

—Carl Sagan,
The Dragons of Eden