2015 Maps of Meaning 10: Genesis I / Part 2 (Jordan Peterson)

And I want to tell you the story today that's at the foundation of Western Civilization, or one of the stories that's the foundation of Western Civilization. Because I think the Egyptian story qualifies, and I think the Mesopotamian story qualifies. And so this is the Judeo-Christian Genesis story, which I think is a staggering story. If you look at the structure of the Old Testament, what happens first? Near the first is that there are two things that constitute what I think are a radical split between different forms of time.

And so one of them is Noah's flood, where all the chaos comes washing back and the world is remade. So there's the time before the flood. Now, in more traditional Christian society, say 150 years ago, that was definitely considered a special kind of time before the flood compared to after the flood. And I think that the Old Testament is set up that way. There's also the Tower of Babel, so the story of the Tower of Babel, where people build a tower that's going to reach to heaven, and God basically stops them by making it impossible for them to communicate with each other. Then they disperse around the world. That's also a kind of chaos story.

So there's the Tower of Babel and the story of Noah. Then after that, there's the story of Abraham. What happens is that the stories in the Old Testament start to become quasi-historical. You know, they're like tribal history in a sense, like they're mythologized tribal history. So they're more than just tribal history, but before that, I think what they are is they're almost pure archetype. And we have no idea how old the stories are. So we know that the story of Creation in Genesis, at the beginning of Genesis, there's actually two creation stories there, and their timelines don't exactly match up.

And the hypothesis basically is that one tribal group or group of tribes had one creation story, and another tribal group or group of tribes had another tribal creation story. And they came together, and they didn't really know how to sort out their damn creation stories because they both held them as sacred. And so what seemed to have happened over time was that those stories were told, and then when they were written down, an editor they called the redactor tried to sequence them so they made some sort of sense. A lot of the Bible is actually the attempt to take diverse archaic archetypal and quasi-historical stories and to organize them in a narrative manner while simultaneously minimizing the internal contradictions.

It's a very, very difficult thing to do, and it's not like only one person did it. Thousands of people have participated in doing it over huge stretches of time. So the historical element of the Bible is probably roughly in the same age as the Mesopotamian stories. So, you know, you can stretch written history back about 5,000 years, something like that, maybe a little bit farther than that. So that's all we're talking about with regard to written history.

And you know, people think of 5,000 years ago as a long time, but it's not a long time. You know, that's only 50,100-year-old men. So it's a very interesting way to think about it. You know, that's not a very long period of time. The stories before the flood, I think they're indeterminately ancient. I think they have their roots in like very, very early shamanic practices, and they're associated with ways of thinking that have characterized people ever since they became people.

Ever since they became whatever we are, they have been human beings like us. Anatomically speaking, for about 150,000 years, and we're also a little bit Neanderthal—about 5% to 2 to 5%, something like that. But our anatomically similar ancestors have been around for about 150,000 years. Looks like we discovered fire about 2 million years ago, so we've been cooking for 2 million years. So anyways, it kind of gives you a bit of a time frame.

Now the first part of the Genesis story, there's basically a story about the creation of being and then there's two stories actually, and then there's a story about the creation of human beings. And so the first part of the story, I'm going to read this to you because I can't—it's too complicated for me to just spin out spontaneously. There are two structural elements described in the first chapter in Genesis: chaos, that's one, and heavens and the Earth. Okay, so there's two structural elements: one is process creation and one actor—God, or the word of God—who's engaged in the process.

The first structural element, chaos, is signified by a word, this is a Hebrew word, tehom, and that means chaos; by tohu for waste or for matter without substance; and by bohu for emptiness or confusion. So, the chaos out of which God extracts order has those elements: it's chaos, waste, matter without substance, emptiness, and confusion. So interesting, there's a psychological element there too, right? So I would say in some sense it's equivalent to the chaos that you fall into when everything falls apart around you, and that's associated with the shamanic idea that during the shamanic transformation, the shaman goes back to the beginning of time, roughly speaking, into the chaos that precedes the emergence of order, and that's part of the shamanic transformation ritual.

So the chaos that's conceptualized as the ground of being is partly the potential out of which matter arises, but it's also partly the state of confusion that you're in when everything, when order falls apart around you. And that makes sense if you think about it because the order that's being described in Genesis is the order that makes up being. So it makes sense when the order that makes up your being collapses that you're going to fall into something that's equivalent to the original chaos. It's a very interesting way of thinking about it, and I don't think it's metaphorical, by the way. It's not metaphorical; it's a different way of describing reality.

So it's not like a metaphor for matter—it's different than that. It's an analysis of the structural components of being. And basically what you have is chaos, order, and the thing that mediates between them. And we've talked about that already as being the fundamental tripartite constituents of reality itself. There has to be potential, there has to be something to interpret the potential, and then there has to be something to mediate between the two things.

