Human Nature Odyssey: Episode 5. Adam, Eve, and the Agricultural Revolution

It’s dark and heavy like a dream. There’s the smell of damp earth. Your body is part of the soil and your limbs are heavy. Suddenly there is light. You are pulled from the ground by your creator, held and sculpted into form. And from a mere clump of dirt you become a human being. Your neck is a bit sore but overall, you feel pretty good. 

Everything is new. The world is just being born. So when you hear the songs of birds, they sing for the first time. 

You are the first person to look upon the world, breathe its air, and feel the weight of your body as a living being. 

And here God planted a garden named Eden. Come, walk through its soft and flowing ferns, enjoy the vibrant sight of crimsons and fuschias of the flowering plants, hear the babbling brooks and streams, rest in the cool shade, feel the warmth of the sun. 

This is the garden of Eden, and God created you to care for it. 

You and your partner are naked without shame, naming the plants and animals you share the garden with. “This we’ll call a giraffe, and that will be known as a flamingo. And this, this will be a dandelion.”

And God speaks and says, “Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat. But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.”

But when God’s not looking, a serpent appears.
“Bulllllllshit,” the snake says. “Obviously God knows  that if you eat from the Tree of Knowledge then your eyes shall be opened, and you shall be as gods, knowing good and evil. I say go for it.” 

Well that sounds convincing enough. You decide to take a bite. And we all know what happened next. 

And God, whose beyond disappointed, as He’s casting you and your partner out of the Garden forever, proclaims, “Because thou hast eaten of the tree, cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life; thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; in the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground.” [getting progressively quieter, further away]

And the world changed forever. 

Welcome to Episode 5 of Human Nature Odyssey: a podcast exploring mythology, history, and where the two meet.

I’m Alex Leff. 

Today we continue our exploration of Daniel Quinn’s 1992 novel Ishmael, about a telepathic gorilla sharing his insights on humanity. 

If this is your first time joining us, welcome. It’s totally fine to start from here and if you want to fill in the gaps with previous episodes later, that’s great. If you’ve been along for the entire Ishmael ride so far, glad to have you back.

Now, being a gorilla, Ishmael is able to inspect humanity from the outside. And when Ishmael observes all the many human cultures, societies, and nations, he sees us as essentially divided into two groups: the Takers and the Leavers.

I grew up in Taker Civilization and you probably did as well. 

According to Ishmael, the Takers emerged 10,000 years ago, grew into the dominant global macroculture we live in today, and are causing worldwide ecological catastrophe. Ishmael believes we destroy the world not because we’re inherently greedy or innately flawed but because we are held captive by Taker Mythology - a very powerful story passed down for thousands of years. Put simply, Taker Mythology preaches that the world belongs to us and that we must conquer it. This is a story we can’t seem to stop acting out.

The Leavers, however, have existed for hundreds of thousands of years as hunter gatherers and some continue to exist today. And in all this time - unlike the Takers - they’ve managed to not destroy the world. They do so not because they’re more noble or ignorant but because they enact a very different story: Leaver Mythology.

So if we in Taker Civilization have an earnest desire to leave behind a livable world to future generations, it would be worth investigating the origins of our Taker Mythology and what Leaver Mythology might be instead.

And Ishmael suggests one of the best ways to do this is by exploring a very ancient story that still holds great influence across our culture today: the story of the Garden of Eden.

Growing up, my rabbi, Arthur Waskow, had an interesting perspective on these ancient stories. To him, the most compelling question wasn’t whether these tales were historical truth or simply fiction, but why do we still tell them? Why are these stories still so important to us? And that got me thinking that myths are an incredibly powerful mirror, reflecting back the worldview of those who tell them… and also who created them. 

These stories weren’t just crafted by one person. 

The Bible is a composite of many different tales taken from different sources and brought into one. It’s the original Marvel universe. In fact Biblical scholars, based on the writing style and language use can trace which parts of the Bible were compiled from different sources and when they may have been added. For example, most scholars believe the Garden of Eden story is actually older than the Seven Day Creation myth, even though chronologically it comes after.

