WOODS AND ARCHETYPES:

CHARTING THE COURSE OF UTOPIAN-DYSTOPIAN DIALECTIC IN THE

FORMATION AND RE-WORKING OF GARDEN OF EDEN MYTHS, TROPES
AND SYMBOLS

THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF

PHILOSOPHY, DEPARTMENT OF COMPARATIVE LITERATURE, JADAVPUR
UNIVERSITY

BY

SHUBHANKAR DAS
ROLL NO. - MPHFCL 1512
SESSION 2013-2015
REGISTRATION NO. - 115334 of 2011-2012

Acknowledgement
I would like to express my most sincere appreciation and gratitude to my guide and supervisor
Dr. Samantak Das without whose counsel this dissertation would have been impossible to
complete. I also would like to show my thankfulness to Dr. Kavita Panjabi, the able Head of the
Comparative Literature Department for providing such a wonderful steering for me to be able to
pursue research in my field. My heartfelt gratefulness goes out to Dr. Sucheta Bhattacharya for
being a source of extremely essential encouragement. I am truly thankful to all the teachers in
our department for providing the warmest of intellectual ambiences possible; to my dad and
mom, its just not possible for me to show gratitude enough to you for being there for me
through thick and thin, you are the heights I never dare to reach. And to all my friends and
colleagues in Jadavpur University, its not mere thanks but here I shout Ana ki bayinakh!

Contents
Page no.
Acknowledgements

Chapter 1: Let there be a garden

Chapter 2: Neoteny: a journey for utopia

Chapter 3: Axis Mundi: tale of two trees

12

Chapter 4: Seeds, deceptions and heresies

17

Chapter 5: Dissecting the dialectics anatomy

27

Chapter 6: Fear and ambiguity: battle of two

hegemons

Chapter 7: Fall to utopia, or a rise to dystopia?

41

48

Chapter 8: Sonata and noise: a trijunction of

comparative methodology

Bibliography

55

58

WOODS AND ARCHETYPES:

CHARTING THE COURSE OF UTOPIAN-DYSTOPIAN
DIALECTIC IN THE FORMATION AND RE-WORKING OF
GARDEN OF EDEN MYTHS, TROPES AND SYMBOLS

Let there be a garden

Is the concept of the Garden of Eden a socio-cultural archetype? If yes, then does it emerge from
what Freud called archaic remnants1, fragments from mankinds racial memory that form a
part of the Jungian collective unconscious? The answer can be viewed as two-fold, one from the
point of view of a theist and another from that of an atheist. If one is to believe literally in the
religious books like the Holy Bible, then as per the Book of Genesis mans spatiotemporal history
started at Eden which subsequently left a permanent mark in his psyche, creating the archetype
of a heavenly garden of innocence that recurrently visits mankind in almost all of the worlds
major religious traditions where the extant racial memories from the subconscious, orally and
scripturally, gets elaborated, complicated and further spawned newer threads into the basearchetypical pattern. Like carrying the seed of the original sin, man also carries the neural seed of
Gods primal creations, of which Eden is perhaps the most spectacular. The post-lapsarian stage
is ontologically inbred with a deep thirst to return to that innocent state, away from the allegedly
and evidently dystopian sinful reality, into that utopia where men and God will again be one.
Away from such literal acceptance of religious scriptures, the archetype of Eden gathers both
anthropological and socio-historical value as being a symbol of pre-pastoral life with a nostalgicromantic connotations added to it after the introduction of agriculture in the mature phase of the
Neolithic age at around 12,000-10,000 B.C.2 as combined with the subsequent shift from the
rural communal life to the rise of urbanism at the juncture of the late Neolithic and Chalcolithic
ages in the modern day broadly defined area of the middle-east. In the earliest dawn of the
1

Freud, Sigmund "The Dream: Archaic Remnants and Infantilism in the Dream" lecture, 1920
Barker, Graeme, The Agricultural Revolution in Prehistory: Why Did Foragers Become Farmers ? Oxford
University Press, (2006): 200.
22

development of mans self-conscious cognition, he was engaged in a lifestyle that can be termed
as hunter-gatherer; just out of his beast-like infancy and yet to graduate into agriculture. While
discussing about anthropologist and archaeologist Juris Zarins work, Dora Jane Hamblin wrote,
the story of Adam and Eve inand especially outof the Garden is a highly condensed and
evocative account of perhaps the greatest revolution that ever shook mankind: the shift from
hunting-gathering to agriculture.3