So these three words, tehom, tohu, and bohu, are very interesting for a variety of reasons and profitably bear further investigation. The Canadian Rabbi Itach Marmerstein, who has begun to explain the Torah one word at a time, describes tehom—by the way, tehom and Tiamat are the same word, okay? So that's worth knowing. I got that from Northrop Frye. So the tehom is like the first syllable of the word Tiamat. And so we know that the Mesopotamian—some people think the Mesopotamian creation story preceded the creation story that's in the Judeo-Christian account, but no one really knows.

There was like a slew of creation stories with roughly similar substructures in the Middle East at that time, and the Mesopotamian story is a manifestation of it. So is the Judeo-Christian story, and their temporal order I don't think is actually even calculable because I think they both disappear into prehistory fundamentally. So, but it's very interesting to know that that tehom is associated with the idea of Tiamat because it also gives you some idea of the connection. You don't know what the hell ancient Hebrew words mean, right? Well, how do you know? You're not there anymore, and so it's interesting to see the association network so you can understand the concepts.

And so, whatever the tehom is—this pre-existent chaos—is sort of like Tiamat, who's the terrible thing that raises up her head when chaos is coming back. It's also the thing that Marduk has to confront with his eyes open. And that Marduk figure is very much like the word of God in the Judeo-Christian story, because the word of God is the thing that's exploratory and communicative, and it's the thing that raises order out of chaos. So I don't think that you can understand that without understanding—or I think that understanding the Mesopotamian story and the role of Marduk in relationship to Tiamat sheds a substantial amount of light on the relationship between the word of God and the initial chaos. They're parallel ideas.

So one of the things that I should tell you about Christianity, which is incomprehensible to me, I don't understand it—is that one of the representations of the word of God that extracts order out of chaos is logos. And that's partly the root word of logic, but it's a lot more than that. Logos basically means something like—it means something like heroic confrontation with the unknown and the communication of the results thereof. It means roughly that. And one of the things that the Christians did was assimilate Christ to the logos that existed at the beginning of time.

It's a very, very strange idea, and it's a kind of mystical or artistic insight that's difficult to understand how that idea could have even happened. And so, in some sense, what the Christians did with the idea of logos by associating that with Christ was to make Christ, who's a redeemer figure, into the same thing that generated order out of chaos at the beginning of time. And so that kind of puts him in the same conceptual class as Horus and in the same conceptual class as Marduk. And I'll tell you later that it also puts them in the same conceptual class as Buddha, but I'll get to that story later.

So also what that means is that there's an idea that lurks latently in Christianity that the ideal person is, and that's partly the person who accepts the necessity of death and rebirth as part of the redemptive process, is identical to the thing that at the beginning of time called order out of chaos. It's a phenomenal conception. And one of the things that I've tried to argue in a paper that no one's ever read is that the reason that Western culture is predicated on the idea that human beings have an unalterable divinity—which is basically the source of their natural rights—is because it's predicated on the idea that the individual consciousness partakes of the process that's capable of pulling order out of chaos or capable of mediating between the two.

And that there's something that's literally divine about that. And one of the things that I also promote in this paper is that you all believe that because you act on it. Like you accept the idea that there are natural rights and that people have individual rights and that they have intrinsic value. You don't know why, and you don't know what that idea is predicated on from a metaphysical perspective, but you do accept it, and you do act it out. And so to me, what that means is you believe it whether you know it or not.

Now, you can argue about that because you can argue about what it means to believe something, but I tend to think that belief exists in relationship to action rather than in relationship to objective conceptualization. And then there's a very interesting little twist in the Genesis story because what happens when God makes man and woman—and this is a very bizarre thing—is that he basically says that men and women are made in the image of God. Now God, in that particular story, is plural, but that's not really relevant to our concerns.

And I think that's remarkable in a variety of ways because, number one, while we don't exactly know what the image of God means, we can place that in relationship to the idea that it was the word of God that extracted order out of chaos. And so what that seems to intimate is that it's the capacity of the human being to extract order from chaos that's equivalent to divinity, perhaps in a reduced form. And I think that that's something we believe in. I think we believe that, and I think it's right.

Even worse than that, and then the other thing that's so damn bizarre about that is it's not just men; it's women too. And that's something that I have a very difficult time accounting for because I don't understand why a society that was as deeply patriarchal as, say, the ancient Jewish society, why in the world that that would also be attributed to women. But it is. Anyways, it doesn't matter. So the identity with God is equally distributed between men and women. So that's quite cool.

So anyways, back to Rabbi Itach Marmer. He describes tehom as the unfathomable undifferentiated womb out of which existence as we experience it emerges. All potential exists in this primordial energy or state. So it's potential. So in some sense, that's what the chaos is—potential. And so I've been thinking about that for a long time too because it seems to me that what people actually interact with is potential. You know, we think we interact with matter, but I don't think we do. I think we interact with all the various possibilities that matter might manifest. And that's not the same thing.