It also seems that one version or another of the Garden of Eden was passed down as an oral tradition for centuries, if not millennia, before it was ever even written down in the 6th and 5th centuries BC. We can’t know how long ago it was first told but as we’ll discuss in this episode, there’s reason to suspect it has been passed down for a very, very, very, very long time, with some key changes along the way. Now that’s a pretty epic game of telephone. 

I like to think about when an ancient story like this would have first been told. Who were the people who first imagined this fable about god, a couple of nudists, and a very tempting fruit? And can we use their story as a mirror to learn anything about them?

Because little did they know that this story would more than just catch on. Could they have fathomed that one day it would be retold on every continent and translated into over 2,100 languages? I mean, damn, talk about going viral. 

And when it was first being told why did this particular story, of all the stories, catch on in the first place? Is it just like, a really good story? Back in the day were there not any better stories out there?

I mean, c’mon, you’re telling me some ancient society couldn’t come up with something better - maybe with more epic production value, like a super strong king who goes around slaying monsters - well guess what? The Sumerians did tell a story like that. The Epic of Gilgamesh. 

And back in ancient Sumer, almost five thousand years ago, the Epic of Gilgamesh was an all-out blockbuster. When the Sumerians first invented writing, Gilgamesh was the first story they wrote down - making it the first written story in all of human history.
But could you tell me the story of Gilgamesh, right now? If you bumped into your neighbor at a 7-eleven and asked them to recite the tale of the ol’ Sumerian king would they know what the heck you were talking about? No, I don’t think so. 

The Epic of Gilgamesh didn’t get passed down. In fact, for thousands of years we didn’t even know it existed. The writing was only recovered and translated in 1853!

Meanwhile, you go up to literally anyone you have ever met and ask them to recite the Garden of Eden, they’ll probably do a pretty good job.

And all these millennia later, there are billions of people alive to whom this story provides profound influence and meaning in their lives.

Because to us, the Epic of Gilgamesh is just a story. The Garden of Eden, however, is still an active myth.

Biblical commentator j. Snodgrass (great name) describes a myth as “a hit song that catches on through the culture… you hear it on the radio for the first time and you’re already singing along… Maybe it’s a bitter song, maybe it’s too sweet, maybe you don’t want your musician friend to know you like it, but for reasons you can’t explain, the song restores a balance.” 

He goes on to put the power of myth another way: “Anybody can tell any story, but for it to become a myth it’s got to awaken a sleeping truth within a community of listeners. It’s got to answer a question we’ve been struggling to formulate in words.” 

Whatever that question was, not only does it still resonate with us today, but it must have really touched on something very important to those who first told it. 

So something must have happened, a long time ago, something big and notable and perplexing, that inspired a group of people to tell a story about it. 

And Ishmael theorizes the major event that first inspired this story was the very birth of Taker Civilization itself… what we call the “Agricultural Revolution”.

To get a better look we’re going to go on a field trip… to my 5th grade classroom. 
Here you’ll find me at 12-years-old, sporting a poofy haired bowl cut. We’re in the middle of a lesson on the Agricultural Revolution and just how big the changes it brought were.

Right now, 5th grade Alex is diligently working on a class project: drawings that depict life as hunter gatherers before agriculture and life as farmers after. 

If you look over his shoulder to see his drawings, which are currently collecting dust in his parents’ basement, you’ll see a roaring river turned into controlled irrigation channels. Then there’s a wild boar with big scary teeth being turned into a domesticated, cute, smiling pig. On another page you’ll notice stick figures putting down their bows and arrows to cultivate neat little lines of fruits and veggies.

In 5th grade I was taught the Agricultural Revolution was the beginning of everything important and anything that came before was just prehistory. 

This was still years before I first read Ishmael - or went through puberty. 

But later, from Ishmael I’d learn how humans actually lived for hundreds of thousands of years before Agriculture. Think of how many things happened over that time. How many people fell in love? How many arguments were started, jokes were told, songs were sung? Entire ice ages came and went. Ishmael argues that the reason we call that pre-history and consider agriculture the real starting point is because the Agricultural Revolution is the beginning of Taker history.

Taker Civilization, at its core, is an agricultural society. It’s only made possible by, and entirely dependent on, agriculture. 

