The Biblical myth of Eden and the Fall come up again and again, probably because it’s so ingrained in our cultural consciousness from centuries of Christian domination. In many ways it’s a very useful and rich myth that quite aptly tells the emergence of our modern state of being, however we like to define it.

In the primitivist worldview, all changes come with the arrival of agriculture, the subsequent development of a sedentary society, and a relatively sudden increase in population. The creation of hierarchies, religions, political systems, patriarchy, and domination of others quickly followed suit. The story of the Fall, then, is easily reinterpreted as the mythical moment of departure from hunter-gatherer life and the entrance into agricultural civilization. For instance, Ran Prieur writes:

The Garden of Eden represents the original human condition, a life of ease and plenty, staying in our place and taking what God/Nature gives us. The Fall is our choice to reject this way of living, to take food by force by domesticating plants and animals and storing great surpluses, so that we’re no longer dependent on God/Nature, but have made ourselves into gods.

While from a materialist standpoint I see no reason to object to this interpretation — it’s laid out quite thoroughly in books like Wandering God, as well as the Pulitzer-Prize-winning Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond — I’d prefer a different tack, based in the point of view of the evolution of consciousness.

Here is Seth’s version:

The Garden of Eden legend represents a distorted version of man’s awakening as a physical creature. He becomes fully operational in his physical body, and while awake can only sense the dream body that had earlier been so real to him. He now encounters his experience from within a body that must be fed, clothed, protected from the elements — a body that is subject to gravity and to earth’s laws. He must use physical muscles to walk from place to place. He sees himself suddenly, in a leap of comprehension, as existing for the first time not only apart from the environment, but apart from all of earth’s other creatures.

The sense of separation is, in those terms, initially almost shattering. Yet [man] is to be the portion of nature that views itself with perspective. He is to be the part of nature that will specialize in the self-conscious use of concepts. He will grow the flower of the intellect — a flower that must have its deep roots buried securely within the earth, and yet a flower that will send new psychic seeds outward, not only for itself but for the rest of nature, of which it is a part …

On the one hand, man did indeed feel that he had fallen from a high estate, because he remembered that earlier freedom of dream reality … But if man felt suddenly alone and isolated, he was immediately struck by the grand variety of the wolrd and its creatures. Each creature apart from himself was a new mystery. He was enchanted also by his own subjective reality, the body in which he found himself, and by the differences between himself and others like him, and the other creatures. He instnatly began to explore, to categorize, to point out and to name the other creatures of the earth as they came to his attention.

In a fashion, it was a great creative and yet cosmic game that consciousness played with itself, and it did represent a new kind of awareness …

I think both interpretations of the Fall myth are quite valid. For the oppressed civilized person, the Fall certainly has validity as an expression of the violent trauma of being alive. From a cosmic, non-corporeal perspective, it also makes sense that we are playing a game of consciousness with ourselves.

What’s useful?

Personally, I like the version John Michael Greer sets out in Paths of Wisdom: Principles and Practice of the Magical Cabala in the Western Tradition, which, once again, seems perfectly in tune with Wilber’s more cerebral presentation. He describes, in Kabbalistic terms, the meaning of the Fall.

The following diagrams are creative variations of the centerpiece of Kabbalistic thinking, the Kabbalistic Tree of Life. It’s a diagram composed of ten Spheres, and twenty-two Paths connecting those Spheres, each of which represent aspects of human as well as cosmic consciousness.

One particular representation of Eden before the Fall (from the Western Hermetic tradition) is shown here:

There’s a lot to this diagram, but I’d like to draw your attention to Malkuth, at the very bottom — the sphere on which Eve stands. Malkuth is the realm of physical manifestation on the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, the “lowest” of the ten Spheres, and the one most familiar to most of us because it is the realm of everyday affairs.

In Malkuth is a dragon with seven heads and ten horns. According to Greer, it “stands for the Serpent of the Eden myth, and represents the presence of the Negative Powers” that remained hidden, and dormant, after Creation.

Shattered and cast out by [the act of Creation] … the unbalanced energies that made up the Primal Worlds are said to have been driven to the outermost parts of Malkuth, at once the densest levels of matter and the furthest reaches of the process of Creation. There, as the diagram shows, they sleep: less metaphorically, they are present but inactive, potentials not yet made manifest.

But then came the Fall.

Greer says,

At the foot of the diagram is the realm of Gehenna, refuse heap of the cosmos. In the diagram of Eden the red dragon representing the negative powers slept here, inert. Now, though, the Powers are awake, and sweep up in a great double arc to surround the Sphere Malkuth and attack the other Spheres below the Abyss. In their place … is the Eve of the previous diagram …

The Tree of Knowledge here is precisely that, the knowledge of self-awareness that makes true choice possible. Eve, life, has here attained this self-awareness — but in the process the two Pillars [representing Form and Force, the Yin and Yang of the cosmos] have been left unsupported. In the diagram, the Pillars are gone, the balance of the system shattered, and Eve herself has descended into the realm of pure imbalance …

So how the heck is this interpreted?