Even Edin or Edn is the Sumerian expression for

uncultivated plain/lowland, and the word Eden can very well be derived from it.
This was the only point in history where the balance between man and nature was at its soon-tobe-lost perfection. It appeared to be idyllic to the later generations and they, perhaps, used it to
formulate the mythical structure of the divine garden. In the middle-east and the Mesopotamian
regions, where the concept of Eden originated, this gets particular significance as the primary
occupations of the people there were related to pastoral lifestyle. The ethno-linguistic groups of
Canaan or the area surrounding the nation of Israel on the Levant, who were the Amorites,
Philistines, Kashites, etc., were cattle herders, living a gypsy-like life of gathering whatever
nature had to offer. In spite of the later on rise of proto-cities like atalhyk, Jericho, etc. and
later cities like Eridu, Ur, Nineveh, etc., for the majority of the mass it still was the same old lifestyle that hardly changed if at all even after the gradual shift from stone tools to metals started.
Thus the symbol of lamb they equated with themselves, praying God to protect them from the
wolves, the symbol of garden they equated with the divine cradle of mankind, as in those
arid/semi-arid places the forests and oasis were very rare, and therefore were like heaven. So be
it from a theist or an atheist angle, Eden and related descriptions emerge out from those shards of

Hamblin, Dora Jane, Has the Garden of Eden been located at last? - http://www.ldolphin.org/eden/ (accessed
on 20.11.13)

memory retained by man which they either retained in their subconscious, or handed down
through subsequent generations, first orally then scripturally.
And in those unsure times of the ancients where the fragility of man was highlighted more than
ever, the creation of such a utopia away from any danger and with the promise of plenty, gave
their minds a space to be happy, to create, to be intoxicated in dreams. Maybe this was what later
gave rise to the literary concept of locus amoenus, an idealized place of safety, comfort and
creativity, carrying the connotations of Edena pristine landscape of ones mind, necessity
rising by each passing eon as cognition and community pawned away the balance man once had
with himself and with nature.
Judaism carries inside it the knowledge of the ancients from both the Mesopotamian and
Egyptian schools of magic. But for its creation myth, it loans heavily from the fertile crescent,
and researchers, like Juris Zarins and Jeffrey Rose 4 have found geological evidences and satellite
images to postulate the presence of an actual lush forestland in the present-day region of the
Persian gulf many millennia ago in the age before the world moved into the present inter-glacial
stage of the current Pleistocene ice-age that may have been the actual Eden and they have also
postulated that the biblical deluge or the Sumerian and Babylonian tales of flood and flood
heroes might be the remnants of the flooding and creation of the Persian Gulf that happened as
the ice sheets retreated and sea level rose, forcing men to migrate up the fertile crescent area into
the hinterlands of Mesopotamia. Though its credibility is heavily debated, the Eden motif stems
from the prehistoric Ubaidian culture running approximately from 7,000-3,800 B.C., from whom

Rose, I. Jeffrey, New Light on Human Prehistory in the Arabo-Persian Gulf Oasis, Current Anthropology, 51,
(December 2010): 849-83.

the myth was adopted and enriched by the successive civilizations of Sumerians, Akkadians,
Assyrians, Persians, etc.
There are legends of luxurious, lush, ever-happy lands called Dilmun in the Sumerians tablets,
and Sir Henry Rawlinson5 was the first one to connect it to the land of Bahrain in the 1880s but
the lack of any prominent high ground and no sign of human habitation in Bahrain during the
early annals of Sumerian settlement in the Uruk6 and Jemdet Nasr7 periods somewhat pales out
the theory. High ground is of utmost importance in the search of the Sumerian Garden of Eden
because of the frequent association of Dilmun with kur or mountain from which ekur gets
derived that is the mountain home or assembly of Gods that is further associated with the
Sumerian ziggurats like in the cities of Eridu, Ur, etc. Other than such mythical gardens or the
mentions of divine gardens in Mesopotamian literature like in the poetry cycle of Bilgamesh,
Epic of Gilgamesh, etc., the Sumerians were actually fond of and famous for building lush, well
irrigated gardens in their cities, prototypical among them may be the garden of the city of
Nippur 8 that acted to be the model for more famous gardens that subsequent Semitic kings and
emperors built in Mesopotamia, like the garden that Assyrian king Sennacherib had built in his
palace city of Nineveh that acted as a visual microcosm of his vast domains and which may have
been the source of inspiration for Nebuchadnezzar II, the Neo-Babylonian kings legendary
Hanging Gardens. Further east to the land of the Sumerians lies Iran where proto-Elamite and
Elamite traditions of gardening is almost as old as the Mesopotamians, furthermore they too
linked gardens with heavenly beings and creation. In fact the word paradise is from Pasargadae,
5

