Eating the Apple (1)

Friday, April 1, 2022

5:40 a.m. All right, guys, I found a translation online I liked, and I will drop it in as I transcribe. [The URL is https://www.vatican.va/archive/bible/genesis/documents/bible_genesis_en.html] Let’s look at the story of Adam and Eve and the apple and the snake. It doesn’t read quite as I remembered it, and it does raise several questions about what you have been saying, these past years, about the tree being the tree of Perceiving Things as Good and Evil.

My first surprise was to see how this story was framed. Specifically, the final verse of Chapter Two: “And the man and his wife were both naked, and were not ashamed.”

As we go along, it will help if you will point your questions. This focuses you and thus us.

All right. So the first question has to be about their being naked and ashamed.

Set your mental switches, as this will require and repay intense concentration.

Okay.

Before we begin, mark your printout at each question is arouses in you, and note the question. Then come back here and we can go through it.

All right, it has taken till nearly six. Let’s begin. “And the man and his wife were both naked, and were not ashamed.” Is there any special meaning to the word “naked,” or is it used merely as we use it? Were they unconscious of being physically naked? And if so, and suddenly they became aware of it, why would this lead them to be ashamed?

Go as slowly as you can, staying with each point in turn, not anticipating. It will be hard enough with patience; probably impossible otherwise. And this could become a very long discussion. If it extends to more than one day, no harm done. But, better to get what we can give you, than to skim the surface.

As you intuit, mythology is telling truths through story, and in the story, characters and action are ascribed both specific meanings and more allusive ones. They are sparks as much as signposts. So here, “naked” produces an effect in the reader (as, earlier, in the listener) that relates directly to the human experience as you live it. That is, physical nudity in societies customarily clothed does naturally evoke feelings of shame, as it does not in societies that live mostly without clothing. Have you noticed that tribes in equatorial regions that live without clothing are mostly or entirely without shame about nudity? Also, they are not easily sexually aroused merely by nudity. They live in a state of innocence. And yet are they not Adam and Eve’s children?

So what are you saying?

The transcribers of the story were well aware of the effects of a certain kind of awakening. The fact that they ascribed their inheritance to all human children is not relevant to the truth of the myth. It was to their children that they were explaining the world. The innocents of the world had their own creation myths, equally true psychologically and of course describing quite a different fate, as will emerge as we examine the story.

So, in effect, the authors of the story were disregarding the rest of the human experience, generalizing from their own branch’s history.

You could put it that way. Just as in later sections they talk of Eve’s children marrying others and not explaining where the others came from. They weren’t writing history, nor anthropology, nor even biography. “Myth” is neither true nor false to physical facts. It is true to psychological facts, and that is its importance and its purpose. So the authors of Genesis were describing what happened to that part of the human race that ate of the apple. The form implies that they were the only people created, but that isn’t quite what it means: It means, “This is what happened to make us as we are.”

So why should consciousness of nudity tie into shame? Wasn’t everything else in creation naked? They were animals, weren’t they?

There’s more to that than you realize. They were animals, yet they were divine as well. But, for that matter, so was everything else in creation, for creation partakes of the nature of its creator. Remember, we are talking about mind-stuff, here. A serpent, a tree, is as much mind-stuff as human prototypes created to live among them. Move to your next point. It relates to this.

“Now the serpent was more crafty than any other wild animal that the lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God say, ‘You shall not eat from any tree in the garden’?” The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden; but God said, ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of the garden, nor shall you touch it, or you shall die.'”

What struck me is that Adam and Eve are portrayed as talking to God and talking to the beasts (to the serpent specifically, but I don’t get the sense that it is only to the serpent) as we talk one to another.

Yes, before they ate of that apple. As you note later, the conversation with God that ensues is their last face to face conversation, and you do not read of their talking with the beasts thereafter.

Changing their awareness changed their range of possibilities?

You tell us. For the moment, concentrate on this part of the story.

Well, the serpent is described as the craftiest of wild animals. (Why “wild”? Did they already have pets? Or does it imply wild v. tamed beasts? I don’t get that any of the beasts are seen as dangerous.) what’s that about?

It implies that the serpent is smart enough to see that God’s word can’t be taken as given, and smart enough to persuade the humans to disobey the one order that they had been given. Rather than allowing yourselves to think this is a treatise on zoology, recognize, again, that  the serpent is being used as a symbol of the state of mind that knows better than anything and everything, and can’t refrain from stirring the pot, as you like to say. Note, the serpent is not described as being of evil intent: It would probably plead that it was merely opening the yes of the humans to the fact that their God was lying to them.

So many questions arise. That one command (that we know of. Were there others, unmentioned here?): Was it a test of obedience? A lure to entice them to disobey? (That is, was it entrapment?) Why put the tree there and call their attention to it, if God didn’t want them to eat of it?

But it wasn’t God, but the serpent, that drew their attention to it. That’s the point, in re the serpent. The situation existed in posse, but the serpent created it in esse.

He lured them on.

Well, cite your next verse.

“But the serpent said to the woman, ‘You will not die; for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.’”

Did they die after eating the apple? If so, in what sense? Does this imply that they would have lived forever otherwise?

I get that in a sense, they died when their bodies died, and otherwise they wouldn’t have, but would have maintained their same sense of themselves.

Not so simple, but on the right track. The fact is that when they ate of the apple, their consciousness changed. We surely have established that much, anyway.

But we’ve used up an hour and have looked at only three of the ten divisions I’ve marked.

“Tomorrow is another day.”

All right. To be continued, I got that. Today’s theme?

“Eating the apple (1)”?

Yes. Thanks for all this.