So that when you're interfacing with your existence, what you're doing is taking a very large number of potential futures, which are basically laid out in front of you, and actualizing one or the other as a matter of your choice. And so I think the thing you're interacting with isn't matter; it's the multiple potential states that matter could manifest itself in. And I think that's what we call potential. And consciousness seems to collapse that into actuality.

So all potential exists in this primordial energy or state. Metaphorically, it is a confused seething mass—the abyss, the deep, and the surging, bellowing of the waves. Toho, similarly, is a chaotic condition. So that's interesting because there's a psychological element there or a place without color or form or, more specifically, something that seems to, for a moment, to have form, but when looked at again loses that form. Tohoo is the subjective effect of chaos, the force that confounds people and that causes them to have misleading visions.

So it's very psychological in nature, that particular concept. And then, vaboh, who finally is related to tahu—I'm sure I'm pronouncing those wrong—means more specifically the indistinct, entangled, confused mass that all forms once were prior to their division into separate kinds of objects, so the heavens and the Earth. So those are the next elements that, apart from the chaos, comprise the vast and spiritually stunning places that rise above us, as well as the material domain that makes up our physical being and the physical being of those things we experience.

This material domain is both a trap in which our consciousnesses are caught and the a priori precondition for individual existence in its destructive and vulnerable but potentially redemptive aspects. The creation narrative in Genesis has deeply embedded within it the idea that the materiality of the world clothes partial beings—beings incomplete, avatars of God—whose purpose is the continuation and potential perfection of the incompletely manifest being characterizing the original creation.

This process—so that's the process. Now we've got the order and we've got the chaos, and now we've got the process. The process creation is characterized by the second word in Genesis, which is bara. According to the Kabbalist Aiden Steinels, the creation represented by bara is not the coming into existence of something new, but the transmutation of a divine and illimitable reality into something defined, delimited, particularized, and actualized. This analysis of bara seems very illuminating, first because it attributes genuinely creative power to consciousness and cognition—creative, though limiting—and second because it seems so closely related to the Christian idea of the logos.

Logos, one of the most remarkable of all the ancient philosophical or theological conceptions, is a word with an extraordinarily broad range of meaning. It means everything our modern word consciousness means and more. It means mind and the creative actions of mind—exploration, discovery, reconceptualization, reason, and speech. Logos is further something whose relationship to the mere material is so fundamental that the material does not really exist at all in its absence.

Finally, it is something whose workings are essentially redemptive, continuing and perfecting the process of creation. It is generally transcribed in the Christian tradition as the word and is closely identified with the transcendental being of Christ as well as with the original creative force of God. This is a very peculiar identification from the perspective of strict temporal logic, because it is the word of God that creates order out of chaos, and that word is a phenomenon that predates the birth of Christ from the temporal perspective.

So that's all exceptionally—it's very exceptionally incomprehensible, I would say fundamentally. It's an unbelievable matrix of sophisticated ideas. And one of the reasons I started to explore this was because, you know, I was very obsessed, as you all know, with the dynamic struggle basically between Soviet communism and the Western worldview. And if you're a rationalist and a relativist, then basically what you have to proclaim is that both societies predicated themselves on arbitrary axioms, so arbitrary descriptions of right and wrong.

And that basically what was happening was that there was a war to see which of those arbitrary systems would dominate. But I thought, well, if it's just a matter of arbitrariness, then we're really in trouble because the only way you could—first of all, neither of those systems are right or better in any real sense of the word. And second, the only way that could be possibly settled is by brute force. So then I thought, well, what if I look into the origins of the ideas that are characteristic of the West?

We know where the bloody communist ideas came from because they were written down by Marx; that's pretty obvious. But the ideas of things like natural rights in the West, they're very peculiar ideas. They're obviously metaphysical ideas. And then you might ask yourself, well, are those mere arbitrary statements or is there something deeper underneath them? And so that's partly what led me back to the analysis of these texts, for example, because the ideas emerged out of the texts. It's not like somebody just sat around and thought the damn things up. They're very, very old ideas.

And it doesn't look to me like the matrix that they emerged out of was actually a matrix of ideas; it was more like a matrix of behavior and it's over thousands and thousands of years. And so that's when I started to understand that the conception of the individual in the West is something like that which mediates between order and chaos. And that's not merely a—that's an ontological statement rather than a theoretical statement; it's a statement about the nature of reality, not about models, so to speak.

And you know, I would add to that the fact that we don't understand a damn thing about consciousness except that it clearly exists. And that it also seems to me to be phenomenologically accurate. I mean, when you guys are—you’re all in this situation right now and probably possessed by anxiety because of it. As soon as you graduate, what emerges in front of you is a huge field of unmapped potential. And it seems to me that there's no other way of saying that that's more accurate.

