September 7, 2023 • 46 mins
Who first told the story of the Garden of Eden? Could it have been a way to explain the unfolding Agricultural Revolution from the perspective of the people who were there?
The Garden of Eden has been told and retold for thousands of years. Why do we keep telling it? With insight from modern biblical scholarship, we investigate the origins of this ancient story and what warning this active myth still has yet to be heeded today.
It’s an adventure to the far flung lands of Alex’s 5th grade classroom as well as the lush old-growth forests of the Middle East (before all the desertification).
There’s parables, characters, and plenty of special effects. You’ll want to bring some popcorn for this one. And don’t listen to anything that serpent tells you on the way in.
This episode is largely indebted to the research and writing of J. Snodgrass and his fascinating book “Genesis and the Rise of Civilization”. If you would like to learn more, you’ll find an exclusive interview with J. Snodgrass on the HNO Patreon.
Citations
Ishmael by Daniel Quinn (1992)
Genesis and the Rise of Civilization by j. Snodgrass (2011)
Sapiens by Yuval Harari (2011)
Indigenous Continent: The Epic Conquest of North America by Pekka Hämäläinen (2022)
The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race from Discovery Magazine (1999)
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:01):
It's dark and heavy, like a dream.
There's the smell of damp earth.
Your body is part of the soil
and your limbs are heavy.
Suddenly there is light.
You are pulled from the groundby your creator
and sculpted into formand from a mere clump of dirt.
(00:23):
You become a human being.
Your neck is a bit sore, but overallyou feel pretty good.
Everything is new.
The world is just being born.
So when you hear the songs of birds,
they sing for the first time.
You are the first personto look upon the world and breathe its air
(00:48):
and feel the weight of your bodyas a living.
Being.
And here, God planted a garden named Eden.
Come walk through its softand flowing ferns.
Enjoy the vibrant sight of crimson'sand fuchsias of the flowering plants.
Here, the babbling brook and streamsrest in the cool shade.
(01:11):
Feel the warmth of the sun.
This is the Garden of Eden.
And God created you to care for it.
You and your partner are nakedwithout shame.
Naming the plants and animals.
You share the garden with.
This will call a giraffe,
(01:33):
and that will be known as a flamingo.
And this.
This will be a dandelion.
And God speaks and says of every tree.
The golden dome is from each one of thetree, of the knowledge of the removal.
Thou shalt not eat of it.
For in the day that though it is thereof,
(01:54):
thou shall shall be dog.
But when God's not working, a serpentappears.
Bullshit, the snake says.
Obviously, God knows thatif you eat from the tree of knowledge,
then your eyes shall be openand you shall be as gods.
I say go for it.
Well, that sounds convincing enough.
(02:16):
You decide to take it back,and we all know what happens
next.
And God, who is beyond disappointed
as he's casting you and your partnerout of the garden forever, proclaims,
because the host of the tree personis the ground for those secrets
and sorrows shall those deliveredall the days of my life?
(02:39):
Thornsalso in thistles show it bring forth to be
in the sweat of those first downso you through
to the return onto the ground
and the world changed forever.
(03:03):
Welcome to Episodefive of Human Nature Odyssey,
a podcast exploring mythology, historyand where the two meet.
I'm Alex.
(03:27):
Today, we continue our explorationof Daniel Quinn's 1992 novel, Ishmael,
about a telepathic gorillasharing his insights on humanity.
If this is your first timejoining us, welcome.
It's totally fine to start from here.
And if you want to fill in the gapsof previous episodes later, that's great.
And if you've been alongfor the entire Ishmael ride so far.
(03:49):
Glad to have you back.
Now, being a gorilla, Ishmael is able
to inspect humanity from the outside.
And when Ishmael observesall the many human cultures, societies
and nations, he sees usas essentially divided into two groups
the takers and the levers.
(04:10):
I grew up in Take Your Civilization,
and chances are you probably did as well.
According to
Ishmael, the takers emerged10,000 years ago,
grew into the dominant globalmacro culture we live in today
and are causing worldwideecological catastrophe.
Ishmael believes we destroy the worldnot because we're inherently greedy
(04:33):
or innately flawed,but because we are held captive
by taking mythology, a very powerful storypassed down for thousands of years.
Put simply, take your mythology preaches
that the world belongs to usand that we must conquer it.
This is a storywe can't seem to stop acting out
(04:54):
the levers,however, have existed for hundreds
of thousands of years as hunter gatherers,and some continue to exist today
and in all this time, unlike the takers,
they've managed to not destroy the world.
They do so notbecause they're more noble or ignorant,
but because they enacta very different story.
(05:16):
Believer mythology.
So if we and taker civilizationhave an earnest desire
to leave behind a livable worldto future generations,
it would be worth investigatingthe origins of our taker
mythologyand what Weaver mythology might be.
Instead.
And Ishmael suggestsone of the best ways to do this
(05:37):
is by exploring a very ancient story
that still holdsgreat influence across our culture today.
The story of the Garden
of Eden.
(05:59):
Growing up, my rabbi, Arthur
Wasco, had an interesting perspectiveon these ancient stories.
To him, the most compelling questionwasn't whether these tales
were historical truths or simply fictions.
But why do we still tell them?
Why are these storiesstill so important to us?
And that got me thinking that mythsare like an incredibly powerful mirror,
(06:23):
reflecting back the worldview of thosewho tell them
and also who created them.
And these biblical storiesweren't just crafted by one person.
The Bible is a compositeof many different tales
taken from different sourcesand brought into one.
In fact, biblical scholars,based on the writing style
(06:44):
and language use, can tracewhich parts of the Bible
were compiled from different sourcesand when they may have been added.
For example, most scholarsbelieve the Garden of Eden story
is actually older than the seven daycreation myth.
Even though chronologicallyit comes after,
it also seems that one version or another,the Garden of Eden was passed down
(07:06):
as an oral tradition for centuries,if not millennia, before it was ever
even written down in the sixthand fifth century B.C.
We can't know how long ago it wasfirst told,
but as we'll discuss in this episode,there's reason to suspect
it's been passed down for a very,very, very,
very long timewith some key changes along the way.
(07:30):
Now, that'sa pretty epic game of telephone.
I like to think aboutwhen an ancient story like this would have
first been told.
Who were the people who first imaginedthis fable about God?
And a couple of nudistsand a very tempting fruit?
And can we use their storyas a mirror to learn anything about them?
Because little did they knowthis story would more than just catch on.
(07:54):
Could they have fathomthat one day it would be retold on
every continentand translated in over 2000 languages?
I mean, damn, talk about going viral.
And when it was first being told.
Why did this particular story of allthe stories catch on in the first place?
Is it just like a really good story?
(08:15):
Back in the day, were therenot any better stories out there?
I mean, come on.
You're telling me some ancient societycan come up with something better,
maybe with more epic production value,
like a super strong kingwho goes around slaying monsters.
Well, guess what?
The Sumerians did tell a story like that.
The Epic of Gilgamesh.
And back in ancient Sumer,almost 5000 years ago,
(08:38):
the Epic of Gilgamesh was an all outblockbuster.
When the Sumerians first invented writing.
Gilgamesh was the first storythey wrote down, making it
the first written storyin all of human history.
But could you tell methe story of Gilgamesh right now?
If you bumped into your neighbor
at a 7-Eleven and asked them to recitethe tale of the old Sumerian king,
(09:02):
would they know what the heckyou were talking about?
No, I don't think so.
The Epic of Gilgameshdidn't get passed down.
In fact, for thousands of years,we didn't even know it existed.
The writing was only recoveredand translated in 1853.
Meanwhile, you go up to literally anyone
you've ever metand ask them to recite the Garden of Eden.
(09:23):
They'll probably do a pretty good job.
And all these millennia later,there are billions of people alive to whom
this story provides profound influenceand meaning in their lives.
Because to us,the Epic of Gilgamesh is just a story.
The Garden of Eden,however, is still an act of myth.
(09:46):
Biblical commentator Jay
Snodgrass, great name, describesthe myth as, quote,
a hit songthat catches on through the culture.
You hear it on the radiofor the first time and you're already
singing along.
Maybe it's a bitter song.
Maybe it's too sweet.
Maybe you don't want your musician friendto know you like it.
But for reasons you can't explain,
(10:08):
the song restores a balance.
Unquote.
He goes on to put the power of mythanother way quote
Anybody can tell any story,but for it to become a myth,
it's got to awaken a sleeping truthwithin a community of listeners.
It's got to answer a question you've beenstruggling to formulate in words.
(10:29):
Unquote.
So in the case of the Garden of Eden,whatever that question was,
not only doesit still resonate with us today, but
it must have really touched on somethingvery important to those who first told it.
So something must have happeneda long time ago.
Something big and notable and perplexing
(10:50):
inspired a group of peopleto tell a story about it.
And Ishmael theorizesthe major event that first inspired
this story was the very birth of taker'scivilization itself.
What we call the agricultural revolution.
To get a better look,we're going to go on a field trip
(11:13):
to my fifth grade classroom and
here you'll
find me at 12 yearsold, sporting a poofy haired bouquet.
