Eating the apple (3)
4:25 a.m. Very well, let’s resume. Setting switches.
Then the LORD God said to the woman, “What is this that you have done?” The woman said, “The serpent tricked me, and I ate.”
The LORD God said to the serpent, “Because you have done this, cursed are you among all animals and among all wild creatures; upon your belly you shall go, and dust you shall eat all the days of your life. I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will strike your head, and you will strike his heel.”
To the woman he said, “I will greatly increase your pangs in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children, yet your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you.”
And to the man he said, “Because you have listened to the voice of your wife, and have eaten of the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You shall not eat of it,’ cursed is the ground because of you; in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you; and you shall eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread until you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”
The man named his wife Eve, because she was the mother of all living.
This all sounds punitive, not to say vindictive. I’m looking forward to hearing your take on it.
Your reactions more specifically?
“The serpent tricked me”? What was the trick? And, I noticed that among Eve’s punishments not merely that her husband would rule over her, but that “your desire shall be for your husband.”
So let’s look at it, continuing as we began, by examining the results of the man and the woman choosing, and in their choice becoming required to see things in terms of good and evil. Once again we remind you, the scriptures were necessarily written from that altered perspective.
“The serpent tricked me, and I age.” Is this as simple as Eve passing the buck, in the same way Adam has been seen to be passing the buck? Or might it be – as with Adam – her explaining what had happened, as best she could according to her understanding?
I get the implication that she didn’t understand how she had come to do it. Is that right?
Bear in mind that according to the myth, Adm and Eve were in uncharted territory. Their perceptions had changed – fallen – and so what they had done looked utterly different to them than it had looked prospectively.
I see. Interesting. “I must have been out of my mind!” Or, more specifically, “I only did what she suggested,” on his part, and “I was tricked,” on hers. Neither one of them could see things now except in terms of good or evil, and they knew they were not evil, yet apparently they had done evil. So, the birth of the excuse that lets us acknowledge what we had done, without forcing us to brand ourselves as evil, which would be devastating.
Yes. You are familiar with the syndrome from Hemingway’s biography, and every one of you can become more familiar with it by close examination of your own biography. But the good news is that you aren’t evil, and that seeing your deeds as good and evil is only one way to see them, and not the most far-sighted or insightful way to see them.
But the scriptures were written by people who lived within that “good v. evil” mindset and could imagine no other. So the punishments had to be God pronouncing judgment. But, no matter how we look at it, it must have been tracing some kind of cause-and-effect relationship between the choice of seeing things as good and evil, and the specific results ascribed. Or was that all just people saying that thunder means the gods are angry?
You mean, were those things that scripture carefully describe as being related, actually not related?
Yes. I don’t mean that they were the result of chance and coincidence, but if they are logically related, I don’t see how, unless by the logic the scriptures ascribe, as punishment for transgression. As punishments they would make sense, even if repugnant to our judgment. But how do they make sense as concomitants to a new way of seeing the world?
It isn’t as the result of “a new way of seeing the world.”; that is a side-effect. They are as a result of being unable to live at a state of unified consciousness.
I see it! That’s remarkable. So few words, but the spark passed.
The tellers, and later the writers, of scripture knew what they were saying. It was truly because of that fall from unified vision that so many consequences followed. Now, the consequences weren’t all “bad” (and of course none of them were “bad” except as seen from the new binary vision), but they were new, and had to be experienced, absorbed, and their meaning ascribed to them.
So if things have to be seen in a new framework of good or evil:
- The woman must have been tricked, or she wouldn’t have disobeyed
- The man must have had his judgment clouded by the fact that God had given him the woman as companion, or he wouldn’t have accepted her suggestion
- The serpent’s intent must have been evil, for he must either have not known the result he pretended to know, or he must have known it would turn out wrong.
Then, when Adam and Eve – and their children – saw the snake through the veil of condemnation, naturally a wall of hatred would separate them, an instinctive mutual fear and hatred. Remember, in those human families who are not descended from those who ate the apple, the snake is not seen as “crafty” but as “wise” and as the dispenser of wisdom.
Suddenly as we wrote that, I realized, different societies have different scriptures (written or unwritten) because they describe different lines of descent psychologically. They in effect have different gods because they live in different worlds psychologically.
Yes.
But wouldn’t that mean that those whose psychology is not shaped in terms of good and evil would have less difficulty in childbearing, and would have women who were not psychologically dependent upon their men, and were not ruled by them? Wouldn’t it mean that for them the ground wouldn’t be cursed and they wouldn’t need to sweat for a living?
You remember Thoreau’s words, surely.
Yes, he said that he learned, by his experiment of living simply, that man does not have to live by the sweat of his brow “unless he sweats easier than I do.”
He was not, at that time, living in terms of good and evil. Such evil as he saw around him, he saw as the result chiefly of ignorance.
Slavery?
That lured him away from his tranquility, but perhaps the tranquility was premature, or let’s say not yet fully earned.
I think you’re going to say something about the individual and society, which is where I came in, 52 years ago with my Master’s thesis, even though I was firmly ensconced in seeing things as good or evil in those days.
Let’s finish with genesis before we move to other things.
I don’t see why this line follows.
The man named his wife Eve, because she was the mother of all living.
It seems merely irrelevant.
Irrelevant, to say that everyone listening or reading descended from their ancestors?
Obvious as you say it. Very well, then finally –
And the LORD God made garments of skins for the man and for his wife, and clothed them. Then the LORD God said, “See, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil; and now, he might reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life, and eat, and live forever”– therefore the LORD God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from which he was taken.
He drove out the man; and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim, and a sword flaming and turning to guard the way to the tree of life.
Why skins instead of fig leaves? Sure, skins are more durable, but they are made from animals instead of plants, and the need for garments is now accepted by God. Irreversible change in their consciousness?
Don’t hurry through this last bit. Look at it slowly. Refocus on it.
There are a couple of puzzles in it.
List them.
Well, as I said, there is the matter of the skins:
- Now okay to use the animals, as they used plants?
- A result of a decrease in perception? They don’t speak to the animals after they eat the apple.
- Clothes assumes that their new condition is permanent, that there is no going back to a state of innocence once it is lost. In context, this means, the first time they thought for themselves, they suffered for it.
Let’s look at this before we look at the rest.
You see, slower is more thorough. We would say, in response to your three points, yes, now they would see the world as something for them to relate to as “other.” The world had become desacralized, you could say. The animals, the plants, the minerals – all of nature, in other words – was other; it could be used according to human will, need, desire, without considering its own inherent rights. Naturally, in such a way of seeing the world, there would be no ability to communicate with animals.
Only, we do, and we always have.
You are changing the terms, in a way. There are always some who commune with animals, and there are always some animals that a given person may commune with. But the general experience of everyone communing with all animals was lost.
All right, I see the distinction.
And let us leave the final part of your selection for next time, as your hour is up and your energy is flagging, though you see it not.
Our thanks as always.