I clearly remember being a six-year-old in Mrs Rourke’s Grade
One class at St Pat’s convent school in Blacktown. We were afraid of Mrs
Rourke. She wore her white hair in a French roll, and was given to shouting at
the top of her lungs, at which unpredictable behaviour my stomach would do
somersaults. I recall Mrs Rourke’s religion classes, which all seemed to centre
around the Garden of Eden and Original Sin. There was a sequence to our teacher’s
classes: she would draw a large circle on the blackboard and tell us that it
was the world. She would then draw two stick-figures that, we were told, were
Adam and Eve. Between Adam and Eve there would be a tree, with a snake coiled
around its trunk and one apple.
I loved gardens. My grandmother, Biddy, had a wild, wild
garden with a winding path meandering through it and down to a fowl-yard. The
soil smelt of old tea-leaves and earthworms. The slab of dark stone that was
the back step was worn down in the middle. The shade at the back of the house
was dense and cold. The bush that spilt out of Galston Gorge, where my mother
played as a child, clambered right up to the end of the street. You could smell
its sweetness in the sunshine, along with Uncle Wally’s rum tobacco.
I liked the idea of the Garden of Eden, and I was not the
first to do so. We know that the idea of “paradise” goes right back to the
Sumerians, who came from Mesopotamia, between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.
We learnt about that in our first year of high school. A hippy teacher called
Dawn Tracy taught us about those two rivers, and I had no clue why I should
care. Turns out those two rivers flow through western Asia and through all the
countries we think of when we talk about the Middle East. It was the
“birthplace” of our civilization, or so they say.
The Sumerians believed that the gods lived in a fertile
valley of flowers, trees, animals and precious stones. Why wouldn’t they? If
you lived in a desert, you too would imagine a fertile and regularly-watered
heaven. One of the first stories ever written down, and the Sumerians had the
oldest known system of writing, was about a man called Gilgamesh who journeyed
to find a hero called Utnapishtim,
who had saved his family and animals by building a big boat, when the gods
decided to send a flood in retribution for human misdeeds. There, in the garden
where Utnapishtim lived, Gilgamesh discovered the secret to eternal life. That story
was written about 5,000 years ago, well after the mythical “event” was supposed
to have taken place.
The image of a paradise where the gods lived removed from
humankind was basic to Zoroastrianism and to the early Hebrews, and thus to the
three major world religions: Judaism, Islam and Christianity. The symbolism is
to be found across cultures, to such an extent that, over the centuries,
beliefs about the physical existence of such a real place have developed.
Indeed, the beliefs of the cult that we casually refer to as “Flat Earthers”
are derived from the notion that the existence of such a place has been hidden
from us by worldwide conspirators. Shambhala,
Shangri La and other names have been
bestowed on this place of peace, innocence and immortality. Some latter day explorers
believed it to be hidden in the Himalayas, others somewhere in the Middle East,
and yet others are convinced that it is concealed at the North Pole. It was the
North Pole image and mythology of a place known as “Meru” that drew my attention,
since the simplicity of the symbolism provoked me to take an imaginative leap
of my own.
Across cultures, the images of Paradise, Eden or Meru share
common characteristics. At the centre of the earth, there is a World Tree (such
as the Scandinavian “Tree of Life” or Yggdrasil),
often growing out of a central mountain. The roots of the tree reach down into
the earth. The trunk of the tree creates the axis around which the world turns.
The branches of the tree reach upwards to the place where the ancestors live.
Four rivers circle the central mountain, and four islands or continents are
laid out around it. At the perimeter of the island continents, there is a
circular wall of mountains that encloses the hidden land.
In Genesis, the first book of the Bible’s Old Testament, Adam
and Eve live in the Garden of Eden until expelled by Yahweh- יהוה -for taking the “fruit
of the tree of knowledge” from the one forbidden tree. In other paradise
mythologies, mankind is, likewise, exiled from the garden and made aware of
evil, is suddenly “made” mortal, and is doomed to experience suffering.
