'Original Sin', the Tree, the Fruit, the Serpent,
Sodom and Gomorrah
or
The Seven Daughters of Eve and Several Theories of
'Original Sin'

12th century carvings of Adam and Eve at St-Félix (Lot), and Monreale (Sicily).

I have for many years been wondering about 'Original Sin' - a concept which has, since the 'Enlightenment', tended to be laughed to scorn by most people in the white countries- except devout adherents to the Abrahamic monotheisms. The very phrase 'shapen in iniquity' seems to most people outrageous. But this merely displays our present - if increasingly hesitant - arrogance.

For Homo sapiens sapiens is, very obviously, flawed - or (s)he (in his/her 'human frailty') would not be trashing the world at the rate of dozens of species a week (some of them not even identified), and enslaving his/her own in misery. Human populations would not otherwise be divided into unbearably poor and unspeakably rich. The idea of 'Original Sin', though picturesquely put (and ludicrously described in Genesis), is, I believe, sound. Indeed, I would say, that this truth is now far more self-evident than those vague ones which declared American Independence. The flaw is inherent, inherited, and of course has nothing to do with recent, childish and monotheistic notions of 'sin'.

Many, if not most, cultures have a similar myth, whether that of Prometheus or the Creator Raven who finds man horribly rapacious, or the myth in which presumptuous mankind constructs a ladder - or a tower - to Heaven and has to be cut down to size; or, in the story ascribed to Aristophanes in Plato's Symposium, sliced down the middle - to make even more rapacious, arrogant and overweening semi-beings: us.

Original Sin was the eating of the 'Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil' - generally and wrongly identified as an apple. So vague is this part of the palimpsest of myth and legend in the First Book of Moses that we can only assume that 'knowledge' came with the mythic ingestion of the fruit or its seeds. So Original Sin as acquisition of knowledge was not tree-worship - but - it is implied, awareness of nakedness, a view of science which we now find rather odd, even though the totalitarian Global Culture is based on the covering of our genitals for no good reason.

On the other hand, we might assume that the story reflects an ancient guilt at leaving our natural and suitable East African habitat for areas where we had to wear clothing to protect us from burning sun and/or winter/nocturnal cold.

Original Sin, then, cannot have been wisdom. But it might have been the conception of a Creator: 'The idea of God is the primordial sin', wrote A.O. Spare. Or it might have been the assumption of wisdom, in other words, hubris - if not mere self-consciousness (in the demotic sense) which is an unique and catastrophic human disease.

Aside from the compulsion to wear clothes, it is hard to imagine what was the 'knowledge' which was so disastrous. Fire ? Tools ? Paternity ? A refined palate unique amongst animals ? The concept of time (past and future) ? The gradual awareness that we are maladjusted interlopers everywhere ? Or perhaps it was not knowledge itself or a particular piece of knowledge or discovery, but the use (particular or general) of knowledge, of information, which resulted in unwise and hubristic behaviour. Or was it simple, dissident (socially threatening) curiosity - like that of the latest wife in the tale of Bluebeard and his castle of many rooms, one of which must not be opened, and which contained the ever-screaming corpses of all the wives who had disobeyed his unexplained (thus Godlike) instruction ?
The story of Bluebeard is not so different from the story of the Garden of Eden and its Absolute Master.

On the other hand, 'Original Sin' might simply have been the unique human capacity for boredom.

It was, of course, not an act - not even the capacity for recrimination or complaint - but a process: a continuing and inherent process - what in ancient Rabbinical tradition was called yetzer ha ra: a continuing propensity towards evil. This might be the process of the encroachment of consciousness by the left hemisphere. Certainly, it is a horrible metamorphosis of amour-de-soi (enjoyed by most mammals) into amour-propre : the ghastly anti-quality of humans which creates, Frankenstein-like, such obscene notions as 'Human Dignity' out of the confusion in our mis-evolved brains between the emotional, the sexual, the sensual, and the transcendental.

