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There is an
important myth from
Indonesia that tells
of a mythological age and its termination. In the
beginning the ancestors of
mankind were not distinguished as to
sex. There were no
births, there were no
deaths. In celebration, a great
public
dance took place . In the
course of the dance one of the
participants was trampled to death and
torn to pieces.
The pieces were buried.
At the
moment of that
killing the sexes separated. Now death was balanced by begetting, begetting by death, while from the buried parts of the
dismembered body food plants grew. Time had come into being, death,
birth, and the killing and eating
of other
living beings,
for the preservation of life.
The timeless
time of the beginning,
+++++++++ the
dreamtime +++++++++
had been terminated by a
communal crime,
a deliberate
murder or
sacrifice.
One of the main
problems of living that mythology deals
with is reconciling the mind to
this
brutal precondition of all
life, which lives by the killing and eating
of other
lives.
You may try to
deceive yourself by
eating only vegetables,
but they too are alive.
The essence of
life is this eating of itself!
Life lives on lives,
and the reconciliation of the human
mind and sensibilities to that
fundamental
fact is one of the functions of some of those
very brutal rites in which the ritual consists
chiefly of killing, a
sacrifice, an
imitation of that first primordial
crime, out of which arose this
temporal reality, in which
we all participate.
The reconciliation of mind to the
conditions of life is
fundamental to all
creation stories.
Creation stories are all the
same in this regard.
In the
Christian myth the
serpent is the seducer which amounts to a refusal to
affirm life.
In
the biblical
tradition
we have inherited,
life is corrupt, and every
natural impulse is sinful unless it has been circumcised or baptized.
The serpent was the one who brought
sin into the temporal reality. The
woman was the one who
handed the fruit of
life to the man.
In a male oriented
religious culture this identification of the
woman with
sin, of the serpent with sin,
and thus of life with
sin, is the twist that has been given to the
story in the
biblical myth and doctrine of
the fall.
It is a
foolish
attitude to say no to
life because with life comes
pain.
It is a
foolish
attitude to say that
life on Earth
should not be as it is.
The idea in the
biblical
tradition of
the fall is that
nature as we know it
is corrupt,
sex in and of itself is
corrupt, and the female, as the epitome of
sex, corrupts us.
Why was the knowledge of good and evil
forbidden to Adam and Eve by
God?
Without that
knowledge, we would all be a bunch of babies still in
Eden, without any participation in
life.
Woman brings life into reality.
Eve is the
mother of this
temporal reality.
There is actually a
historical explanation based on the coming of
the Hebrews into
Canaan and the subjugation of the
Canaanites. The principal divinity
of the Canaanites was El the
Creator; secondary
gods, who acted on
Earth, were Baal and Baal's consort
Asherah, and associated with
Asherah is the serpent.
The
serpent is and was the symbol of the mystery
of life.
The male
god, oriented group rejected it.
There is
historical rejection of the Mother Goddess in the creation story of the Garden of Eden.
Formerly you had
a dream time paradise there in the
Garden of Eden - no
time, no birth, no death - no life.
The serpent
dies. The serpent
then is resurrected shedding its old skin and thus
renewing its life. The serpent is the lord
of the central tree, where
time and eternity come together. The
serpent is the primary
god, actually, in the
Garden of Eden.
Yahweh, the one who walks there in the
cool of the evening, is just a visitor. The Garden is the serpent's place. It is an old, old
story. We have Sumerian seals from as early as 3500
BCE showing the serpent and the
tree and the goddess,
with the goddess giving the
fruit of life to
a visiting male. The mythology of the Mother Goddess is
right there.
The myth of
Adam and Eve deals with moving
out of the mythological dream
time zone of the
Garden of Eden, where there is no
time, and where men and women do not even
know that they are different from each
other. The two are just
creatures. God and
man are practically the same.
God walks in the cool of the evening in the
garden with
Adam and Eve. Then
Adam and Eve
eat the fruit of life and
come to understand the
knowledge of the
duality of
opposites.
Adam and Eve had not
thought of themselves as
opposites.
Male and female is one
opposition.
Another
opposition is
men and God.
Good and evil is a third
opposition.
The primary oppositions are
sexual
opposition and the
opposition between
human beings and God. Then comes the idea of good
and evil in the world. Adam and Eve have thrown themselves
out of the Garden of Eden, the
dream time, heaven you might say, just by that
act of recognizing
duality. To move out into the
world, you have to
act in terms of pairs of
opposites.
Women are held
responsible for
the Fall because they represent
life. Man
doesn't enter life except by
woman, and so it is
woman who brings
us into this world of pairs of
opposites and
suffering.
The
Garden of Eden is a metaphor for that innocence that is innocent
of time and innocent of
opposites.
The dreamtime
is the prime center out of which consciousness becomes
aware.
