My eighth grade teacher told us one day that Isaac Newton
had declared, "Matter can neither be created nor
destroyed." I timidly reminded her that the Bible began with,
"In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth."
She, in monotone, repeated Mr. Newton's statement to us,
with neither explanation nor comment. In all innocence, I had
ventured into the dangerous territory of what public schools
could (or could not) teach in the USA. I just shut up.
So began my fingers-crossed attitude to Bible reading and
believing, and my fascination later with Charles Darwin's
theories. I am now 88 years old and have, in the everlasting
meantime, engaged in attempts to reconcile evolution and the
Bible to my own satisfaction. That led me back to the creation
stories in Holy Scripture, having graduated from General
Theological Seminary in New York City in 1951, and having
served as pastor to six parishes, to the relationship between
myth and history.
Rene Girard theorizes that behind every foundational cultural
myth there lies an actual incident of deadly, bloody, human
violence, concealed and "nice-ified" by the myth itself. It
puzzles me, therefore, that he develops his foundational biblical
anthropology around the story of Cain and Abel, in which
the actual violence is not concealed but explicit. It seems to
me that the better question could have been, "What was the
violence concealed behind the myth of Adam and Eve?"
Among the early modern biblical anthropologists (in the
late 19th and early 20th centuries), Adolphe Lods, J.F. McLennan,
and W. Robertson Smith were theorizing from evidence
within the book of Genesis that a hidden time of matriarchy/
matriliny existed before the patriarchy came into being. Their
evidence consisted mainly in noting (1) several marriages
that could not have been possible under the prohibitions of a
patriarchal system; (2) that some women held an obviously
established right to name their children; and (3) that early genealogies,
stretching back to Adam and Eve, were apparently
manufactured. They entertained the possibility that there was
a time (a hidden time not stated in the text) when male participation
in the process of procreation was not understood;
a time when there was no word "father," nor any concept or
knowledge of "fatherhood." Women, in the primitive perception,
produced children for the community sui generis, or
through the mysterious agency of an invading Spirit. This part
of these anthropologists' theorizing provides for an element
of "hiddenness" required by Girard's theories. But was there
violence as well?
I want to leave Adam and Eve for the moment, and jump to
the present to the work of James Gilligan, M.D., faculty member
at Harvard Medical School. He
had been chief psychiatrist for the
State of Massachusetts' penal system,
and wrote the book,
Violence,
in 1996 in which he concludes
from his study of, and personal
acquaintance with, his most violent prisoners, that patriarchal
systems mandate violence. He writes, "The fundamental challenge
for our time, I believe, is to break the link between civilization
and patriarchy so that we can continue to receive the
benefits of the former without having to pay the costs of the
latter. If humanity is to evolve beyond the propensity toward
violence that now threatens our very survival as a species,
then it can only do so by recognizing the extent to which the
patriarchal code of honor and shame generates and obligates
male violence. If we wish to bring this violence under control,
we need to begin by reconstituting what we mean by both
masculinity and femininity." (p. 267)
If violence is endemic to a patriarchal society, as Gilligan
says, and I believe he's right, we may ask what actual violence
occurred at the beginning of patriarchy (and civilization,
and history, and time) to start us off in that direction.
In Girard's psychological theorizing, he identifies the human
propensities to "mimic" and to "desire" as the ultimate
roots of violence. When baby A desires a toy that baby B
holds, a rivalry for the object desired sets up, and a tugging
match ensues. He calls this "mimetic rivalry." One human
being mimics the desire of another human being for a given
object, and rivalry follows.
I ask: What may have happened in a primitive community
when it discovered the secret of male participation in procreation?
Accepting Girard's theory, I believe that a mimetic rivalry
sets up between men and women for the desired object,
namely the children. Where men previously had no claim to
producing the children that women were bearing, they now
wish to claim full and exclusive production and ownership.
"My doll, not yours!" becomes, "My child, not yours!" But
for a man to know that a particular woman is carrying and
bearing his child, he must keep her away from other men. In
whatever else primitive patriarchal marriage may have consisted,
it surely necessitated the sequestration of each woman
by each man from all other men. From this circumstance an
exclusionary rite of marriage would necessarily evolve, and
an establishing of patriarchal households.
But prior to the evolution of patriarchal marriage, and
immediately upon the discovery of paternity, the community
would be faced with the problem of many existing children
whose fathers could not be identified. Because the new
patriarchal system would require the legitimizing of children,
i.e., public recognition of the child's male parent (as in: man
C begat child D), living children whose male parents could
not be identified were probably slaughtered by men over the
vigorous objections of women. Patriliny replaces matriliny.
'The fundamental challenge for our time, I believe, is to break the link between civilization and patriarchy so that we can
continue to receive the benefits of the former without having to pay the costs of the latter.' James Gilligan, M.D.
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The priority of the new word "father" over the established
word "mother" must be gained and perpetuated at whatever
cost. Several modern archaeological digs in the Mediterranean
area have uncovered large numbers of remains of infant
bodies collected together in funerary urns. The ritual sacrifice
of first born male children was still being practiced in Judah
in the 6th century BCE (See Under Every
Green Tree, Susan Ackerman,
Harvard Semitic Monographs 46, 1992).
One may conjecture
that until
the length of the
gestation period
for humans became
common knowledge, the
legitimacy of every first-born
child would be suspect, and that even
after the nine-month pregnancy was certain, the killing of
first-borns would have already been ritualized as a "sacrifice,"
and carried out anyway. This unprovable scripting of early
human behavior would provide the violence needed for these
conjectures to fall in line with Girardian theory. I offer this
script as a reasonable but horrific description of the violence
that lies behind the myth of Adam and Eve.
I equate the forbidden fruit "of the tree of the knowledge
of good and evil" with "the knowledge of male participation
in procreation." Once that knowledge is acquired, civilization,
patriarchy, history, and time begin: first, with the slaughter
of unnameable, unpatriarchable, children; second, with the
curse of male domination and female sequestration; and third,
with the establishment of male genealogy as the first basic
structure of history (C begat D). But the terrible slaughter
is quietly disremembered, and the historical/patriarchal
community lives henceforth in denial of its violent origins.
Rituals and prohibitions in all patriarchal societies thereafter
are structured to prevent adultery and bastardy (the new and
dangerous possibilities that were not dangerous or possible in
prehistoric matrilineal cultures).
I believe this essay can be one of many possible historical
interpretations of the myth of Adam
and Eve, and may lead to interesting
new attempts
in Christology, anthropology,
sociology,
etc. I would
also hope that it
would prevent the
present assumption
by both Biblical literalists,
and even some modern Biblical
historians, that myth and history are necessarily
antithetical. We can assume that they complement each other.
Otherwise we are still left with two important questions:
"What really happened (i.e. history as opposed to myth) at the
beginning of time among men, women, and God?" and "Why
not now abandon patriarchy (easier said than done) in order to
reduce, and eliminate, violence in the world?"