Inside Paradise
While `Eden' itself may originate in the Sumerian edinu, simply meaning `plain', the term used in Genesis for `paradise' is a mixture of various near eastern words, including the old Persian paradeida, which may mean `a royal park' or `enclosed garden',' denoting a sense of exclusivity, even of luxury. Indeed, the Greek paradeisos was often used by writers such as Xenophon to describe the lush walled gardens of wealthy monarchs like King Cyrus, envied throughout the Near East for his opulence. Perhaps the old Mesopotamian belief in the `king as gardener' underpinned the Eden imagery ,5 where God himself creates the garden, and Adam - a true human king-figure before the Fall - maintains it. (And it may be significant that the priests of several ancient Mediterranean religions, such as those of the Egyptian Osiris cult, were known as `gardeners' and that Mary Magdalene, who, I have argued elsewhere, was a priestess of a goddess-worshipping religion,' believed the risen Jesus to be a `gardener'.)
`Eden' may refer to the wider region in which the first garden was believed to be located, variously described in the Old Testament as the `Garden of the Lord" or the `Garden of God',8 a verdant place that was soon synonymous with peace, tranquillity and, above all, innocence. Four rivers gave the garden its lush fertility, providing abundant food for its teeming and diverse plant and animal life, inspiring generations of Christian artists and writers.
Many Jewish and early Christian chroniclers pursued a fruitless task of trying to locate the four rivers of Paradise. These are named by the Bible as the Euphrates and the Tigris - both of which are real and important features of the near east - together with the apparently mythical Gihon and Pison, although the first-century Jewish chronicler Flavius Josephus believed that one of the latter was actually the Nile, placing Eden in north Africa. Indeed, some early Church Fathers and late classical writers placed Eden in Ethiopia, Mongolia or even India. Others have located the earthly Paradise in eastern Turkey, where it would have been served by the Euphrates, Tigris and the River Murat, the north fork of the Euphrates providing the identity of the mysterious fourth river.
Many archaeologists and theologians had long believed Eden to have been situated in Sumer, the ancient area approximately 125 miles (200 km) beyond the northern tip of the Persian Gulf, but in the 1980s Dr Juris Zarins argued that the original Paradise had sunk beneath the waves as the waters of the Gulf had risen dramatically since the time described in Genesis. Zarin also suggested that the `Gihon' is now the River Karun, which rises in Iran, flowing south west into the Persian Gulf. This is an exquisite irony - today's Iraq is no one's Paradise!
However, it hardly matters where Eden may have been - always assuming that it is a valid exercise to read the Old Testament so literally - for, like the Holy Grail, its significance is so much more potent if seen by the eyes of the heart, not the eyes of the head. Eden may have had the geographical reality of, say, New York or Madrid (or the comparative unreality of Las Vegas or Blackpool), but its maps are really treasures of the mind, like Shangri-La or Atlantis. In any case, Eden represents the Golden Age, when nature was at peace with itself and mankind `walked with God'. Unfortunately, however, the loss of Paradise, even as a mythical concept, has proved far more traumatic to the human race than any bitter-sweet longing for the delights of Camelot.
`Eden' remains a synonym for the ultimate, unspoilt and ineffably beautiful location. When Charles Dickens wished to underscore the true vileness of an allegedly paradisical plot of American swamp in his Martin Chuzzlewit,9 he simply called it `Eden' with characteristic irony. Surely it is one of the few instantly recognized names of ancient myth that is as well known today as it was millennia ago.
The curse of life
The story of Man's10 abrupt expulsion from Eden - be it fiction, metaphor or literal fact - has become etched too deeply on the collective unconscious to ignore, for it has set in stone JudaeoChristian attitudes to men, women, original sin (and therefore children), the Creator and his opposition, Lucifer/Satan/the Devil. This all-powerful myth has imbued us all at some level of perception with a belief that life is a curse, that death is the end - a collapsing back of the body into its constituent dust, no more - that women are inherently on intimate terms with evil, that men have carte blanche to do as they please with not only all the animals in the world but also their womenfolk, and that God, above all, is to be feared. Snakes come out of it rather badly, too, as the embodiment of evil, the medium through which Satan tempts we pathetic humans. The Devil, on the other hand, is the only being in the tale to show some intelligence, perhaps even humour, in taking the form of a wriggling, presumably charming, phallic symbol through which to tempt a woman.