And it still is today… even if you and I aren’t farmers ourselves, the vast majority of the food we eat is not hunted or gathered - it’s farmed. 

And before the Takers - for most of human history - we find not a single evidence of farming.

Which is pretty freakin’ odd - if you believe civilization is the most superior, advanced form of society and that humans are supposed to farm and build cities. 

And even stranger still, when the Agricultural Revolution began, all the hunter gatherers didn’t throw down their bows and arrows, shout eureka, and immediately adopt farming. 

Instead of being a sudden watershed moment for all of humanity, it was more like a gradual tidal wave, slowly spreading to new communities over millennia, sometimes by voluntary adoption, sometimes by force. Many communities chose to not adopt agriculture - seeing their hunter gatherer lifestyles as a more appealing way to live. 

So our hunter gatherer ancestors weren’t just sitting around the campfire thinking, “well this sucks” - waiting for some kind of technological breakthrough that would finally make everything better. 

In fact, the transition to farming came with a lot of disadvantages compared to hunting and gathering. The first farmers would have spent much more of their day doing physical labor, were more susceptible to infectious diseases like smallpox, measles and tuberculosis, which originated in domesticated animals. Compared to hunter gatherers, the first farmers had a less diverse and nutritious diet, and were more likely to experience famine when their limited food source failed. And the first farmers could expect to live shorter lives on average than hunter gatherers. Life expectancy actually went down. 

Why then adopt agriculture? In addition to some of the material benefits, like food surplus allowing for greater division of labor and the formation of hierarchical classes, what if the first farmers committed to an agricultural lifestyle because they viewed themselves and their relation to the world entirely differently than they had before?

Ishmael proposes that the Agricultural Revolution, more than just a change in lifestyle and technology, was the birth of a fundamentally different mindset.

Over many generations, we can imagine the Revolution like a ground shattering earthquake, ripping a major chasm in the ground. On one side you have Takers - who began to believe they were supposed to rule the world and do so by force. On the other you have the Leavers - who believed… something else. 

Let’s consider these two different ways of life and the mindsets that would justify them.

Ishmael defines mythology as a story cultures enact - we act out. 

And Ishmael explains, every working mythology begins with a premise. The premise of Taker Mythology is that “the world belongs to us.” You can hear it echoed in our stories. In the Bible’s Garden of Eden, for example, God explicitly gives Adam and Eve dominion over the world. And you can see this in the behavior of Taker Civilization all around the world. We act out Taker Mythology like it’s an imaginary game for grown ups. 

Ishmael believes all cultures enact a story - including Leavers. 

And for many years our inquisitive gorilla friend read about various Leaver cultures in the present and in the past, he studied how hunter gatherers generally behave, what specific stories they tell, and came to believe that the premise of Leaver Mythology is the exact inverse of the Takers. Takers believe the world belongs to us. Leavers believe we belong to the world. 

That’s the imaginary game Leavers are playing. And it comes with very different logic with very different results than the Takers’. 

It’s worth mentioning that some Leaver societies do practice a form of agriculture. But these versions of farming reflect the premise “we belong to the world.” Like silvopasture, where animals are encouraged to graze along tree lines which actually improves the health of the forest, or selected burnings, using ash as fertilizer, regenerating the soil.

Takers practice a specific kind of agriculture, and it’s the one that’s come to dominate the world. Daniel Quinn in his later books calls this “Totalitarian Agriculture.” Picture vast fields of single types of crops, where all pests and weeds are removed.

Ishmael believes what it comes down to is control. 

The Takers’ Totalitarian Agriculture seeks total control of their food supply. If the crops fail, if there’s a flood, or a drought, Takers engineer more control to make sure this doesn’t happen next time.

Hunter-gatherer-Leavers let go of that control. If there’s not enough to eat, Leavers will go somewhere else and find food there. 

Because if you believe you belong to the world, and build your culture and mythology around that premise, then you give a certain kind of faith in the hands of the gods - as Ishmael puts it. You trust that the gods have the knowledge of which species and forests and rivers should live and who should die. 

The Takers, on the other hand, take the life and death of the world around them into their own hands. 

