East of Eden...
And then what did The Pagan represent?
He was A Person from
The Suburbs of Eden.
He was regarded as
A Nature Man,
and on The Head of His Lance was written The Word, “Grail.”
That is to say,
Nature intends The Grail.
Spiritual Life is The Bouquet of Natural Life,
not a supernatural thing imposed upon it.
And so The Impulses of Nature are what give Authenticity to Life,
not Obeying Rules come from a Supernatural Authority,
that’s the sense of The Grail.
With Fire and Steel did The Gods forge
The Klingon Heart.
So fiercely did it beat, so loud was the sound, that the gods cried out,
“On this day we have brought forth the strongest heart in all the heavens.
None can stand before it without trembling at its strength.”
But then The Klingon Heart weakened,
its steady rhythm faltered
and The Gods said,
“Why have you weakened so?
We have made you the strongest in all of creation.”
And the heart said :
I am alone.
And the gods knew that they had erred.
So they went back to their forge and brought forth another heart.
But the second heart beat stronger than the first, and the first was jealous of its power.
Fortunately, the second heart was tempered by wisdom.
If we join together,
no force can stop us.
And when the two hearts began to beat together, they filled the heavens with a terrible sound.
For the first time, the gods knew fear.
They tried to flee, but it was too late.
The Klingon hearts destroyed the gods who created them and turned the heavens to ashes.
To this very day, no one can oppose the beating of two Klingon hearts.
Not even me.
What did you mean, Joe, when you said that
The Triumph of Tristan’s view of Love and Vision of Love,
This beginning of Romantic Love in The West was
“Libido over Credo”?
Well, the credo, “I Believe,”
and I believe not only in The Laws,
but I believe that These Laws were instituted by God,
and there’s no arguing with God.
I mean, These Laws are just
a heavy weight on me,
and disobeying those is sin,
and it has to do with my Eternal Character.
BILL MOYERS:
JOSEPH CAMPBELL:
BILL MOYERS:
JOSEPH CAMPBELL:
JOSEPH CAMPBELL:
BILL MOYERS:
JOSEPH CAMPBELL:
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Well, the Grail becomes the, what we call it, that which is attained and realized by people who have lived their own lives. So the story very briefly is of this — I’m giving it now as Wolfram gives it — but this is just one version. The Grail King was a lovely young man, but he had not earned that position. And the Grail represents the fulfillment of the highest spiritual potentialities of the human consciousness. And he was a lovely young man, and he rode forth from his castle with the war cry, “Amor!” And as he’s riding forth, a Moslem, a pagan warrior, a Mohammedan warrior, comes out of the woods, a knight. And they both level their lances at each other, they drive at each other, and the lance of the grail king kills the Mohammedan, but the Mohammedan lance castrates the Grail King.
What that means is that the Christian separation of matter and spirit, of the dynamism of life and the spiritual, natural grace and supernatural grace, has really castrated nature. And the European mind, the European life, has been as it were, emasculated by this; true spirituality, which would have come from this, has been killed. And then what did the pagan represent? He was a person from the suburbs of Eden. He was regarded as a nature man, and on the head of his lance was written the word, “Grail.” That is to say, nature intends the grail. Spiritual life is the bouquet of natural life, not a supernatural thing imposed upon it. And so the impulses of nature are what give authenticity to Life, not obeying rules come from a supernatural authority, that’s the sense of The Grail.
BILL MOYERS: And The Grail that these romantic legends were searching for is the union once again of what had been divided? The Peace that comes from joining?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: The grail becomes symbolic of an authentic life that has lived in terms of its own volition, in terms of its own impulse system, which carries it between the pairs of opposites, of good and evil, light and dark.
Wolfram starts his epic with a short poem saying, “Every act has both Good and Evil results.”
Every act in Life yields pairs of opposites in its results.
The Best We Can Do is lean toward The Light, that is to say, Intend The Light, and What The Light Is, is that of the harmonious relationships that come from compassion, with suffering, understanding of The Other Person. This is what The Grail is about.
BILL MOYERS: When we say God is Love, does that have anything to do with Romantic Love? Does mythology ever link Romantic love and God?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Well, that’s what it did do. Love was a divine visitation, and that’s why it was superior to Marriage. That was the troubadour idea. If God is Love, well, then, Love is God, okay.
