East of Eden: Wilderness, Domestication, and the Psyche
"The cultivation of those sciences which have enlarged the limits of the empire of man over the external world, has, for the want of poetical faculty, proportionately circumscribed those of the internal world, and man, having enslaved the elements, remains himself a slave."
Percy Bysshe Shelley
“Why do circuitousness and indirection play so great a role in poetic thought? There is a shyness at the core of existence, a hesitance to be seen…When we begin to see the landscape as the animals themselves see it, undistorted by clamorous self-assertion, a widened constellation of being emerges to graze and root and swim.”
Jane Hirschfield (1998, p. 108)
A question that should be repeated like a mantra in these times of ecological urgency: why is it that humans persist in destroying the only home that we have ever known? Why do we foul our own nest?
This paper is a meditation on the raw and the cooked, the savage and the civilized, the wild and the domesticated. We will, with the circuitousness and indirection of the poets, orbit around this mystery at the heart of our planetary duress. Our meandering path will lead us, among other places, to Eden and East of Eden to the land of Nod. We will cross fields and forests and ultimately find ourselves in the realm of image. In the spirit of James Hillman, we are not seeking historical or scientific explanations for our current predicament so much as psychological insights, pregnant images that may prove to be seeds or catalysts for an alchemical transformation of psyche. We are circling around the questions, but we are not on a quest for quick solutions. We take a cue from another poet, Rainer Maria Rilke, who counselled a thoughtful young correspondent not to search for answers but, “to love the questions themselves, as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign tongue” (1934/2004).
Near the end of his life, C.G. Jung stated, “The world hangs by a thin thread, and that is the psyche of man… We are the great danger. Psyche is the great danger. What if something goes wrong with the psyche?” (Whitney & Wagner, 1986). Jung, of course, recognized that something had indeed gone wrong with the psyche. He had witnessed the horrors of the world wars and experienced the anxious dread at the dawning of the nuclear age. Jung knew what humanity was capable of when the psyche falls out of balance.
We now have a second question to track quietly and patiently, like a hunter: why did the human psyche begin to wobble, and when? Building upon the ideas of Kant, Schelling, and the German Romantics, Jung believed that the primary reality of the psyche is image, even going so far as to assert that psyche is image (Kearney, 1988). And thus, our inquiry must also weave in yet another question: how does our ego-consciousness relate to image — the fundamental basis of psyche, according to the Jungian and archetypal strands of psychology?
Let us set forth on our circuitous path, hold our questions lightly but close, and look for fresh tracks in a book written in a very foreign tongue. Please open your Bibles to Genesis, Chapter 2.
If we venture into the wilds of psyche, we find a poet or a mystic at nearly every turn. Mary Oliver reminds us, “To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work” (1994). How we pay attention, and what we pay attention to, shapes us. To focus one’s attention on something is, inevitably, to not focus on many other things. What we pay attention to becomes conscious, whereas what we do not pay attention to falls into the unconscious. Focused attention is a limited, energy-consuming resource.
It is estimated that homo sapiens have lived on earth for roughly two million years. For all but the smallest fraction of that timespan, much of our limited resource of attention was focused toward one inescapable end: procuring food. And for all but an equally small fraction of our collective story, homo sapiens have been foragers. Our attention was directed towards hunting animals and gathering edible wild plants and fungi. Our survival depended upon how well we paid attention to our food sources; this was “our endless and proper work”. In the remarkable cave paintings at Lascaux, Altamira, and elsewhere, it is evident just how exquisitely our hunter-gatherer ancestors were paying attention to the things that were most consequential for them: the animals that provided them with the bulk of their food.
Let us reflect on just a few of the things a hunter-gatherer must be attentive towards and therefore conscious of in order to succeed. They must be attentive to the voices of others creatures — not just the voices of the prey they are stalking, but the plants whose stems may have bent or broken by passing animals, the birds whose chatter and chirps of alarm extend the awareness of the hunter far beyond what they can see with their own eyes. They must know intimately the behavior of the beings they share their ecosystem with, the characteristic movements of their prey (thus the traditional dances of many hunter-gatherer groups that mimic with astonishing similitude the movements of antelope, buffalo, deer, etc.). They must be able to anticipate migration patterns, to know when and where to find a specific mushroom that may only fruit under certain conditions. Our ancestors, in short, by necessity developed a style of consciousness that enabled them to be exquisitely attuned to their ecological community. They existed within this community, their survival was bound up with the that of their fellow species. If they over-hunted, the food source upon which their tribe depended would decline or disappear altogether. The consciousness of hunter-gatherers is suffused with an innate understanding of ecological limitation.