We're in the middle of a lessonon the agricultural revolution
and just how big the changesit brought were.
Right now, fifth grade, Alexis diligently working on a class project
(11:34):
drawings that depict life as huntergatherers before agriculture
and life as farmers after.
If we look over his shoulderto see his drawings,
which are currently collecting dustin his parents basement,
you'll see a roaring river turnedinto controlled irrigation channels.
Then there's a wild boar with big,scary teeth
(11:56):
being turned into a cute domesticheaded, smiling pig.
On another page, you'll noticestick figures putting down their bows
and arrows to cultivate neatlittle lines of fruits and vegetables.
In fifth grade,I was taught the agricultural revolution
was the beginning of everything important
and anything that came beforeit was just pre-history.
(12:18):
This was still years before
I first read Ishmaelor went through puberty.
But later from Ishmael, I'd learnhow humans actually lived
for hundreds of thousands of yearsbefore agriculture.
Think of how many things happened overthat time, how many people fell in love,
how many arguments were started,jokes were told.
Songs were sung.
(12:39):
Entire ice ages came and went.
Ishmael arguesthat the reason we call that pre-history
and consider agriculturethe real starting point is
because the agricultural revolutionis the beginning of taker history.
Take your civilization at its core
is an agricultural society.
(12:59):
It's only made possibleby and entirely dependent on agriculture
and it still is today.
Even if you and I aren't farmersourselves, the vast
majority of the food we eat is not huntedor gathered.
It's farmed. And before the takers.
For most of human history,we find not a single evidence of farming.
(13:22):
Which is pretty freaking odd.
If you believe civilization is the mostsuperior advanced form of society
and that humans are supposed to farmand build cities.
And even stranger stillon the agricultural revolution began.
All the hunter gatherersdidn't throw down their bows and arrows,
shout Eureka and immediatelyadopt farming.
Instead of being a sudden watershed momentfor all of humanity.
(13:45):
It was more like a gradual tidal wave,slowly spreading to new communities
over millennia, sometimesby voluntary adoption, sometimes by force.
Many communitieschose to not adopt agriculture,
seeing their hunter gatherer lifestyleas a more appealing way to live.
So our hunter gatherer ancestors weren't
just sitting around the campfirethinking, Well, this sucks.
(14:08):
Waiting for
some kind of technological breakthroughthat would finally make everything better.
In fact, the transition of farming came
with a lot of disadvantagescompared to hunting and gathering.
The first farmers would have spentmuch more of their day doing
physical labor, were more susceptibleto infectious diseases like smallpox,
measles and tuberculosis,which originated in domesticated animals.
(14:30):
Compared to hunter gatherers,the first farmers had a less diverse,
nutritious diet
and were more likely to experience faminewhen their limited food source failed.
And the first farmers could expectto live shorter lives on average.
And hunter gatherers.
Initially,life expectancy actually went down.
Why then adapt?
Agriculture, in additionto some of the material benefits
(14:54):
like food surplus allowing for the greaterdivision of labor.
What if the first farmers committedto an agricultural lifestyle
because they viewed themselvesand their relation to the world
entirely different than they had before?
Ishmael proposesthat the agricultural revolution
and more than just a changing lifestyleand technology
(15:14):
was the birthof a fundamentally different mindset
over many generations.
We can imagine the revolutionlike a ground shattering
earthquake,ripping a major chasm in the ground.
On one side,you have takers who began to believe
they were supposed to rule the worldand do so by force.
(15:35):
On the other, you have the leaverswho believed something else.
Let's considerthese two different ways of life
and the mindsets that would justify them.
Ishmael defines mythology
as a story cultures, an act we act out,
(15:58):
and Ishmael explains.
Every workingmythology begins with a premise,
the premise of Take the mythologyis that the world belongs to us.
In the Book of Genesis, for example, God
explicitly gives Adamand Eve dominion over the world.
And you can see this in the behaviorof take your civilization
all around the world.
(16:20):
We act out taking mythology like it's
an imaginary game for grown ups.
Ishmael believes all culturesenact a story, including levers.
And for many years,our inquisitive gorilla friend
read about various lever culturesin the present.
And in the past, he studied how huntergatherers generally behave.
(16:40):
What specific stories they tell, and cameto believe that the premise of Weaver
mythologyis the exact inverse of the takers.
Takers believe the world belongs to us.
Believers believe we belong to the world.
That's the imaginary gameweavers are playing.
And it comes with a very different logic,with very different results
(17:03):
than the takers.
It's worth mentioningthat some Weaver societies do practice
a form of agriculture,
but these versions of farming reflectthe premise We belong to the world.
Like Silver Pastor,where animals are encouraged to graze
along tree lines, which actuallyimproves the health of the forest.
Or selected burnings using ashes.
(17:25):
Fertilizer, regenerating the soil.
Takers practicea specific kind of agriculture,
and it's the one that's cometo dominate the world.
Daniel Quinn, in his later books, callsthis totalitarian agriculture picture vast
fields of single types of cropswhere all pests and weeds are removed.
(17:45):
Ishmael believes what the differencecomes down to is control.
The takers
totalitarian agricultureseeks total control of their food supply.
If the crops fail,if there's a flood or a drought.
Takers engineer more control to make surethis doesn't happen next time.
Hunter gatherer leverslet go of that control.
(18:06):
If there's not enough to eat, generally
weavers can go somewhere elseand find food there.
Because if you believeyou belong to the world
and build your cultureand mythology around that premise,
then you leave a certainkind of faith in the hands of the gods.
As Ishmael puts it, you trustthat the gods have the knowledge of which
species and forests and rivers should liveand who should die.
(18:29):
The takers, on the other hand,take the life
and death of the worldaround them into their own hands.
To see this in action.
Let's travel back
now to a time even further in the pastthan my fifth grade classroom.
Let's go back in time.
2/8, zero years ago.
(18:53):
We're finding our way throughtall grassland,
towering old growth, cedar forestsand shaded rivers teeming with life.
This lush place is the Middle East, a.k.a.
Mesopotamia, a.k.a.
the Fertile Crescent, a.k.a.
one of the placeswhere the agricultural revolution began.
(19:13):
This is beforethe forests will be felled for farmlands.
The rivers will be dammed, and thedecertification as a result of thousands
of years of totalitarian agriculturewill lead to the sandy expanses.
We will one day become familiarwith in our own era.
But right now, in between the Tigrisand Euphrates Rivers, a group of people
(19:35):
is beginning to act very differentlyfrom their weaver neighbors.
Let's picture the agricultural revolutionfrom the leavers perspective.
The foreststhey once hunted are being toppled.
The valleys that were once hometo all sorts of fruits and vegetables
and medicinal herbs are being replacedby carefully cultivated fields of wheat.
The wolves and leopardsand lions are being exterminated
(19:57):
just because they're predators.
What would it have been like for believersto witness their neighbors starting
to behave this way?
And most
importantly, what story wouldthe levers have told their children
to help them understandwhat they were witnessing from afar?
Ishmael suspects that this
this was the origin of the Gardenof Eden myth.
(20:18):
After all, the Book of Genesisand all the stories in the Torah
or Old Testamenttake place in the very same region.
The Mesopotamian Agricultural Revolutionbegan.
And Ishmael proposes this story didn'toriginate from the takers
inside the revolution, but from the leverson the outside looking in.
Let's consider the Garden of Edenas a metaphor for hunting and gathering.
(20:41):
There's food all around you cultivatednot by your hands, but gods.
All you have to dois gathered in the story.
Hunting and gathering is romantic,portrayed as a leisurely paradise
compared to the toil of agriculture,where food only grows from your labor.
Think of God's punishmentat the end of the story, God says cursed
(21:02):
is the ground because of you
through painful toil, you eat food from itall the days of your life.
It will produce thornsand thistles for you,
and you eat the plants of the fieldby the sweat of your brow.
You will eat your fooduntil you return to the ground.
With this in mind,we can see how the myth might
have been a wayto explain the agricultural revolution.
(21:24):
And if this theory is true,which we'll never be able to really prove,
it would actually explainsome of the inconsistent seeds
with the storythat have always perplexed us.
For example, Harvard law professorAlan Dershowitz
wrote about how God forbidsthe knowledge of good and evil
and threatens Adam and Evethat they'll die the day they eat it.
QuoteIt is quite remarkable that a holy book,
(21:46):
which reports to be a guide
to conduct, begins with a clear rulethat is immediately disobeyed
and a specific threat of punishmentwhich is not imposed.
What are we supposed
to learn from a God who fails to carry outhis very first threat?
Unquote.
An 18th century philosopher, Voltaireasked, quote,
(22:06):
Why did not God want man to knowgood and evil?
It appears to my poor reason
that God should have orderedman to eat a great deal of this fruit.
Unquote.
It is a bit weirdfrom our cultural perspective
that the knowledge of goodand evil is a curse and that agriculture
is the fall of manrather than a cause for celebration.
(22:27):
After all, Ishmael questionsif a Tinker Society
were to come up with its own creationmyth, or did they not call it the fall,
but something like the ascentor the liberation?