BILL MOYERS: There’s that wonderful passage in Corinthians by Paul, where he says “Love beareth all things, endureth all things.”
JOSEPH CAMPBELL:
BILL MOYERS: And yet, one of my favorite stories of mythology is out of Persia, where there is the idea that Lucifer was condemned to hell because he loved God so much.
Then he created Man, whom he regarded as a Higher Form Than The Angels, and he asked The Angels then to serve man.
But in this view, he could NOT bow to Man, because of his Love for God, he could bow ONLY to God.
Now, the worst of the pains of hell insofar as hell has been described is The Absence of The beloved, which is God.
So how does Iblis sustain the situation in hell? By The MEMORY of The Echo of God’s Voice when God said, “Go to hell.”
And I think that’s A Great Sign of Love, do you agree?
BILL MOYERS: Well, it’s certainly true in life that the greatest hell one can know is to be separated from the one you love.
Now, I have a friend whom I met by chance, a young Buddhist monk from Tibet. You know, in 1959 the Communists crashed down and bombed the palace of the Dalai Lama, bombarded Lhasa, and people murdered and all that kind of thing. And he escaped, he escaped at the time of the Dalai Lama. And those monasteries, I mean, there were monasteries with 5,000 monks, 6,000 monks, all wiped out, tortured and everything else. I haven’t heard one word of incrimination of the Chinese from that young man. There is absolutely no condemnation of the Chinese here. And you hear this from the Dalai Lama himself. You will not hear a word of condemnation. This recognition of the way of life through which that vitality of the spirit is moving in its own way. I mean, these men are sufferers of terrific violence, and there’s no animosity. I learned religion from them.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: That’s the most sophisticated interpretation of why Christ had to be crucified. Abelard’s idea was that this … oh, this is connected with The Grail King and everything else … that The Coming of Christ to be crucified and illustrating thus The Suffering of Life, removes Man’s Mind from commitment to the things of This World in compassion. It’s in compassion with Christ that we turn to Christ, and so the injured one becomes the savior. It is the suffering that evokes the humanity of the human heart.
Of late, however, scientists have resurrected the name of an ancient goddess, Gaia, to express the idea of Earth as a living body on which we depend for life. In the last half of this conversation with Joseph Campbell, he takes us back to the time when the love of God meant the love for mother goddess, and he unites these themes in one image, the virgin birth, which to him represents the birth of spirit from matter, the birth of compassion in The Heart.
(interviewing) The Lord’s Prayer begins, “Our Father which art in heaven.”
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: This is a metaphorical image, this is a symbolic image, and to make the point that it’s not your father, your physical father, we have “Our Father who art in heaven.” But heaven again is a symbolic idea, where would it, heaven, be? It is no place. All of the references of religious and mythological images are to planes of consciousness or fields of experience potential in the human spirit, and these are to evoke attitudes and experiences that are appropriate to a meditation on the mystery of the source of your own being, I would say. So there have been systems of religion where the mother is the prime parent, the source, and she’s really a more immediate parent than the father, because one is born from the mother, and then the first experience of any infant is the mother, so that the image of woman is the image of The World. You might say that mythology is simply a translation of The World into a mother image. We talk of Mother Earth and so forth.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: That’s right, and when you have a goddess as the creator, it’s her own very body that is the universe. She is identical with the universe. And in Egypt, you have the mother heavens, Nut, the goddess Nut, who is represented as the whole heavenly sphere.
BILL MOYERS: So it would be natural for people trying to explain the wonders of the universe to look to the female figure as the explanation for what they saw in their own lives.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Not only that, but then when you move to a philosophical point of view, the female represents what in Kantian terminology we call the forms of sensibility. The female represents time and space itself. She is time and space, and the mystery beyond her is beyond pairs of opposites, so it isn’t male and it isn’t female. It neither is nor isn’t, but everything is within her, so that the gods are her children. Everything you can think of, everything you can see, is the production of the goddess.
Oh, this is a wonderful story. The Vedic gods are together and they see a strange son of amorphous thing down the way, like a kind of smoky fog. And they say, “What’s that?” They don’t know what it is. And Agni, the god of fire, says, “I’ll go find out who that is.” So he goes up to this smoky thing and he says, “Who are you?” And from the smoky thing the voice says, “Who are you?” And he says, “I’m Agni, I’m the lord of fire, I can burn anything.” And out of the fog there comes a piece of straw, it falls on the ground, it says, “Let’s see you burn that” He can’t burn it. He goes back, he says, “This is strange.”