Now let us turn to Adam and Eve. As with all creation myths, the story of Genesis provides a rich reservoir of insight and meaning, from the theological to the sociological to the historical. For our purposes, let us keep our focus upon the psychological and gastronomical. Let us enter this seminal text from a novel angle: the procurement of food.
Before eating of the tree of good and evil, Adam and Eve are foragers. Yahweh provides them with the bounty of the earth: “Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat.” (Genesis 3:16, The New King James Version). When the forbidden fruit has been eaten (which, through our psychological lens, we may interpret as the stirrings of self-reflective consciousness in humans), a rift has been created between the human and other-than-human. “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.” (Genesis 3:7) Yahweh’s wrath and punishment that follow has much to do with how Adam and Eve will (and will not) get their food. The trees of the garden are now off limits. Yahweh makes it clear that humans will now have to toil in the fields in order to sustain themselves. “Thorns also and thistles shall it (the earth) bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field. In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground.” (Genesis 3:18-19)
Is it possible that the agricultural revolution of the Levant, a watershed moment in the history of civilization, is a symbolically retold in the foundational text of the monotheistic traditions as a tragedy, a banishment, a punishment from an angry god? If we continue our reading of Genesis, the centrality of the theme of the means of food procurement becomes even more evident. Adam and Eve’s first two sons, Cain and Abel, are the first humans to domesticate other life forms. Cain is a farmer, a cultivator of soil, domesticator of wild grasses into cereal grains. Abel is a pastoralist, a domesticator of wild animals into livestock. Cain and Abel have been born into a post-forager world, a world in which the gates that lead back to the garden are guarded by cherubim wielding flaming swords (As Thomas Wolfe would say, “you can’t go home again”). The psycho-spiritual split between humanity and nature was irreversible, and Adam and Eve’s sons simply had to deal with the consequences and survive.
Cain and Abel both bring to Yahweh an offering, the fruits of their labor in this brave new world of domestication. Cain brings “the fruit of the ground” and Abel brings “of the firstlings of his flock and the fat thereof.” (Genesis 4:3-4). Humiliated and incensed when Yahweh has “respect” for Abel’s offering but not his own, Cain’s anger turns murderous. He lures his younger brother onto his field and kills him.
We might ask, why did Yahweh prefer the offering of sheep to the offering of grain? Here, I think, we gain another valuable insight, a useful image, with regards to our seed question: why do we foul our own nests?
The story of Cain and Abel suggests that there are degrees of banishment, that there is a spectrum of distancing from the garden in which we were not separate from but enmeshed in nature. Just as we considered the focus of the attention of the hunter-gatherer, let us now reflect upon the focus of attention of Abel, the pastoralist.
Abel is one degree removed from his hunting progenitors. He no longer hunts wild prey — he tends to a flock of domesticated animals. As a shepherd, Abel is responsible for the needs of his flock. They require food, and their insatiable ruminant appetites carry them (and him) hither and thither throughout the course of the year — into the mountain valleys in the summer, down into the comparatively mild lowlands in the winter. The sheep have been domesticated, but the land upon which they depend for food, and thus the landscape through which the pastoralist must navigate, is wild. The enmity which existed between the hunter and competing predators (wolves, for example) has intensified. One of the hats our pastoralist wears is in that of the security guard, charged with safeguarding an irresistible cache of calories that has little or no means of defending itself. Abel the pastoralist is a transitional figure: he has one foot in the wild and one foot in the domesticated. He still, more often than not, falls asleep under the stars. His means of procuring food precludes settling in one place consistently for long periods of time. He does not think of land as property, even though he may skirmish with other pastoralists for access to food for his flock. His attention is directed both toward staying attuned to the wild landscape as well as the members of his domesticated flock.
