history, psychology, mythBy “second creation”, I am referring to the Adam and Eve story. Psychology refers to our concept of ourselves, which is finite and how we attempt to deal with an experience of time and space that is infinite. Even ancient people would have had a sense that history went back further than they could know, and of course there were the unreachable things in the sky, sometimes called the “heavens”.
The common interpretation of cave paintings is that people were feeling some remorse for the living beings they were killing. In tribal warfare too, they justified it for survival reasons, but knew their enemy had families. This is the “knowledge of good and evil” contained in the tree from which Adam and Eve ate. Also noteworthy is that is the woman tempts the man, then he feels vulnerable. This is the basis for most of the sitcoms on TV today. We know the joke, but we don’t recognize it in this ancient form of storytelling.
And what is our punishment? Working and having children, the very things that protect us from vulnerability and give a sense of the infinite. How this was co-opted by the Kingdom of David, or whoever those people were up in the hills of the desert, is a bigger mystery, and unfortunately it got mixed in with a search for how to be saved from this disease. We now know that we all have these conflicts going in our heads, we would go to extreme, violent ends to protect our family, and most of us who own computers and are sitting safely in our rooms using them, benefit from people who have perpetrated violent acts to create that safety. We all have to resolve this dissonance.
Instead of looking for a savior, I think the story is telling us to look for ways to grow, mature, learn to live with these selfish instincts and learn to be civil and care for each other. Most of the religions still in practice today started at a time when cities were forming and those things were becoming increasingly important. So it makes sense that the many traditions that have some form of the Golden Rule all started in that time.
I’m not just making this up out of thin air, John Shelby Spong explores these ideas, especially in his latest book and this talk by a clinical psychologist covers much of it. It is in 5 parts, about an hour total
All mythologies visit certain key themes and questions. They attempt to address in symbolic fashion the origin and meaning of human life, the reason for death, the source of evil, pain and suffering, and other timeless issues. I’d no more interpret the Hebraic mythos as psychology than I’d interpret the mythology of the Hopi as psychology. Conflating the two demeans the value of studying mythology as a phenomenology and places its discourse in an inappropriate venue.
This is what mythology is, and this is what its purpose is.
I absolutely believe it was an attempt at psychology, amongst other things. While I’m very critical of religion, it definitely attempts to address real and important matters. For a long time religion was a great aid to human progress. But those days are gone, we have developed better approaches (like actual psychology) that don’t carry the costs of superstition.
However, I personally don’t admire anything about the Genesis myth. It inflicted upon us the truly hateful idea of original sin, something which the religious still preach as truth to children today. This provided the explanation for a number of phenomena that we now have much better explanations for, such as:
Ok, the first one is still a work in progress, but I think we can safely rule out “we fell from grace because our ancestors ate a magic apple”.
Most scholars interpret the "knowledge of good and evil" as being the "knowledge of everything", a merism. So it is doesn't just mean actions that are good and actions that are bad, it refers to all knowledge.
Therefore I interpret it as nothing more than a story about the consequences of disobedience, in this case the disobedience being that of seeking knowledge with which to free oneself from the need of a moral authority. It is a tool to secure obedience.
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