Well, the Babylonians in ancient
your empire, did tell a different storyabout the agricultural revolution.
That story was called the BabyloniaA Process.
(22:51):
And in that story, a divinehalf fish, half
man guy teaches humanitythe gift of farming.
In this story,this knowledge isn't a curse.
It's a blessing.
And this fisherman, God, is revered.
Similarly in ancient China,another originating place
of the agricultural revolution.
There's the myth of the divine farmer,the legendary
(23:14):
first emperor who invented the plow,the hoe and irrigation.
In this story,farming isn't a punishment either.
But the Garden of Eden story,where agriculture is
a punishment,clearly has a different perspective.
When the levers are
met by takers,they usually have two options
to be exterminatedor become takers themselves.
(23:36):
So we can imagine that the Weaverswho told these stories about Adam and Eve
eventually became takers.
In order to survive as takers,they would have changed the old stories
a bit, as well as adding new takers
stories about kings and templesand eventual monotheistic God.
But a few inconsistenciesremain as clues that the original message
(23:57):
may have reflected a different mindset.
So what Ishmael does that I find reallyfascinating is try
and reimagine the Garden of Eden storyand how it might have been told
by its original Weaverstorytellers from the Weavers perspective.
It might seem like the takers are behavingas if they have the knowledge
(24:17):
of the gods, the knowledge ofwho should live and who should die.
How did they cometo this dangerous belief?
So let's pretend we're sitting around
the campfire thousands of years agoamong our fellow weavers.
As we listen to the story,they tell their children about the world
as it once was, and why the peoplearound them started acting this way.
(24:40):
This next parable is inspiredby one in Ishmael.
It's the story of how the gods acquiredthe knowledge they needed
to rule the world.
One morning in the Garden of Eden, whenthe gods of the world were still young,
they gathered in the toweringbranches of the Tree of Life.
(25:01):
Here they were discussingthe care of their creation.
One of the gods began.
So here's what I'm thinking. Right.
In this meadow, the grasses grow longand are dense and thick.
Let's sprinkle a swarm of beetlesand let them eat from the tree of life.
Another God responded,That would be good for the Beatles.
(25:22):
My concern isthey will feast on too much of the stress
the boars and the buffalo, the goatsand the gazelles would all go hungry.
That would not be good for them.
Another guy agreed.
That's true for the grassesand those who eat them.
The bringing of beetleswould spell disaster.
You must consider the boarsin the buffalo, the goats and gazelles.
(25:43):
They are all our children.
They also must eat from the tree of life.
I mean, yes,but the Beatles are our children too.
One will be their turn to eat.
Do they not deserve to be fedand take care of?
Just then a leopard appeared fromthe grass and the gods became distracted.
Oh, the leopard looks so hungry.
(26:04):
Let's send it to pheasants for its dinner.
Now, that would be good. Oh, okay. I see.
So what do we care about?
Leopards, but not the pheasants now, huh?
I don't think the pheasants will thinkthat's very good.
But look, the pheasant is getting readyto eat one of your precious beetles.
If we don't send the leopard, the beetlewill be the pheasants next snack.
(26:26):
Well, it's plain to see that.
What is goodfor one is evil for another. Huh?
Then how are we to know when it istime for one
to live and for another to die?
So in the garden,the gods planted a new tree.
This was a very powerful tree.
And its fruit bore the knowledge of goodand evil, of the tree of life.
(26:49):
All creatures,large and small, were welcome to eat.
But the tree of knowledge was for the godsalone.
The fruit soon ripenedand the gods shared it among themselves.
And their eyes were opened.
And with this camethe knowledge of good and evil.
040. Oh.
(27:12):
It all makes sense.
For now, the leopard will go hungryand the pheasant will be spared.
The grasslands will be a feastfor the Beatles and the boars
and buffaloes, goats and gazelleswill all have their feast in turn.
Yes. Today, those whose time it is to gohungry will do so in peace.
(27:33):
For they shall know.
The gods have the knowledgeto tend the garden.
That same morning, while the gods eatfrom the knowledge of good and evil.
Adam and Eve began to wake up.
They stretched their limbsand walked among
the other creatures of the garden.
Of all our children, these two possess
a most spirited curiosityand a keen intellect.
(27:55):
I like their funny noses.
That was a nice touch. Oh, thank you.
They are quite clever,
but I wonder if their curiosity will everlead them to the Tree of Knowledge.
Oh, you're right.
That would be a problem.
I gotta be honest,I don't see what the issue here is.
So what if they from our fruit wouldn'tactually have any effect on them, right?
It only works on God.
(28:16):
Yes, but what if they believedand worked on them?
What if they started to act as if they hadthe knowledge of good and evil?
Oh, exactly.
They could delude themselves
into thinking that good was really justwhat was good for them.
And what was evil was onlywhat was bad for them.
Well, they'dprobably grow up out of that eventually.
(28:37):
But if they were to behave that way,they might not grow up at all.
They would consume the whole gardenor as much as they could
before they destroyed themselves.
Let us warn our childrenbefore it is too late.
The gods realizedof all the trees of the garden,
only the tree of knowledge of goodand evil could destroy Adam and Eve.
(28:59):
And so the gods said to them,You may eat every tree in the garden.
Save the tree of the knowledgeof being from the eat of that tree.
You will die
in this version of the story.
Adam and Eve never actually obtainthe knowledge of good and evil.
(29:22):
Sure, they eat the fruit, digest it.
But what if the fruit doesn'tactually work on people?
So when the gods forbid Adam and Evefrom eating from the Tree of Knowledge,
they're not being meanor unnecessarily withholding.
They just know that
if Adam and Eve mistakenly believethey have the knowledge of the gods,
it would ultimately leadto their own destruction.
(29:42):
In this case, the gods were givinga real warning that on the day
we eat from the tree of Knowledgeis the day that we die.
Wait a second.
Adam and Eve get banished,but they don't die.
Well, consider that in Hebrew.
The word for Earth is Adama.
So Adam means of the Earth
and the Hebrew word Eve means life.
(30:04):
So they're meant to representall of humanity.
And in just a few thousand years,since the birth of Take Your Culture,
just a geological instant,one day in the life of the gods,
acting like we have this knowledge of goodand evil
has brought the worldto the brink of extinction.
Maybe the gods were right, after all.
But in the
taker version of the story,the one we tell Gods orders
(30:28):
to not eat the forbiddenfruit is sometimes seen as just a test.
And we past God told us to have dominionover the earth, and being kicked
out of the garden is just the tough lovewe needed to get on the right path.
And from thenon, takers have known exactly what to do.
It was our divine destiny to conquer
the world.
(30:55):
At one point, Ishmael asks the narratoran interesting question quote
When did the agricultural revolution end?
Unquote.
That's the thing.
It didn't.
As the narrator puts it, quote,It didn't end.
It just spread. Unquote.
From the river valleys to the mountains,across oceans and continents,
(31:18):
taker civilization continues to makethese ancient stories come to life.
Perhaps that's why people in over 2000
languagesworldwide could repeat this story today.
On some level, we recognize these aren't
just mythological eventsthat happened in the past.
But like true mythology,they are unfolding all around us.
(31:40):
For instance, in 1846,
as white settlersadvanced west across North America, U.S.
Senator ThomasHart Benton commented, quote,
The white race alone
received the divine commandhe means to have dominion over the earth,
for it is the only race that has obeyed itand the only one that hunts out
new and distant lands and even a new worldto subdue and replenish.
(32:04):
The red race has disappearedfrom the Atlantic coast.
The tribes that resisted civilizationmeet extinction.
This is a cause of lamentation with many.
For my part,I cannot murmur at what seems to be
the effect of a divine law, unquote.
We won't even get into how messed up thatquote is, but you can see in this example
(32:25):
how influential the taker version of themyth has been in our real world.
Not only do takers believethey have divine dominion over the world,
but that the humans livingas levers must be converted or killed.
This genocide of Weaver peoples,erasing their ways of life and the people
who practice them, has also been presentsince the very beginning.
(32:48):
Ishmael believes there's actually anotherstory from Genesis about this genocide
and that this would have been originallytold from a Weaver's perspective as well.
The story of Cain enable.
If you missed the Cain and
Abel episode of the Bible,it goes something like this.
Adam and Eve have two sons, one named Cainand the other Abel.
(33:10):
Cain is a farmer. Abel is a sheepherder.
When Adam is on his deathbed,
his two sons make offeringsto God for their father's blessing.
Cain being a farmer, offersGod the harvest from his field.
ABEL Being a sheepherder offersGod a sheep.
God rejects Cain's crops and acceptsAbel's sheep.
(33:32):
Cain is so jealous and enraged by this
that he murdersAbel, his own brother, as punishment.
God exiles. Cain.
And we're told he goes offto become the first builder of cities.
God favoredAbel and his clever way of life,
which Ishmael points out is a weird endingif the story were created by takers.
(33:54):
It makes a lot more sense if we considerthe story being told from the perspective
of nomadic pastoralists or sheepherderslike Abel.