Well, Vayu, the lord of winds, says, ”I’ll try.” So he goes and the same thing, “I can blow anything around.” Throws it down, “Now, let’s see you blow that” Well, he can’t. He goes back. Then a woman arrives, a beautiful, mysterious, mystic woman. And she instructs the gods and tells them who that is. “That is the ultimate mystery of being, from which you boys have received your strength. And he can turn it on or off for you,” you know. And there she comes as the one who illuminates the gods themselves concerning the ultimate ground of their own being.
BILL MOYERS:
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Well, it makes a psychological difference in the character of the cultures. You have the basic birth of civilization in the Near East with the great river valleys then as the main source areas, the Nile, the Tigris-Euphrates, and then over in India, the Indus valley and later the Ganges. This is The World of the goddess; all these rivers have goddess names finally.
Then there come the invasions. These fighting people are herding people. The Semites are herders of goats and sheep, and the Indo-Europeans of cattle. They were formerly the hunters. They translate a hunting mythology into a herding mythology, but it’s animal oriented. And when you have hunters you have killers, and when you have herders, you have killers, because they’re always in movement, nomadic, coming into conflict with other people and they have to conquer the area they move into. This comes into the Near East, and this brings in the warrior gods, like Zeus, like Yahweh.
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And The Libido?
The Libido is The Impulse to Life.
Comes from where?
Comes from The Heart.
BILL MOYERS:
And The Heart is what?
The Heart is the organ of opening up to Somebody Else.
That’s the human quality, as opposed to the animal qualities, which have to do with, primarily with self-interest.
Opening up to that which is other is the opening of The Heart, and that’s as the troubadours saw it, it is the opening of The Heart.
I can certainly understand, though,
why The Church was threatened by this,
because how can you have a church
if everyone’s libido is his or her Own God?
Why Not?
Why can’t The Church handle that?
If you can sanctify a marriage that has been arranged,
why can’t you sanctify A Marriage
where two people have Joined Each Other?
BILL MOYERS:
So The Courage to Love became
The Courage to Affirm against Tradition,
whatever knowledge stands confirmed in One’s Own Experience.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL:
Yeah.
BILL MOYERS:
Why was that important in The Evolution of The West?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL:
Well, it was important in that it gives The West this accent,
as I’ve been saying, on The Individual,
that he should have faith in his experience,
and not simply mouth terms that have come to him from
other mouths.
I think that’s the great thing in The West.
The validity of the individual’s experience of what humanity is, what life is, what values are, against the monolithic system.
BILL MOYERS:
Was there some of this in the legend of The Holy Grail?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL:
Yes. Wolfram has a very interesting statement about The Origin of The Grail.
He says The Grail was brought from Heaven by
The Neutral Angels.
There was The War in Heaven between God and Lucifer, and the angelic hosts that sided one group with Lucifer, and the other with God.
Pair of opposites,
Good and Evil,
God and Satan.
The Grail was brought down through The Middle, The way of the middle,
by the neutral angels.
BILL MOYERS:
What is the Grail representing, then?
Well, that’s the same business.
Love Knows No Pain.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL:
Yeah, and that’s a basic Muslim idea, about Iblis, that’s the Muslim name for Satan, being God’s greatest lover.
Why was Satan thrown into hell?
Well, the standard Story is that when God created the angels, he told them to bow to none but himself.
And Satan would not bow to Man.
Now, this is interpreted in the Christian Tradition, as I recall from my boyhood instruction, as being The Egotism of Satan, he would not bow to Man.
And then God says, “Get out of my sight.”
JOSEPH CAMPBELL:
Yeah.
BILL MOYERS:
That’s why I’ve liked the Persian myth for so long. Satan as God’s lover.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL:
Yeah. And he is separated from God, and that’s the real pain of Satan.
BILL MOYERS:
You once took the saying of Jesus.
“Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your father who is in heaven, for he makes the sun to rise on the evil and the good and sends rain on the just and the unjust.”
You once took that to be the highest, the noblest, the boldest of the Christian teachings.
Do you still feel that way?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL:
Well, I think the main teaching of Christianity is,
“Love your enemies.”
