The Eater of Worlds

" All right, so here’s how the book opens: "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters." This is a hard narrative section to get a handle on because, in order to understand it properly, you have to actually look behind it. There are a lot of pieces of old stories in the Old Testament that flesh out the meaning of these lines. I can give you a quick overview of it. One of the ideas that lurks underneath these lines—although you can't tell, because it's in English. You have to look at the original language, and, of course, I don't speak the original language. I’ve had to use secondary sources, too bad for me. But the "without form and void," and the deep idea—you see, that's associated with this notion of endless, deep potential. For example, words that are used to represent "without form and void" are something like—I’m going to get this partly wrong—tohu wa-bohu. Another one is tehom. It’s important to know this, because those words are associated with an earlier Mesopotamian word, which is Tiamat. 

Tiamat was a dragon-like creature who represented the salt water. Tiamat had a husband named Apsu. Tiamat and Apsu were locked together in a kind of sexual embrace. I would say that's potential and order, or chaos and order. They were locked together, and it was that union of chaos and order that gave rise in the old Mesopotamian myth, the Enuma Elis, to being, to the old Gods first, and then, eventually, as creation progressed, to human beings themselves. 

There's this idea lurking underneath these initial lines that God is akin to that which confronts the unknown, carves it into pieces, and makes the world out of its pieces. The thing that it confronts is something like a predatory reptile, a dragon, or a serpent. I think part of the reason for that—and this is a very deep and ancient idea—is that…This is where it gets so complicated to do the translation. It’s partly how human beings created our world. We went out beyond the confines of our safe spaces—let's say our safe spaces defined by the tree or the fire—and we actively voyaged outward to the places that we were afraid of and didn't understand. We conquered and encountered things out there: animals, mammoths, snakes, and predators of all sorts. It was as a consequence of that active, brave engagement with the terrifying domain of what we did not understand that the world, in fact, was generated. That idea lurks deeply inside the opening lines of Genesis. 

It’s a profound idea, in my estimation. I think, also, that the way our brains are structured—and this is something that I’m going to try to develop more today—is the ancient circuits that our ancestors used to deal with the space beyond the home territory which they had already explored. Unknown territory is characterized by promise, because there are new things out there, but also by intense danger. We’re prey animals, especially millions of years ago when we were very young. We had to go out there and encounter things that were terribly dangerous. There was a kind of, let's say, paternal courage that went along with that. It was the spirit of paternal courage that enabled the conquering of the unknown, and there’s no difference between the conquering of the unknown and the creation of habitable order. 

The thing is that, as our cognitive faculties have developed to the point where we’re capable of very high levels of abstraction, the underlying biological architecture has remained the same. For example, when you’re having an argument about something fundamental with someone that you love, you’re trying to structure the world around you, jointly, to create a habitable space that you can both exist within. You’re using the abstracted version of the same circuits. You're using the same circuits that our archaic ancestors would have used when they would have went out into the unknown itself to encounter beasts, predators, and geographical unknowns. It's the same circuit. It's just that we do it abstractly now instead of concretely. But, of course, it has to be the same circuit, because evolution is a very conservative force. What else would it be? This is also why I think it’s so easy for us to demonize those people who are our enemies. Our enemies confront us with what we don't want to see, and, because of that, our first response is to use snake detection circuitry on them. That accounts for our almost immediate capacity to demonize. There’s a reason for that. It’s not a trivial thing. First of all, it's a very fast response. And second of all, it's a response that's worked for a very, very, very long time. 

Ancient representations of reality were sort of a weird meld of observable phenomena—things we would consider objective facts—and the projection of subjective truth. I’ll show you how the Mesopotamians viewed the world. They had a model of the world as a disc. If you go out in a field at night, what does the world look like? Well, it’s a disc. It’s got a dome on top of it. That was basically the Mesopotamian view of the world, and the view of the world of people who wrote the first stories in the Bible. There was water on top of the dome. Well, obviously. It rains, right? Where does the water come from? There’s water around the dome. The disc is made of land, and then underneath that there’s water. How do you know that? Well, drill. You’ll hit water; it’s under the earth. Otherwise, how would you hit the water? And then what’s under that? Fresh water. And then what’s under that? If you go to the edge of the disc, you hit the ocean. It’s salt water. So it’s a dome with water outside of it, and then it’s a disc that the dome sits on, and then underneath that there’s fresh water, and then underneath that there’s salt water. That was roughly the Mesopotamian world.

That’s a mix of observation and imagination, because that isn’t the world, but it is the way the world appears. It’s a perfectly believable cosmology. The sun rises and the sun sets on that dome. It’s not like the thing is bloody well spinning. Who would ever think that up? It’s obvious that the sun comes up and goes down, and then travels underneath the world and comes back up again. There's nothing more self-evident than that. That’s that strange intermingling of subjectively fantasy, right at the level of perception and actually observable phenomena. All of the cosmology that’s associated with the Biblical stories is exactly like that: it’s half psychology and half reality, although the psychological is real, as well.