Cain, by contrast, has taken a significant step further away from nature and towards civilization. Cain, after the murder of Abel, is banished once again — a second condemnation on top of the original punishment meted out on his parents. Abel’s murder is a symbolic rendering of an actual historical phenomenon: the human groups that practiced growing cereal grains gained the upper hand against their pastoral neighbors, and pastoralists were displaced and driven into ever more marginal land. Closer to our line of inquiry, however, there is a psycho-spiritual significance to Yahweh’s displeasure. Cain did not merely domesticate a single species (as did his brother Abel), he domesticated the land itself. Cain’s means of procuring food is often in direct opposition to the natural order, and for this his offering is met with displeasure. “And now art thou cursed from the earth, which hath opened her mouth to receive thy brother’s blood from thy hand; When thou stillest the ground, it shall not henceforth yield unto thee her strength; 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 (Hebrew: to wander), on the east of Eden” (Genesis 4:10-11).
It is worth pausing at this point to explore a word that is taking a central importance in this exploration: to domesticate. The verb derives from the Latin domesticus, which means “of the house (domus). To domesticate, therefore, literally means to bring into the house, or to bring out of the natural order and into the realm of human, cultural order. Anything domesticated is governed, first and foremost, by culture rather than nature.
It might strike us as incongruent that Cain, the first human to develop agriculture and the builder of the first city (Enoch) was condemned to be a fugitive and vagabond. Our viewpoint as descendants of Cain tends toward an assumption that those who are settled in one place (i.e. farmers) are rooted and those who move about are rootless (i.e. foragers or pastoralists). Viewed psychologically, however, Cain’s rootlessness is not geographical but psychological, a reflection of his definitive exile from nature, from a life grounded in behavior driven principally by instinct. Cain is the originator not just of agriculture, but of culture (both words being derived from the Latin verb colere, to till or cultivate). Culture and agriculture are inextricably linked. Murray Stein asserts that culture (social and religious mores and rules) supplanted nature (instinctual and biological drives) as the principle organizer of our drives and desires (1989). Regardless of how established their fields and cities would become, Cain and his descendants would not belong to the earth in the way that hunter-gatherers and pastoralists did. Jung succinctly captures the danger of the psychological rootlessness that the agricultural revolution helped set in motion:
"Age-old convictions and customs are always deeply rooted in the instincts. If they get lost, the conscious mind becomes severed from the instincts and loses its roots, while the instincts, unable to express themselves, fall back into the unconscious and reinforce its energy, causing this in turn to overflow into the existing contents of consciousness. It is then that the rootless condition of consciousness becomes a real danger. This secret vis-a-tergo results in a hubris of the conscious mind which manifests in the form of exaggerated self-esteem or an inferiority complex. At all levels a loss of balance ensues, and this is the most fruitful soil for psychic injury." (1946/1966, pp. 98-99, CW 16 pt.1, para. 216)
It is difficult to overstate the significance of the agricultural revolutions (revolutions plural: farming developed independently in half a dozen locations across the globe nearly simultaneously seven to twelve thousand years ago). Agriculture presents several immediate and obvious benefits: larger populations are supported, surplus grain can be stored to mitigate risk of famine, permanent settlements can be developed. The entire edifice of culture — virtually all of the arts and sciences — would not have been possible without agriculture. But whereas the domestication of animals substantially altered the psyche of pastoralists, agriculture radically and fundamentally altered the psyche of farmers. The farmer thrives by bringing land, plants, and animals that were formerly wild into domestication. Because agriculture can produce a surplus of food, human population growth was no longer constrained by the ecological carrying capacity of land in the same way that it had been for hunter-gatherers and pastoralists. Furthermore, the advent of agriculture immediately gave rise to conflict and expansionist tendencies. The more cultivated land a group of people had under their control, the greater their competitive advantage over neighboring groups, with whom relations became increasingly hostile.
As an organic farmer, I am well aware that there are as many approaches and attitudes towards farming as there are farmers. Yet we can safely generalize and posit that the farmer’s attention is focused very differently than the hunter’s. A farmer succeeds (i.e. increases yield and reliable results) by bringing as many variables under their conscious control as possible. Anything that cannot be brought under some level of control is problematic, and every effort is made to mitigate, repel, or eliminate the plants, insects, and animals that may encroach upon the domesticated crop. The value of land is now synonymous with how suitable it is for agriculture. Land that has not been brought under cultivation has become “wild,” “savage,” (both nouns derive from words meaning wood or forest), their denizens become “heathens” (dwellers of the heath, i.e. marginal lands and moors). Through the style of the attention required by agriculture, an unmistakable dichotomy has developed in the human psyche: cultivated and wild, inside and outside, the raw and the cooked (to use the term coined by anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss). Perhaps to compensate for the psychic pain of the estrangement from nature, a sense of superiority develops within this newly domesticating and domesticated human psyche. Henceforth, the subjugation, domestication, or eradication of the wild, the uncultured, the uncivilized becomes not just a convenient justification for bringing more of the world under conscious control, but a moral duty. Turner’s Manifest Destiny and Kipling’s poem The White Man’s Burden are inextricably linked to Cain and the logic of agriculture.