To see this in action, let’s travel back now to a time even further in the past than my 5th grade classroom. Let’s go back in time… to eight thousand years ago. 

We’re finding our way through tall grassland, towering old growth cedar forests, and shaded rivers teaming with life. 

This lush place is the Middle East, aka Mesopomamia, aka the Fertile Crescent, aka one of the places where the Agricultural Revolution began. This is before the forests will be felled for farmlands, the rivers will be dammed, and the desertification as a result of thousands of years of totalitarian agriculture will lead to the sandy expanses we will become familiar with in our era.

But right now, in between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, a group of people is beginning to act very differently from their Leaver neighbors.

Let’s picture the Agricultural Revolution from the Leavers’ perspective. The forests they once hunted are being toppled. The valleys that were once home to all sorts of fruits and vegetables and medicinal herbs are being replaced by carefully cultivated fields of wheat. The wolves, and leopards, and lions, are being killed just because they’re predators. 
 
What would it have been like for Leavers to witness their neighbors starting to behave this way? 

And most importantly: what story would the Leavers have told their children, to help them understand what they were witnessing from afar? 

Ishmael suspects that this - this was the origin of the Garden of Eden myth. After all, the book of Genesis, and all the stories in the Torah or Old Testament, take place in the very same region the Mesopotamian Agricultural Revolution began.

And Ishmael proposes that this story didn’t originate from the Takers inside the revolution, but from the Leavers on the outside looking in.

Let’s consider the Garden of Eden as a worthy metaphor for hunting and gathering. There’s food all around you, cultivated not by your hands but god’s, all you have to do is gather it.

In the story, hunting and gathering is romantically portrayed as a leisurely paradise, compared to the toil of agriculture, where food only grows with your labor. Think of God’s punishment at the end of the story: God says “Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat food from it all the days of your life. It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground.”

With this in mind, we can see how the myth might have been a way to explain the agricultural revolution. 

If this theory is true, which we’ll never be able to really prove, it would actually explain some of the inconsistencies with the story that have always perplexed us. 

For example, Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz wrote about how God forbids the Knowledge of Good and Evil and tells Adam and Eve they’ll die the day they eat it, “It is quite remarkable that a holy book, which purports to be a guide to conduct, begins with a clear rule that is immediately disobeyed, and a specific threat of punishment which is not imposed… What are we supposed to learn from a God who fails to carry out his very first threat?” And 18th century French philosopher Voltaire asked, “Why did not god want man to know good and evil? …It appears to my poor reason that god should have ordered man to eat a great deal of this fruit!”

It is a bit weird, from our cultural perspective, that the knowledge of good and evil is a curse, and that agriculture is the ‘fall of man’ rather than a cause for celebration. 

After all, Ishmael questions, if a Taker society were to come up with its own creation myth, wouldn’t they not call it “The Fall” but something like the “Ascent” or “Liberation”? 

The Babylonians, an ancient Taker empire, did tell a different story about the Agricultural Revolution. That story was called the Babyloniaca of Berossus. And in that story, a divine half fish - half man, teaches humanity the gift of farming. In this story this knowledge isn’t a curse, it’s a blessing. And this fish-man god is revered. 

Similarly in ancient China, another original place of the agricultural revolution, there’s the myth of the “Divine Farmer”, the legendary first emperor, who invented the plow, the hoe, and irrigation. In this story, farming isn’t a punishment either. 

But the Garden of Eden story, where agriculture is a punishment, clearly has a different perspective. 

When Leavers are met by Takers they usually have two options: to be exterminated or become Takers themselves. So we can imagine that the Leavers who told these stories about Adam and Eve eventually became Takers in order to survive. As Takers, they would have changed the old stories a bit, as well as adding new Taker stories, about kings and temples and a vengeful monotheistic god, but a few inconsistencies remain as clues that the original message may have reflected a different mindset.

So what Ishmael does, that I find really fascinating, is try and re-imagine the Garden of Eden story and how it might have been told by its original Leaver storytellers. 

From the Leavers’ perspective, it might seem like the Takers are behaving as if they have the knowledge of the gods, the knowledge of who should live and who should die. How did they come to this dangerous belief? 