Literal interpreters of the Eden-Meru story believe that the
land exists in a physical form, but is somehow hidden by geography, conspiracy,
or the state of the explorer’s soul when he/she goes searching for it. However,
there are many who look on the mythology as symbolic of man’s search for peace
and wisdom. My own theory, however, is somewhere in between, as I do believe
that Eden-Meru is a real and physical “place”, but not in the way readers might
think.
My own proposition is that Paradise or Eden-Meru represents
the human brain and its capacity for transcendence, and that the fall from
paradise is the history of mankind’s evolution (macro) reflected in the
development of the foetus (micro), in particular.
[1]The central mountain is surrounded by open water, and then further out by
four large islands that form a ring around the Pole.
As we all know, the
brain and spinal cord are surrounded by cerebrospinal fluid. This fluid
provides a stable environment for delicate neurological structures against the
forces of gravity and sudden acceleration and deceleration (speeding up,
changing direction and slowing down). Cerebrospinal fluid also carries
nutrients to the brain and takes waste away. It is vital in the development of
the foetal brain.
There are four surrounding island continents that have high mountains
along their southern [outer] rims…
The cerebral cortex is divided into four sections, called "lobes": the frontal lobe, parietal
lobe, occipital lobe, and temporal lobe. The frontal lobe is important for thinking
and control of voluntary movement or activity. The parietal lobe processes sensory
input, while the occipital lobe is primarily responsible for vision. The temporal
lobe is the part of the brain in charge of memory
storage, the process of hearing sounds, visual recognition of faces and
objects, and the use of language. “The cerebral cortex, especially that part customarily
designated "neocortex," is one of the hallmarks of mammalian
evolution and reaches its greatest size, relatively speaking, and its widest
structural diversity in the human brain”. - Jones, Edward G., Peters, Alan (Eds.) Cerebral Cortex, Comparative
Structure and Evolution of Cerebral Cortex.
In humans, the skull (“the outer rim”) is supported by the
highest vertebra, called the atlas, permitting a nodding motion. The atlas
turns on the next-lower vertebra, the axis, to allow for side-to-side motion. The
human cranium, the part that contains the brain, is globe-shaped and relatively
large in comparison with the face. In most other animals, the facial portion of
the skull, including the upper teeth and the nose, is larger than the cranium.
Already, we can see a picture building up, layer upon layer. The
subconscious metaphor of an Eden, represented by the complex geography of the world at the centre of everything, may
be a modern human memory of its own evolution and divergence from non-human
primates. As early humans became more “human”, was there a species memory of primate
origins that was passed down through myth?
[…]‘thinking with imagery’ and even ‘thinking with the body’ must have preceded language by hundreds of thousands of years. It is part of our mammalian inheritance to read, store and retrieve emotionally coded representations of the world, and we do this via conditioned associations…- Stephen T Asma, ‘The Evolution of Imagination’
[1]
*Unreferenced passages in bold
font:- https://rgdn.info/en/mirovaya_gora._v_mifah_i_legandah_mira The World
Mountain – Mount Meru in myths and legends of peoples of the world, prepared by
“Arbat” (Russia).
X-ray art of Arnhem Land
It may seem far-fetched to imagine that early man could have a notion of his interior body-schema, but pre-literate cultures have been drawing “x-ray” interior maps for millennia. X-ray art can be seen in the Mesolithic (“middle” “stone”) art of northern Europe, as well as in Siberia, the Arctic Circle, North America, West Papua, New Ireland, India, and Malaysia. It is well-known from the Aboriginal rock art and bark paintings of Arnhem Land. X-ray art is always related to the sacred and ceremonial. It represents the unseen, and is, therefore, numinous or “otherworldly”.
The Human Cranium
…this mountain (Meru) was made of lodestone, and was the source of the
earth’s magnetic field. For some creatures, the magnetic field that hugs our
planet serves as a compass for navigation or orientation.