To paraphrase an alchemical maxim, “As above so below. As without so within.” The external wilderness of inhospitable deserts, dark woods, and pestilent marshlands is paralleled by an inner wilderness within the human psyche. We might call this wilderness the unconscious: in the agricultural psyche, anything that falls outside of the cultivated, domestic realm is synonymous with the wilderness. Anything that falls outside of ego-consciousness, in other words, is wild.
Here on our journey we find two helpful guides in James Hillman and Michael Vannoy Adams. “What Jung means when he says that we defend ourselves against ourselves,” Adams writes, “is that the anxious ego neurotically defends itself against the unconscious. As a practitioner of imaginal psychology, I prefer to say, instead, that the anxious ego-image neurotically defends itself against non-ego images” (Adams, 2014, p. 14). It is not difficult to picture this anxious ego-image neurotically defending itself as an early group of agricultural humans, building up the high walls of Enoch or Jericho, desperate to protect their newly acquired possessions. Indeed, the very notion of “possessions” or “acquisitions” would have had very little currency before the agricultural revolution.
Let us take our “as without as within” maxim a step further and suggest that Adams’ non-ego images are not unlike wild animals and that the realm of the unconscious is much like a dark, unexplored forest. Now let us read Adams further and picture our ego-image as a nervous farmer or city dweller who, having rarely if ever left the confines of the domesticated world, is confronted with a creature from the forest or, heaven forbid, finds himself, like Dante, lost in a dark wood.
"As I define “unconscious,” it is what the ego-image is unconscious of. Ironically, it is not the unconscious that is unconscious. Rather, it is the ego-image that is unconscious, and what it is unconscious of are non-ego images. To the extent that the ego-image is unconscious of non-ego images, it tends to react anxiously and defensively because it regards them as dangerous." (2014, pp. 14-15)
When the agricultural ego-image encounters a wild animal, there are three common outcomes: the animal’s head ends up hanging as a trophy over a mantle; the animal finds itself caged in a zoo; or the animal devours the ego altogether. Psychologically, the image is repressed (killed), domesticated (made safe and palatable by conceptualization), or the it overwhelms the ego (resulting in a psychotic break, suicide, etc.).
"Why does the ego-image tend to kill non-ego images rather than engage them in some other way? I would argue that it does so because it regards non-ego images as “opposite” rather than “different.” The neurotic reaction of the ego-image to non-ego images is a function of what I call moralistic, scientific, and aesthetic oppositions – good versus evil, true versus false, and beautiful versus ugly. These oppositions provide the ego-image with a convenient excuse to repress – or “kill” – non-ego images that it considers evil, false, or ugly – and, as a result, dangerous. “Evil,” “false,” and “ugly” are, of course, concepts. When the ego-image applies these concepts to non-ego images, these oppositions eradicate the differences, the distinctive qualities, that are intrinsic to non-ego images." (2014, pg. 15)
Once we become aware of this tendency to domesticate or eliminate that became ascendant through the practice of agriculture, we see it everywhere. Domestication is the ego’s attempt to make what was unpredictable predictable, what was uncontrolled controlled, what was threatening non-threatening, what was bewildering (notice the recurrence of the root word wild) intelligible. Until Kant and the Romantics, the discipline of philosophy since Plato had been an exercise in the domestication of image and instinct (Kearney, 1988). To conceptualize is to domesticate the messy, endlessly varied details of existence into clean, rational precepts, to impose order on the world much in the same way a farmer imposes order on the land by plowing it into straight rows. In a sarcastic critique of the domestication rampant in the art world, critic and scholar David Freedberg wrote:
"Art is certainly not the image that troubles or is disturbing. The image that rouses us powerfully, that disturbs us deeply, has no place in the musuem… The images that are most effective turn out to be excluded from museums. They are the most effective precisely for the ways in which they engage our apparently lower senses." (1989, pp. 424-425)
Image, Freedberg argued, is powerful. Because images originate in the wilds of psyche, they do not obey cultural norms and, like wild beasts of the forest, they may be perceived as a threat to the ego-image. Both religion and the modern art world, perhaps unconsciously, adhere to the maxim, “keep your friends close and your enemies closer”. By bringing the potency of image in to the gallery, the church, the synagogue, image is, in effect, domesticated. The artist, who maintains the psyche of the hunter or the pastoralist, chafes but often succumbs to this process of domestication. Nowhere do we see this tension and ambivalence demonstrated more dramatically (and humorously) than the street artist (i.e. wild, or outside the domesticated art world) Banksy’s stunt of shredding his own artwork Girl with Balloon by remote control moments after it sold at auction for auction at Sotheby’s.