So let us pretend we are sitting around the campfire thousands of years ago among our fellow Leavers as we listen to the story they tell their children about the world as it once was and why the people around them act this way.
This next parable is inspired by one in Ishmael. It’s the story of how the gods acquired the knowledge they needed to rule the world. 

NARRATOR: One morning in the Garden of Eden, when the gods of the world were still young, they gathered in the towering branches of the Tree of Life. Here they were discussing the care of their creation. One of the gods began…

GOD #1: So here’s what I’m thinking. In this meadow the grasses grow long and are dense and thick. Let’s sprinkle a swarm of beetles and let them eat from the Tree of Life.

NARRATOR: Another god responded…

GOD #2: That would be good for the beetles. My concern is they will feast on too much of this grass. The boars and the buffalo, the goats and gazelles, would all go hungry. That wouldn’t be good for them. 

NARRATOR: Another god agreed…

 GOD #3: That’s true, for the grasses - and those who eat them - the bringing of beetles would spell disaster. We must consider the boars and the buffalo, the goats and gazelles, they are all our children. They also must eat from the Tree of Life.

GOD #1: Yes but the beetles are our children too. When will it be their turn to eat? Do they not deserve to be fed and taken care of?

NARRATOR: Just then, a leopard appeared from the grass, and the gods became distracted. 

GOD #2: The leopard looks so hungry. Let’s send it a pheasant for its dinner. Now that would be good.

GOD #1: Oh so we care about leopards but not pheasants now? I don’t think the pheasant will think that’s very good. 

GOD #2: But look! The pheasant is getting ready to eat one of your precious beetles. If we don’t send the leopard the beetle will be the pheasant’s next snack. 

GOD #3: Well, it’s plain to see that what is good for one is evil for another.

GOD #2: Then how are we to know when it is time for one to live and for another to die? 

NARRATOR: So in the Garden the gods planted a new tree. This was a powerful tree and of its fruit bore the knowledge of good and evil. Of the Tree of Life, all creatures large and small were welcome to eat. But the Tree of Knowledge was for the gods’ alone. The fruit soon ripened and the gods shared it amongst themselves. And their eyes were opened. And with this came the knowledge of good and evil. 

GOD #1: Woah, far out.

GOD #2: It all makes sense now. For now the leopard will go hungry and the pheasant will be spared. The grasslands will be a feast for beatles. And the boars and buffalos, goats and gazelles, will have their feast in turn. 

GOD #3: Yes. Today those whose time it is to go hungry will do so in peace. For they shall know the gods have the knowledge to tend the garden. 

NARRATOR: That same morning, while the gods ate from the Knowledge of Good and Evil, Adam and Eve began to awaken. They stretched their limbs and walked among the other creatures of the garden.

GOD #2: Of all our children these two possess a most spirited curiosity and a keen intellect.

GOD #1: I like their funny noses. That was a nice touch.

GOD #2: Thank you.

GOD #3: They are quite clever. I wonder if their curiosity will ever lead them to the Tree of Knowledge. 

GOD #2: Hmmm, you’re right. That would be an issue. [change word]

GOD #1: I don’t see what the problem is. So what if they eat from our fruit? It wouldn’t actually have any effect on them. It only works for gods. 

GOD #3: Yes but what if they believe it works on them. What if they started to act as if they had the knowledge of good and evil? 

GOD #1: [concerned] Oh.

GOD #3: Exactly. They could delude themselves into thinking that Good was really just what was good for them.

GOD #2: And what was Evil was only what was bad for them. 

GOD #1: Oh god. [trying to comfort themself] Well they’d probably grow up out of that, eventually…

GOD #3: If they were to behave that way, they might not grow up at all.

GOD #2: They would consume the whole garden. Or as much as they could. 

GOD #1: And in doing so they would also destroy themselves. 

GOD #3: Let us warn our children, before it is too late. 

NARRATOR: And when the gods saw that, of all the trees of the garden, only the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil could destroy Adam and Eve. And so the gods said to them, “You may eat of every tree in the garden save the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, for on the day you eat of that tree you will die.” 