BILL MOYERS:
Hard to do.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL:
I know, well, that’s it — I mean, when Peter drew his sword and cut off the servant’s ear there, in the Gethsemane affair, and Jesus said, “Put up your sword, Peter,” and put the ear back on,
Peter has been drawing his sword ever since.
And one can speak about Petrine or Christian Christianity in that sense.
And I would say that the main doctrine of Christianity is the doctrine of Agape, of true love for he who is yours, him who is your enemy.
BILL MOYERS:
How does one love one’s enemy without condoning what the enemy does, accepting his aggression?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL:
Well, I’ll tell you how to do that. “Do not pluck the mote from your enemy’s eye, but pluck the beam from your own,” do you know?
BILL MOYERS:
Do most of the stories of mythology, from whatever culture, say that suffering is intrinsically a part of life and that there’s no way around it?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL:
I think I’d be willing to say that they do. I can’t think of anything now that says if you’re going to live, you won’t suffer.
It’ll tell you how to understand and bear and interpret suffering, that it will do. And when the Buddha says there is escape from suffering, the escape from sorrow is nirvana. Nirvana is a psychological position where you are untouched by desire and fear.
BILL MOYERS:
But is that realistic? Does that happen?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL:
Yes, certainly.
BILL MOYERS:
And your life becomes what?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL:
Harmonious, well-centered and affirmative of life.
BILL MOYERS:
Even with suffering.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL:
Exactly. There’s a passage in Paul’s Epistle to the Philippians, isn’t there?
Be as Christ, for Christ did not think godhood something to be hung on to, to be clung to, but let go and came down and took life in the form of a servant, a servant even unto death.
Let’s say, come in and accept the suffering, and affirm it.
BILL MOYERS:
So you would agree with Abelard in the 12th century, who said that Jesus’ death on the cross was not as ransom paid, as a penalty applied, but it was an act of atonement, atonement at one with the race.
BILL MOYERS:
So you would agree with Abelard that mankind yearning for God and God yearning for mankind in compassion met at that cross.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL:
Yes. And by contemplating the cross, you are contemplating the true mystery of life. And that love for this experience, no matter how horrific the experience, the love for it
BILL MOYERS:
So there’s joy and pain in love.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL:
Yeah, there is. Love, you might say, is the burning point of life, and since all life is sorrowful, so is love. And the stronger the love, the more that pain, but love bears all things. Love itself is a pain, you might say, but is the pain of being truly alive.
BILL MOYERS:
As Joseph Campbell pursued his quest across Europe for the stories of love and chivalry, he paused often to visit the great cathedrals.
They too reflected the glory of love, the love of Mary, mother of God.
Reverence for the power of the female is another grand theme in ancient mythology. In the primitive planting cultures, woman contributed importantly to the economic life of the community by participating in the growing and reaping of crops.
And as the mother and nourisher of life, she was thought to assist the earth symbolically in its fertility.
In fact, some believe there was even a golden age of the goddess until she was driven from the imagination by the emergence of patriarchal authority.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL:
Yes.
BILL MOYERS:
Could it have begun, “Our Mother”?
BILL MOYERS:
But what happened along the way, Joe, to this reverence that in primitive societies was directed toward the goddess figure, the great goddess, the Mother Earth?
What happened to that?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL:
That comes in primarily with agriculture and the agricultural societies.
BILL MOYERS:
Fertility and all of that?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL:
It has to do with the earth, the human woman does give birth as the earth gives birth to the plants. She gives nourishment as the plants do. So woman magic and earth magic are the same, they are related. And the personification, then, of this energy which gives birth to forms and nourishes forms is properly female. And so it is in the agricultural world of ancient Mesopotamia, the Egyptian Nile, but also in the earlier planting culture systems, that the goddess is the mythic form that is dominant.
BILL MOYERS:
Because of this obvious perception of creation issue, fertility.
It’s the female wisdom.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL:
It’s the female as the giver of forms.
She is the one who gave the forms and she knows where they came from.
BILL MOYERS:
I wonder what it would have meant to us if somewhere along the way, we had begun the prayer “Our Mother,” instead of “Our Father.”
What psychological difference would it have made?
BILL MOYERS: The sword and death, instead of fertility.
“She took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat. And the eyes of both of them were opened—" implying that before that they were closed "—and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons."