So we could just assume that that is what confronts you, and that what you're doing as you navigate your way through it in one form or another is actualizing that potential into some reality that you inhabit, that is hopefully operating in accordance with what you both need and want. But you certainly view yourself as at least to some degree as a being that is capable of doing that. It seems to me—I mean, you assume that you can choose what you're going to do after you go to university.

Like you don't have infinite choice, and it seems perfectly reasonable to presume that that's anxiety-provoking. Why wouldn't it be? We also know from empirical research that an unstructured future is hard on people. They produce stress hormones like mad if they don't know what they're doing or why, if there's a lot of unexpected potential lying around.

Alright, the fundamental story of the first part of Genesis is predicated on the assumption that chaos can be conceptualized as a matrix, as something with a metaphorically female aspect— a matrix, by the way. That's—a matrix is something out of which matter arises. It's the same word: matrix, matter, mother. Those are the same words. And one of the things that's very interesting about the word matter is that we use it in two ways, right? And I think it's a reflection of the tohu-vabohu divide. One thing is things are made out of matter, and then the other thing is that things matter.

And part of the Old Testament conceptualization of matter is that it's partly matter and partly what matters. So part of the Old Testament conceptualization of matter is that the world is made out of what matters. And again, I don't think that's a metaphor; I think your nervous system is actually set up in that manner because the way your brain reacts to the world is as if it matters. And since your brain evolved—and since we don't know any other way of producing an entity that can adapt to reality without evolution—then the fact that your brain evolved to treat the world as if it matters would indicate that the reason for that is because it matters.

And I don't see any way out of that argument. So that because the normal argument is the physical substrate is primary and anything that matters is epiphenomenal, right? That's part of the subjective or qualia, but I don't see any evidence whatsoever that that's how your brain is organized. I think all the evidence suggests the opposite and that you're first attracted to what matters, and then you parse it out into the world.

So, so, so good. You try untangling that, but I haven't been able to untangle it. So, right? Right, right. Well, you know, yeah, that is Heidegger's point is that meaning manifests itself. That's why he's a phenomenologist because the root word of phenomenology is physis, which means to shine forth and it's the a priori state, right? And you know, I think that you can assimilate those theories to ideas like the root—the ground of existence is something like information rather than something like matter.

It's actually not like matter because whatever's at the ground of the world we have no idea about doesn't even act like matter. It's very strange stuff, but I think it acts at least as much like information as it does like matter. The talk we just—to care about the things that go on—what only differs between a computer and a human mind is that the human mind is alive, and so it has a certain number of calories it can allocate. Right? Right?

Well, that, yes, that's a reflection of the idea that limitation has utility, you know? And so that, or that even—that limitation is a precondition for meaning. Or more—I think limitation is a precondition for being. So one of the things that led me to conclude is that there's a logic in that. If there can't be being without limitation, and limitation produces tragedy, then how is it possible to have being that's acceptable?

And I think the answer to that is, well, that's what the redemptive question is. The root of morality—that the essence of morality is to determine how to live so that you can have being with tragedy held in abeyance sufficiently so that the being is worth having. And it's a very tricky thing to do because the tragedy is built into the being. And I think that what redemptive systems attempt to manifest or portray—they're a form of discovery—is how that human being could—what its structure is.

And part of it seems to have to do with truth. You have to confront the thing that's tragic because otherwise you can't deal with it. That's a big—that's a huge part of it. And then you have to communicate the consequences of that to others. That's not all of it, but that's a big part of it. That's the logos part of it, you know? You have to embody the logos fundamentally.

So, okay, so now I want to move from the initial part, which is the creation of something out of nothing in the origins of order itself. I want to concentrate on the story of Adam and Eve. And the reason I want to do that is because I think it's an unbelievably illuminating story in the same way that the Mesopotamian story is illuminating, and I think it's staggering the degree to which the information in it has been compressed.

Now, I think what happens is something like this: people are always telling stories about one thing or another, and they tell stories down the generations. And I think what happens is that as stories are handed down across the generations, all that remains of the story is those elements that cannot be forgotten. And so what that means is that there's something centrally meaningful about those elements because that's what you remember. You remember what's meaningful; you get rid of what isn't.

Right? So if I tell you the story of what I did today and you go off to someone else and you retell the story, you're going to compress it down to just a few lines, and those are the few lines that in some sense seem to sum up the entire story, and that's the part you didn't forget. So then you might ask, if a thousand people tell a story for a thousand years, what's left of the story?

And the straightforward answer to that seems to be, well, it's the part of the story that nobody can forget, and that would be the part of the story that's most richly meaningful. Now, why precisely it would be richly meaningful I think that's a whole different question, and I don't really know how to answer that. I think to some degree it echoes in people. You know, it's like—we don't understand that exactly, you know? You go to a movie and the movie will reach a climax, and all of a sudden it'll produce an emotional release in you.