As Ishmael says, quote, So you see that
your agricultural revolutionis not an event like the Trojan War.
Isolated in the distant past and withoutdirect relevance to your lives today,
(34:18):
the work begun
by those Neolithic farmersin the Near East has been carried forward
from one generation to the nextwithout a single break.
Right into the present moment.
It's the foundation of your vastcivilization today, in exactly
the same way it was the foundationof the very first farming village.
Unquote.
(34:39):
In the taker version of the story,eating from the tree of Knowledge is
sometimesseen as the birth of consciousness.
Adam and Eve weren't self-aware before,but now they are in this interpretation.
It's their consciousness that God forbidand now demands them to conquer the world.
And if they destroy the worldin the process,
(34:59):
it was all consciousnesses fault.
But if we see being banishedfrom the garden
as a metaphorfor the agricultural revolution,
we know that human consciousnessexisted long before that leavers
have the ability to reason, tell stories,make scientific inquiries and so on.
So consciousnessisn't inherently self-destructive,
(35:19):
but it does make self-destructionat least more of a risk.
That's what's so mythologically potentabout the Garden of Eden story.
We are unique in the community of life.
There's something special about usthat doesn't necessarily separate
us from the rest of life,but does differentiate us from it.
We have consciousness.
(35:41):
Sure, other species are conscious,like crows and dolphins and octopi,
and maybe many.
But we are self-awarein a very particular way.
We tell stories.
We create mythologies.
These are incredible powersthat, as far as we know, only we possess.
They allow us to peer into the past.
(36:02):
Imagine possiblefutures and change the whole world.
And with that comesthe incredible temptation
to eat the forbidden fruitand imagine ourselves as gods.
But we've tried that.
It's not working.
Ishmael proposes.
Our greatest task as humans is to bethe first to have this consciousness,
(36:23):
to have the temptationto think of ourselves as gods
and learn how to still live in balancewith the community of life.
This, then,
is the vision of Weaver mythology.
This is what we should strive toas a species.
Hearing this, the narrator gets inspiredand suggests that what if humans
were able to be, as he puts it, quote,consciousness trailblazers, unquote.
(36:47):
So if over hundreds of thousands,millions of years
other species were to developa self-awareness and struggle themselves
of their own God temptations,we could lead by example
of how to not be at war with the world,but belong in it.
Make peace with it.
Here'show the narrator enthusiastically puts it.
If you'll pardonhis male centered language, quote,
(37:09):
Just think in a billion years,whatever is around, then whoever is around
then says, Man, oh yes, man,what a wonderful creature he was.
It was within his graspto destroy the entire world
and to trampleall our futures into the dust.
But he saw the light beforeit was too late and pulled back.
He pulled back and gave the rest of usour chance.
(37:32):
He showed us all how it had to be done.
If the world was to go on.
Being a garden forever.
Man was the role model for us all.
Unquote.
I think
Daniel Quinn, the author, hasthe narrator suggests
this rather than Ishmael saying it,because Daniel Quinn also is excited
by this grandiose idea,but perhaps not so sure.
(37:54):
We can't really know.
In response, he writes that Ishmael agreesand says, quote,
Not a shabby destiny, unquote.
So we aren't doomed to destroy the world,destined to be alienated
from the community of life, foreverbanished from the Garden of Eden.
It's not human knowledge or consciousness.
(38:17):
That's the problem.
It's believingthe world is ours to control
and that our reason for beingis to rule it.
So thousands of yearsafter the story was first told,
takers are still acting likethey have the knowledge of good and evil
and are still committing genocideagainst their Weaver siblings.
Adam and Eve are still taking a bitefrom the tree,
(38:39):
and Cain continues to murder Abel.
The story is stuck on repeat.
What if the trick
isn't simply to stop telling the story,
but to change how it ends?
What if Cain stops murdering Abel?
What if Adam and Eve spit out the fruit
and stop acting likethey have the knowledge of good and evil?
(39:01):
What would happen next?
Thanks for listening.
So todaywe got our mythical and metaphorical.
On the next episode, it's time we geta bit more practical and scientific.
Until next time,I hope you'll consider what it might mean
for us to return to the Garden of Eden.
(39:23):
How might we find our way?
Talk with you soon.
Everyone, this week on our Patreon,we're sharing the first special bonus
episode, a conversation with author JaySnodgrass, whose book Genesis
(39:44):
and the Rise of Civilizationgreatly inform this episode.
You probably remember some of the quotesI gave of his earlier on.
And if you enjoyed reconsideringthe meaning and origins
of these biblical stories, then I thinkyou'll find our conversation fascinating.
I want to play you a small segment here,and if you'd like to listen
to the full conversation,you can go check out our picture.
(40:06):
So here's a few minutes of my talkwith author Jay Snodgrass
on his bookGenesis and the Rise of Civilization.
Something that I love about Genesisor your genesis.
Genesis of the Rise of Civilization.
It picks up where Ishmael left off.
So Ishmael really is focusingon the Garden of Eden
and the Cain and Abel story.
(40:27):
And you just continue and show how, like
the flood is somethingthat we can analyze through this lens.
And then the Tower of Babelis something we can analyze this lens
for folks who forgetor are not familiar with it.
All the people of the worldunite and create this massive tower
towards the heavens andand through their unity, they're kind of
(40:47):
like challenging God's sovereignty.
And, you know,you talk about how this word Babel is,
I'll quote fromthe book is meant to remind us of Babylon.
And the Hebrew word Bilal means confusion.
So it's kind of like this commentaryon the actual historical empire
(41:08):
of Babylon, but mythologizing a little bit
to be somethingthat I think feels quite relevant today,
thinking about how the story endsand that, you know, there's this
almost wecan think of it as like a globalization,
you know,in that part of the world of globalization
and this interconnected economyand this massive infrastructure project.
(41:30):
But then you know,the people stop being able to speak
each other's languagesand they they scatter once again.
And I kind of feel like
the era that we're living through now,we can imagine ourselves
just kind of building this global Babel.
But despite being more interconnectedthan ever before, you know,
we're able to watch the tiktoks of peopleall around the entire world.
(41:54):
We still seem to naturallyjust be creating these new
languages, these different ideologiesand ways of understanding what reality is
and findingeven with how interconnected we are,
our cohesion seems to be slipping.
I'm curious what you think about thator how you think about the Tower of
Babel story.
(42:15):
You know, the Tower of Babeland the separation of the cultures
which possible that that'show the author came
upon ruins, Sumerian ruins,and said, who built this giant pyramid,
the ziggurat of earth,and then abandoned it. Hmm.
So I looked at thethe Tower of Babel story
as a story of retriedretry idolization here
(42:39):
in North America, like some of thethe earth mounds, the pyramids,
the cities that were builtby the indigenous peoples
of North Americathat were then abandoned mysteriously.
Of course,it really looks like those big cities
where you can see the the granaries,you can see the the obvious, you know,
(43:01):
division of labor,you can see hierarchy in the tombs.
Archeologically.
We can look at all of that stuff.
And then we can say,what happened to those people?
And the most convincing,
you know, response that I have foundis they seem to have separated
into smaller groupsand decided to become small,
(43:23):
interdependent, egalitarian groups.
Instead of kings,you had elected representatives.
If we were going to measure
two cultures, which one is more primitive?
Which one is more advanced?
I think we would start firstwith who's got the tools, who's
got the big buildings, the monuments,the money, the bombs, the weapons.
(43:47):
Right. But somebody else could
look at two culturesand say which one is more advanced?
In which one would you rather bethe poorest person?
Mm hmm.
You know, inwhich one is there more security sharing?
People taking care of each other?
People look at people idolize, ancient,you know, whatever, like Egypt
(44:10):
or whatever they say, Oh, you know,I wish I could go back and be Cleopatra.
It's like, Yeah, but what about beingthe poorest person in ancient Egypt?
But, you know, if you're looking backat some of the indigenous cultures, it's
like, oh, I would rather, you know, bein a egalitarian, a cooperative society.
I would probably enjoy that morethan I would enjoy being like King Tut.
(44:33):
Because, man, then you'realways looking over your shoulder, right?
Yeah, yeah.
You've got all the stuff, but you can'tyou can't trust anybody.
Right.
You're asking about the Tower of Babel.
And, you know, I think we have examplesof that in the past.
And I think if there's going to be
a future for the human species,I think if human beings are still around
(44:58):
a thousand years ago,I think that they're going to be telling
the Tower of Babel storyabout about us about now.
Yeah.
And they're going to say like, yeah,everybody was trying to do this
global economy thingthat was making 1% rich.
And finally,
maybe there was some disastershake up, whatever.
(45:19):
But but finally,a lot of people just just walked out.
You know, I would rather live in a in ain a in a village of long houses
as long as I knewthat the other 299 people in that village,
that they all had my backand that they need me.
And if they respect me and they knowmy name, you can listen to the rest
(45:43):
of our conversation at Patria, CNN.comslash human nature odyssey.
There's all sorts of additional materialsthere that dove deeper into these ideas
and topics,including interviews with bonus guests.
