Decoding the Garden of Eden
The Bible is surely the original literary riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma. A series of smaller books, written by dozens of authors over several centuries, in various literary styles and languages, cobbled together in various different ways before an agreed format was settled on, now translated into many more dozens of languages, yet still somehow maintaining a unified and authentic depiction of the workings of God on Earth and through humanity.
The starting point for me in solving this riddle, when I first dove into the biblical deep end last year, was working out what was actually said: basically trying to break down some of the main translation issues that seem to have plagued the book’s proliferation across lands and languages. This seems like a necessary first step towards understanding the true messages that the Bible holds. Not the only step, it turns out.
There seems to be a general consensus that the Bible is not simply historical record. Even people who take many of its main chapters entirely literally still acknowledge that it is also a creative and, in many ways, a symbolic piece of work. It seeks to convey deeper meanings through literary techniques such as storytelling, poetry and symbolism — not to mention a healthy dose of prophecy. The Bible Project video series, which a friend showed me when I was first coming to grips with this scriptural behemoth, gives a great primer to anyone who would like to know the basics but can’t be bothered actually reading it.
With all these literary style being employed, it is difficult to properly know how to read what you are reading. The whole thing is steeped in metaphor and analogy, and the lines easily blur between real and symbolic.
The Genesis chapters are perhaps the best example of this dilemma. I was slightly shaken at the extent that Fundamentalist Christians take Genesis as an accurate if necessarily abridged history of the world. Like, the whole world. There are impressive illustrated timelines that transcribe the details of Genesis into a factual historical progression from the creation of the world to Adam and Eve to Exodus and beyond. I admire the dedication and attention to detail immensely.
Given to me by a friend: whether you believe it or not, the satisfaction of a good colour-coded timeline cannot be denied. This particular one is less a timeline of historical events, but more of the rolling out of certain spiritual laws and realities.
There are, regrettably, several fairly substantial intellectual barriers to interpreting Genesis as an accurate record of humankind. I doubt I need to point them out, given it is almost certain you were more familiar with them growing up than I was. Leaving aside specific details and adopting a more meta perspective, it also seems a bit unfair that our collective human history would be revealed almost exclusively to the Hebrew people. But let’s avoid that racially-tinged topic for now.
Aforementioned issues aside, there is clearly something to this yarn. From talking snakes to towers to Heaven, these stories resonate with people. Plus, they are in many instances told with oddly specific details that would seem out of place in otherwise symbolic works of storytelling — details that it just seems weird that you would include if they weren’t true (like, why his rib?).
So, what do we make of the events being depicted in Genesis: truth or fiction?
Surely the answer is that they are both. That the stories of Genesis are based on real events—perhaps single events or perhaps archetypal events that are embedded into the DNA of our planet and our species. These stories are then reinterpreted and described in the Bible in a way that — either consciously or through some divine hidden hand — is able to communicate an underlying metaphorical wisdom. Or—more sinisterly, because I do love a conspiracy after all—to include details that act to undermine the spirituality of these stories.
The ubiquitousness of the Garden of Eden story and the infamous exploits of Adam and Eve represent as good as case study as any as to the complexity of events detailed in Genesis.
I always turn to Michael Heiser to get an idea of what the key detail are of any Bible passage, and to dispel some of the more unhelpful assumptions that have crept in to its interpretation. He notes that the Bible does not say that Eden is the entire world, merely a part of it — a particularly nice part, it goes without saying. The two specific humans spoken of in Genesis 2 and 3 are also not the same humans (the true OGs so to speak) originally created in Genesis 1. We can logically extrapolate from this that Adam and Eve were not the literal first and only people on Earth, but more that there was something special about them that warranted their inclusion. I’m more than happy to accept this, given the alternate situation at some point requires pretty daunting incest to have taken place.
Another point Heiser makes, which again aligns with basic reason, is that the deceptive ‘snake’ should not be taken literally as a talking reptile. Writers of the style of the Old Testament typically employed animal imagery to describe characters of particular attributes. What the snake actually represents is a divine being—an Elohim of the spiritual world—who has decided to work against God’s wishes. We can thus probably trace the widespread moral demonisation of our poor reptilian comrades back to this story.