That’s so interesting. Their eyes are opened, which indicated that they weren’t to begin with. Whatever God created to begin with was kind of blind, but not—blind in some strange way. They weren’t wandering around in the garden and bumping into trees. It was some sort of metaphysical blindness that’s been removed by whatever has just happened. Whatever’s just happened also made them realize that they were naked. Ok, so what sort of eye-opening is that? What does it mean to realize that you’re naked? It means to realize that you’re vulnerable. That’s what people discovered. It’s like, uh oh. We can be hurt.
So you’re a zebra in a herd of zebras, and there’s a bunch of lions around there laying on the grass. You don't care. Those are laying-down lions. Laying-down lions are no problem. It’s standing-up, hunting lions that are the problem. You're not smart enough to figure out that laying-down lions turn into standing-up, hunting lions, so you’re not, like, building a fort to keep the lions out. You’re just mindlessly eating grass. You’re not very awake, but that's not what happens to human beings. Human beings wake up, and they think, we’re vulnerable—permanently. It’s never going away. It’s the recognition of that eternal vulnerability.
What happens? The first thing they do is clothe themselves. Well, what happens when you're naked, and when you need protecting from the world? You're all wearing clothes. Why? Well, we’ve been doing that for a very, very long period of time. It’s tens of thousands of years, at minimum. In fact, you can track, more or less, when clothing developed by doing DNA testing on the kind of lice that cling to clothes rather than hair. We have a pretty good idea of when clothing emerged, and of different types, as well. But the point is that they’re naked, and they think that’s not so good; we’re vulnerable. Their eyes are opened enough so that they become self-conscious, and they recognize their own vulnerability. The first thing they do—the first step of culture—is to protect themselves with something from the world. You protect yourself from the world, and from the prying eyes of other people.
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This is a book by Lynne Isbell: Why We See So Well. "From the temptation of Eve to the venomous murder of the mighty Thor, the serpent appears throughout time and cultures as a figure of mischief and misery. The worldwide prominence of snakes in religion, myth, and folklore underscores our deep connection to the serpent-but why, when so few of us have firsthand experience? The surprising answer, this book suggests, lies in the singular impact of snakes on primate evolution. Predation pressure from snakes, Lynne Isbell tells us, is ultimately responsible for superior vision and large brains of primates-and for a critical aspect of human evolution."
That was tested recently. Psychologists have known for a long time that people can learn to fear snakes, but they discovered in primates a set of neurons—Pulvinar neurons—which are specialized. "Pulvinar neurons reveal neurobiological evidence of past selection for rapid detection of snakes." That's from 2013. So the snake definitely woke us up.
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Color vision as an adaptation to fruit eating in primates. It’s not by accident that women make themselves look like ripe fruit to be attractive to men, right? And that’s also not sociocultural in origin.
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"And they heard the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day: and Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God amongst the trees of the garden."
That’s interesting. What's the implication? Prior to being woken up—prior to recognizing nakedness and vulnerability—there is no reason for man and woman to hide from God. Why are they hiding from God? They're naked and vulnerable. Ok, so think about this—think about this: Imagine that you have the capacity to live truthfully, courageously, and forthrightly. Just imagine that, and then imagine why you might not do that. How about fear and shame? How would that work? Well, let’s say that the idea of living forthrightly, truthfully, and courageously is analogous—given what we already know about these stories—to walking with God in the garden. What stops people from doing that? What stops people from hiding? Well, it’s their own recognition of their own inadequacies. They look at themselves, and they think, how in the world is a creature such as I, with everything that’s wrong with me, supposed to live properly in this world?
What do you hide from? Well, you go home, and you sit on your bed for five minutes and ask yourself what you have hidden from in your life. Man, you’ll have books of knowledge reveal themselves to you in your imagination. Well, why are you hiding? It’s no bloody wonder you're hiding. It’s no wonder that people hide. That's the thing that's so terrifying about this story. We woke up and we thought, oh my God, look at this place. There is some serious trouble here, and we’re in some serious trouble, and we’re not what we could be. And so we hide, and that's what the story says: people woke up, became self-conscious, recognized their own vulnerability, and that made them hide from manifesting their divine destiny. It’s like, yea. That’s exactly right.