It has always been suspected, but a new study has proven,
that humans can sense the earth's magnetic field. The study, published in the
journal eNeuro, provides the first
direct evidence, from brain scans, that humans can sense electro-magnetic
fields, probably through magnetic particles in the brain. Literature about
standing stones and megaliths has, in the past, suggested this sense, that, in
modern times, may be drowned out by the busy electro-magnetic stimulation (radio
waves, micro-waves etc.) present in modern life.
These islands are separated by four large inward-flowing rivers, which
are aligned as if to the four points of the compass– though of course there is
no north, east, or west at the North Pole: every
direction from this centre is south. [my italics]
The brain has a dense blood supply. Arterial blood supply to
the human brain consists of two pairs of large arteries, the right and left
internal carotid and the right and left vertebral arteries.
The other name of the Meru is Jayadhara, which means “Jaya support”, or the structure that
supports the sun. Throughout human history, and in many cultures, there has
been an analogy drawn between the land of the gods in the sky, and the solar star, or sun. In Indian cosmology,
Mount Meru is the axis of the earth, around which the stars revolve, and above which
the sun shines. Continuing the conceit, we come to the zenith of the nervous
system: the pineal gland. This pea-sized, pine-cone-shaped
gland is located in the middle of the brain. “Once a revered tool of seers and
mystics, it’s now largely dormant, its divine purpose lost over the ages. It’s
the organ of supreme universal connection and its significance appears in every
culture throughout the world” (from Gaia,
an online blog).
In some species of amphibians and reptiles, the pineal gland
is a light-sensing organ, known as the parietal eye, and is also called the
third eye. René Descartes believed the human pineal gland to be the
"principal seat of the soul".
This great spaceship, suspended above our heads like a Christmas ball… A
big transparent ball that we almost expect to see turn to rain the snow on the
roof of the world of the gods.
People who claim to have the capacity to “see” with their
third eyes are sometimes known as seers.
Spiritual traditions from India refer to the third eye as the ajna (or brow) chakra. The third eye refers to the gate that leads to inner realms
and spaces of higher consciousness. It is often associated with mystic
experiences such as religious visions, clairvoyance, observation of the chakras,
the ability to perceive auras, precognition, and out-of-body experiences, such
as astral travel and lucid dreaming. Buddhists regard the third eye as the
"eye of consciousness".
The human spine has evolved a number of adaptions that help it handle
upright walking, such as its typical S shaped curvature.
It hardly needs to be pointed out that one of the major
evolutionary steps in the journey to becoming modern humans was the development
of an upright posture, or bipedalism.
Perhaps the mythical snake or serpent in Christian mythology (referring to a
paradise that we know as Eden) was a reference to the newly-evolved s-shaped
spine? If you recall Genesis, you may remember the story that Eve was cursed
with delivering her offspring in pain and anguish thenceforth, after having
eaten from the Tree of Knowledge. ‘To the woman he said, "I will make your
pains in childbearing very severe; with painful labour you will give birth to
children”. (Genesis 3:6).
[…] such a pelvic form had profound obstetrical consequences for
australopithecines, resulting either in a different mechanism of birth from
either later humans or nonhuman primates (Tague and Lovejoy) or in degree of difficulty during labour (Berge et al).
(-Yearbook of Physical Anthropology [Vol. 35,
1992)
Why did Mrs Rourke, circa 1960, draw the tree at the centre
of her simplistic earth illustration? The human nervous system- that is, the
structures in the brain combined with the spinal cord and motor and sensory
nerves- can be seen to look like Yggdrasil,
the giant ash tree of Scandinavian myth, the axis of the world, and recognised as the Tree of Life.
…floors or terraces [in the World Tree] are identified
with “heavens” or cosmic levels […] By climbing them, the pilgrim approaches
the Center [sic] of the World and,
on the upper terrace, he enters the “pure sphere”.
…it is on the loftiest mountain plateau of the Inner Continent, several
thousand feet higher than any portion of the surrounding country. It is the
most beautiful place I have ever beheld in all my travels. In this elevated garden
all manner of fruits, vines, shrubs, trees, and flowers grow in riotous
profusion…
(- Willis George Emerson, “The Smoky
God”)
The World Mountain is located in the centre of the universe, with stars,
planets and many suns revolving around it. There are thirty-three gods who
communicate with each other there.