What spiritual fruits can we pick from this heavenly garden? The story establishes some of the key archetypes for the later Genesis escapades and beyond. The sinful and flawed nature of humanity: having reached a particular stage of spiritual development and alignment with God, then choosing to use their own free will to explore that which is against God’s will, and then requiring to face the consequences of such a choice. Satan, the adversary and the deceiver, in the metaphorical form of a serpent, who gives more than a gentle nudge of our free will in a subversive direction. And, of course, God: a truly divisive, some would say irrational and controlling patriarchal figure, who invokes a punishment so harsh (the fall of mankind, no less) for an action (basically the search for knowledge and belief in intellectual independence) many have so much sympathy for.
There is a lot here to be spiritually triggered about. However, as well as the Old Testament, we have some other religious takes available to us to try and decode the underlying spiritual wisdom of Eden. The Qurʾān mentions the Garden of Eden in 10 different passages, although seemingly often in a more metaphorical context, with Adam and Eve (well, mainly Adam to be honest) only referred to directly in one passage (Sura 2:34).
There seem to be a few different take aways from the Qurʾān passages. For example, one being the framing of Eden as very much a metaphorical place rather than a physical earthly one. But the story at its heart seems similar: the couple are tempted by the Satan archetype, apply their free will to choose to disobey God, and fall away from Him as a consequence.
The writings of the Bahá'í Faith also provide interesting interpretations of many Bible stories, including one of many possible meanings for the fall of Adam and Eve. In this metaphor, Adam signifies the heavenly spirit of man, while Eve represents man’s soul (not gonna say I fully understand the difference).
The tree is the human world and the snake in this context represents attachment to the human world — essentially framing the fall as a choice of the material over the spiritual. This is a far more agreeable and straight forward moral message, and a signature of the Bahá'í teachings. Given that the spiritual world is pure and whole while the material is one of duality, of the dichotomy between good and evil, this still isn’t a fantastic choice, but it does take the edge off somewhat.
It also challenges the idea of original sin passed down to all men that proceed this event — framing sin as this urge for material attachment as a constant and inevitable presence in the lives of man from this point onwards. Hard to argue with that.
We also have more recent interpretations of the Garden of Eden story, specifically the perspectives derived from channeled material.
Kim Michaels is perhaps the go-to medium for these purposes, given he makes the not insignificant claim to channel the ascended consciousness of Jesus (sorry, Yeshua) himself. Michaels begins by clearing up some of the logical conundrums that arise from an understanding of Adam and Eve as the literal first two people on Earth.
As you might have suspected all along, Adam and Eve are not historical figures, but an archetypal couple who represent the passage that many lifeforms have taken and will take of the falling from one state of existence to a lower one. It is within this lower state where many others existed, many of which had also fallen in a similar way, that they then bred and multiplied. The rest of the Bible then deals with humanity in this fallen state — a guidebook for the spiritually lost perhaps.
So how do we understand this fall? While a traditional reading might see it as the fall of mankind into sin — often in a quite literal and physical sense in our decision to first procreate… how dare we! — Michael's channellings suggest something a bit more nuanced. The fall represented a fall in consciousness, from a holistic to a fragmented state of awareness, as the Bahá'í interpretation also suggests. We might also see this as a fall into dualistic thinking, where a coherent and unified understanding of the world was divided into the polarities of light and dark, good and evil etc. We might even see it more simplistically as a shift from love to fear. It was, as all interpretations seems to agree on, a very real spiritual turning away from God and the divine unity of the world.
But this is interesting, because as it is portrayed in the Bible, it is very easy to be sympathetic to Eve’s choice and to the couple’s plight in general. What they did really doesn’t seem like such a big deal, especially given the unreasonableness of Yahweh. To then turn this choice into the pure antithesis of Godliness, as the Genesis telling does, could be seen as a profound act of spiritual violence — one that has resulted in an untold amount of guilt, trauma and baggage to be associated with the inherently valid choice of backing our own intellect and intuition.
In fact, many non-religious (or at least non-Christian) interpretations of this event view Eve’s decision to take that infamous apple as the origins of the liberation of mankind: a conscious decision to turn against the controlling and manipulative God of the Old Testament and choosing instead to follow our own wisdom and intellect. We can essentially see this as the birth of Satanism (not the blood-drinking type, but the intellectual-based spirituality of satanic belief). Look no further than the logo of one of the world’s most pervasive tech companies to see how the choice to take a bite from that apple has been celebrated in our culture.