This set of mythic images can be read in a number of ways, macrocosmic and microcosmic. On a planetary scale, it represents the coming of age of our species, the awakening of self-awareness and of the individual responsibility within one portion of the animal life on Earth. The forces of nature, manifested in instinct and in environmental pressure, no longer hold humanity in balance in the world; instead, the same biological drives that once maintained that balance goad humanity toward excess in every direction, and the forces released by those drives — forces that go far beyond the human, or the natural — contaminate every aspect of humanity’s thought and action. One might even see in the fate of Eve, cast down into Gehenna, the fate of so much of the natural world at human hands, made into a realm of garbage and fires. For his part, Adam, humanity, with his feet now firmly on the ground of Malkuth but the crown of inner guidance vanished from his head, is left to find his way the best he can.

Equally, the diagram could be read in microcosmic terms, as a map of the human soul in its present condition. In this reading … the primal instincts, once the great source of balance in the self, now lead to imbalance; desires become addictions, fears become obsessions; responses evolved to protect against beasts of prey warp into habits of lethal violence, so that men and women have become beasts of prey themselves. These imbalances contaminate the whole of the ruach, the conscious self, and to make matters worse the ruach has fallen below Tiphareth [the Sphere of the personal God or Christ-Consciousness] and no longer has direct access to its own higher faculties; the Veil has drawn shut …

[But] the Fall was not a crime or an accident. Rather, it was — is — a necessary stage in any process of awakening. Most children go through the equivalent several times in the course of their growth … Our species also passes through such stages. For self-awareness to be gained, the balancing role of instinct had to be relinquished; for evolution to proceed, the static peace of Eden had to be left behind … the Fall marks the end of the way of Creation and the beginning of the way of Redemption.

The Way of Creation is the past — the Garden, and the Fall — and the Way of Redemption is the future, the way forward.

In yet another assuring concordance, in Up From Eden Ken Wilber says that his book, about the past up to the present, is one half of the story.

I do not lament the emergence of the ego and the loss of archaic innocence, although we may all shudder at some of the horrendous consequences. For, according to the perennial philosophy, the mental-ego, apart from all its shortcomings, is nonetheless something of a halfway mark on the path of transcendence. That is, egoic self-consciousness is halfway between the subconsciousness of nature and the superconsciousness of spirit. The subconsciousness of matter and body gives way to the self-consciousness of mind and ego, which in turn gives way to the superconsciousness of soul and spirit — such is the “big picture” of evolution and history, and such is the context of man’s history as well.

All of this points the way to the necessity of spiritual growth, and of integration and transcendence, for evolving into the next stage in our development.

Painful as it is, we are collectively in a developmental stage, and there is nothing wrong with that, in a cosmic sense. There is nothing inherently wrong with experiencing our consciousness so narrowly and with such distortion. It comes with the territory. Though there are many negative things we do with that consciousness, which we must undo if we are to evolve further, we are where we need to be, and nowhere else.

And there is much to appreciate in who we are. Seth says, in this poetic celebration of the unique consciousness of humanity,

In a manner of speaking, the birds and the insects are indeed living portions of the earth flying, even as, again in a manner of speaking, bears and wolves and cows and cats represent the earth turning into creatures that live upon its own surface. And in a manner of speaking, again, man becomes the earth thinking, and thinking his own thoughts, man in his way specializes in the conscious work of the world — a work that is dependent upon the indispensable “unconscious” work of the rest of nature, a nature that sustains him. And when he thinks, man thinks for the microbes, for the atoms and the molecules, for the smallest particles within his being, for the insects and for the rocks, for the creatures of the sky and the air and the oceans.

Man thinks as naturally as the birds fly. He looks at physical reality for the rest of physical reality: He is earth coming alive to view itself through conscious eyes — but that consciousness is graced to be because it is so intimately a part of earth’s framework.

The task, again, is to integrate, and to harmonize, not to discard.

In concurrence with Wilber’s quote in Part 1, in which he asserts that “each stage of evolution transcends but includes its predecessors,” Greer writes,

The dragon is to be vanquished, not slain. The Negative Powers have a place in the scheme of things from beginning to end. In the macrocosm, they can be seen as the primary energies of existence, unmixed and therefore unbalanced, which must be harmonized rather than destroyed. In the microcosm, their reflections are powerful if chaotic forces moving through the self, destructive if uncontrolled but potential sources of enormous strength once brought into balance and discipline. In either interpretation, they are returned to their own realm, but there remain awake. Thus the previous state of Eden is not restored, nor is the Fall prolonged; instead, a third state having elements of both brings the entire system into a renewed harmony.

Who we are and where we are is natural and fitting to the cosmic, karmic order of things.

The question, and the struggle, is how to be both wholly ourselves and wholly a part of the universe, without contradiction, and without the terrible imbalance that we suffer.