You know, maybe you'll start to cry. It doesn't mean you know exactly why; it's something in you is responding to it. So it's echoing in you in some sense. So you might even say that the structure of the story comes to match the structure of your caring. It's something like that. So it's a mirror of your psyche.

And in some way, the proverbial Chinese telephone game—you start with one message; it goes to people, and by the end it's unrecognizable—like I don't know that any meaning is—I mean, we—there are actual ways we do know that because there are, first of all, what tends to happen in the historical story is that it isn't change that's the rule; it's permanence.

So for example, grizzly bears now and grizzly bears 150,000 years ago, they're the same. And roughly speaking, the farther you go back in time, the more people are the same from one generation to another; they don't change at all. So for example, among the Australian Aborigines before the Europeans came, there's not a lot of evidence of cultural transformation over a 25,000-year period. And so I don't think we really understand the degree to which a static culture is actually static.

The same thing just happens over and over, and the same stories are told. And I don't think they're told in exactly the same way as the story or the game that you're describing because, first of all, the knowledge is distributed to some degree in everyone. So even if you told a part of the story and you told it wrong, then someone else is going to correct you. So the story is actually distributed throughout the entire society. So I don't think it's nearly as fragile as people assume.

Now, I don't—obviously there are times in history where those things start to transform quite rapidly, but I think that's what happens when the population starts to grow and diverse, separated communities start to come back together and then the stories start to transform. But other than that, I think the a priori condition is stability, not transformation.

Now we do know for example there's a group of people in Northern Japan called the Ainu, and God only knows where they came from. There's all sorts of theories about that. But one of the things that's interesting about the Ainu is that they have a ceremony that involves the worship of bears that seems to have exactly the same structure as the structures of bear worship that have been found in Neolithic caves in Western Europe. So the way the bear's skull is set up on the altar and so forth is the same as the caves that were discovered in Western Europe, even though there's a gap of approximately 25,000 years.

So, I don't think that broken telephone analogy is quite right because that's only at the sentence level, first usually. And the only person who knows the message to begin with is one person and there's no context for the message. So it's an interesting analogy, and I also think some of it's useful because I do think stories transform themselves across time to some degree, even with the retelling because the language is going to shift and move and so forth. But I don't think we should assume that the default position is noise; I think we should assume that it's signal.

So, okay: Adam and Eve. The first thing that happens is that they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed. So the first thing you might ask is, well, what is meant by naked and what is meant by ashamed? And so then you think, well, there are a number of things about people that are quite—and one is that we're clothed. And although there are some people who go about naked, it's not the standard human position in the world.

In fact, you can actually trace the origin of cloth using the evolutionary structure of lice because there are some lice who have evolved to hold on to cloth, not hair, and they've tracked the DNA development, the genetic development of those lice, back more than 25,000 years. So people use cloth and they use it, well, they use it obviously for production, but they also use it for all sorts of symbolic routines. But the point is that there does seem to be a particular human relationship with the idea of nakedness.

Now, you might ask yourself why, and what does it mean that the original people might have been naked and not ashamed? And why would that be a surprise to the readers? Because obviously, one of the things that sentence presumes is that the reader is going to assume that the fact that the men and women who were naked were not ashamed is actually a deviation from the norm. So here's what I've made of it, and you can tell me what you think.

First of all, they weren't self-conscious. Now, you might ask, well, what would that have to do with nakedness? And I would say, well, a huge chunk of white people don't run around naked because they're self-conscious. And there's a bunch of reasons for that. Is that, well, human beings are standing up, first of all, like unlike other animals. And so the most vulnerable parts of us are exposed not only to the world but directly to the view of other people.

And so most animals run around on all fours, and that means they basically have armored backs, right? Their most vulnerable parts are not full center and front for everyone to see. So human beings also mate face to face, although they don't have to, and that also heightens self-consciousness.

And then in relationship to shame, shame is actually an emotion that seems to be manifested under conditions of judgment. And so you might say, well, people are often afraid of public speaking. Why? You guys are afraid of public speaking? Okay, how many of you are completely comfortable with public speaking? Oh, that's good. That's quite amazing. So, okay, so why might people be afraid of public speaking? You bet: that's a lot of eyes looking at you, right? And often people who are afraid of public speaking won't meet the eyes; they look down.

What that basically means is they're reacting to the crowd as if it's a predator. The best way to overcome that is to start looking at people. And you don't look at the crowd because there isn't a crowd; you look at individuals within the crowd, and then that's no problem because you know how to do that. It's a great way to decrease your fear of public speaking.

