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by Anne Baring (see credits)
This is one seminar from a course of twelve devoted to exploring
and healing the soul. We publish it here with permission of the
author.
Read
Genesis 2 and 3.
The
purpose of this seminar is to explore the effect of another powerful myth on
our attitude to the different aspects of the feminine principle - above all on
the body.
Last
time we explored the influence of the myth of Marduk and Tiamat and the
profound change it reflected in human consciousness as the solar god defeated
and killed the mother goddess. The Myth of the Fall belongs to the same phase
of the separation from nature when the image of the Great Father replaced the
Great Mother and when spirit, mind and man began to be seen as superior to
nature, body and woman and when the first slowly came to be associated with
good and the second with evil. lt describes the change of state from
(unconscious) unity and harmony to separation and estrangement. The Myth of the
Fall is one of the most powerful myths of separation and has had an immense
influence on the Judeo-Christian view of life. It has largely structured the
negative attitude to woman and the relationships between men and women in
Christian civilisation. Its negative effects have never been recognised by the
Christian Churches, let alone acknowledged by them. In my view it constitutes
the shadow aspect of Christian teaching, one that has done immense harm to the
human psyche. It lies at the root of our present mechanistic view of nature and
matter.
The
myth of the Fall has been taken literally as divine revelation and this has
fostered a concept of human nature as innately flawed. The myth stands at the
beginning of our cultural inheritance and so powerful is this long mythological
conditioning that it is very difficult to become aware of the assumptions
derived from it, let alone to challenge them. The relevance of this myth to
ourselves today is that the deeper layers of the soul which for so many
thousands of years had known a life of participation with creation through the
image of the goddess, and through an instinctual, if unconscious perception of
the wholeness and unity of life governed by divine law, were now forcibly
deprived of that image. The earlier revelation where the whole of life was
perceived as an epiphany of the goddess was gradually forgotten; only the
mystical traditions of the three patriarchal religions kept it alive,
transmitting the archaic vision to Kabbalah and Hassidism in the Judaic
tradition and to Alchemy in the Christian and lslamic traditions. It is through
their influence that the older image of the sacred marriage and the older
holistic perception of life is re-emerging into full consciousness in many
different places at the present time.
Instead of taking this myth literally and treating it as something fixed in our
re1igious tradition, could we understand it historically, as the expression of
a catastrophe endured at a specific time which was interpreted not unnaturally,
as a divine punishment for which the goddess was made the scapegoat? And
further, could we understand it psychologically, as an expression of
humanity’s experience of itself at the moment of initiation into a new
phase of consciousness? Then it can be read as a description of the breaking of
unconscious unity or fusion with life, and the perplexing awareness of duality.
The guilt Adam and Eve suffer is not moral guilt, in the sense of having done
something wrong, but tragic guilt, whose roots lie in the structure of
existence itself, and life’s own evolutionary impulsion. The growth of
consciousness entails sacrifice and loss. Guilt is the feeling that arises with
the experience of loss and separation, and this myth was invented to describe
it, but there is no-one to blame and nothing to be blamed for. Human nature is
not intrinsically flawed or sinful. It is simply that consciousness has become
separated from the root and rhizome of the soul and doesn’t understand
what has happened.
Since
it is deeply harmful to people to tell them that they are flawed, or in a state
of sin from the time they come into the world, people will unconsciously
try to get rid of this intolerable burden by off-loading their sense of
self-hatred and guilt by projecting their unconscious feelings in the
form of negative projections onto other groups or other people. These are named
and identified as something nasty that needs to be got rid of; eliminated.
Hence the dark side of Christian history with its persecution of the Jews,
Muslims or any group named as heretical. Even now we can see how easily
negative projections can be activated in our society, as with the present
demonising of people who hunt. There is no awareness of the shadow aspect of
our attack - i.e. that we are blameless and the “other” deserves
blame.
The
myth of the Fall comes originally from the Old Testament and it is possible
that it was first imagined after some dire catastrophe had happened to the
Jewish people - possibly the ethnic cleansing of the entire population of the
northern province of Israel in about 750 bce. We know that in the child, a deep
conviction of guilt is formed when some trauma has been experienced in early
life. We can apply this understanding to a specifc historical event which gave
people the need to explain some catastrophe that had befallen them in terms of
a punishment by God.
