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The Descent
Wetland heron nests at dusk: January 15,2014
CC Jean Stimmell |
To my way
of thinking, the Adam and Eve Myth shares common ground with my first big dream
about the fierce, Buddhist nun passionately grieving her dead baby. This was
transformational to me, igniting an instantaneous paradigm shift, which, among
other things, brought me into therapy: I saw in that instant that the Nun’s visceral,
raw passion and fierce, primal emotion were what is really real, more so than the pale, stale, static image
of Buddha sitting under the Bodhi tree.
And infinitely more really real than the conventional telling of Adam and Eve story – and the conclusions drawn about what it is to be human!
Here’s
what I mean: In the Jewish, Islamic and Christian religions, Adam and Eve were
created by God to live in his creation and to have a relationship with
him, something like a human getting a dog. Their very names are indicative of their
roles. Adam comes from the Hebrew meaning "man." Eve is from the
Hebrew for "life."
God wanted for Adam and Eve to live with him in his
transcendent life, pure, cerebral, static, unchanging, unemotional–an eternity
of no surprises. He made a deal with them: They could live in the Garden of
Eden, a perfect place with no thorns or weeds, cultivate the garden, name the
animals, and eat of the garden's fruit, everything but the dark fruit from the
tree containing the knowledge of good and evil.
This sounds to me like the master of the house
telling his dog that you can live in my palace and eat the finest food but
don’t ever bite me, piss on the floor, or go outside to have fun chasing the
mail man or fucking the neighborhood bitches. I’m warning you, if your do, you
are out of here! Do you understand!
How boring thought the dog...that’s no fun al all.
No doubt both Adam and Eve felt the same way: You
can’t have yin without yang, you can’t have up without down, you can’t have
heaven without hell, you can’t have the transcendent without the descendent.
[Enter Stage
Right] At that point, the Serpent appears to get the plot moving. She represents by her very shape her connection to the earth and moist mysteries, to emotion, intrigue, betrayals,
and dark passions: the ecstatic,
irrational, imaginal: the Realm of Dionysus.
But
not according to the Bible which claims that the Serpent was not Dionysus but
Satan himself!
Specifically,
the Bible says that Eve was seduced into eating the fruit
by Satan, who then disguised as the Serpent deceived Adam to get him to also
eat the fruit (of course, he was no fool: he damn well knew it was against the rules, but
didn’t have the balls to take the lead, so he let Eve take the Fall.)
Because they disobeyed God by
following Satan’s advice, God expelled Adam and Eve from the garden. How dare
them! What a nerve to place their earthly desires above God’s transcendent
vision. It was very bad! According to
the Bible, it was “through this act that
sin entered the world."
My alternative version is that the
serpent was the voice of the Earth, freeing Adam and Eve from being eternal
captives, programmed robots in a stale, unchanging, transcendental mansion in
the sky. The Serpent sprung them out of dullsville, allowing them, instead, to to
descend into the uncertainty, dread, and wonder of the land of the
living.
XXX
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