Okay, so, how about speaking in front of a crowd naked? That's a common nightmare, by the way. So what do you think about that? Sound like fun? No! Why? Why? Even more, scy! Right? And so what's the problem with the scrutiny? Makes—why? Because you're in—why? Because you have flaws! That's right; you have a lot of flaws, and you're bloody well aware of them. You know, and it's bad enough to have your intellectual flaws revealed, but to add to that your physical flaws, you know?

And you could think about that as your deviation from an implicit ideal; it's something like that, right? People don't like that. That's why you never—except for the Naked News—you never see that happening or you virtually never see that happening except under very specific conditions. So part of the issue with being naked and ashamed is that the nakedness has to do with flaws.

So you might say, well, what does it mean to see yourself as naked? Well, I think what it means is to see yourself with all your vulnerabilities. And that's like your local vulnerabilities, which just happens to be how hideous you are as a physical entity. But then there's even worse, which is if you're really self-conscious and aware of what it means to be vulnerable because let's say that's what's at the core of nakedness.

You also realize your flawed and mortal nature across time, so that's partly the burden of the fact that you're physically imperfect and degenerating all at the same time. And that's something that human beings understand and that no other animal understands. It's a big deal. So I think partly the reason that we put on clothes is so we don't freeze to death when it's cold, but part of it also is to separate ourselves from continual scrutiny.

A lot of that's going to be sexual scrutiny too, and evaluation—we shield ourselves from that so that we can do some other things. Now and then, so the original people didn't have that problem; so I think they weren't self-conscious. That's the first thing to notice.

So, okay, the next thing that happens is that Adam is complaining about the fact that he doesn't have any company, right? So God does this: the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept; and he took one of his ribs and closed up the flesh instead thereof. And the rib which the Lord God had taken from man made he a woman and brought her unto the man.

And Adam said, "This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh. She shall be called woman because she was taken out of man." So I want to read you something about this because one of the interpretations of that, especially feminist interpretations of that story, is that that makes women subordinate to men, and it also inverts the natural order because obviously men come from women rather than women coming from men.

And so the idea there is that that's something like a patriarchal presumption that overthrew the original matriarchal order, which there was none of, by the way—that's a faulty anthropological theory. There was never a pre-patriarchal matriarchy; it's a misplaced myth that's historicized. Because you know in the scheme that I showed you, the feminine is underneath the masculine, so to speak.

Right? So in some sense, the feminine nature is out of that out of which culture springs. But that's a psychological truth, not an anthropological truth. So it is—it is—yes, and I'm going to read you why that is, but yes, it is exactly that. But there's a reason for it, and it has to do with the idea that the central element of human being is logos, regardless of whether it's man or woman.

Now logos is also symbolically masculine because it's associated with the heroic part of the individual. So let me read this because, again, it's too complicated for me to conjure up on the fly. So it is, of course, contrary to the entire scheme of nature that woman be derived from man. And it is very tempting to read a simple patriarchal prejudice into that derivation.

I think it is more appropriate to give these ancient and incomprehensible stories the benefit of the doubt and to search for something more profound. Logos is symbolically masculine, and that would be partly because of the idea of Marduk against Tiamat, for example. There are diverse reasons for this that have little to do with simple ideological prejudice or with gender per se.

The profound implicit idea put forth in this creation sequence, woman from man, is that the individual woman rather than the mere female is a product of logos, and not simply a daughter of matter, matter, mother, or nature. Thus, the story does not denigrate the female, as is now commonly postulated, but elevates human being itself, man and woman, above a simply material and symbolically feminine substrate.

Now, there was a whole series of ancient writings that were uncovered in the late 1950s that are now called the Gnostic Gospels. And hypothetically, they are New Testament gospels of a whole variety of sorts that were defined as non-canonical by what became the Christian church. They all emerged in the late 1950s. It's a fascinating story because the people who discovered them, if I remember correctly—it's been a long time since I read this—their father had been killed by someone, and so they went out to find the guy who killed him and killed him.

Then they went to a cave to bury them, and when they dug in the cave, they found all these scrolls that had been buried for thousands of years. And then they took them home, and their mother used a bunch of the papers that were inside them to light fires with so the family could cook. But an antiquities dealer came along and recognized them for what they were and squirrelled them away.

Now, weirdly enough—and I don't remember how this happened either—is that one of them—one of these manuscripts called the Gospel of Thomas made its way to Carl Jung, and he was the only person in the entire world who had access to any of the Gnostic Gospels until probably 25 years ago when they were finally more or less released to scholars. So that's also extremely bizarre.

So anyways, there's a quote from the Gospel of Thomas, yeah, it's very, very bizarre. It's a very amazing story. So anyways, there are all these gospels, and now they've been translated in various ways, and you can buy them as the Gnostic Gospels. The Gnostics were a group of early Christians who believed that redemption could be attained through knowledge as much as redemption could be attained through faith, and that was basically crushed by the developing Christian church.