From
another perspective we can also understand it as a myth about the birth of
consciousness with all that this entails, for each of us repeats this human
experience as we move from infancy to early childhood, moving gradually out of
the containing matrix of the mother (the Garden of Eden) into separation and
self-awareness and therefore duality (the Fall). If there is a sudden loss of
the mother during this time, the catastrophe evokes in the child a feeling of
guilt, the feeling that it must have done something wrong in order to have been
punished by the loss of the person with whom it had a deep instinctual bond.
(Why am I punished? I must be bad).
The
birth of consciousness brings duality - awareness of oneself and the other,and
awareness of having to choose between alternatives, eventually responsibility
for choice. The idea that we have free-will and the possibility of choice stems
from this myth so it marks an immensely important stage in the evolution of
human consciousness. But it also says that we made the wrong choice, with
disastrous consequences.
Thirdly, this myth can also be understood as telling the story of a state of
original wholeness, which is forgotten in the eating of the fruit of the Tree
of Knowledge. It may tell the story of our fall from one dimension of
consciousness into another, from the “Garden of Eden” or primary
soul-world into the secondary world of physical manifestation where we enter
into bodies that cause us to experience suffèring and death. (I will
explore this further in seminar 6 on the reunion of body, soul and spirit). But
the fruit of the Garden has been ingested and continues to live on inside us as
the memory of the former state of union that draws us back towards it.
Finally, it can be read as the story of the demythologising of the Great Mother
or goddess into a human woman who is blamed for bringing suffering, death and
evil into the world. It is possible that it was formulated by priests as a
means of getting rid of the older religion by defaming the goddess (negative
projections!). The title Adam gives to Eve in this myth is actually the former
title of the Great Mother - “Mother of All Living”. The Genesis myth
takes the life-affirming images of the garden, the Tree of Life and the serpent
- all inseparable from each other in the mythology of the earlier era - and
weaves them into a story about fear, guilt, punishment and blame. The Great
Mother who once held both the living and the dead within her being now, as Eve,
becomes the cause of death coming into the world. It really is a complete
reversal of the former mythology.
Cranach’s wonderful painting of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden gives
the feeling of relationship between human beings, animals and the natural world
that is henceforth to be lost as a result of Eve’s taking the apple from
the serpent.
The
myth of the Fall is essentially a tragic myth, a myth about what it felt like
to become separate from nature, a myth about loss and the feeling of having
been somehow punished or cursed. But, unfortunately, it has been taught and
accepted by generation after generation as divinely revealed truth
transmitting the idea that the grief and pain of the human condition came about
through a sin of our primal ancestors, principally the sin of a woman, Eve, and
that we have all been contaminated by that sin. It has entered the Western
imagination as having something timeless to say about our nature and the nature
of woman in particular. It has been responsible for the misogyny which has
caused women an immense amount of suffering. As the story stands, it is
Eve’s response to the serpent that initiates the change from unity and
harmony in the divine world to separation and estrangement and introduces evil,
suffering and death into the world. Yet it could also be understood as a story
about the human response to the instinctive prompting (the serpent being an
image of instinct) to move into a new phase in the evolution of life. This new
phase entails great suffering just as the birth of a child entails suffering
for both mother and child, yet it is part of the evolutionary life process
which has brought us from the creative explosion of that first instant of the
birth of the universe and will ultimately return us to the source from which we
came. In this case, we owe a debt of gratitude to Eve for listening to the
serpent and daring to take the apple from the Tree of Knowledge. (However at
the time the myth was formulated, when human consciousnes was very fragile, it
could not have been understood in this way).
From
this perspective, there is no moral guilt. No-one did anything wrong.
But there is tragic guilt in the sense of our having to carry the burden
of loss and non-comprehension of what has happened during the phase of
separation from nature. Understanding the myth in this new sense could help to
remove the intolerable hairshirt of guilt that has been fixed on the Christian
psyche by the interpretation given to the myth by the early Christian Fathers.
Their
interpretation deprived the deeper layers of the soul of a life of
participation with the natural world and the instinctual perception of the
unity of life which had been understood for thousands of years through the
image of the goddess. It is the beginning of our treating nature as something
unregenerate, far removed from ourselves that we are empowered to control and
dominate.
