Old Stories, New Interpretations : The Garden of Eden (Part II)
Forbidden Zones:
Growing up, Saturday trips to the downtown library were something of a family requirement - and I was not a reader. (It was only years later that I realized that I was in fact a naturally voracious reader - of audiobooks). But I did make the best of these childhood library trips. I would make my rounds of the library copy machines, looking under each to fish out lost change. I discovered that when I fed the change machine with my stash of new coins, the machine would occasionally glitch, and I would get more money out than I put in - something of a flaccid, but nevertheless entertaining enough, slot machine.
Something else that I remember about this library (that is winding me to the point of this entry) is the mysterious third floor. The first and second floors housed all the books for public consumption. The fourth floor was where the puppet shows, magic shows and story time happened. Every once in a while, however, on my way up to the fourth floor the elevator doors opened on the third floor. It was one of those floors that required a key to access. This floor was off limits to the public - sort of a backstage to the library. I’m still not sure exactly what happened there. But the eroding if not imaginative qualities of memory have morphed it into some type of dimly lit purgatory for books where unseen employees pushed oversized carts around under a haphazard grid of exposed ductwork.
I’ve always been interested in metaphorical 3rd floors - which brings me to the Gnostics.
First, Gnostics still exist, but the heyday of the Gnostic phenomenon was roughly 1600-1800 years ago. The Gnostics were not a religious sect and were not bound by a specific set up beliefs. If anything did bind them together, it was a quest for gnosis (or direct knowing) of a reality that was meta to this reality. If the first, second, and fourth floors of the downtown library represented a microcosm of the sense-based, physical world reality, then the Gnostics would have been interested in the 3rd floor as a portal to the true library and would have rejected the other floors as a false library.
I wouldn’t identify myself as a Gnostic, but I wouldn’t say that I don’t share any philosophical traits with Gnostics, either. Perhaps I am Gnostic-adjacent. Whatever the case, I found the Gnostic spin on the Garden of Eden creation myth much more interesting than the orthodox take (which I won’t outline here because, especially if you’ve grown up in the footprint of the Judeo-Christian world, you already have at least the gist of the orthodox version).
Essentially, the Gnostics inverted the Garden of Eden story. “God” was actually something of a temperamental child that was an accidental character to emerge out of the higher realms. He would have probably had to sit at the kids table at celestial family gatherings. This God, or “Demiurge” was a corrupt being that created Earth as a material prison. Eve, in this story isn’t the bi-product of Adam’s rib but is actually a messenger that visits Adam in a dream and essentially red-pills Adam (side note: “the Matrix” is a highly Gnostic film). A further notable twist on the story is that God’s own creator, Sophia (wisdom) mystically enters the serpent to serve as an instructor on the true origin of Adam and Eve. Not only is the couple higher in rank than the god who created them, but they are not actually even a couple, or separate beings, in any historical sense, according to the Gnostics. Adam, Eve, and the serpent are all understood as representing different elements within the human psyche. For more on the Gnostic Genesis, you can check this out since it goes far more in depth than I do, here.
I offer a short primer on the Gnostic Genesis, as I see it as a useful metaphor for describing humanity’s relationship to technology and artificial (or emergent) intelligence. I’ll go into that in Part III.