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I love this part of the story. It’s so funny, and we could use a little humor at this point. "And the Lord God called unto Adam, and said unto him, Where art thou? And Adam said, I heard thy voice in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked." So, in case there was any doubt about that, that's why. "And God said, Who told thee that thou wast naked? Did you eat of the tree, whereof I commanded thee that you should not eat?" This is where Adam shows himself in all his post-fall, heroic glory: "And the man said, The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat."
So that's man. Again, there's a modern feminist interpretation of the story of Adam and Eve that makes the claim that Eve was portrayed as the universal bad guy of humanity for disobeying God and eating the apple. It’s like, fair enough. It looks like she slipped up, and then she tempted her husband, and that makes her even worse—although, he was foolish enough to immediately eat, so it just means that she was a little more courageous than him and got there first.
It’s Adam who comes across as really one sad creature in this story, as far as I'm concerned. Look at what he manages in one sentence: First of all, it wasn’t him; it was the woman. Second, he even blames God! It wasn’t just the woman—and you gave her to me! "And she gave me of the tree, and I did eat." It’s like, hey, Adam’s all innocent—except now, not only is he naked, disobedient, cowardly, and ashamed, he’s also a snivelling, backbiting fink. He rats her out like the second he gets the opportunity, and then he blames God. That’s exactly right. You go online, and you read the commentary that men write about women when they're resentful and bitter about women. It’s so interesting. It’s like, it’s not me: it’s those bitches. It’s not me: it’s them—and not only that, but what a bloody world this is in which they exist. It’s exactly the same thing. It’s exactly the same thing, and it is absolutely pathetic.
"And the Lord God said unto the woman, What is this that thou hast done? And the woman said, The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat." Well, at least she has a bloody excuse. First of all, it’s a snake. We already found out that they're subtle. Second, it turns out that the damn snake is Satan himself, and he’s rather treacherous. So the fact that she got tangled up in his mess is, well, problematic, but it’s a hell of a lot better excuse than Adam has.
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"And the Lord God said unto the serpent, Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life"—and snakes, by the way, are lizards that lost their legs, just so you know—"And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel."
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I love these pictures. They’re so smart. And again, strip the religious context from them and just look at them for a second. What do you see? You see the eternal mother holding her infant away from a snake. See it, down there? Crocodile, snake—everything predatory that's been after us for like 60 million years. The reason we’re here is because of that. That’s why it’s a sacred image.
This one I like even better. Down there there's something like the moon, and then there's a reptile down there that Eve’s stepping on. This is really old, and I showed you this before, but I think it’s so cool. She’s coming out of this thing that’s like a hole in the sky. It indicates the eternal recurrence of this figure. It’s an archetype. The potential out of which she is emerging is all musical instruments, back here. And so what the artist is representing is the great, patterned complexity of being, and the emergence of the protective mother from that background, protecting the infant, eternally, against predation. It’s like, how can that not be a holy image? If you don't think it’s a holy image, then there isn’t something wrong with the image: there's something wrong with the perceiver.
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"Unto the woman he said"—God’s just outlining the consequences of this, right now. It’s like, ok, well, now you’ve gone and done it: you’ve woken up. This is what's going to happen—"I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee."
It doesn’t say he should. It says he will. And why "in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children?" Well, when you develop a brain that big, so that you can see, it’s not that easy to give birth anymore. And then you produce something that’s dependent beyond belief—that’s one of the things that you could say dooms you to precisely this. So that's Eve’s punishment for waking up. And Adam, "Because thou hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it: cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life." What's that? It’s the invention of work.
"Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to three; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field."
It’s the invention of work. What do people do that animals don't? Work. What does work mean? It means you sacrifice the present for the future. Why do you do that? Because you know that you're vulnerable, and you're awake. From here on in, from this point, there's no return to unconscious paradise. I don't care how many problems you solved so that today’s ok. You’ve got a lot problems coming up, and no bloody matter how much you work, you're never going to work enough to solve them. All you're going to do from here on in is be terrified of the future, and that's the price of waking up. That’s the end of paradise, and that’s the beginning of history, and that’s how that story goes.
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"In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return. And Adam called his wife’s name Eve; because she was the mother of all living."
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"Unto Adam also and to his wife did the Lord God make coats of skins, and clothed them"—that's William Blake, by the way—"And the Lord God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever:"
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"Therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken. So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life."