We
need to go back to the Jewish commentaries on this myth to find the root of the
negative projections directed at the figure of Eve in Christian writings for
this was the foundation on which Christian writers built. In the Old Testament
we find this key sentence: “Of the woman came the beginning of sin, and
through her we all die.” (Sirach 25:24) And there is also this typical
passage from another source:
“Women are evil, my children: because they have no power or strength to
stand up against man, they use wiles and try to ensnare him by their
charms...For indeed, the angel of God told me about them and taught me that
women yield to the spirit of fornication more easily than a man does, and they
lay plots in their hearts against men: by the way they adorn themselves they
first lead their minds astray, and by a look they instil the poison, and then
in the act itself they take them captive - for a woman cannot overcome a man by
force. So shun fornication, my children, and command your wives and daughters
not to adorn their heads and faces, for every woman that uses wiles of this
kind has been reserved for eternal punishment.” (quoted in The Myth of the
Goddess - source given)
It
was the belief that Eve was responsible for the expulsion from the Garden of
Eden that became the justification tor making Jewish women subject to their
fathers and husbands and this was carried forward into Christian culture,
mainly through the influence of St. Paul. In his letters to the different
churches, St. Paul instructed women to keep their heads covered, not to teach
or speak in church and to be subject to their husbands in all things, “for
man is not of the woman; but the woman of the man. Neither was the man created
for the woman; but the woman for the man.” (I Tim. 2:8-14, Eph. 5:22-4, 1
Cor. 14:34-5, 1 Cor. 11:7-9)
These
ideas naturally entered into the mainstream of Christian teaching and were
responsible for an enormous amount of suffering as women and men absorbed these
pernicious projections onto woman. Despite the fact that in the Gospels Jesus
does not refer to original sin nor equate sexuality with sinfulness but, on the
contrary, protects an adulterous woman from death by stoning, this became one
of the foundation stones of Christian teaching. The myth became doctrine and
deeply programmed the Christian psyche to regard human life, nature and woman
in a negative light.
The
most influentual of the early Christian Fathers wrote extensively about the
myth of the Fall (Jerome, Tertullian, Origen, Augustine) and so did Luther and
Calvin. All were convinced that the sexual instinct was an impediment to
spirituality. They had a terror of what Tertullian called the
“uncleanliness of the womb” and “the parts of shame”.
Origen, perhaps the most brilliant and prolific writer of them all, castrated
himself. St. Augustine, a most passionate and outstandingly gifted man,
eventually repudiated his partner of 18 years, whom he dearly loved, and by
whom he had had a son, because he believed chastity would be more pleasing to
God. His moving Confessions are saturated with a deep distrust of the
body and the belief that sexuality was the cause of his temptation to sin. He
struggled desperately to understand where evil came from and because he
believed that God must be wholly good and “incorruptible” he
concluded that evil must come from man principally from his "corruptible" body.
From this belief and the profound conviction of his own sin and guilt came the
doctrine of Original Sin which has been one of the foundations stones of
Christian doctrine. Sadly, through this doctrine the love of God was placed in
opposition to the natural life of the body. Chastity and abstinence were
believed to restore the lost sense of unity. Naturally men who thought this way
would be frightened of and threatened by women.
“Truly by continence are we bound together and brought back into that
Unity from which we were dissipated into a plurality.” (St. Augustine)
The
tortuous and tortured reasoning of St. Augustine led to this kind of argument:
“By a kind of divine justice the human race was handed over to the
devil’s power, since the sin of the first man passed at birth to all who
were born by the intercourse of the two sexes, and the debt of the first
parents bound all their posterity.” (p. 221, The Later Christian
Fathers, Bettinson)
St.
Augustine said that human nature was fundamentally flawed, that sexual desire
and death were a punishment for Adam and Eve’s sin. Sexual desire
is the proof of- and the penalty for- universal original sin which is
transmitted like a virus through the sexual act.
Sexual union was only for the purpose of procreation, not for the joy to be
experienced in the act itself. Infants were infected from the moment of their
conception with the contamination of original sin; if they died unbaptised
their souls could not be saved...Adam’s sin had corrupted the whole of
nature itself and made it subject to death.