There are, of course, alternative ways of interacting with wild animals or wild images more analogous to the approach of our hunter-gatherer ancestors (here it must be said that while hunter-gatherers seek to kill the individual animal, they also revere it and try to ensure the general health of its species). We can, using a distilled version of James Hillman’s entire oeuvre, “stick with the image.” In other words, we can resist the agricultural ego-image’s conditioned behavior to domesticate or kill.
Interpretation need not kill the image with a concept. Rather than replace the image with a concept, it may respect the image and, by meticulous attention to the distinctive qualities of the image, render explicit the essence that is implicit in the image. (Adams, p. 23)
Sylvester Wojkowski further elucidated Hillman’s ecological and decidedly anti-domesticating approach to the images of the psyche.
"Hillman imagines images as souls that we need to befriend, or as animals that we need to carefully observe, to understand their behaviour and ecology. However, to fully engage the image we need to love it." (2012, p. 9)
Let us take stock and return now to the question that initiated our circuitous journey: why is it that humans persist in destroying the only home that we have ever known? We have seen how radically the human psyche shifted with the advent of agriculture, and how this change in the means of procuring our sustenance had the unintended consequence of both literally and psychologically moving us away from nature and towards a new and powerful set of drives not necessarily consonant with natural instincts and impulses: culture. On a physical level, the domesticating, expansionist logic set in motion by growing crops has led to the ongoing and accelerating transformation of Earth’s surface, a transformation that by and large has degraded the health of the very ecosystems we inescapably depend upon. Psychologically, the impulse to domesticate has contributed to the “anxious ego-image neurotically defending itself against non-ego images,” the tendency to see everything that does not support or reinforce the known, safe world of ego-consciousness as either threatening or of no value.
These insights leave us with new questions, most prominent among them: well, what do we do about all of this? If the fouling of our nest began twelve thousand years ago, is bound up with something as fundamental as how we procure food, and stems from the way in which we experience reality, what hope if any is there in righting the ship? Seven billion humans returning to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle is clearly neither realistic nor desirable. Jung reminds us that the thin thread by which the world hangs is none other than the human psyche, and thus the rapprochement between nature and culture inescapably begins in the psyche. As without, so within. If we can transform how relate to the wild places of the psyche, that cannot but impact how we engage with the other-than-human world, whether we meet it as domesticators or as co-equal members of the Earth community. Conversely, we can work towards healing the inner wound, the estrangement with the wild images of psyche, by deepening our sense of connection and relatedness with the natural world. “Rewilding” is a term that has recently made the leap from ecology to psychology, and a rewilding of psyche is perhaps part of what is called for in these times. Perhaps we can encourage our psyches to unlatch the garden gate and run wild and free in the woods, in a world in which they have simply forgotten they, too, belong.
References
Adams, M. V. (2014). For the love of imagination: interdisciplinary applications of Jungian psychoanalysis. New York, NY: Routledge.
Hirshfield, J. (1998). Nine gates: entering the mind of poetry. New York, NY: Harper Collins.
Jung, C. G. (1966). Psychotherapy today (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.). In H. Read et al. (Eds.), The collected works of C. G. Jung (Vol. 16, 2nd ed., pp. 94-110). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1946)
Kearney, R. (1988). Wake of the imagination. New York, NY: Routledge.
Freedberg, D. (1989). The power of image: studies in the history and theory of response. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.
Oliver, M. (1994) White Pine. New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Rilke, R. M. (1934/2004) Letters to a young poet. (M. D. Herter Norton, Trans.). New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company.
Stein, M (Speaker). (1989). A psychological approach to the Bible (Audio recording), C.G. Jung Society of Chicago.
Whitney, M. (Director), and Wagner, S. (Writer). (1986). Matter of heart [Motion Picture]. United States: Kino International.