In this version of the story, Adam and Eve never actually obtain the knowledge of good and evil. Sure, they eat the fruit, digest it, but what if the fruit doesn’t actually work on people?

So when the gods forbid Adam and Eve from eating from the Tree of Knowledge, they’re not being mean. They just know that if Adam and Eve mistakenly believe they have the knowledge of the gods - it would ultimately lead to their own destruction. 

The gods were giving a real warning: that on the day we eat from the tree of knowledge is the day that we die.

But wait a second, Adam and Eve get banished - they don’t die. Well consider that in Hebrew, the word for earth is “Adamah” so Adam means “of the earth.” And the Hebrew word “Eve” means “life”. They’re meant to represent all of humanity. 

And in just a few thousand years since the birth of Taker culture, just a geological instant, one day in the life of the gods, acting like we have this knowledge of good and evil has brought the world to the brink of extinction. Maybe the gods were right after all. 

But in the Taker version of the story, the one we tell, God’s orders to not eat the forbidden fruit is sometimes seen as just a test - and we passed. God told us to have dominion over the earth - and being kicked out of the garden is just the tough love we needed to get on the right path.

And from then on Takers have known exactly what to do. It was our divine destiny to conquer the world.

At one point Ishmael asks the narrator an interesting question, “when did the Agricultural Revolution end?”

That’s the thing, it didn’t. As the narrator points out "It didn’t end. It just spread.” From the river valleys to the mountains, across oceans and continents, Taker civilization continues to make these ancient stories come to life. 

Perhaps that’s why people in over two thousand languages worldwide could repeat this story today - on some level we recognize these aren’t just mythological events that happened in the past. But like true mythology, they are unfolding all around us. 

For instance, in 1846, as white settlers advanced west across North America, US senator Thomas Hart Benton commented, “The white race alone received the divine command” [he means to have dominion over the earth] For it is the only race that has obeyed it [and] the only one that hunts out new and distant lands, and even a new World, to subdue and replenish… The red race has disappeared from the Atlantic coast: the tribes that resisted civilization meet extinction. This is a cause of lamentation with many. For my part, I cannot murmur at what seems to be the effect of a divine law.”

We won’t even go into how messed up that quote is but you can see in this example how influential the Taker version of the myth has been in our real world. Not only do Takers believe they have divine dominion over the world, but that the humans living as Leavers must be converted or killed.

This genocide of Leaver peoples - erasing their ways of life and the people who practice them - has also been present since the very beginning.

Ishmael believes there’s actually another story from Genesis about this genocide - and that this would have originally been told from a Leavers’ perspective as well: the story of Cain and Abel.

If you missed the Cain and Abel episode of the Bible, it goes something like this: Adam and Eve have two sons, one named Cain and the other Abel. Cain is a farmer. Abel is a sheep herder. When Adam is on his deathbed his two sons make offerings to God for their father’s blessing. Cain, being a farmer, offers God the harvest from his field. Abel, being a sheep herder, offers God a sheep. God rejects Cain’s crops and accepts Abel’s sheep. Cain is so jealous and enraged by this that he murders Abel, his own brother. As punishment, God exiles Cain and we’re told he goes off to become the first builder of cities. 

God favored Abel and his Leaver way of life - which Ishmael points out, is a weird ending if the story was created by Takers. It makes a lot more sense if we consider the story being told from the perspective of nomadic pastoralists or sheep herders like Abel. 

As Ishmael says, “So you see that your agricultural revolution is not an event like the Trojan War, isolated in the distant past and without direct relevance to your lives today. The work begun by those neolithic farmers in the Near East has been carried forward from one generation to the next without a single break, right into the present moment. It’s the foundation of your vast civilization today in exactly the same way it was the foundation of the very first farming village.”

In the Taker version of the story, eating from the tree of knowledge is sometimes seen as the birth of consciousness. Adam and Eve weren’t self-aware before… but now they are. In this interpretation, it’s their consciousness that God forbade and now demands them to conquer the world. And if they destroy the world in the process it was all consciousness’s fault. 

But if we see being banished from the Garden as a metaphor for the Agricultural Revolution, we know that human consciousness existed long before that. Leavers have the ability to reason, tell stories, make scientific inquiries, and so on.