You'll find writings,transcripts of episodes and audio extras.
Your support makes this endeavor possible.
What metaphorically once began asa tiny outpost in the howling wilderness,
(46:05):
has grown into a little villageand will soon become a small town.
A town in balancewith the howling wilderness, of course.
I'd love to see you there.
So leave a message in the Patreonand be a part of the conversation.
Our theme music is CelestialSoda Pop by Ray, which
you can find the link in our shownotes.
Thank you to Gary, Markand Jesse for feedback on this episode
(46:27):
and you to our voice actors Ariana, Arthur
and Ariel.
It's dark and heavy, like a dream.
There's the smell of damp earth.
Your body is part of the soil
and your limbs are heavy.
Suddenly there is light.
You are pulled from the groundby your creator
and sculpted into formand from a mere clump of dirt.
(00:23):
You become a human being.
Your neck is a bit sore, but overallyou feel pretty good.
Everything is new.
The world is just being born.
So when you hear the songs of birds,
they sing for the first time.
You are the first personto look upon the world and breathe its air
(00:48):
and feel the weight of your bodyas a living.
Being.
And here, God planted a garden named Eden.
Come walk through its softand flowing ferns.
Enjoy the vibrant sight of crimson'sand fuchsias of the flowering plants.
Here, the babbling brook and streamsrest in the cool shade.
(01:11):
Feel the warmth of the sun.
This is the Garden of Eden.
And God created you to care for it.
You and your partner are nakedwithout shame.
Naming the plants and animals.
You share the garden with.
This will call a giraffe,
(01:33):
and that will be known as a flamingo.
And this.
This will be a dandelion.
And God speaks and says of every tree.
The golden dome is from each one of thetree, of the knowledge of the removal.
Thou shalt not eat of it.
For in the day that though it is thereof,
(01:54):
thou shall shall be dog.
But when God's not working, a serpentappears.
Bullshit, the snake says.
Obviously, God knows thatif you eat from the tree of knowledge,
then your eyes shall be openand you shall be as gods.
I say go for it.
Well, that sounds convincing enough.
(02:16):
You decide to take it back,and we all know what happens
next.
And God, who is beyond disappointed
as he's casting you and your partnerout of the garden forever, proclaims,
because the host of the tree personis the ground for those secrets
and sorrows shall those deliveredall the days of my life?
(02:39):
Thornsalso in thistles show it bring forth to be
in the sweat of those first downso you through
to the return onto the ground
and the world changed forever.
(03:03):
Welcome to Episodefive of Human Nature Odyssey,
a podcast exploring mythology, historyand where the two meet.
I'm Alex.
(03:27):
Today, we continue our explorationof Daniel Quinn's 1992 novel, Ishmael,
about a telepathic gorillasharing his insights on humanity.
If this is your first timejoining us, welcome.
It's totally fine to start from here.
And if you want to fill in the gapsof previous episodes later, that's great.
And if you've been alongfor the entire Ishmael ride so far.
(03:49):
Glad to have you back.
Now, being a gorilla, Ishmael is able
to inspect humanity from the outside.
And when Ishmael observesall the many human cultures, societies
and nations, he sees usas essentially divided into two groups
the takers and the levers.
(04:10):
I grew up in Take Your Civilization,
and chances are you probably did as well.
According to
Ishmael, the takers emerged10,000 years ago,
grew into the dominant globalmacro culture we live in today
and are causing worldwideecological catastrophe.
Ishmael believes we destroy the worldnot because we're inherently greedy
(04:33):
or innately flawed,but because we are held captive
by taking mythology, a very powerful storypassed down for thousands of years.
Put simply, take your mythology preaches
that the world belongs to usand that we must conquer it.
This is a storywe can't seem to stop acting out
(04:54):
the levers,however, have existed for hundreds
of thousands of years as hunter gatherers,and some continue to exist today
and in all this time, unlike the takers,
they've managed to not destroy the world.
They do so notbecause they're more noble or ignorant,
but because they enacta very different story.
(05:16):
Believer mythology.
So if we and taker civilizationhave an earnest desire
to leave behind a livable worldto future generations,
it would be worth investigatingthe origins of our taker
mythologyand what Weaver mythology might be.
Instead.
And Ishmael suggestsone of the best ways to do this
(05:37):
is by exploring a very ancient story
that still holdsgreat influence across our culture today.
The story of the Garden
of Eden.
(05:59):
Growing up, my rabbi, Arthur
Wasco, had an interesting perspectiveon these ancient stories.
To him, the most compelling questionwasn't whether these tales
were historical truths or simply fictions.
But why do we still tell them?
Why are these storiesstill so important to us?
And that got me thinking that mythsare like an incredibly powerful mirror,
(06:23):
reflecting back the worldview of thosewho tell them
and also who created them.
And these biblical storiesweren't just crafted by one person.
The Bible is a compositeof many different tales
taken from different sourcesand brought into one.
In fact, biblical scholars,based on the writing style
(06:44):
and language use, can tracewhich parts of the Bible
were compiled from different sourcesand when they may have been added.
For example, most scholarsbelieve the Garden of Eden story
is actually older than the seven daycreation myth.
Even though chronologicallyit comes after,
it also seems that one version or another,the Garden of Eden was passed down
(07:06):
as an oral tradition for centuries,if not millennia, before it was ever
even written down in the sixthand fifth century B.C.
We can't know how long ago it wasfirst told,
but as we'll discuss in this episode,there's reason to suspect
it's been passed down for a very,very, very,
very long timewith some key changes along the way.
(07:30):
Now, that'sa pretty epic game of telephone.
I like to think aboutwhen an ancient story like this would have
first been told.
Who were the people who first imaginedthis fable about God?
And a couple of nudistsand a very tempting fruit?
And can we use their storyas a mirror to learn anything about them?
Because little did they knowthis story would more than just catch on.
(07:54):
Could they have fathomthat one day it would be retold on
every continentand translated in over 2000 languages?
I mean, damn, talk about going viral.
And when it was first being told.
Why did this particular story of allthe stories catch on in the first place?
Is it just like a really good story?
(08:15):
Back in the day, were therenot any better stories out there?
I mean, come on.
You're telling me some ancient societycan come up with something better,
maybe with more epic production value,
like a super strong kingwho goes around slaying monsters.
Well, guess what?
The Sumerians did tell a story like that.
The Epic of Gilgamesh.
And back in ancient Sumer,almost 5000 years ago,
(08:38):
the Epic of Gilgamesh was an all outblockbuster.
When the Sumerians first invented writing.
Gilgamesh was the first storythey wrote down, making it
the first written storyin all of human history.
But could you tell methe story of Gilgamesh right now?
If you bumped into your neighbor
at a 7-Eleven and asked them to recitethe tale of the old Sumerian king,
(09:02):
would they know what the heckyou were talking about?
No, I don't think so.
The Epic of Gilgameshdidn't get passed down.
In fact, for thousands of years,we didn't even know it existed.
The writing was only recoveredand translated in 1853.
Meanwhile, you go up to literally anyone
you've ever metand ask them to recite the Garden of Eden.
(09:23):
They'll probably do a pretty good job.
And all these millennia later,there are billions of people alive to whom
this story provides profound influenceand meaning in their lives.
Because to us,the Epic of Gilgamesh is just a story.
The Garden of Eden,however, is still an act of myth.
(09:46):
Biblical commentator Jay
Snodgrass, great name, describesthe myth as, quote,
a hit songthat catches on through the culture.
You hear it on the radiofor the first time and you're already
singing along.
Maybe it's a bitter song.
Maybe it's too sweet.
Maybe you don't want your musician friendto know you like it.
But for reasons you can't explain,
(10:08):
the song restores a balance.
Unquote.
He goes on to put the power of mythanother way quote
Anybody can tell any story,but for it to become a myth,
it's got to awaken a sleeping truthwithin a community of listeners.
It's got to answer a question you've beenstruggling to formulate in words.
(10:29):
Unquote.
So in the case of the Garden of Eden,whatever that question was,
not only doesit still resonate with us today, but
it must have really touched on somethingvery important to those who first told it.
So something must have happeneda long time ago.
Something big and notable and perplexing
(10:50):
inspired a group of peopleto tell a story about it.
And Ishmael theorizesthe major event that first inspired
this story was the very birth of taker'scivilization itself.
What we call the agricultural revolution.
To get a better look,we're going to go on a field trip
(11:13):
to my fifth grade classroom and
here you'll
find me at 12 yearsold, sporting a poofy haired bouquet.
We're in the middle of a lessonon the agricultural revolution
and just how big the changesit brought were.
Right now, fifth grade, Alexis diligently working on a class project
(11:34):
drawings that depict life as huntergatherers before agriculture
and life as farmers after.
If we look over his shoulderto see his drawings,
which are currently collecting dustin his parents basement,
you'll see a roaring river turnedinto controlled irrigation channels.
Then there's a wild boar with big,scary teeth
(11:56):
being turned into a cute domesticheaded, smiling pig.