So what happened? Well, Michael suggests the insertion of this type of divine archetypal figure into the Eden story was actually a deliberate and malicious attempt to paint the Old Testament God in a tyrannical way. This would have the effect of either turning many people away from the idea of God altogether — in the most extreme sense by birthing the idea of Satanism itself — or keep those who do believe in God in what might be politely described as an abusive relationship with their deity.
Michael's channellings suggest this is not the only occasion that a deliberately misleading depiction of a God archetype was inserted into the Bible. In fact, the entire Genesis story seems to have been corrupted in order to foster in its followers a relationship with the Creator based more on fear than love. But this a wombat hole for another time.
Perhaps the most coherent and spiritually poignant attempt at drawing meaning from Genesis, certainly that I have come across, is the book Our Soul’s Awakening. It is based on the writings of Emmanuel Swedenborg, a mid 1700s Swedish scientist turned Christian mystic who attempted a wholesale, non-literal reinterpretation of the Bible based his personal spiritual visions. His central thesis was that the entire Bible (he seemed to have only gotten round to directly tackling Genesis and Exodus) could be better understood as a symbolic story full of metaphors, analogies and allegories that reveal profound spiritual truths.
The story begins in Genesis 1 and the creation of the heavens and the earth. Rather than (or as well as) their physical meanings, Swedenborg suggests that these alternate phrases also indicate the creation of the two conditions of mankind: its spiritual higher nature on one hand, and its worldy lower nature on the other. From here, the story of creation and the filling of the earth thus describes the transformation of the lower human nature from its initial spiritual void (i.e. something under the dictates of the self) into something that better represents and is in line with its higher self. This higher self, described as heavenly deposits or remnants, are present in everyone at a young age, giving everyone a chance to develop into a spiritual individual. The awareness of this spiritual nature within us is the moment, in Genesis 1:3, when God proclaims: “Let there be light”.
From here we can see the symbology develop. The “expanse in the midst of the waters” is the opening up of rational perception. The complete separation of these waters is the distinguishing of two truths: truth from revelation (or, from external sources more generally) and truth from our own rational discernment. The gathering of the waters under the heavens into one place is the formation of memory, where these discerned truths can be stored. The first appearance of dry land, or earth, is a more complete capacity for rational thought, which represents the ground within which a spiritual seed can be planted, and from which the first signs of a spiritual life can sprout: as herbs, as grasses, and finally fruit-bearing trees. We see the sun, moon and stars appear as the higher values that guide us; we see birds and animals multiplying as the growing level of positive thoughts and emotions within us.
To cut a long story short, we finally arrive at the creation of man on day 6, representing a fully formed intellectual and spiritual individual.
Things get juicy when man then becomes male and female. These are not to be understood as separate people, but as the corresponding components of the human mind: the male symbol of understanding, and the female symbol of love and affection. A bit blunt to reduce men to intellect and women to emotion perhaps, but you can see where they are coming from.
So, back to the garden: what happens next in Eden, and what is its real spiritual meaning?
Like Michaels, Swedenborg suggests that Adam and Eve were not representative of actual individuals, or were in a literal, physical sense the first humans on Earth. Adam is in fact the name for a race of men and women who, as per the account of Genesis 1, were able to spiritually transcend the greater mass of humanity and embrace the divine remnants dormant within each of us of our species.
Eden, then, is better understood not as physical place where this race resided — although certainly they were people who dwelled and took joy in the beauty of nature — but a spiritual place or state of being characterised by love. Love for God, love for each other, and love for their own divinity.
So who was Eve in this metaphorical analysis? This is where things get tricky. Basically, the Adamites were getting restless — they were starting to wonder, as is their right as beings with free will, what it would be like not to live a life simply under God — alone with the Lord — but to instead live for themselves. They decided, in a spiritual sense, to go to sleep, as indicated in Genesis 2.
Respecting this free will, God decided nonetheless to enable them to embrace this new found sense of identity in a pure form. Hence God gave the people Eve: their true sense of selfhood, revitalised with a feminine energy of beauty and innocence. To editorialise slightly: perhaps this is an indication that one can still fully embrace their own individual identity in its fullest, whilst still living a life dedicated to the divine principle of selflessness.