The idea of inherent flaw is not, in fact, restricted to the Abrahamic monotheisms. The post-Confucian Chinese philosopher Xún Zi wrote in the third century BCE : 'The nature of man is evil; he acts compulsively to gain - for himself and over (in competition with) others.'

And if one considers the myth of the Garden of Eden in the light of the recent history of the earthly paradise of Rwanda, one is less inclined to dismiss it as 'mere myth'.

"It is hard to account for the common human resistance to happiness," wrote Salley Vickers, "unless it is that we would rather be crippled by what we lack than risk the pain that is one potential consequence of placing our secret selves in others' hands."  Is the Secrecy, the Secretiveness of Self the cause of our woes and our determination to continue them ?

Just why do humans not (to use Whitman's word) loaf  about being happy like bonobos, gorillas, orang-utans and even chimpanzees ? Why are we not using our brains to devise new forms of pleasure instead of new forms of oppression ? Why are dolphins and whales not relentlessly-driven and driving beings ? Why is nothing good enough for humans ? Why are we insatiable, unstoppable, out of control ? Once (before we became misnomically sapiens sapiens ?) we were pleasure-animals, now we are overfed, robotic slaves in the rich places, and the miserable, diseased and despised starving elsewhere.

'All the miseries of Man merely prove his superiority,' wrote Pascal, one of the most contemptible of 'Enlightenment' writers. 'They are the miseries of a great lord, of a dispossessed monarch.' This statement merely shows how twisted and perverted mankind can be. How can misery prove superiority ? Through the 'grace' of 'art' ? Of course not! The 'high end' of human cultures accounts for less than 0.1% of human activity. And those people who get to the 'top of the ladder', whether in painting or in banking, do so because they lack the sensibility and vision to enjoy themselves, like bonobos or wolves, on the rungs. Mankind rushed to the top of the evolutionary ladder through its amazing freedom of choice (but not the choice of suicide!) and hence by choosing to suppress its abilities for pleasure. And when some do decide that pleasure might be a good thing, they haven't the faintest idea how to find it - and resort to infantile activities like randomly taking narcotics, hallucinogens and other psychotropes - often several together.

It is amazing how backward Man is emotionally, compared with his ability to solve - and, more importantly, to invent - puzzles. We are the only autistic species, continually at war, continually devising new weapons, continually skirmishing inside our heads, continually managing crises of our own making, and making a crisis of the whole planet which from early in our 'development' has become nothing more to us than our prey. Something is wrong here. 'Original Sin' is a childish, easy sound-bite of an explanation, itself indicating how wilfully inadequate we are: a species continually at war with itself since it first declared Nature to be an Enemy. The only species which cannot evolve further, because the cultures it has constructed are designed to prevent it from inherent adaptation, from learning from its mistakes, is itself a mistake of nature, a dead end of evolution.

'The lower animals' do not recognise omens.

Our attraction towards psychoactive substances suggests not so much that something 'went wrong' in the evolution of our brains, but that something 'went missing', disappeared, or was suppressed (in the corpus callosum) at some point before we started clubbing each other, having clubbed and eaten all the happy animals we could find - probably including the Neanderthals who (I guess) were not missing the neuro-transmitter or synapse of happiness - that quality which no constitution yet devised offers a right to, but only to its pursuit, as if with club and axe.

Is there something which suppresses 'pleasure-receptors', the production of neuro-transmitters in the human brain ? Are we cursed with a 'striving (or dissatisfaction) gene' ? At what point in the development of the human brain and psyche can we place this irreversible flaw which is now so virulently mushrooming into the Sixth Extinction of the planet ? Which forces those who are neither in ground down misery nor in grinding-down affluence to work ever harder for ever-more-faceless taskmasters, though we have invented all sorts of spin-off marvels (as well as music and the other arts) with which we all could have a lovely and leisurely time.