The vertebral column usually consists of 33 vertebrae. A spinal nerve carries motor, sensory, and autonomic
signals between the spinal cord and the body. In the human body there are 31 pairs of spinal nerves, one on each
side of the vertebral column. Neurons (or nerve endings) communicate with one
another by releasing chemicals called neurotransmitters, such as dopamine and
glutamate, into the small space between two neurons. Glutamate is the major
"excitatory" neurotransmitter in the brain, which means that it helps
to activate neurons and other brain cells.
At this stage of the mystical experience, it is the abundance of dopamine
in the brain that fills the person with unspoken satisfaction. […] There, humans exhibit differences in gene expression when compared to
the other primates.
Specifically, the researchers’ results showed that interneurons
expressing genes that code for dopamine synthesis are present in humans’
striata but not in non-humans. This, they say, is part of what makes human
brains uniquely human. - Stav Dimitropoulos, How Does Neuroscience Explain Spiritual and Religious Experiences? (blog)
In the Judeo-Christian scriptures, Adam and Eve are told by
Yahweh that they may eat anything in the Garden of Eden, except “the fruit of
the tree of knowledge”. There are various theories about what this “fruit”
might have been. Predictably, there are those who assume that, because it was
Eve who tempted Adam, the fruit was sexual. Others construe the imagery as
meaning that man and woman have created their own downfall through science and
technology. But what if the sanction against the fruit was not primarily about
the actual fruit, but the act of reaching
up for it? Does the narrative refer to the transition to becoming upright
human animals? Is the species memory of “being cast out of Paradise” a memory
of human life before mankind became erect?
"[…] the eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew that they
were naked."
– Genesis 2
What could the myth mean by “naked”. Does it mean “hairless”,
as opposed to having an overall covering of hair, as in other primates?
Our sweaty hairlessness, the theory goes, allowed us to hunt for longer,
chasing nutritious large game that eventually helped give us the energy we
needed to fuel growing brains.
-Melissa Hogenboom, earth (BBC
webpage).
Interestingly, the eating of the fruit of the tree of
knowledge, the need to cover themselves, and the loss of the close relationship
with other animals in the Garden of Eden were all connected events in the Old
Testament. Until they were cast out of Paradise, Adam and Eve were companions
of all the animals, and they could even speak to each other. What happened to
turn man against his companions, and instil the fear of man in those relatives
of his? Was man cast out of paradise at the point at which he evolved beyond
the vegetarian diet of earlier primates?
The human gut consists mainly of the small intestines, which are
responsible for the rapid breakdown of proteins and absorption of nutrients.
The ape's gut is primarily colon, which indicates a vegetarian diet. This
structural difference supports the hunting hypothesis in being an evolutionary
branching point between modern humans and modern primates. Buss also cites
human teeth in that fossilized human teeth have a thin enamel coating with very
little heavy wear and tear that would result from a plant diet. The absence of
thick enamel also indicates that historically humans have maintained a
meat-heavy diet. Buss notes that the bones of animals [that] human ancestors killed found at Olduvai Gorge have cut marks at
strategic points on the bones that indicate tool usage and provide evidence for
ancestral butchers. – wikipedia, citing Buss, David (1999).
There is that other troubling and incongruous assertion in
Genesis: was Eve created from Adam’s rib? Why would ribs be important in this
memory of the evolutionary watershed that is the development of an upright
posture? Like every other part of this creation myth, the story of Adam’s rib
is possibly a species memory of the evolution of the bipedal human’s ribcage,
as opposed to the hominids who preceded.
[…] humans and other great apes differ in the relative mediolateral
dimensions of the upper and lower ribs, which leads to a difference in the
overall contour of the rib cage (barrel-shaped in humans, conical or
funnel-shaped in the great apes, as seen in anterior view). […] The overall
shape of the hominoid thorax may be an adaptation that serves to better
dissipate tensile forces in the body during under-branch suspensory behaviours.