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One more thing, and then we’ll stop. Adam and Eve are tempted by the snake; they eat the fruit; they wake up; they realize they're naked; they realize that they’re vulnerable; they realize the future; they realize they're gonna die; they realize they’re gonna have to work; they realize the difficulty in conception, and the fall of humankind from unconscious paradise. Ok. That makes sense. What about the knowledge of good and evil? What in the world does that mean?
The Mesopotamians believed that human beings were made out of the blood of Kingu, who was the worst monster that Tiamat, the Goddess of chaos, could imagine and then produce. So their idea was that there as something deeply, deeply, deeply, demonically flawed about humanity. That's their conception, and it’s out of that same milieu that these stories emerge.
So what does opening your eyes and realizing your vulnerability have to do with the knowledge of good and evil? I thought about that. I really thought about that. I gotta tell you, I thought about that for like 20 years, because I knew there was something there that I could not put together. At the same time, I was reading things. I'm going to tell you something truly awful, and so if you need a trigger warning, you're getting one. Believe me, I do not give trigger warnings lightly. I'm going to tell you something you’ll never forget.
This is what Unit 731 used to do in China. It’s a Japanese unit during the 2nd World War. As far as I can tell, they did the most horrific things that were done to anyone during World War II, and that's really something. So this is what they did: They took their prisoners and put them in a position so that their arms would freeze solid. Then they would take them outside and pour hot water over their arms. And then they would repeat that until the flesh came off the bones. They were doing that to investigate the treatment of frostbite for soldiers. You can look up Unit 731 if you want to have nightmares. So that's Unit 731. That’s human beings. Someone thought that up, and then people did it. What's knowledge of good and evil? Here’s the key, man: You know you’re vulnerable. No other animal knows that. You know what hurts you, and now that you know what hurts you, you can figure out what hurts someone else. And as soon as you know what hurts someone else, and you can use that, you have the knowledge of good and evil.
Well, it’s a pretty good trick that the snake pulled, because it doesn't look like it’s exactly the sort of thing that we might have wanted if we had known the consequences. But as soon as a human being is self-conscious and aware of his own nakedness, then he has the capacity of evil, and that's introduced into the world right at that point.
Here's the rest of the story: So there's the snake, right, and you’re some tree-dwelling primate. The snake eats primates, and that sucks, so let’s watch out for the damn snakes. Then your brain grows, and you think, wait a minute. There’s not just snakes—there's where snake live. Why don't we just get the hell out of the tree, hunt down the snakes, and get rid of them? Those are sort of like potential snakes, and so the snake becomes potential snake. It’s the same circuit that you're using to do this thinking. You get rid of the damn snakes. It’s like Saint Patrick chasing them out of Ireland. No more snakes. Everything is paradise. It’s like, no, no, no. That’s not how it works, at all.
You’ve got human snakes. You’re a tribe, you’ve got tribal enemies, and you’ve got to defend yourself against the human snakes, right? Maybe your empire expands, and you get rid of all the human snakes. Then what happens? They start to grow and develop inside. You get rid of all the external enemies and make a big city, and all of a sudden there's enemies that pop up inside.
The snake isn’t just the snake in the garden, and the snake isn’t just the possible snake, and the snake isn’t just the snake that's your enemy. The snake is your friend, because your friend can betray you. And then it’s even worse than that, because you can betray you. So even if you get rid of all the outside snakes, you’ve got an inside snake, and God only knows what it’s up to.
That's why the bloody Christians associated the snake in the garden of Eden with Satan. It’s unbelievably brilliant, because you gotta think, what's the enemy? Well, it’s the snake, and fair enough. But, you know, that's good if you're a tree-dwelling primate. If you're a sophisticated human being with six million years of additional evolution, and you're really trying to solve the problem of what it is that's the great enemy of mankind…Well, it’s the human propensity for evil, right? That’s the figure of Satan. That’s what that figure means—just like there's a logos that’s the truth that speaks order out of chaos at the beginning of time, there’s an antithetical spirit—the hostile brother. That’s Cain to Abel, which we’ll talk about next week—that's doing exactly the opposite. It’s motivated by absolutely nothing but malevolence and the willingness to destroy, and it has every reason for doing so. That’s what’s revealed in the next story, in Cain and Abel: the first glimmerings of the antithetical spirit outside of this strange insistence by the Christian mystics, let’s say, on the identity between the snake in the garden of Eden and the author of all evil himself.