It was in the Gulag of the USSR that Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, formerly an atheist, recognised Original Sin - and, when he was free so to do, joined the Russian Orthodox Church. His predecessor, Fyodor Dostoyevski, was, more than any writer of his time, almost obsessed by the curse of Original Sin, which, in him, took the very obvious form of compulsive gambling. We are the only addictive species - addicted to anything and everything from adrenaline and testosterone to desire, greed, sugar, routine, institutions...to glue.

However, I have digressed! My original question is where we might put the evolutionary (or, to be truthful, the counter-evolutionary) point of 'Original Sin', or expulsion from 'Paradise'. Paradise might be the self-acceptance of the 'higher' animals (whose sense of continuous self-hood, if it exists, is not ours), and the spectrum of self-esteem (so often at the lower end) is the Judgement of God. Is the notion of gods and God - the ludicrous concept of immutability and Truth - itself 'Original Sin' ? Was the snake-tempter in the Garden an avatar of Stalin-Jehovah ? Was the tree of Knowledge the tree of Justification, the tree of Perception of Causality - the tree of Reason itself ? Reason leads us to ask the wrong whys: not 'why am I not happy ?' but 'why am I here ?' - and 'what shape is the universe ?

Or was it the Tree of the Burden of Self-consciousness ?

While it is ridiculous (if not insane) to imagine that mere nudity or actual sexual reproduction - or even masturbation (much practised by apes) - could stunt our capacity for wholeness or happiness, might it not be the result of the curious biology of Homo sapiens sapiens, whose females become fertile once a month rather than once every six months ? In other words:

Original Sin was biological: frequent œstrus leading to our high reproductivity rate, which, in turn (because of our rapaciousness) has led to the devastation of all the lands and seas of our little planet. This, too, might be contained in Arostophanes' parable in Plato's Symposium, where 'the original' hermaphrodite humans overreached themselves and began to storm Olympus - so had to be sliced down the middle, and their heads turned round to make the 'half-people' who now form our species. On the other hand, mere over-reproduction would not have the dreadful effect we have had on the planet without our rapaciousness, the hubristic tendency to excess and lack of satisfaction, unsatisfiability.

If Our Flaw (of unlimited excess because of the adaptation of our brains to problem-solving and tool-devising ad infinitum without a care for the consequences - man is the only irresponsible species) is not in our reproductive propensity, then it must have formed very early in our history, together with the great increase in brain-power. It may be connected with the knowledge of paternity: for, once men knew that their genital pleasure often produced children, there was no stopping their arrogance. They saw themselves as sowers, and women as earth, dirt, and 'mere' bearers of children.

Men bond by doing silly, secret or illict things things together. This suggests that humans were originally matriarchal, very much like elephants. But matriarchy was generally overthrown early (though not, for example, in Arabia until the arrival of the Prophet M'hamed), for reasons which are obscure and not necessarily connected with the discovery of paternity. And homosexuality is widespread amongst humans, but not in patriarchal-hierarchical social animals such as wolves, whose male bondings are mere and often shifting alliances of the mateless. This suggests that a collective unconscious throws up men (and women) who somehow feel that the patriarchal hierarchies which humans have saddled themselves with are unnatural and unsustainable except through mechanisms of continual war, and moral laws designed to produce social war and docile underclasses. Only the Greeks seem to have squared the circle of patriarchy and homosexuality - even if it was at the expense of women. Outside Nubia, only the Greeks celebrated nudity for deeply aesthetic reasons.

Obviously, the flaw must have developed long before humans created towns, for the existence of towns already presupposes a giving-up of freedom to roam in order for women to wear their joints and bones out grinding grain for an inadequate diet, while men bent double in the vineyards to grow grapes to make wine to help them (but probably not 'their' women) to forget their urban misery. In Sumeria, the surplus of not-very-nourishing food created a huge surplus and probably rickety population, the consequent emergence of classes and the permanent institution of organised warfare in the name of expansion, expansion, expansion.