As both Judaism and Christianity depend so intimately on the basic premises of Genesis, this lost paradise of the soul is evoked several times throughout both Old and New Testaments. The crucified Jesus promised the thief hanging on the cross next to him `Today you will be with me in Paradise'," although it is unclear how those listening may have interpreted this term. Did they see it as synonymous with `heaven', a state of bliss that must remain unknowable to the living (and remain for ever unknown to the wicked)? Or did it somehow encompass the old idea of the luxuriant garden?
Images of the garden as Paradise recur throughout the Old Testament, assuming a highly sensuous form in its love poem, the Song of Songs - believed to be the erotic praise of the Queen of Sheba by her lover, King Solomon - in powerful phrases such as `Our bed is verdant';12 `You are a garden locked up, my sister, my bride," and `You are a garden fountain/a well of flowing water streaming down from Lebanon' .14
(These blatantly sexual verses are still widely interpreted by modern churchgoers and theologians as `an allegory of the great Christian drama of sin and redemption, affirming the love of Christ for both the individual soul and his Church',15 which would be truly remarkable, for they were composed centuries before Jesus was born. Not only that, but the ripe lasciviousness which summons up sometimes disconcertingly vivid images of Solomon and Sheba's amorous activity in their tented boudoir seems a world away from the austere love of Ecclesia, the Christian Church. However, as we shall see, the Song of Songs does have some light to shed on a great Christian mystery, but hardly one that would feature in any sermon.)
As in all the best dramas, early harmony must be doomed - or there simply won't be much of a story - so the scenario described at the beginning of Genesis is not to last: after all, no state of earthly bliss can endure. It was to be all downhill after the creation.
Forbidden fruit
As the original naturists Adam and Eve frolicked among amiable animals, one of which had already evolved a remarkable talent. This was a talking snake, whose ability seemed to take its creator by surprise, although this is by no means the last time his own creations will catch Yahweh unawares.
Having created Adam and Eve `in his own image' he then ordered them not to touch the fruit of `the tree of the knowledge of good and evil' in the middle of the garden, on pain of death - presumably a concept they had some difficulty understanding. But along slid the loquacious serpent, who swiftly took the opportunity to whisper with his flickering forked tongue to Eve: `Did God really say, "You must not eat from any tree in the garden?""'
When Eve dutifully repeats God's proscription on `fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden', the serpent responds `You will not surely 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'" [My emphasis]. While the humans seem to be enticed primarily by the lusciousness of the forbidden fruit, the serpent concentrates on making explicit the appeal of becoming like God, with the implication of a potential challenge to his authority. If his intention were simply to make mankind fall from grace - evil for its own sake - there was no need to spell it out for them. `Look at the lovely fruit!' would have done just as well. Did the serpent actually care about Adam and Eve's intellectual development? In any case, there must be something special about the fruit because God
put it out of bounds so specifically. So they eat.
When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it. Then the eyes of both of them were opened . . .l8
They may have had only the taste sensation in mind - the fruit being `also desirable for gaining wisdom' seems something of an afterthought - but in gobbling it down the damage is done. Their guilty snack is a moment of pure cataclysm, for far from being the equivalent of being caught with their hands in the cookie jar, it opened the portals for evil - although of course in order to tempt the woman Satan was already present, so presumably the Fall was only a matter of time, fruit or no fruit.
The sensuous indulgence changes everything. The man and his wife realize abruptly that they are not only naked but that their nudity is a shameful thing - the implication is that this is actually unnatural, some kind of perversion - so they hastily manufacture clothes out of leaves, revealing if nothing else that sewing is apparently instinctive human behaviour in an emergency.
