The Fall reframed

Ishmael reframes the story of the Fall in the Garden of Eden from a Leaver viewpoint, declaring that the story as it is known in Genesis makes no sense when viewed from the Taker viewpoint. The story in Genesis supposes that pre-agriculture was paradise and the agricultural revolution precipitated expulsion from the Garden, preventing a Taker from having been its original author. Recap on the background and some of the terms here.

Ishmael lets the narrator imagine the gods bickering about how to rule the earth. Their dilemma rests on the fact that no matter how they try to divide the food (should the lion live and the deer die? or the frog live and the fly dies, but then the frog must die when the stork comes along - oh dear!) without committing both good and evil acts. Then they eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and suddenly realise that that is the right way: some days the frog can live, and other days it must die. It's what we call an ecosystem, but remember we're trying to explain the Fall.

Then one day Adam appeared on the scene and the gods were worried: "He is almost like ourselves, what if he should be tempted to eat of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, impatient for the time that he will be ready to eat from The Tree of Life? There is no telling what the knowledge could do to him, because he is not a god himself." And a bit of knoweldge is a dangerous thing it would seem, because they conjecture that Adam (the human race, that is) will employ the knowledge in its own service, i.e. to live well, grow exponentially in population, and slowly kill all the rest of nature to feed its expanding numbers.

And if any say, "Let's put off the burdens of the criminal life and live in the hands if the gods once again," I will kill them, for what they say is evil. And if any say, "Let's turn aside from our misery and search for that other tree," I will kill them, for what they say is evil ... And to the people of this land I will say, "Grow, for this is good," and they will grow.

To reiterate, the story is nonsensical in Taker mythology - a mystery - because the knowledge given by Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil is beneficial to man. Why would it be forbidden?

But when you look at the story from a Leaver point of view - from the point of view of the little tribes bordering the Fertile Crescent between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers where agriculture is said to have originated - then it starts to make more sense. What these tribes saw was a people who needed more and more land and killed or converted their neighbours (to the agricultural revolution). And wat they thought, these tribes, is "why on earth would anyone want to give up this way of life for such a burdensome, loathsome, cursed form of living as agriculture?". And so they dreamt up the story of the fall whereby man took the power of the gods, the power of life and death, good and evil, into his own hands (and stuffed it up by being completely selfish), only to be deny itself The Good Life.

And so you see that this explanation is pure genius and puts a lot of things into perspective - like how Adam is not the mythological First Man, only the First Man in Taker culture. And Eve, whose name means life, symbolises fertility and population expansion. To add further weight to the agriculture argument, the story of Cain and Abel is the story of two brothers - agriculturalist people and neighbouring Semitic herders. And the gods accept Abel's offering, not Cain's agricultural offering. Clearly the gods are on the side of a Leaver culture!

What Ishmael does not point out, but what occurred to me, is the traditional puritan notion that the Evil in the Garden is connected with sex (the snake plays a symbolic role). Following Ishmael's reframe one might want to comment that population growth, rather than sex per se, is the evil. Then again, we now know that religion has as much to do with mind control as with keeping society together.