Feminists (scoffing at the Virgin Mary's unique distinction of being free from Original Sin) might place the Great Lapse rather late on in our development, and argue, therefore, that:

Original Sin came about when men turned their daughters into currency and women into arthritic and undernourished drudges: living property - and when men for reasons of property instituted the insane doctrine of monogamy, and for reasons of discomfort with constructed patriarchy outlawed male homosexuality.

Or did it come, before that, with ownership of land ? Or much before that, with the greatest discovery of all time: how to make fire - and the cooking of food (meat) which we are not designed to consume, and the preparation of otherwise inedible seeds to make up for the lack of vegetables and fruit which our dentition and are guts are designed to consume ?

Or before that, with the first idea ? For ideas separate us not just from the rest of reality, but from ourselves.

Or with the first tool ? Or with language, which must have developed contemporaneously with tool-making, fire, cooking, and mass-deception ?

Neanderthals also had language and fire, though we do not know whether or not they cooked. At any rate, we are the only cooking species now on the planet, and we developed cooking specifically to render meat - which in its raw state we cannot digest, and in its whole state we cannot tear apart with our rather vegetarian teeth - edible, if not entirely digestible. For it tends to stick in pockets of our colons and fester.

With fire we were able to destroy both forest and grassland. Did Neanderthals use fire in this way, too ? With fire we eventually smelted ore - to create deserts out of agriculture. And to create famines through dependency on crops which, in any case, did not provide sufficient vitamins or chemical elements to keep us healthy and alert. We are the only endemically sick species!

Neanderthals might have been a rather 'developed' form of Bonobo chimpanzee - which would account for their disappearance. Bonobos take life easy. They are vegetarian forest-dwellers who lie about enjoying themselves, and each others' genitals, to the full. They are the Great Unstriving Species - still surviving, despite the ubiquity and nastiness of Homo sapiens sapiens, the Only Striving Species.

Bonobos fit rather well into 'the balance of Nature', a human concept which humans are hell-bent on destroying. Although highly intelligent and resourceful, they do not cultivate, nor even transplant. They enjoy themselves (albeit in a tropical environment). They don't strive. They are.

We strive - and are not, because we are always lacking, and we don't know what we lack.

Our striving drivenness depends for reinforcement on the invention of super-human beings: impersonal forces which humans, solipsistically, made personal.

Original Sin might therefore have come with the concept of the first, meteorological, gods who were claimed to control the weather and seasons, upon which the success of labour-intensive crops depended ? So perhaps:

Original Sin occurred when 'Nature' turned from matrix to enemy.

Certainly since the invention of the Semitic god shared by three 'important' religions, well after 4004 BCE, mankind has got steadily more malignant. We have also turned ourselves into the only mammalian species which cannot clean its genitals with its tongue. This is just one of the degeneracies caused by culture.

Before agriculture came an early kind of horticulture: the transplanting of young trees and vegetables to convenient spots near the small encampments of from 12 to 30 or so people which form the optimum size for groups of gatherers, scavengers and hunter-gatherers.
For people to be able to eat parts of animals other than the eyes, the brains, the blood and the contents of the digestive tract, fire had to be invented. This required not just the knowledge and the skill, but a certain amount of organisation in order to 'hold the flame'. The highly-carnivorous Neanderthals also had this ability - and became extinct. So Original Sin was not the capture, killing (with tools) and eating (in cooked form) of fresh meat. Nor was it cannibalism, which, enantiodromically, became a universal taboo, along with suicide.

But human sacrifice was practised in Europe in historical times and at one time was normal.

Once the cooking of meat and the roasting of roots and nuts was possible, the less placid and more overweening of our species must have seen that other members of the group could be 'organised' into the relative drudgery of nomadic animal husbandry (represented in Genesis by Abel), and the absolute slavery of Cain's family and 'servants' in growing crops such as rice, taro and manioc, fruit and nuts - though it was thousands of years before apples and other fruit became the size they are today. Labour camps started early in our 'development'.