On another page, you'll noticestick figures putting down their bows
and arrows to cultivate neatlittle lines of fruits and vegetables.
In fifth grade,I was taught the agricultural revolution
was the beginning of everything important
and anything that came beforeit was just pre-history.
(12:18):
This was still years before
I first read Ishmaelor went through puberty.
But later from Ishmael, I'd learnhow humans actually lived
for hundreds of thousands of yearsbefore agriculture.
Think of how many things happened overthat time, how many people fell in love,
how many arguments were started,jokes were told.
Songs were sung.
(12:39):
Entire ice ages came and went.
Ishmael arguesthat the reason we call that pre-history
and consider agriculturethe real starting point is
because the agricultural revolutionis the beginning of taker history.
Take your civilization at its core
is an agricultural society.
(12:59):
It's only made possibleby and entirely dependent on agriculture
and it still is today.
Even if you and I aren't farmersourselves, the vast
majority of the food we eat is not huntedor gathered.
It's farmed. And before the takers.
For most of human history,we find not a single evidence of farming.
(13:22):
Which is pretty freaking odd.
If you believe civilization is the mostsuperior advanced form of society
and that humans are supposed to farmand build cities.
And even stranger stillon the agricultural revolution began.
All the hunter gatherersdidn't throw down their bows and arrows,
shout Eureka and immediatelyadopt farming.
Instead of being a sudden watershed momentfor all of humanity.
(13:45):
It was more like a gradual tidal wave,slowly spreading to new communities
over millennia, sometimesby voluntary adoption, sometimes by force.
Many communitieschose to not adopt agriculture,
seeing their hunter gatherer lifestyleas a more appealing way to live.
So our hunter gatherer ancestors weren't
just sitting around the campfirethinking, Well, this sucks.
(14:08):
Waiting for
some kind of technological breakthroughthat would finally make everything better.
In fact, the transition of farming came
with a lot of disadvantagescompared to hunting and gathering.
The first farmers would have spentmuch more of their day doing
physical labor, were more susceptibleto infectious diseases like smallpox,
measles and tuberculosis,which originated in domesticated animals.
(14:30):
Compared to hunter gatherers,the first farmers had a less diverse,
nutritious diet
and were more likely to experience faminewhen their limited food source failed.
And the first farmers could expectto live shorter lives on average.
And hunter gatherers.
Initially,life expectancy actually went down.
Why then adapt?
Agriculture, in additionto some of the material benefits
(14:54):
like food surplus allowing for the greaterdivision of labor.
What if the first farmers committedto an agricultural lifestyle
because they viewed themselvesand their relation to the world
entirely different than they had before?
Ishmael proposesthat the agricultural revolution
and more than just a changing lifestyleand technology
(15:14):
was the birthof a fundamentally different mindset
over many generations.
We can imagine the revolutionlike a ground shattering
earthquake,ripping a major chasm in the ground.
On one side,you have takers who began to believe
they were supposed to rule the worldand do so by force.
(15:35):
On the other, you have the leaverswho believed something else.
Let's considerthese two different ways of life
and the mindsets that would justify them.
Ishmael defines mythology
as a story cultures, an act we act out,
(15:58):
and Ishmael explains.
Every workingmythology begins with a premise,
the premise of Take the mythologyis that the world belongs to us.
In the Book of Genesis, for example, God
explicitly gives Adamand Eve dominion over the world.
And you can see this in the behaviorof take your civilization
all around the world.
(16:20):
We act out taking mythology like it's
an imaginary game for grown ups.
Ishmael believes all culturesenact a story, including levers.
And for many years,our inquisitive gorilla friend
read about various lever culturesin the present.
And in the past, he studied how huntergatherers generally behave.
(16:40):
What specific stories they tell, and cameto believe that the premise of Weaver
mythologyis the exact inverse of the takers.
Takers believe the world belongs to us.
Believers believe we belong to the world.
That's the imaginary gameweavers are playing.
And it comes with a very different logic,with very different results
(17:03):
than the takers.
It's worth mentioningthat some Weaver societies do practice
a form of agriculture,
but these versions of farming reflectthe premise We belong to the world.
Like Silver Pastor,where animals are encouraged to graze
along tree lines, which actuallyimproves the health of the forest.
Or selected burnings using ashes.
(17:25):
Fertilizer, regenerating the soil.
Takers practicea specific kind of agriculture,
and it's the one that's cometo dominate the world.
Daniel Quinn, in his later books, callsthis totalitarian agriculture picture vast
fields of single types of cropswhere all pests and weeds are removed.
(17:45):
Ishmael believes what the differencecomes down to is control.
The takers
totalitarian agricultureseeks total control of their food supply.
If the crops fail,if there's a flood or a drought.
Takers engineer more control to make surethis doesn't happen next time.
Hunter gatherer leverslet go of that control.
(18:06):
If there's not enough to eat, generally
weavers can go somewhere elseand find food there.
Because if you believeyou belong to the world
and build your cultureand mythology around that premise,
then you leave a certainkind of faith in the hands of the gods.
As Ishmael puts it, you trustthat the gods have the knowledge of which
species and forests and rivers should liveand who should die.
(18:29):
The takers, on the other hand,take the life
and death of the worldaround them into their own hands.
To see this in action.
Let's travel back
now to a time even further in the pastthan my fifth grade classroom.
Let's go back in time.
2/8, zero years ago.
(18:53):
We're finding our way throughtall grassland,
towering old growth, cedar forestsand shaded rivers teeming with life.
This lush place is the Middle East, a.k.a.
Mesopotamia, a.k.a.
the Fertile Crescent, a.k.a.
one of the placeswhere the agricultural revolution began.
(19:13):
This is beforethe forests will be felled for farmlands.
The rivers will be dammed, and thedecertification as a result of thousands
of years of totalitarian agriculturewill lead to the sandy expanses.
We will one day become familiarwith in our own era.
But right now, in between the Tigrisand Euphrates Rivers, a group of people
(19:35):
is beginning to act very differentlyfrom their weaver neighbors.
Let's picture the agricultural revolutionfrom the leavers perspective.
The foreststhey once hunted are being toppled.
The valleys that were once hometo all sorts of fruits and vegetables
and medicinal herbs are being replacedby carefully cultivated fields of wheat.
The wolves and leopardsand lions are being exterminated
(19:57):
just because they're predators.
What would it have been like for believersto witness their neighbors starting
to behave this way?
And most
importantly, what story wouldthe levers have told their children
to help them understandwhat they were witnessing from afar?
Ishmael suspects that this
this was the origin of the Gardenof Eden myth.
(20:18):
After all, the Book of Genesisand all the stories in the Torah
or Old Testamenttake place in the very same region.
The Mesopotamian Agricultural Revolutionbegan.
And Ishmael proposes this story didn'toriginate from the takers
inside the revolution, but from the leverson the outside looking in.
Let's consider the Garden of Edenas a metaphor for hunting and gathering.
(20:41):
There's food all around you cultivatednot by your hands, but gods.
All you have to dois gathered in the story.
Hunting and gathering is romantic,portrayed as a leisurely paradise
compared to the toil of agriculture,where food only grows from your labor.
Think of God's punishmentat the end of the story, God says cursed
(21:02):
is the ground because of you
through painful toil, you eat food from itall the days of your life.
It will produce thornsand thistles for you,
and you eat the plants of the fieldby the sweat of your brow.
You will eat your fooduntil you return to the ground.
With this in mind,we can see how the myth might
have been a wayto explain the agricultural revolution.
(21:24):
And if this theory is true,which we'll never be able to really prove,
it would actually explainsome of the inconsistent seeds
with the storythat have always perplexed us.
For example, Harvard law professorAlan Dershowitz
wrote about how God forbidsthe knowledge of good and evil
and threatens Adam and Evethat they'll die the day they eat it.
QuoteIt is quite remarkable that a holy book,
(21:46):
which reports to be a guide
to conduct, begins with a clear rulethat is immediately disobeyed
and a specific threat of punishmentwhich is not imposed.
What are we supposed
to learn from a God who fails to carry outhis very first threat?
Unquote.
An 18th century philosopher, Voltaireasked, quote,
(22:06):
Why did not God want man to knowgood and evil?
It appears to my poor reason
that God should have orderedman to eat a great deal of this fruit.
Unquote.
It is a bit weirdfrom our cultural perspective
that the knowledge of goodand evil is a curse and that agriculture
is the fall of manrather than a cause for celebration.
(22:27):
After all, Ishmael questionsif a Tinker Society
were to come up with its own creationmyth, or did they not call it the fall,
but something like the ascentor the liberation?
Well, the Babylonians in ancient
your empire, did tell a different storyabout the agricultural revolution.
That story was called the BabyloniaA Process.
(22:51):
And in that story, a divinehalf fish, half
man guy teaches humanitythe gift of farming.
In this story,this knowledge isn't a curse.
It's a blessing.
And this fisherman, God, is revered.
Similarly in ancient China,another originating place
of the agricultural revolution.
There's the myth of the divine farmer,the legendary
(23:14):
first emperor who invented the plow,the hoe and irrigation.