But as they cower in the bushes covered in fig leaves, they realize that all is lost: God is walking in the garden `in the cool of the day' and calls out `Where are you?' Adam tells the Almighty that he is hiding because he `was afraid because I was naked'. God is outraged, demanding to know (without a flicker of irony) `Who told you you were naked?' Like an irate schoolmaster trying to elicit a confession from a mulish class, he adds: `Have you eaten from the tree from which I commanded you not to eat?"9
When God wrathfully demands to know how they knew they were naked, Adam pipes up disloyally: `The woman you put here with me - she gave me some fruit from the tree and I ate it.' After the world's first sneak has finished blaming his wife, and in doing so also even implies that he blames God for giving him Eve as his companion, she, too, is keen to pass the blame on to the serpent, which God declares:
Cursed are you above all the livestock and all the wild animals! You will crawl on your belly and you will eat dust all the days of your life. And I will put enmity between you and the woman, And between your offspring and hers; He will crush your head And you will strike his heel.20
Yet the symbolism of the snake is open to very different interpretations. In ancient Egypt it was used as the uraeus, the cobra that decorated the head-dress of the royal family as `Lord of Life and Death',2! the ultimate symbol of earthly power. According to the medieval Jewish Cabbalists, the secret or esoteric number of the serpent in Eden is the same as that for the Messiah: as the infamous - but extremely well educated - ritual magician Aleister Crowley wrote: `[the snake] is the Redeemer', noting `the serpent is also ... the principal symbol of male energy'22 and `creator and destroyer, who operates all change'.23 (He also amused and shocked by proffering `the serpent's kiss' to women, especially those whom he had just met. Of course it was a more or less painful bite.) To the heretical Gnostic Christians, the serpent, coiled around the Tree of Life, was to be celebrated as the bringer of gnosis, of intense personal enlightenment of the spirit. And to the Tantrics, the eastern devotees of sacred sexuality, the snake represents the power of kundalini, the creative sexual force that is normally envisaged as being curled up at the base of the spine. When roused it produces intense heat and power - but woe betide the individual who has not prepared diligently for its awakening with rigorous magical and spiritual discipline, for it can become awesomely uncontrollable.
However, in the original Eden myth, as the serpent slithers off to a fate of humiliation24 God rounds on Eve, cursing her:
I will greatly increase your pains in childbearing; With pain you will give birth to children. Your desire will be for your husband, And he will rule over you.25
The culpability of Eve and the serpent may be endlessly debated, but those four short lines have proved only too influential over the minds of men, not only providing a divine blessing for wife-beaters and all manner of marital abuses, but also - as we shall see - even specifically and egregiously dooming generations of midwives to torture and death. As their medical and herbal knowledge eased the pains of childbirth, they were singled out by an outraged Church as heretics or witches who had deliberately flouted God's holy law. Thousands of midwives were duly hounded to an atrocious death.
(Although when God removed one of Adam's ribs with which to fashion Eve, at least he first mercifully put him to sleep, it is quite incredible that as late as the nineteenth century, Queen Victoria's doctors were horrified when she asked to have her pains relieved for the births of her last seven children by the new anaesthesia. These men of the modern era, the time of rail travel, photography and the telegraph, seriously objected that to kill the agony of childbirth was to risk offending the Almighty, who had made his views on this subject very clear in Genesis. Fortunately for Victorian women and subsequent generations of nervous mothers-to-be, the queen-empress won that particular battle.)