What
we find in the writings of the early Christian Fathers is that woman, because
of her descent from Eve, is imagined and described in the following terms:
1.
As an inferior substance because Eve emerged from Adam.
2.As a secondary creation because Eve was created second, out of Adam.
3.
As the ally of the serpent and the devil - because she succumbed to temptation
first.
4.
As the Devil’s Gateway (Tertullian 3rd century A.D.) through whom the
devil is enabled to pursue his aims in the world through causing her to tempt
men into sexual relations. (This reasoning laid the ground for the witch trials
over 1000 years later)
The
result was that Eve and therefore woman were equated with body, matter and with
carnality (and the left hand).
Adam
(who got off relatively lightly as a secondary rather than a primary sinner)
and man were equated with mind and rational soul and with spirituality (and the
right hand).
“The image of God is in man and it is one. Women were drawn from man who
has God’s jurisdiction as if he were God’s vicar because he has the
image of the one God. Therefore woman is not made in God’s
image.’’ (italics mine)
No
wonder it has been so difficult for women priests to gain acceptance! This
belief in original sin and the profound rejection of woman, body and sexuality
is still carried in the unconscious of modern man and woman and it has
inflicted a devastating wound on the Christian psyche. It is a powerful
thought form or complex that has not been addressed and therefore cannot be
transformed.
St.
Augustine immeasurably compounded a tragic situation that was already well
established by the early Christian Fathers. His doctrine of original sin became
the foundation stone of the Churches’ teaching, the necessary counterpart
of its belief in redemption by Christ. It need not have been so. Contemporaries
of St. Augustine taught that we were not born into a sinful state and that we
had free will. If these had won the battle with St. Augustine, the history of
Christianity might have been very different. For one thing, we might have been
spared the polarisation of humanity into the saved and the damned and the
tortures and executions that went with the belief that it was God’s will
that the Church should seek out and extirpate sin wherever it could be found.
No wonder people were revolted by the excesses of religion and turned with
relief to science.
A
modern comment on St. Augustine says: “It is one of the paradoxes, and
also one of the tragedies, of the western Christian tradition that the man who
affirmed so strongly the presence of God in the depths of his own self...should
as a dogmatic theologian have been responsible more perhaps than any other
Christian writer for ‘consecrating’ within the Christian world the
idea of man’s slavery and impotence due to the radical perversion of human
nature through original sin. It has been St. Augustine’s theology which in
the West has veiled down to the present day the full radiance of the Christian
revelation of divine sonship - the full revelation of who man essentially is
(Philip Sherrard, The Rape of Man and Nature, Golgonooza Press, London).
Effects of the myth
Generations of children have sat in church listening to this story. Generations
have been imprinted with the idea that a woman succumbed to the temptation of
the serpent and brought sin and suffering into the world and that her suffering
and even her death giving birth to her children was the punishment for that
original sin. They also learned that this primal woman tempted Adam to eat the
apple from the Tree of Knowledge and thus was to blame for his fall and his
being forced to toil for his living. How would this myth have influenced their
view of their mothers? How did it affect the attitude of boys to girls and
girls’ view of themselves? Would it not have set up a great conflict in
their nature, making them mistrust and feel guilty about their instincts,
believing that this punishing God demanded the repression of sexuality?
Generations of men and women have sat in church listening to this story,
absorbing it as the word of God and divinely revealed truth. How were they
affected by it? How has it programmed man’s attitude to woman and
woman’s view of herself and all the negative patterns of behaviour we
still encounter from wife and child beating to paedophilia and child abuse?
Conversely, what unconscious agenda might woman carry to avenge the long
suffering she has endured as a result of the interpretation given to this myth?
Again, how has it affected our attitude to children? Generations of children
had evil beaten out of them lest they fall into the clutches of the devil. Even
in the Bulger case, there were people writing letters to the ‘Times’
that children were born evil because of original sin.
As a
therapist and a woman, I have been made deeply aware of the misogyny in the
culture as a whole and the guilt women carry, as well as men’s fear of
women and women’s fear of men and I have often wondered whether these stem
at least in part from the psychic burden that has been carried by the
Judeo-Christian psyche for 2500 years .