So then, the serpent. As per Heiser, we are not talking about a literal snake in the Edenic grass here, as all animals named by Adam are representative of distinct affections and thoughts. The snake is said to be the most subtle of these creatures, because it respects the ‘sensuous’ level of the human experience — the senses. We all know how easy it is to be deceived by our senses, how they can so slipperily lead us astray if we don’t have our rational faculties in place and active. You might even say, as the book does, that our senses simply cannot be trusted.
So here we have, in allegorical terms, the senses speaking directly to the selfhood — a selfhood, we remember, defined in large part by its innocence. Eve had yet to be tested by the brutal harshness of life that is the resisting of life’s temptations, as the serpent knew full well. Once Eve gave in, the intellect — Adam — had no chance to resist the pull of the tempted self.
What was the ultimate temptation? As somehow who advocates for digging into the world, l am not overly comfortable with this temptation still being knowledge, but this interpretation at least adds some nuance to the story. The tree of knowledge is a type of knowledge that is not for us to take — it is for God, in whatever real or metaphorical way you might imagine God, to grant to us at the right time.
Why do so many people caught up in sensual-driven revelatory experiences — intense relationships, drug addictions, sudden fame and popularity — often end up with such profound spiritual trauma? Perhaps they catapulted themselves into a place that permitted them access to a level of spiritual knowledge they simply did not have the faculties to process and reconcile, and they were destined to ‘fall’ as a result of it.
In this context, the moral of The Garden of Eden story seems less a condemnation of humanity and more a description of our very nature. Where there exists free will, so too will there exist the self — a self who uses its free will to choose to follow the very senses that God has granted us to use. That such an act is presented with such condemnation in the Bible adds weight to Michaels’ suggestion that it has been told with the deliberate intent of undermining the deity archetype of the Old Testament.
So was the fall of humanity, and of each of us, never in doubt — defined by the very conditions that make up the human experience on this world full of temptations? Did we suddenly slip into the nihilism of pre-determination? Of course not, because that is equally untenable under the possession of free will. That some part of humanity was always destined to fall doesn’t mean we have to keep making the same mistakes.
The Garden of Eden tells this story — providing an allegorical warning of the dangers of a life lived in the senses rather than the mind, or perhaps more simply in the material world rather than the spiritual world, bogged down in the muck of division when in fact everything is one. The rest of Bible, if the allegory was to be continued, tells the story — or at least a story — of how we can find our way back afterwards if we were to go astray in this way.
I’m not sure I buy everything in Our Soul’s Awakening, and the allegory can feel slightly stretched at times. I’m sure if you wanted to be upset by gender stereotypes, there is plenty of fodder here. But it sure is one heck of a powerful story, including but not limited to Eden-gate, and presents a compelling overarching meaning for the Genesis chapters that transcends the contradictions and potential spiritual sabotages that it may contain.
My own personal interpretation of Genesis, which could perhaps be extended to the whole Bible, is that it represents a form of information with a depth and profoundness of meaning unable to be tainted by the meddlings of men. No amount of re-writing, deliberate omission or dubious translation is able to diminish to any fatal extent this broader meaning — if one has the eyes to read it.
If we take the Bible as a whole: it is, notwithstanding its flaws, a unique compendium of dialogues with the divine world — so diverse yet still coherent — with its longevity and cultural spread a testament to this. Running through the book are these deeper spiritual meanings — metaphors, analogies, allegories and even prophecies — essentially sanctified above the threat of innocent mistakes and malicious tamperings that have and always were going to occur to the text over time.
They are immune because, I think, they exist at a spiritual level beyond those who either mistakenly or deliberately have acted to obscure the original message of the Bible. In other words, perhaps these people simply didn’t understand what the passages meant, thought they were nonsense, and so concluded they may as well be kept in as they were.
These overarching spiritual concepts that are weaved via divine guidance into the fabric of the Book are the true source of wisdom that the Bible provides, and can only be unlocked and accessed by those who seek to understand it in its entirety. Hopefully, like Swedenborg, they can then explain it to the rest of us.
Perhaps this is a theory we can apply to all Holy Books, from other faiths and religions whose followers may be inclined towards literal readings. One can never get lost in the details of these books, which come with the baggage of the particular time and place to which they were born. Instead one must search for and hopefully find the broader spiritual meanings that are encoded into them: pieces of a spiritual puzzle that is unique to each of us, where some pieces are destined to find a more comfortable fitting in some more of us more than others.