(- Centre for Academic Research & Training in Anthropogeny, MOCA)
Yet another change brought about by the evolution to
bipedalism would have been related to the fact that early humans experienced
changes in their vestibular systems. The vestibular system in a modern human is
the sense that maintains the upright positioning of the head and neck, and it
originates in the labyrinths in the inner ear. Thus, once again, reaching up
for the fruit may have been more significant than the fruit, itself.
[…] the evolution of large vertical canals accompanied the evolution of
bipedalism, suggesting that the anterior and posterior canals are important for
bipedal balance.
- Brian L. Day and Richard C.
Fitzpatrick, Cell Press
Now, there is that other issue that I have not yet mentioned,
but that cannot be ignored, and that is the fact that, in Genesis, it was Eve
who “tempted” Adam to eat of the fruit that would lead them to be cast out from
the garden. Resulting from this action, all daughters of Eve would be subjected
to pain in childbirth, women would be dominated by men (because societies would
be hunter-based), son would murder son (competition and territoriality), and
mankind would be born with the stain of the “original sin” (evolutionary step)
henceforth.
Why Eve?
[Sexual] Selection, one may say with some confidence, has shaped the evolution
of the human mitochondrial genome. This miniscule piece of genetic information
has already been a key part of the study of human evolution and population
dispersal, and it seems likely to continue playing an important role as we
tease out the role of selection.
(- Elson, Turnbull and Howell,
American Journal of Human Genetics)
Darwin correctly realized that sexual selection could be
mediated by male–male combat or by a
female's choice of attractive males [my Italics]. His original definition of sexual selection, which appeared in The
Origin of Species, appears to
emphasize male–male combat [i.e., “a struggle between the males for possession
of the females” but even then he was clearly aware of female choice. (- andMate choice and sexual selection:
What have we learned since Darwin?)
In humans, as in most multicellular organisms, mitochondrial DNA is
inherited only from the mother's ovum. (- Wikipedia)
In other words, it was Eve’s mitochondrial DNA that not only
was one of the main sources of genetic divergence through her sexual selection
of a mate, but it was through Eve that the changes caused by that divergence
continued on down through the generations.
It is fair to propose that, according to our species memory
of being “cast out of Paradise”, we have inherited a nostalgia for the way we
were before we evolved into an upright species, and that the blame is put on
the female/mother for her supreme role in selection of a male partner, and her
crucial place in the increments of evolution, through her mitochondria.
We have established, hypothetically, that the fall from
Paradise was a species memory of the evolutionary step that encompassed
achieving upright posture, losing body hair and becoming better hunters, but
what does that have to do with the seat of Paradise being the human brain and
spinal cord. As I mentioned, briefly, at the beginning, this narrative is about
the evolution of mankind (the macro narrative) and the evolution of the foetus
(micro). At the intersection of the two, I believe, is the germ of the
archetype of Paradise.
Watching human baby brains grow is a little like watching evolution in
action. A new study shows the human brain regions that expand the most during
infancy and childhood are the same parts that expanded the most during
evolution as humans diverged from other primates. – Livescience (blog)
Like a fractal, the evolution of the foetal brain contains
within it the story of human evolution. It is possible that, within our
nostalgia for a time before we were upright, there is the sense of loss that
originates in expulsion from the maternal womb.
According to legends about the country of Meru, the land
possessed a perfect climate and atmosphere that allowed humans to be fourteen
feet tall and to live for a thousand years. In Genesis, when expelled to the
outer world, Adam and Eve and their descendants were exposed to a vastly
inferior environment wherein they began to age and to become aware of their
mortality. Post-Eden, man is now considered one tenth of what man was in the
Golden Age of humanity “when Gods and men walked and talked together”. If we
accept that the symbolism of Eden/Paradise/Meru may belong to an ancient memory
of the brain and its evolution, we might also consider why it is that the story
of a “fall” or expulsion occurred in this widespread narrative.