Marilyn Yalom, in A History of the Wife (2001), describes how early Christian Fathers such as Tertullian and Saint Augustine believed that Eve's Fall had `conferred a moral taint on all carnal union, even that within marriage'. While Augustine declared that `married couples should engage in sex only to beget children, and should scrupulously avoid copulating merely for pleasure':
Saint Jerome went even further. He considered sex, even in marriage, as intrinsically evil. He rejected sexual pleasure as filthy, loathsome, degrading, and ultimately corrupting. This linkage of sex and sin, with blame attributed to the daughters of Eve, became increasingly entrenched within the church, and by the fifth century was common currency among ecclesiastical authorities. It was also related to the rise of monasticism, which, by the sixth century, offered an alternative to marriage for Christian men and women. (Institutionalized celibacy has not been a part of Jewish or Muslim practice.)26
Back in a Paradise, trembling on the brink of disaster, Adam and Eve (wearing new suits of clothes made from animal skins for them by God himself) are then summarily expelled, prevented from trying to sneak back in for further helpings of delicious wisdom by `cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life'.27 In the words of the blind English poet John Milton (1608-74), Latin secretary to Oliver Cromwell and a fervent Protestant, in his epic religious poem Paradise Lost:
The world was now before them, where to choose Their place of rest, and Providence their guide: They hand in hand with wand'ring steps and slow, Through Eden took their solitary way 28
Although weary and chastened, Milton's Adam and Eve seem on the brink of a great adventure as they resignedly turn their newly clad backs on Paradise. `The world was now before them' - anything could happen now they were no longer institutionalized and free to go and do as they pleased. They might be cursed and even damned, but they had a glimmering of hope.
Yet although, as the French writer Jean Markale notes of our progenitors, `in discovering evil they also discovered good', he goes on to remark astutely: `Men now felt guilty. Guilty of what? We have no idea.'29
After the Fall
It will not be an easy journey. Adam is condemned to a life of `painful toil' with the brutal reminder `dust you are and to dust you will return'. According to Christian theology, their Fall is the original sin with which we are all burdened, even - indeed, especially - newborn babies, who arrive in this world as kicking, screaming proof of Eve's curse, not to mention the very fact that their existence is the inevitable evidence of parental intercourse. Birth itself was shameful. (It was only in the 1950s that pregnancy was mentioned openly in polite society. Before that, euphemisms, such as being in `an interesting condition' applied, and even then some blushes were expected.)
However, in the biblical account, there is no mention that the snake is the Devil, Satan or Lucifer. He is simply a snake, apparently doing what snakes do best - tempting women. The sexual connotations may be cringingly obvious to the post-Freudian world, but they were n
ot necessarily so blatant to our Bible-quoting ancestors. However, it is not much of a leap from the story of the wicked snake to the notion of its being instructed or even possessed by the personification of evil, whoever or whatever that might be: Milton makes the point clear in his description of `... the serpent, or rather Satan in the serpent.'3o
(The identification of snakes with evil is so ingrained that a serpent, tongue flickering horribly, simply had to be the symbol for Hogwarts' house of Slytherin, alma mater of all magicians who went to the bad, in J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter novels. Yet Harry's unconscious skills do set a boa constrictor free from London Zoo, who is polite enough to hiss 'Thanks', before slithering off.)
The unedifying story of the expulsion from Paradise is believed to be essentially about the arrival of sin among humankind - its fall from grace and future as the plaything of evil and the repository for all known pain and suffering. While the preferred modern view is to dismiss it as nonsense or at best see it as an allegory, a surprising number of Christians still believe that Adam and Eve literally existed and that we have since suffered from their sin.
However, perhaps the story is most revealing about God's own nature. He appears to be as much at a loss with Adam and Eve as they are in their new circumstances - and not much of a psychologist, despite having created the prototype man and woman in the first place. Did he really believe that banning a certain substance, the fruit of a tree - that one over there, look! - would mean that they would obediently steer clear of it? Clearly he has a great deal to learn as a father.
Not only does God seem taken aback by the whole episode, but also he seems neither to have understood that he has created intellectual curiosity and a desire for sensuous satisfaction nor that the snake, too, was his handiwork, saddled with a set of characteristics that inevitably led him to tempt the woman. Like Judas in his role as catalyst for Jesus' sacrifice, the snake was doomed from the first. And both are seen as literal embodiments of, or at best, servants of evil. And - after Eve's calamitous fall - traditionally women have been seen as not much better.
The Secret History of Lucifer: And the Meaning of the True Da Vinci Code Page 2