So anyways, Jung is often regarded as a kind of Gnostic, but it's really quite remarkable that he ended up with the Gospel of Thomas. I think that's just incomprehensible fundamentally. So similar idea—this individual woman rather than the mere female is a product of logos. And so there's an idea in the Gospel of Thomas—similar ideas is put forth in the Gospel of Thomas in more thoroughly elaborated form.

Simon Peter said to them, "Make Mary leave us, for females do not deserve everlasting life." Jesus said, "Look, I will guide her to make her male so that she too may become a living spirit resembling you males, for every female who makes herself male will enter the kingdom of heaven." So the question is, what exactly does that mean? Well, I would say, you know, you can think about it.

What do you think's happened since women discovered the birth control pill? You know, it seems to me fundamentally that what's happened is that women have taken on the attributes of masculinity. That's what they want because that's associated with freedom and exploration and the kind of creativity that's associated with the mind rather than—I'm not going to say mere biological creativity because it's not mere; it's important, but it's not of the essence of consciousness, say, or it's not of the essence of spirit.

And so I don't think that the birth control pill could have even come about as a possibility if there wasn't the lingering idea in Western culture that attributing to women the same spiritual phenomenology that—or abilities that characterize men wasn't a possibility. Right? Because you might say women were emancipated because of the pill, but then you might say, well, what were the preconditions that would allow a society to do something as radical as to invent the pill?

Now obviously, one of the preconditions was that there was enough of an agreement—implicit agreement among the scientific community—that the idea of allowing women voluntary control over their own reproductive status wasn't the kind of heresy that should have been punished by like instant death. And even though that idea was there, there was still a huge battle and still is between Catholicism, roughly speaking, in the Western world and the idea of birth control because it's still part of Catholic dogma that if you're a good Catholic, you don't do that.

And I don't know if you know this or not, but generally, women have a menstrual period about once every 28 days. Well, you know that's built in—that was built into almost all formulations of the birth control pill even though it wasn't necessary. So the guy who invented the pill decided that it would be three weeks on and one week off so that the menstrual cycle would stay intact, so that it wouldn't look as much like a deviation from the natural order to all those people who were opposed to birth control.

When the simple matter is you can take birth control all the time and never have a menstrual period, and that isn't a problem. Or it's—you know, maybe it has to happen now and then, but it certainly doesn't have to happen on a weekly or a monthly basis. So Jung believed in the 1950s—there's this phenomenon that occurred in Catholicism again, which I don't understand very well, but part of the underlying idea was that there was a shift in Catholic dogma in the mid-'50s, and there was a tremendous movement in the Catholic world to appreciate Mary as a deity, roughly speaking, along with Christ and God and the Holy Ghost.

So it was as if Mary was being added as the fourth part of the Trinity. And it wasn't a movement; it wasn't an idea that the aristocracy of the church imposed on the masses. It was exactly the other way around. The idea that Mary was to be uplifted into heaven, roughly speaking, so she would be beside God and Christ was an idea that was really popular in the Mediterranean countries and also in Central and South America where Mary worship is a huge element of Christianity.

And what happened was because of that popular pressure, the Catholic aristocracy announced Mary's—and this is where I haven't got the terminology exactly right—her ascension into heaven in the mid-1950s. And Jung believed that that idea was a movement in the collective unconscious, and the movement was that the imagination of the Western world had progressed to the point where it was self-evident that the feminine element of being was underrepresented in the idea of deity and that it needed to be elaborated on with all of the other mostly masculine symbols.

And then he would have read that as a precursor to the possibility that the pill could have even become an idea, right? The underlying imagination had to be arranged to allow that to be a possibility before any of that research could have even been conducted, much less the product be sold. You know, because you have to think how bloody much preparation does it take for a culture to allow a birth control device to be sold for general use? It's not like that happens just because it's invented.

I mean, forget that. You know, it's still—people have by no means yet come to terms with that. So I'll tell you the last—the next part of this story, and then we'll stop until next week. So, and the Lord God took the man and put him into the Garden of Eden to dress it and keep it.

Okay, so that's an interesting idea, I think, because—so what it’s now—now what the story is proposing is that there's a universal habitation for mankind. And the universal habitation is the idea of the garden. Now, Eden means well-watered place, and paradise means—it's from paradesa—means a walled enclosure. So the original Garden is a walled enclosure that's well-watered.

Then you think, well, what exactly is a garden? And it seems to me that a garden is a productive union of nature and culture, so it's another order and chaos union, right? So a perfect garden is beautiful because it's natural, but it's also beautiful because it's attended to and paid attention to. And a garden is also something that's productive, right? It's not just chaotic wilderness; it's a place where you can live.

So the idea is that human beings have to live inside walled gardens. And so there's a physical element to that, which is just true, and then there's a metaphysical element to it, which is that the environment of a human being is the proper admixture of chaos and order, and it has to be bounded. So, and then there's a very interesting corollary to that which I think is tremendously interesting is that there's a snake in the garden, and that's an interesting thing.