What
comes through in Chrìstian writings is a deep sado-masochism - sadism
towards woman in general (which is reflected: at the extreme end of the
spectrum in pornography) and masochism because this myth led men and women to
cultivate a quite unnecessary sense of sin and self-blame. It is reflected in
the long-held belief that physical illness (like cancer) or catastrophe (like
the loss of a child) is a punishment for sin. There is a telling passage in St
Augustine (who lost his own son at age 16):
“God effects some good in correcting adults when they are chastised by the
sufferings and deaths of the children who are dear to them. Why should this not
happen, since, when the pain is past, it is as nothing to those to whom it
happened’? While those on whose account it happened will either be better
men if they are corrected by their temporal disasters and decide to live better
lives; or else they will have no excuse when they are punished at the future
judgement, if they refuse to direct their longing towards eternal life under
the stress of this life’s pain." (The Later Christian
Fathers,p.202.)
Imagine the effect of this belief on generations of women who lost their
children in childbirlh or through illness. Or its effect on men who lost their
wives or wives their husbands. Not only did they have to bear the loss itself
but on top of that the guilt that their sin had brought it on them.
Can
you pick up the unconscious sadism and masochism in this paragraph? One of the
most important things to know about the psyche is that the first thing someone
who is carrying a burden of guilt and self-blame at the unconscious level does
is to off-load it onto someone else by blaming, criticising or attacking that
person. If you look at the blaming that goes on at every level from the
political to the marital, you will realise what a lot of guilt is held at the
unconscious level. (Whenever you find yourself blaming someone, ask yourself
"Where am I feeling that I am bad, not good enough etc.?" or "Where have I
recently been criticised by someone or, most importantly, by myself?". This
will give you awareness of how you may off-load your own unconscious guilt by
criticising others).
The
belief system engendered by the interpretation given to the myth of the Fall
justified every kind of persecution of woman from denying her the right to any
property and making her subject to her husband, to the witch trials of the
fifteenth to seventeenth centuries: “Never in the history of humanity was
woman more systematically degraded. She paid for the fall of Eve sevenfold, and
the Law bore a countenance of pride and self-satisfaction, and the delusional
certainty that the will of the Lord had been done.” (p. 162 Zilboorg, A
History of Medical Psychology)
It
lies at the root of the deep fear and distrust of instinct and the repression
of sexuality that has so wounded the Christian psyche. Culturally, it is partly
responsible for man’s fear of woman and her “emotionality’’
and for the prejudice which for centuries barred her access to education and an
effective place in the world in any of the professions exercised by men,
including the priesthood and the healing profession. Not surprisingly, it has
also given man a good reason for mistrusting his own feelings and feelings in
general.
In
the religious sphere, we are confronted by the violent history of Christianity
which contrasts so strongly with the teaching of its Founder who spoke of love
and compassion and our sonship with God. We cannot disregard the persecution of
heretics, the inquisitions, tortures, burnings, the brutal repression of any
group that threatened the established one. “Catholics who assume the cross
and devote themselves to the extermination of heretics shall enjoy the same
indulgence and privilege as those who go to the HoIy Land.” (Decree of the
Fourth Lateran Council 1215). ‘We have to acknowledge the long term
effects of the Crusades against the Muslim infidel which are carried right
through to our own time in the catastrophe of Kosovo. We need to take account
of attitudes to the body and sexuality and the belief that a life dedicated to
God demanded the sacrifice of sexuality and that this sacrifice was pleasing to
God.
All
this can be described as pathology and all this forms part of the Hedge of
Thorns which I spoke about 1ast time because these habits of behaviour are
deeply embedded in a belief system that has existed for some 1700 years - since
the time of the early Christian Fathers. It constitutes an unconscious
collective thought form which is extremely difficult to deal with
because:
1.
It is deeply unconscious and
2.
The myth is still being carried wherever Christianity is carried.
The greatest sickness in Christian culture has been the fear of sexuality,
the denigration and denial of the ecstatic, the repression of delight in life,
and the devaluation and fear of women. The greatest mistake in Christian
teaching has been the belief that in order to cultivate the soul we had to
neglect the body and that the body and matter were not part of spirit. The body
has suffered terribly from being feared and despised and, in the name of the
spiritual life, made to endure every kind of misery from starvation to
flagellation and the wearing of hair shirts.
