Thee Incredible Weirdness of Being
Created | Updated Aug 5, 2004
The problem that a lot of people have with the existence of God is not so much the concept of a divine creator as the fact that powerful people make out that the only way to 'Him' is through religion.
This would not be so bad if it were not for the concept of Creation. Many seem to feel that they must either accept the Holy Books precisely as given or not at all. This has led, unfortunately, to Fundamentalism and gender feminism1. Luckily, pretty much everyone of sound mind (and, perhaps, more advanced souls) takes the story presented in Genesis as a metaphor, if not an outright fiction, invented by people in an attempt to explain the origin of the world.
Fundamentalists condemn such ideas as blasphemous, but they would do well to heed the words of St Athanasius, bishop and patriarch of Alexandria:
>'Should we understand sacred writ according to the letter, we should fall into the most enormous blasphemies.'
Origen, widely regarded as the most accomplished Biblical scholar of the early church, said that
'The Scriptures were of little use to those who understood them literally, as they were written.'
The Gnostics have (or at least had) many alternative theories as to what really happened in Genesis. A few of their seemingly more outlandish claims are backed up by the Qabbalah and it is these that I feel deserve actual attention. Of particular note is the idea that
Adam, in fact, represents the entire collective souls of humanity; accounting for extraterrestrials, Adam would, in fact, be all souls in existence, apart from those of God Herself, the primary Hindu triad, and possibly angels and lesser gods. Some Gnostics name Adam as the son of the two Aeons Sophia and Abraxas, whereas others identify him as the
collective souls of all the humans (and other organisms, obviously, both on Earth and on other planets), whereas still others combine these two ideas, with the son of Sophia and Abraxas splitting up into all the different souls that now inhabit our galaxy. The ultimate quest of the Gnostic is a return to the True World of Light, a place of formlessness and total unity, which is very similar to most accounts of Kether, the highest sephirah of the Qabbalistic Tree of Life (the sephiroth represent and correspond to many things, including worlds, Heavens, Hells, grades of initiation into magickal orders, tarot cards, star signs, etc.)
I believe that the story of Creation is literally true, but has been totally misinterpreted by Fundamentalists. God creating Adam and Eve actually means that She placed souls within the Universe, and through various (and sometimes numerous) reincarnations, we can eventually return to the unity of Adam, which, since God is within all of us and we within God, is equal to unity with god Herself, as I wrote last week. Adam and Eve simply represent the masculine and feminine aspects of all organity and are really one being, at least in the beginning; this idea also crops up in Gnosticism and Greek mythology. Genesis says that the Universe was created in six days, which is quite possibly the length of time after the Big Bang that the first heavy atoms started to appear; prior to this, all there was was hydrogen and helium, perhaps with a little bit of lithium. The creation in the blink
of an eye is surely true from God's point of view, since She would not really notice billions of years passing as humans evolve from bacteria.
Evidence of both my theory of Creation and Evolution (which is, by the way, also literally true) are to be found in the same sentence of the Qu'ran. I can't remember the exact reference, but it says that Allah created us all from a single being - both physically, in the sense of ultimately evolving from bacteria, and spiritually, in the sense of our souls coming from Adam, the primordial man. It is interesting to note that the Egyptian primordial god was named Atum, which is very phonetically similar. Also, since Adam is Hebrew for 'red,' it may be that the first humans appeared in the red earth regions.
Adam's first son, Cain, is a farmer who kills Abel, Adam's second son and a hunter. I believe that Cain and Abel refer not to individual human beings, but to groups of people and the story is about how farming killed hunting. Howard Bloom has another theory on this in his book The Lucifer Principle, but the basic idea he presents is that they fight because they are brothers, in the same way as Hindus and Buddhists, Christians and Muslims, Hebrews and Arabs, and all siblings fight; therefore, Cain and Abel seems to be a Jungian construct for the sibling rivalry which permeates all life. Speaking of Jungian constructions, the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil is also a Jungian construct, representing humanity's mental and physical evolution to a state where God can be in our minds as well as our souls. Adam 'fell' because he sought this knowledge too early; however,
some Jewish writings indicate that Adam and Eve had to defy God so that their descendants might sing Her praises. Moses parting the Red Sea is an early indication of a psi phenomenon, and the Flood was, of course, mainly confined to Mesopotamia, where it would have seemed as if the entire world was flooded; if we take world to mean 'home region' rather than 'planet,' then it did indeed flood the entire world - as far as the Hebrews were concerned. The 'Flood' may also have applied to the sinking of Atlantis, Mu, and Lemuria; from the points of view of those actually on the lost continents at the time,
it would have seemed as if they were being flooded rather than sunk. Since the lost continents were for a long time the centre of all culture, their loss could indeed be seen as the flooding of the world. Another hypothesis is that the last Ice Age ended much later than is usually thought, which brought with it rising ocean levels which, again, would have seemed like floods to people at ground zero. Archaeological and palaeontological records show that the last woolly mammoths were dying out just as the first pharaohs were building
their pyramids, so this theory is not as far-fetched as it may at first seem.
Until we meet again, my friend, this is Hussassan, signing off.
Thee Incredible Weirdness of Being Archive
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