(And a third of human populations cannot digest cow's milk.)

This was probably the moment when human problems became problems of scale and proportion.

Sedentary village organisation and cohesion was easily achieved by scare stories, the invention of vengeful gods and murderous enemies. This was, surely, when our obsession with morality (i.e. destructive obedience) began. So perhaps:

Original Sin was simply morality itself, the concept of right and wrong, which overlays the awareness that we take more than we give. and becomes moralism, the doctrines of duty and labour, and the religion of paid employment which has now engulfed 99% of the planet's overpopulation.

Morality implies free-will, and the 'wrongest' forms of free-will are generally held to be suicide and murder, with murder (but not by soldiers) now considered to be worse. Our non-moralistic attitude to animals implies that we think they do not have free-will, which is a nonsense. Most human cultures are, to varying degrees, restrictions on free-will. How much free-will does an impoverished woman have in Sa'udi Arabia, or a Mexican migrant worker in the United States ? Much less than that of a dog. Insofar as humans are The Stupid Animals their free-will is theoretical.

Was the shift from nomadism to settlement the point when, becoming the only animal to take more from the earth than we put back in, we became irredeemable parasites, and, being the only species to mistake form for content, and the only interfering species, became, perhaps simultaneously, the only unhappy, the only aggrieved, the only complaining species ? Was the killing of Abel the archetype of Original Sin, and not the other myth of expulsion from the Garden ? What was the Garden, anyway ? Was it the whole world ? Or a fertile valley from which God (or Man) had expelled all the animals ? For a garden is a place of anti-nature.

So perhaps

Original sin was competitive greed -

or drivenness, which amounts to the same thing, and which St Augustine referred to as 'the flesh'.

Human beings have the intelligence to organise themselves in such a way that they limit their population to the resources available. But we have rarely done so. Instead, we have multiplied, and the Mendelian paradigm of Universal Misery has, in turn, ruled us. As the most intelligent tropical species, we could have enjoyed paradise for ever in Africa, with plenty of time to do the only harmless thing we have yet devised: make music.

But we didn't. We bred and bred, and so the Seven Daughters of Eve traipsed off into cold, inhospitable Europe, there to breed cold, inhospitable, egoistic, malnourished and unpleasantly-pale children. So again it comes back to sex, not as a shameful act, but as an act which, unrestricted, turned us from happy animals into aggressive and striving human beings, who now are congenitally hyperactive and cannot be happy unless they are doing or undoing something.

Recently, something very like a Second Sin has arisen: individualism, the corrupting process of mere ego - solipsism, the sin of narcissism which is enveloping the planet with its demands for world-exhausting comfort, and gets ever greater as the ages roll. Solipsism is an extreme form of consciousness of self, but consciousness of self cannot be our original flaw, since it is present in many higher mammals. Nor was it ambition, for this is the quality which allows packs and herds to acquire the leadership necessary to make them function. But perhaps it was when humans, in settlements and solipsistic, acquired their unique Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD), which accorded having and doing all the attention that other species devote to being, that

Original Sin was simply the concept of property, which pre-dated and entailed the family with its bloodlines, obligations, honour and 'honour-killings'. Property also led to the principle of deferred pleasure, which ultimately became the notion of Heaven, earned by moil and toil 'here on Earth'. Property makes sense out of life - to those who have it. But it is, of course, nonsense. And, being nonsense, it can only be justified by superstition and religion - ultimately by Universal Sky-Gods of intolerance, hatred and vengeance, such as we are too familiar with in Judaism, Christianity and Islam. In human societies full of violence, impoverishment and generale evil, the most desperate dreamed of an Invisible All-seeing Goodness - which, of course, as always, was co-opted by the powerful and integrated with exploitative, retributive and often xenophobic religion. A Big God is the inevitable idea of those pathetic people - winners as well as losers - who demand a purpose to life - and consequently have no sense of the ridiculous.