Because part of that is the recognition that you can't have a place of bounded chaos and order that's productive without having something in it that's disruptive. There's no way of getting the disruptiveness out, and that's because—imagine, here's the problem—and this has been discussed intensely in Christian theology because there's a relationship between the snake and Satan, which is something we'll talk about later.

But if you're surrounded by infinite potential, in some sense—and that's chaos—and you try to wall off part of it, you can't keep the chaos out. You can only keep it out partially, in some sense, because it's going to come sneaking back in. Because you can't erect a wall that's going to keep out all the potential from a designated safe place. And so if you have to live in a garden, you're going to encounter snakes.

And there's—and not even God himself can keep the damn snakes out of the garden, because it's an inevitable consequence of walling off a small section from the hole. So let me see if I can give you an example. Well, I can think of a metaphysical example, which is, you know, you're going to inhabit one of your conceptual structures and attempt to keep that matched with the world—that's like a walled space. You're saying, "These are the relevant things; this is the place that I can inhabit."

But the fact of the matter is, as you're walling off that little enclosure for you to inhabit, there's dynamism all around you, and the dynamism is going to affect the structure of this limited place that you're attempting to inhabit, and at some point, it's going to poke its head through. You just can't seal something off from everything; the thing is going to come back, okay?

Now, one of the things that happens in the Genesis story is that the snake is actually something to which Adam and Eve cannot not attend. That's the other thing that's so interesting. So the snake pops up in what's essentially paradise, and human beings' attention is immediately drawn to it. And I would also say that's what human beings are like. You know, if we've walled off something and attempted to make it perfect and secure, and something pops up inside that's unexpected and predatory and attractive, the first thing we're going to do is be automatically drawn to it.

And then if we interact with it, what it's going to do is to increase our consciousness. And that is what happened as human beings evolved because one of the things we know is that we co-evolved with snakes. We co-evolved with predatory snakes. And Lynn Isbell has demonstrated that the acuity of primate vision among a very large and diverse range of primates is correlated quite highly with the prevalence of predatory snakes in the environment.

And so the Genesis story draws this tremendously complicated analogy. And one analogy is snakes give people vision, and the other analogy is the snake is actually representative of the chaos that surrounds every bounded order. And so it tells the story of psychological abstraction—that would be consciousness versus the unknown—and it overlays that on primate snake. And it's because it's the same idea at two levels of abstraction.

So you have the same reaction to unexpected things that occur in your pristine environment as your distant ancestors would have had to the appearance of a snake in a place that they regarded as secure and use the same damn circuits. It's the same thing. And one of the major claims in the story of Genesis is no gardens without snakes. And so, you know, the story is set up so that God tells men and women to ignore the damn snake and not to pay attention to it—not to interact with it—and also not to eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, which we'll talk about later.

But human beings don't do that—they interact with the snake and they become self-conscious, which is a catastrophe. And that's how it's shown in the story as well. So as soon as human beings become self-conscious, they get thrown out of paradise. So you can read it this way: We got so smart by paying attention to the damn snakes that we figured out we were mortal.

They drove cortical evolution, especially the evolution of the visual system. Now, I'm not trying to reduce it to a unidimensional phenomenon, but the point is once you get cortically elaborated enough, at some point you're going to discover time, which we have discovered. And once you discover time, you’re going to discover one of your boundaries, and one of your boundaries is a temporal boundary. And that means that you die, and that's sort of like the ultimate manifestation of self-consciousness.

And then as soon as you know that you're going to die, well, you're not in paradise anymore, that's for sure. And then you have to start taking—you have to start preparing for the future in a self-conscious manner. And one of the things that happens to Adam once God catches him after he's become self-conscious is God says to him straightforwardly, "Well now you've done it, you know. You've become self-conscious, and now all you're going to be able to do for the rest of history is work. You're going to be condemned to work."

And you might say, well, what's the definition of work? That's easy: it's the sacrifice of the present for the future. And you won't do that unless you're self-conscious because why the hell would you prepare for the future unless you knew that it might consist of nothing but trouble? And you know, Genesis portrays that discovery as something that's absolutely fundamental to the ground of human existence. It's only part of what it portrays, and so we'll talk about some of the other details when we get together next week.

Now what I want to do is I want to tell you this story. I want to show you how it relates to the emergence of self-consciousness, and that's the collapse of paradise. And so it's the same idea as the descent into the underworld. So the Bible, in some sense, is a descent into the underworld and an ascension story. It's precisely that because it's a redemptive story.

History starts when people descend into chaos, and the entire historical element of the Bible is part of the attempt of human beings to lift themselves out of the painful self-consciousness that they've fallen into as a consequence of interacting with the snake and the fruit.