I
think the intense pre-occupation with sexuality today is a compensation for the
2500 year (in the Old Testament) old repression of it due mainly to the belief
that original sin was transmitted through the sexual act. The long repression
of instinct together with the diminishing influence of the Church has led in
this century to “the return of the repressed’, in the swing to sexual
excess and the rejection of any form of moral authority. Sadly, there has been
no insight into or understanding of why this has happened and why it may have
been necessary in order to free the psyche from a deep negative complex.
Because sexuality was split off from the sacred, it has never been brought into
relationship with spirit. It therefore still has to function at an unconscious
level and is still entangled with the old guilt complex and the compensation to
it. Hence the sexual compulsions, pornography and sadistic fantasies as well as
the lack of sexual responsibility that have taken possession of our culture and
are endangering our children.
To
repeat, one of the effects of the repression of the sexual instinct is the
desire to punish or injure others. The outraged instinct surfaces as an
uncontrollable compulsion of some kind, as in paedophilia or child abuse (which
may also be rooted in physical abuse in the abuser’s childhood).
Another effect of the repression of the emotions and the feelings is that they
have never had a chance to develop properly. The emphasis on intellect and mind
has left the soul without a voice. The instinctual, feeling aspect of human
nature has been devalued, equated with what is primitive, feminine and
non-rational. As a result people’s feelings tend to spill over
uncontrollably in all kinds of life situations. Many a woman has said to me,
“I don’t dare speak in case I lose control and can’t remember
what I want to say." Fear of humiliation and ridicule has made it difficult for
women to speak up and speak out, to speak in public, to be able to articulate
their feelings. There is a long way still to go. And for men it is even more
difficult since feelings are so threatening to them and they tend to run away
into the safety of the intellect where they can be in control. Not
surprisingly, women have to fight an internal critical voice which comments
disparagingly on what they are doing. Until they learn to become aware of this
voice, they may fall victim to it in the same way that a helpless animal falls
victim to a predator.
The
religions of the last two and a half thousand years, both Eastern and Western,
have put the emphasis of their teaching on the rejection of human existence on
earth, the rejection the body and natural instincts; the rejection of woman.
They have driven a wedge between spiritual life and human life and split the
human organism into two irreconcilable parts, mind and body, the controller and
the controlled, the part that aspired to be spiritual and the part that was
considered to stand in the way of spirituality and that was sacrificed to
whatever was conceived necessary to reach the goal of spiritual attainment or
enlightenment. Spirit and body were set against each other. Woman suffered
terribly because she was identified with body and believed to be (and believed
herself to be) the main impediment between man and God. The body suffered
because it was subjugated and punished in the attempt to root out desire and
delight in life. The “mortification of the flesh” became a phrase
dear to ascetics. Woman could not be spiritual unless she renounced the world
of the flesh and became a nun. The love of her family, the care of her home,
the daily routine of preparing meals, the infinite services she rendered the
community and her extended family were not considered spiritual but were simply
part of her duty as a wife and mother.
No-one can be blamed for all this since, as Jesus said, “we know not what
we do.” But I feel a deep anger when I think of all this long rejection
and suffering and I hope this seminar has gone some way to heal it and to
affirm woman’s value and her deep spirituality in the care and compassion
and love she has demonstrated for thousands of years. To reject the love of
life, the enjoyment of life, the experience of a close relationship and
parenthood, the richness, challenge and marvel of life seems to me to be a
negation of spirituality. Spirituality is more a rich embrace of everything
that life brings, a celebration of the miraculous gift of incarnation on this
planet.
To
end, I would like to do a meditation on the body, to restore to it its value
and its preciousness as the physical manifestation of the soul and the
connecting link between nature and spirit:
Imagine your body as a vessel made of whatever material you like.
Thank it for everything it has done for you in your life, past and
present.
Say to it that you are sorry it was made to suffer in the past and that you
will take great care of it in future. Tell it that you love it and feel that
love overflowing from your heart into every part of it.
See it as the connecting link between invisible spirit and the environment
all round you: the earth, the trees, the plants and flowers, the food you eat,
all the things you make with the raw materials of life.
See it made of the finest transparent substance, like a crystal or a jewel
or series of jewels. See that jewel-like body glowing with light that radiates
beyond itself.
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