It is more than interesting that hunter-gatherer groups, such as the Pygmies described by Turnbull, not only are free of ADD but live highly co-operative and humorous lives which are not based on family groups and do not involve property. Significantly also, they find the whole concept of gods and religion, work and reward, ridiculous. For a Pygmy, life itself is a deity, encompassing the forest, the climate, the earth and the air: Gaia. We, at the end of our 'development' (which I see as continual deterioration), are at the opposite pole: nothing is sacred except success - a thoroughly unpleasant concept measurable only in units of ignorance, cruelty, avarice, jealousy, envy, hypocrisy and soullessness - just a few of those qualities which escaped from Pandora's Box.

Consider the modern Olympus: Success has easily supplanted Zeus as well as Jehovah (or rather the Book which claims to be Jehovah's myriad and muddled celestial instructions. That's easy to see. But there are new gods, far sillier and more destructive than any in the charming Indian pantheon: Monogamy with his innumerable magazine-reading handmaidens of Romantic Love. Democracy - which is merely elections of the soulless to serve Success. And The Sanctity of Human Life, which is wed (monogamously) to War, an elected Ares armed with mortar-bombs and WMD. Not forgetting, of course The Family, the primary unit of oppression and of the suppression of reason.

But to return to Original Sin, there is yet another possiblility: the Knowledge could be the knowledge that we die - and are therefore less important than our brains want to imagine. We are the only species to know of our deaths - and so we invented the Unique and Everlasting Human Soul!. We also wish to postpone our deaths, and Christianity claims to "conquer" it. Settled societies fear death far more than nomadic societies - some more than others: the Romans and Egyptians were particularly worried about their demise - and death has come to be intimately connected with the passing-on of property. So

Original Sin was the knowledge and/or fear of death, and the 'hard-wiring' of superstition into our brains. Doctrinal superstition is the abrogation of reason, a denial of our most interesting attribute. But what was the flaw which allowed us to embrace superstition ? the flaw which allows only a minute proportion of human beings to achieve a balance between the fatal triad of instinct, reason and emotion ? The flaw which not only allows us to be anxious, but turns us into a species which is motivated by anxiety ? Not only motivated by anxiety but addicted to it! This is the difference between us and some occasionally-hunting gatherers; between us and vegetarian bonobos, who have lived on the planet longer than we have by loafing about and playing contentedly with each others' genitals.

The question of The Flaw goes round and round...and gets nowhere, because it is a silly question, a wrong why.

However, reflecting on the above, I rather think that the point when we actually "fell from grace" (poetically speaking) was the moment when we changed Nature for ever by no longer regarding it as a nurturer. This moment could be defined as the beginning of culture - not in the anthropological sense, but, rather (though not entirely tautologically) in the cultural sense. In other words: human vainglory, or that lovely French word orgueil. For culture not only makes us ever more aggressive, but it also neotenises. Education systems are systems of socialisation, obedience and neoteny, and the only adults in our axolotlised species are those beyond culture, mostly the dead, but also a very few people who have resisted cultural infantilisation.

Ironically, the question Why ? is asked less and less in our smug global civilisation - but probably that single questioning thought was our diving-board into the abyss of war, epidemics, mayhem, species-extinction, hierarchy, plutocracy and genocide:

WHY ? was the sound of Man Falling.

Whether our vainglory began before thought (the perception of causality) was codified and coded into language, or when fire and the axe were first used for tree-felling, is difficult to say. Our divorce from reality was process rather than act. What we know is that the reduction of the forests produced a tragœdic chain of events, led to deforestation, the wiping out of many species, malnutrition in our own, migration, the rise of cities and the ever-continuing alienation of Man from his matrix.

And so the planet of experiment, of opportunity and diversity became the monotonous
Planet of Pain...

More on Original Sin, on a more academic and superficial level >

see also : http://www.themystica.com/mystica/articles/g/great_myth_original_sin.html