In this story,farming isn't a punishment either.
But the Garden of Eden story,where agriculture is
a punishment,clearly has a different perspective.
When the levers are
met by takers,they usually have two options
to be exterminatedor become takers themselves.
(23:36):
So we can imagine that the Weaverswho told these stories about Adam and Eve
eventually became takers.
In order to survive as takers,they would have changed the old stories
a bit, as well as adding new takers
stories about kings and templesand eventual monotheistic God.
But a few inconsistenciesremain as clues that the original message
(23:57):
may have reflected a different mindset.
So what Ishmael does that I find reallyfascinating is try
and reimagine the Garden of Eden storyand how it might have been told
by its original Weaverstorytellers from the Weavers perspective.
It might seem like the takers are behavingas if they have the knowledge
(24:17):
of the gods, the knowledge ofwho should live and who should die.
How did they cometo this dangerous belief?
So let's pretend we're sitting around
the campfire thousands of years agoamong our fellow weavers.
As we listen to the story,they tell their children about the world
as it once was, and why the peoplearound them started acting this way.
(24:40):
This next parable is inspiredby one in Ishmael.
It's the story of how the gods acquiredthe knowledge they needed
to rule the world.
One morning in the Garden of Eden, whenthe gods of the world were still young,
they gathered in the toweringbranches of the Tree of Life.
(25:01):
Here they were discussingthe care of their creation.
One of the gods began.
So here's what I'm thinking. Right.
In this meadow, the grasses grow longand are dense and thick.
Let's sprinkle a swarm of beetlesand let them eat from the tree of life.
Another God responded,That would be good for the Beatles.
(25:22):
My concern isthey will feast on too much of the stress
the boars and the buffalo, the goatsand the gazelles would all go hungry.
That would not be good for them.
Another guy agreed.
That's true for the grassesand those who eat them.
The bringing of beetleswould spell disaster.
You must consider the boarsin the buffalo, the goats and gazelles.
(25:43):
They are all our children.
They also must eat from the tree of life.
I mean, yes,but the Beatles are our children too.
One will be their turn to eat.
Do they not deserve to be fedand take care of?
Just then a leopard appeared fromthe grass and the gods became distracted.
Oh, the leopard looks so hungry.
(26:04):
Let's send it to pheasants for its dinner.
Now, that would be good. Oh, okay. I see.
So what do we care about?
Leopards, but not the pheasants now, huh?
I don't think the pheasants will thinkthat's very good.
But look, the pheasant is getting readyto eat one of your precious beetles.
If we don't send the leopard, the beetlewill be the pheasants next snack.
(26:26):
Well, it's plain to see that.
What is goodfor one is evil for another. Huh?
Then how are we to know when it istime for one
to live and for another to die?
So in the garden,the gods planted a new tree.
This was a very powerful tree.
And its fruit bore the knowledge of goodand evil, of the tree of life.
(26:49):
All creatures,large and small, were welcome to eat.
But the tree of knowledge was for the godsalone.
The fruit soon ripenedand the gods shared it among themselves.
And their eyes were opened.
And with this camethe knowledge of good and evil.
040. Oh.
(27:12):
It all makes sense.
For now, the leopard will go hungryand the pheasant will be spared.
The grasslands will be a feastfor the Beatles and the boars
and buffaloes, goats and gazelleswill all have their feast in turn.
Yes. Today, those whose time it is to gohungry will do so in peace.
(27:33):
For they shall know.
The gods have the knowledgeto tend the garden.
That same morning, while the gods eatfrom the knowledge of good and evil.
Adam and Eve began to wake up.
They stretched their limbsand walked among
the other creatures of the garden.
Of all our children, these two possess
a most spirited curiosityand a keen intellect.
(27:55):
I like their funny noses.
That was a nice touch. Oh, thank you.
They are quite clever,
but I wonder if their curiosity will everlead them to the Tree of Knowledge.
Oh, you're right.
That would be a problem.
I gotta be honest,I don't see what the issue here is.
So what if they from our fruit wouldn'tactually have any effect on them, right?
It only works on God.
(28:16):
Yes, but what if they believedand worked on them?
What if they started to act as if they hadthe knowledge of good and evil?
Oh, exactly.
They could delude themselves
into thinking that good was really justwhat was good for them.
And what was evil was onlywhat was bad for them.
Well, they'dprobably grow up out of that eventually.
(28:37):
But if they were to behave that way,they might not grow up at all.
They would consume the whole gardenor as much as they could
before they destroyed themselves.
Let us warn our childrenbefore it is too late.
The gods realizedof all the trees of the garden,
only the tree of knowledge of goodand evil could destroy Adam and Eve.
(28:59):
And so the gods said to them,You may eat every tree in the garden.
Save the tree of the knowledgeof being from the eat of that tree.
You will die
in this version of the story.
Adam and Eve never actually obtainthe knowledge of good and evil.
(29:22):
Sure, they eat the fruit, digest it.
But what if the fruit doesn'tactually work on people?
So when the gods forbid Adam and Evefrom eating from the Tree of Knowledge,
they're not being meanor unnecessarily withholding.
They just know that
if Adam and Eve mistakenly believethey have the knowledge of the gods,
it would ultimately leadto their own destruction.
(29:42):
In this case, the gods were givinga real warning that on the day
we eat from the tree of Knowledgeis the day that we die.
Wait a second.
Adam and Eve get banished,but they don't die.
Well, consider that in Hebrew.
The word for Earth is Adama.
So Adam means of the Earth
and the Hebrew word Eve means life.
(30:04):
So they're meant to representall of humanity.
And in just a few thousand years,since the birth of Take Your Culture,
just a geological instant,one day in the life of the gods,
acting like we have this knowledge of goodand evil
has brought the worldto the brink of extinction.
Maybe the gods were right, after all.
But in the
taker version of the story,the one we tell Gods orders
(30:28):
to not eat the forbiddenfruit is sometimes seen as just a test.
And we past God told us to have dominionover the earth, and being kicked
out of the garden is just the tough lovewe needed to get on the right path.
And from thenon, takers have known exactly what to do.
It was our divine destiny to conquer
the world.
(30:55):
At one point, Ishmael asks the narratoran interesting question quote
When did the agricultural revolution end?
Unquote.
That's the thing.
It didn't.
As the narrator puts it, quote,It didn't end.
It just spread. Unquote.
From the river valleys to the mountains,across oceans and continents,
(31:18):
taker civilization continues to makethese ancient stories come to life.
Perhaps that's why people in over 2000
languagesworldwide could repeat this story today.
On some level, we recognize these aren't
just mythological eventsthat happened in the past.
But like true mythology,they are unfolding all around us.
(31:40):
For instance, in 1846,
as white settlersadvanced west across North America, U.S.
Senator ThomasHart Benton commented, quote,
The white race alone
received the divine commandhe means to have dominion over the earth,
for it is the only race that has obeyed itand the only one that hunts out
new and distant lands and even a new worldto subdue and replenish.
(32:04):
The red race has disappearedfrom the Atlantic coast.
The tribes that resisted civilizationmeet extinction.
This is a cause of lamentation with many.
For my part,I cannot murmur at what seems to be
the effect of a divine law, unquote.
We won't even get into how messed up thatquote is, but you can see in this example
(32:25):
how influential the taker version of themyth has been in our real world.
Not only do takers believethey have divine dominion over the world,
but that the humans livingas levers must be converted or killed.
This genocide of Weaver peoples,erasing their ways of life and the people
who practice them, has also been presentsince the very beginning.
(32:48):
Ishmael believes there's actually anotherstory from Genesis about this genocide
and that this would have been originallytold from a Weaver's perspective as well.
The story of Cain enable.
If you missed the Cain and
Abel episode of the Bible,it goes something like this.
Adam and Eve have two sons, one named Cainand the other Abel.
(33:10):
Cain is a farmer. Abel is a sheepherder.
When Adam is on his deathbed,
his two sons make offeringsto God for their father's blessing.
Cain being a farmer, offersGod the harvest from his field.
ABEL Being a sheepherder offersGod a sheep.
God rejects Cain's crops and acceptsAbel's sheep.
(33:32):
Cain is so jealous and enraged by this
that he murdersAbel, his own brother, as punishment.
God exiles. Cain.
And we're told he goes offto become the first builder of cities.
God favoredAbel and his clever way of life,
which Ishmael points out is a weird endingif the story were created by takers.
(33:54):
It makes a lot more sense if we considerthe story being told from the perspective
of nomadic pastoralists or sheepherderslike Abel.
As Ishmael says, quote, So you see that
your agricultural revolutionis not an event like the Trojan War.
Isolated in the distant past and withoutdirect relevance to your lives today,
(34:18):
the work begun
by those Neolithic farmersin the Near East has been carried forward
from one generation to the nextwithout a single break.
Right into the present moment.
It's the foundation of your vastcivilization today, in exactly
the same way it was the foundationof the very first farming village.
Unquote.
(34:39):
In the taker version of the story,eating from the tree of Knowledge is
sometimesseen as the birth of consciousness.
Adam and Eve weren't self-aware before,but now they are in this interpretation.
