f i v e
Why this shift from an animate earth to a deanimated, desouled planet? I suspect a if not the primary driver had to do with a seismic shift in what we ate, and how we procured food.
To explore this, let’s re-visit the mythological origin story from which Western consciousness, and increasingly global consciousness, derives: Book one of Genesis.
Before the snake and the fateful apple, Adam and Eve were foragers. Yahweh tells his two new garden managers in their onboarding process, “Of ever tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat.”
One bite of the forbidden fruit, however, changes Adam and Eve’s consciousness irrevocably. The scribes tell us, “And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons.” Suddenly, a psychological rift has emerged between the human and the other-than-human. A new, self-reflective, discerning and discriminating form of consciousness has taken root.
My own playful revision of Genesis is that Adam and Eve had to leave the garden not because they ate of the apple, the pomum, but because they ate of the grain, the granatum. In Genesis, Adam and Eve are evicted and have to procure food not by foraging but by toil and sweat. But was it perhaps the other way around? Did our ancestors begin to leave Eden, an ensouled world in which humans did not see any reason to distinguish themselves with fig leaves and aprons, when they discovered that planting and tending seeds of wheat had some caloric advantages?
Agriculture made humans different, profoundly different, from the beings we shared the land with. It othered us, and we othered the world. The key to procuring food was no longer primarily about knowing the seasonal rhythms of mushrooms and berries, being attuned to the migratory patterns of antelope and salmon. Agriculture rewards different skills, a different awareness. The farmer succeeds by systematically bringing as many variables under conscious control as possible. The key verb of agriculture is to domesticate, to bring into the domicile, the house. Psychologically, the practice of agriculture developed an entirely new structure of incentives and disincentives, a privileging of rationality and logos and a corresponding devaluation of emotion, intuition, and eros. The great earth mother goddesses were overthrown or subjugated by patriarchal sky gods like Zeus and Yahweh.
We have learned since childhood that agriculture enabled settlements, then towns, then cities, then empires and the flourishing of civilization. These early walled city-states of the Levant are a perfect metaphor for human ego-consciousness differentiating and guarding itself from “wild” and “savage” surroundings, fortifying against invasion.
Viewed through this lens, Genesis hints at the psychological trauma humans were – and still are -- experiencing from losing our Eden, our place as subjects in a world full of subjects. Cain, the first farmer, is also the founder of cities, of the fortified ego. And yet while in a physical sense we think of Cain as the archetypal settler, psychologically and spiritually he is profoundly, painfully unsettled. Yahweh is unimpressed by Cain’s offering, unsparing in his punishment after the subsequent killing of his brother Abel, “And now art thou cursed from the earth; a fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be in the earth… And Cain went out from the presence of the Lord, and dwelt in the land of Nod, on the east of Eden.”