As the brain cannot retrieve the data of our foetal state directly, it
will employ a great tool to remind us about our stay inside the womb in order
to relate to a state of total well-beingness [sic], and that
tool is called nostalgia.
-Tom Thomas, Nostalgic (Quora online
forum)
[…] to remember and cherish our
earlier developmental periods as better and blissful. Hence the participant
deity stems from the perfect beginnings before time. The participant religions
anchor their rituals on techniques of “going back”. - Shlomo Giora Shoham, The Genesis of
Genesis: The Mytho-Empiricism of Creation
Just as modern man experiences a nostalgia for earlier
evolutionary phases, before bipedalism, he experiences the germ of that
nostalgia in his sense of loss at being expelled from the womb, the original
“Eden”.
This place is called by inhabitants the "navel of the earth,"
or "the cradle of the human race."
In Vedic India, intuitive knowledge of human consciousness and the
universe was rendered into myths and symbols of profound insight, remarkable
beauty and power, unintelligible to the modern intellect trained in analytic
discourse. It seems likely that they were the result of intuitive faculties of
mind that are no longer well developed or may one day yet become far more
prevalent, as the capacity to read, write and calculate was at one time a rare
endowment and considered a sign of genius.
-
Garry
Jacobs, A Brief History of Mind and Civilization, Cadmus, 2016
The image of “Paradise/Eden/Meru” that has remained vital
throughout modern human history and mythology may be a pre-verbal schema of the
brain and spinal cord, representing a nostalgia for the innocence of
pre-bipedal hominids and, simultaneously, of the developing foetus, which is,
in itself, the evolution of modern man on an individual scale.
[…]there are deep embodied metaphorical structures within language
itself, and meaning is rooted in the body (not the head).
Rather than being based in words, meaning stems from the actions
associated with a perception or image. Even when seemingly neutral lexical
terms are processed by our brains, we find a deeper simulation system of
images. […]It is possible that Homo sapiens of 40,000 years ago were
graphically literate before they were verbally literate.
(- Stephen T Asma, ‘The Evolution of
Imagination’ (2017).
Why attempt to decode a rich mythology, such as the
all-pervasive symbolism of “Paradise”, and turn it into some kind of mundane
analysis of the human brain and the story of foetal expulsion from the womb? It
is only as a 21st Century human that we can look on the mysteries of
the human brain, of foetal development and evolution as mundane. Modern science
is a bit like butterfly collecting. By the time you have euthanized your
specimen and pinned it to a corkboard, the butterfly is no longer the
enchanting beast that it once was. Science can make us uninspired, as can that
other party-pooper, organised religion.
How wonderful, indeed, would such a country be: a place of
mystery and wisdom at the heart of everything? And the most wonderful thing of
all…it is a country hidden deep inside our DNA.
Slowly, but with no doubt or hesitation whatever, and in
something of a solemn expectancy, the two animals passed through the broken,
tumultuous water and moored their boat at the flowery margin of the island. In
silence they landed, and pushed through the blossom and scented herbage and
undergrowth that led up to the level ground, till they stood on a little lawn
of a marvellous green, set round with Nature's own orchard-trees—crab-apple,
wild cherry, and sloe.
"This is the place of my song-dream, the place the music
played to me," whispered the Rat, as if in a trance. "Here, in this holy place,
here if anywhere, surely we shall find Him!"
― Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in
the Willows
A favourite passage in a favourite book… but a product of its
time, nonetheless, for, is it not Her
that we remember? Is it not the innocent
earth, the untouched “Paradise”, the womb of the archetypal Mother that we long
for? The Greek words nostos (‘return home’) plus algos (‘pain’) are
the root of that bittersweet ache that we mean by “nostalgia”.
In the telling and infinite re-telling of myths about
“paradises”, humankind has created an unattainable place out of its interior
life: the geography of the brain, spinal cord and nervous system, that, to the
contemporary rationalist, may seem mundane and knowable, but to humans of times
past, represented the most awe-inspiring of mysteries.
"Plan
of the Brain-Mental Action" Sivartha 1912 Human Mind Antique Book
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