It's their consciousness that God forbidand now demands them to conquer the world.
And if they destroy the worldin the process,
(34:59):
it was all consciousnesses fault.
But if we see being banishedfrom the garden
as a metaphorfor the agricultural revolution,
we know that human consciousnessexisted long before that leavers
have the ability to reason, tell stories,make scientific inquiries and so on.
So consciousnessisn't inherently self-destructive,
(35:19):
but it does make self-destructionat least more of a risk.
That's what's so mythologically potentabout the Garden of Eden story.
We are unique in the community of life.
There's something special about usthat doesn't necessarily separate
us from the rest of life,but does differentiate us from it.
We have consciousness.
(35:41):
Sure, other species are conscious,like crows and dolphins and octopi,
and maybe many.
But we are self-awarein a very particular way.
We tell stories.
We create mythologies.
These are incredible powersthat, as far as we know, only we possess.
They allow us to peer into the past.
(36:02):
Imagine possiblefutures and change the whole world.
And with that comesthe incredible temptation
to eat the forbidden fruitand imagine ourselves as gods.
But we've tried that.
It's not working.
Ishmael proposes.
Our greatest task as humans is to bethe first to have this consciousness,
(36:23):
to have the temptationto think of ourselves as gods
and learn how to still live in balancewith the community of life.
This, then,
is the vision of Weaver mythology.
This is what we should strive toas a species.
Hearing this, the narrator gets inspiredand suggests that what if humans
were able to be, as he puts it, quote,consciousness trailblazers, unquote.
(36:47):
So if over hundreds of thousands,millions of years
other species were to developa self-awareness and struggle themselves
of their own God temptations,we could lead by example
of how to not be at war with the world,but belong in it.
Make peace with it.
Here'show the narrator enthusiastically puts it.
If you'll pardonhis male centered language, quote,
(37:09):
Just think in a billion years,whatever is around, then whoever is around
then says, Man, oh yes, man,what a wonderful creature he was.
It was within his graspto destroy the entire world
and to trampleall our futures into the dust.
But he saw the light beforeit was too late and pulled back.
He pulled back and gave the rest of usour chance.
(37:32):
He showed us all how it had to be done.
If the world was to go on.
Being a garden forever.
Man was the role model for us all.
Unquote.
I think
Daniel Quinn, the author, hasthe narrator suggests
this rather than Ishmael saying it,because Daniel Quinn also is excited
by this grandiose idea,but perhaps not so sure.
(37:54):
We can't really know.
In response, he writes that Ishmael agreesand says, quote,
Not a shabby destiny, unquote.
So we aren't doomed to destroy the world,destined to be alienated
from the community of life, foreverbanished from the Garden of Eden.
It's not human knowledge or consciousness.
(38:17):
That's the problem.
It's believingthe world is ours to control
and that our reason for beingis to rule it.
So thousands of yearsafter the story was first told,
takers are still acting likethey have the knowledge of good and evil
and are still committing genocideagainst their Weaver siblings.
Adam and Eve are still taking a bitefrom the tree,
(38:39):
and Cain continues to murder Abel.
The story is stuck on repeat.
What if the trick
isn't simply to stop telling the story,
but to change how it ends?
What if Cain stops murdering Abel?
What if Adam and Eve spit out the fruit
and stop acting likethey have the knowledge of good and evil?
(39:01):
What would happen next?
Thanks for listening.
So todaywe got our mythical and metaphorical.
On the next episode, it's time we geta bit more practical and scientific.
Until next time,I hope you'll consider what it might mean
for us to return to the Garden of Eden.
(39:23):
How might we find our way?
Talk with you soon.
Everyone, this week on our Patreon,we're sharing the first special bonus
episode, a conversation with author JaySnodgrass, whose book Genesis
(39:44):
and the Rise of Civilizationgreatly inform this episode.
You probably remember some of the quotesI gave of his earlier on.
And if you enjoyed reconsideringthe meaning and origins
of these biblical stories, then I thinkyou'll find our conversation fascinating.
I want to play you a small segment here,and if you'd like to listen
to the full conversation,you can go check out our picture.
(40:06):
So here's a few minutes of my talkwith author Jay Snodgrass
on his bookGenesis and the Rise of Civilization.
Something that I love about Genesisor your genesis.
Genesis of the Rise of Civilization.
It picks up where Ishmael left off.
So Ishmael really is focusingon the Garden of Eden
and the Cain and Abel story.
(40:27):
And you just continue and show how, like
the flood is somethingthat we can analyze through this lens.
And then the Tower of Babelis something we can analyze this lens
for folks who forgetor are not familiar with it.
All the people of the worldunite and create this massive tower
towards the heavens andand through their unity, they're kind of
(40:47):
like challenging God's sovereignty.
And, you know,you talk about how this word Babel is,
I'll quote fromthe book is meant to remind us of Babylon.
And the Hebrew word Bilal means confusion.
So it's kind of like this commentaryon the actual historical empire
(41:08):
of Babylon, but mythologizing a little bit
to be somethingthat I think feels quite relevant today,
thinking about how the story endsand that, you know, there's this
almost wecan think of it as like a globalization,
you know,in that part of the world of globalization
and this interconnected economyand this massive infrastructure project.
(41:30):
But then you know,the people stop being able to speak
each other's languagesand they they scatter once again.
And I kind of feel like
the era that we're living through now,we can imagine ourselves
just kind of building this global Babel.
But despite being more interconnectedthan ever before, you know,
we're able to watch the tiktoks of peopleall around the entire world.
(41:54):
We still seem to naturallyjust be creating these new
languages, these different ideologiesand ways of understanding what reality is
and findingeven with how interconnected we are,
our cohesion seems to be slipping.
I'm curious what you think about thator how you think about the Tower of
Babel story.
(42:15):
You know, the Tower of Babeland the separation of the cultures
which possible that that'show the author came
upon ruins, Sumerian ruins,and said, who built this giant pyramid,
the ziggurat of earth,and then abandoned it. Hmm.
So I looked at thethe Tower of Babel story
as a story of retriedretry idolization here
(42:39):
in North America, like some of thethe earth mounds, the pyramids,
the cities that were builtby the indigenous peoples
of North Americathat were then abandoned mysteriously.
Of course,it really looks like those big cities
where you can see the the granaries,you can see the the obvious, you know,
(43:01):
division of labor,you can see hierarchy in the tombs.
Archeologically.
We can look at all of that stuff.
And then we can say,what happened to those people?
And the most convincing,
you know, response that I have foundis they seem to have separated
into smaller groupsand decided to become small,
(43:23):
interdependent, egalitarian groups.
Instead of kings,you had elected representatives.
If we were going to measure
two cultures, which one is more primitive?
Which one is more advanced?
I think we would start firstwith who's got the tools, who's
got the big buildings, the monuments,the money, the bombs, the weapons.
(43:47):
Right. But somebody else could
look at two culturesand say which one is more advanced?
In which one would you rather bethe poorest person?
Mm hmm.
You know, inwhich one is there more security sharing?
People taking care of each other?
People look at people idolize, ancient,you know, whatever, like Egypt
(44:10):
or whatever they say, Oh, you know,I wish I could go back and be Cleopatra.
It's like, Yeah, but what about beingthe poorest person in ancient Egypt?
But, you know, if you're looking backat some of the indigenous cultures, it's
like, oh, I would rather, you know, bein a egalitarian, a cooperative society.
I would probably enjoy that morethan I would enjoy being like King Tut.
(44:33):
Because, man, then you'realways looking over your shoulder, right?
Yeah, yeah.
You've got all the stuff, but you can'tyou can't trust anybody.
Right.
You're asking about the Tower of Babel.
And, you know, I think we have examplesof that in the past.
And I think if there's going to be
a future for the human species,I think if human beings are still around
(44:58):
a thousand years ago,I think that they're going to be telling
the Tower of Babel storyabout about us about now.
Yeah.
And they're going to say like, yeah,everybody was trying to do this
global economy thingthat was making 1% rich.
And finally,
maybe there was some disastershake up, whatever.
(45:19):
But but finally,a lot of people just just walked out.
You know, I would rather live in a in ain a in a village of long houses
as long as I knewthat the other 299 people in that village,
that they all had my backand that they need me.
And if they respect me and they knowmy name, you can listen to the rest
(45:43):
of our conversation at Patria, CNN.comslash human nature odyssey.
There's all sorts of additional materialsthere that dove deeper into these ideas
and topics,including interviews with bonus guests.
You'll find writings,transcripts of episodes and audio extras.
Your support makes this endeavor possible.
What metaphorically once began asa tiny outpost in the howling wilderness,
(46:05):
has grown into a little villageand will soon become a small town.
A town in balancewith the howling wilderness, of course.
I'd love to see you there.
So leave a message in the Patreonand be a part of the conversation.
Our theme music is CelestialSoda Pop by Ray, which
you can find the link in our shownotes.
Thank you to Gary, Markand Jesse for feedback on this episode
(46:27):
and you to our voice actors Ariana, Arthur
and Ariel.
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