So consciousness isn’t inherently self-destructive - but it does make self-destruction at least more of a risk. 

That’s what is so mythologically potent about the Garden of Eden story. We are unique in the community of life. There’s something special about us, that doesn’t necessarily separate us from the rest of life, but does differentiate us from it. We have consciousness. Sure, other species are conscious, like crows, and dolphins, and octopi - but we are self-aware in a very particular way. We tell stories. We create mythologies. These are incredible powers that as far as we know, only we possess. They allow us to peer into the past, imagine possible futures, and change the whole world. And with that comes the incredible temptation to eat the forbidden fruit, and imagine ourselves as gods. We’ve tried that. It’s not working. 

Ishmael proposes our greatest task as humans is to be the first to have this consciousness, to have the temptation to think of ourselves as gods, and learn how to still live in balance with the community of life. This, then, is the vision of Leaver Mythology. This is what we should strive to as a species. 

Hearing this, the narrator gets inspired and suggests that what if humans were able to be, as he puts it, “consciousness trailblazers.” So if, over hundreds of thousands, millions of years, other species were to develop a self-awareness and struggle themselves with their own god temptations, we could lead by example of how to not be at war with the world, but belong in it, make peace with it. 

Here’s how the narrator enthusiastically words it, if you'll pardon his male-centered language, “Just think. In a billion years, whatever is around then, whoever is around then, says, ‘Man? Oh yes, man! What a wonderful creature he was! It was within his grasp to destroy the entire world and to trample all our futures into the dust–but he saw the light before it was too late and pulled back. He pulled back and gave the rest of us our chance. He showed us all how it had to be done if the world was to go on being a garden forever. Man was the role model for us all!”

I think Daniel Quinn, the author, has the narrator suggest this rather than Ishmael saying it because Daniel Quinn also is excited by this grandiose idea but perhaps not so sure. We can’t really know. 

In response he writes that Ishmael agrees and says, “Not a shabby destiny.” 

So we aren’t doomed to destroy the world, destined to be alienated from the community of life, forever banished from the Garden of Eden.

It’s not human knowledge or consciousness that’s the problem. It’s believing the world is ours to control and that our reason for being here is to rule it. 

So thousands of years later after the story was first told, Takers act like they have the knowledge of good and evil and Takers commit genocide against their Leaver siblings. 

Adam and Eve are still taking a bite from the tree. Cain continues to murder to Abel.

The story is stuck on repeat. 

What if the trick isn’t simply to stop telling the story, but to change how it ends?

What if Cain stops murdering Abel? What if Adam and Eve spit out the fruit and stop acting they have the knowledge of good and evil? What would happen next? 

Thanks for listening. 

So today we got all mythical and metaphorical. On the next episode it’s time we get a bit more practical and scientific. 

Until next time, I hope you’ll consider what it might mean for us to return to the Garden of Eden? How would we find our way?

Talk with you soon.

Hey everyone, this week on our Patreon we’re sharing the first special bonus episode, a conversation with author J. Snodgrass, whose book “Genesis and the Rise of Civilization” greatly informed this episode. If you enjoyed re-considering the meaning and origins of these biblical stories then I think you’ll find our conversation fascinating. I wanna play you a small segment here and if you’d like to listen to the full hour conversation you can go check out our Patreon. 

So here’s a few minutes of my talk with author J. Snodgrass on book Genesis and the Rise of Civilization: 

You can listen to the full conversation at patreon.com/humannatureodyssey

There’s all sorts of additional materials there that dives deeper into these ideas and topics. In addition to interviews with bonus guests, you’ll find writings, transcripts of episodes, and audio extras. Your support makes this endeavor possible. What once began as a tiny outpost in the howling wilderness has grown into a little village and will soon become a small town - a town in balance with the howling wilderness of course. I’d love to see you there. So leave a message on the Patreon and be a part of the conversation.

Our theme music is Celestial Soda Pop by Ray Lynch. You can find a link in our show notes.

Thank you to Gary, Mark, and Jessie for feedback on this episode. And thank you to our voice actors, Arianna, Arthur, and Ariel.