There is a
standard folk tale
plot dealing with the One Forbidden
Thing.
Bluebeard, says to
his wife, "Don't open that
closet"?
Each wife
disobeys.
Another would be Pandora with
Pandora's Box.
In the
Old Testament
God points out the forbidden
fruit
The
Old Testament
God is challenging his children to partake of the
forbidden fruit.
The
Old Testament
God created human
beings.
Humans exihibit behavioral traits that fall within
Old Testament
God's granted
parameters.
When a human attempts to leave the popular social
culture, when he or she partakes of the forbidden
fruit of life
agitating as an agent for social change, then that individual overcomes his
conditioning and becomes master of his own life
falling into rebellion fighting the popular cultural conceptions of
God.
The independent
living of life
begins with that first act of disobedience - the
mark of free will - the ability to question tradition - the ability to observe
life as life is as opposed to how it has been
imaginatively
conceptualized.
In most cultures there
are two or three creation
stories.
There are two in the
Bible. In the
Garden of Eden
story of Chapter 2:
God is trying to think of ways to
entertain Adam, whom he has
created to be his
Gardener's assistant , to take care of his
garden. That is an old, old
story that was borrowed from ancient
Sumer. The gods wanted somebody to take care of their
garden and cultivate the food that they needed, so they
created man.
That's the background of the
myth of Chapters 2 and 3 in the
book of Genesis. But
Yahweh's gardener is bored. So God tries to invent
toys for man. Yahweh creates the animals, but all the
man can do is name them. Then
Yahweh thinks of this grand
idea of drawing the
soul of woman out of Adam's own
body - which is a very different
creation story than that found in Chapter 1 of
book of Genesis, where
God created
Adam and Eve together in the
image of Himself as
male and female.
There God is Himself the
primordial androgyne.
Chapter 2 is by far the earlier
story, coming from perhaps the eighth
century or so B. C., whereas Chapter 1 is of a priestly text of about the fourth century B.C.,
or later. In the Hindu
story of the
Self that felt fear, then desire, then split in two,
we have a counterpart of
book of Genesis. In
book of Genesis, it is
man, not the god,
who splits in two. So we all now spend
our lives
trying to find and embrace
our other halves.
There is a basic
mythological theme that
originally all was
One,
and then there was
separation - heaven and earth, male and
female, and so forth.
How did
we lose
touch with
unity?
One
theme is that the
separation was somebody's
fault - they ate the wrong
fruit or said the
wrong words to
God so that he got angry and went away. So now the
eternal is somehow away from
us, and we have to find some
way to get back in
touch with it.
There is
another
theme, in which
man is thought of as having come not from above but
from the womb of Mother Earth. Often, in these
stories, there is a great ladder or
rope up which humans climb. The last
humans to want to get out are two great big
fat heavy humans. They grab the rope, and snap! - it
breaks. So we are
separated from our
source.
In a
sense, because of
our minds,
we actually are separated, and the
problem is to reunite that
broken cord.
There's a
Hindu image that shows a triangle, which is the
Mother Goddess, and a dot in the center of the triangle,
which is the energy of the transcendent entering the field of
time. And then from this triangle there come
pairs of triangles in all directions. Out of one comes two. All
things in the field of
time are pairs of
opposites. This is the shift of
consciousness from the
consciousness of identity to the
consciousness of participation in duality. Now
you are into the field of time.
Another
theme involves
emanation and precipitation without
personification.
A sound precipitates
air, then fire,
then water and earth - and that's how the
world becomes. The
whole universe is included in this first
sound, this vibration, which then commits all
things to
fragmentation in the field
of time.
In the
beginning
Yahweh, the
god of the
Israelites, was simply the most
powerful god among many.
Yahweh was just a local
tribal
god. In the sixth century BC, when the
Jews were in
Babylon, the notion of a
world savior came in, and the
biblical divinity moved into a new
dimension.
The
idea of good and evil in
mythology, of life as a
conflict between the
forces of
darkness and the
forces of
light, is a Zoroastrian idea, which has come over into
Judaism and Christianity.
In other
traditions, good and evil are
relative to the position in which you are standing.
-adapted from
the Power of
Myth, interview of Joseph Campbell,
mythologist, by Bill Moyers, journalist.
If it is beneficial for
some action to take place for the individual
conscious then that
consciousness will label that occurrence as
beneficial or good to that
consciousness.
Spiritual corruption
occurs when that consciousness realizes that
the choice it is making is not beneficial to it but goes ahead and does it
anyway.
Fault occurs when that consciousness makes a
conscious choice for action based upon
a faulty understanding of
reality.
Simple minds and those who, steeped
in spiritual
corruption, deceive themselves
use good and evil as a way of categorizing
things.
Also see Joseph Campbell on:
image
myth
life
consciousness
archetype
metaphor
mystery
the
serpent
religion
dream time
hero
God
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