C. C. Lamberg-Karlovsky, Dilmun: Gateway to Immortality, Journal of Near Eastern Studies, The University of
Chicago Press, Vol. 41, No. 1 (Jan., 1982): 45-50 - http://www.jstor.org/stable/544617 (accessed on 19.07.14)
6
4,000-3,100 B.C.
7
3,100-2,900 B.C.
8
Delumeau, Jean, History of Paradise: The Garden of Eden in Myth and Tradition, Continuum, New York, (1995): 56.

the capital of the Achaemenid emperors who were famous for uplifting the Persian gardening
style of chahar-baagh to the highest level of artistic beauty and for the upcoming centuries as
the words Persia and Empire became synonymous so did the words paradise and Pasargadae.
Chahar-Baagh structure reflected the biblical description of the garden of Eden where the central
foci is a body of water created by the intersection of four cardinal streams/canals; researchers
disagree on whether this design was of Elamite or Sumerian in origin. This codified archetypical
legend of utopian garden is found even in the Norse mythology where the tree and the woods
Yggdrasil and Hoddmimis holt respectively upkeep the nine worlds and where the first man
and woman Ask and Embla were created by the gods.9 And after the future apocalyptic event
of Ragnark10, under the great ash tree Yggdrasil a new couple of mortals is prophesied to be
established with the names of Lif and Lfrasir wholl repopulate the world, thus bringing in a
cyclical pattern of cosmology unlike the Judaeo-Christian doctrine where Eden, the utopia, once
lost, shall never be regained, but rather through salvation can man gain its better and celestial
counterpartParadise, which is, another utopian archetype that, though is stemming from Eden
but unlike the latter, is not directly a part of collective unconscious because it resides not in faded
memory but in hope and imagination.

Larrington, Carolyne, (Trans.) The Poetic Edda, Oxford World's Classics, (1999).
Davidson, Hilda Ellis, The Lost Beliefs of Northern Europe, Routledge, (1993): 50, 74-75.

10

Neoteny: a journey for utopia

Cosimo Quarta wrote in the essay Homo Utopicus: on the need for utopia 11 that mans finitude
propels him towards infinitude, the mortal spatiotemporal restraints provoke him to go beyond
himself, yearn for something that he doesnt or will never have. The restlessness blooming out of
the desire of perfection coagulates with the knowledge of its impossibility gives rise to a
perpetual re-projection of its being. This is the genesis of mans need for utopia, something
that is ontologically attached with human nature itself. This is even more highlighted with the
phenomena of neoteny12, an evolutionary trend to be born earlier on a scale of inter-species
comparative birth-cycle so that foetal development is cut off at premature stage and juvenile
characteristics are retained in adults of the species, that humans have inherited more than the
other animals and thus has within him a perpetual immaturity that makes him ever-inquisitive,
creative, restless, rebellious and plastic. Thus, going on a quest for identification of some
land/nation/system where the socio-political and culture elements are either tangentially or
wholly magnified of that in his own times, filled with hitherto unavailable situations and one or
more of the Jungian or other archetypes because in that state of pure creativity his innermost
thoughts and memories materialize into images, symbols and codes of existencethus creating a
utopia.
Man is essentially nostalgic. Yearns for his direct past or communal past where, either according
to his own or racial memory, the present drawbacks in existence were absent or deemed to be so
coming from the rather curious form of Hegelian master-slave dialectic where man, in his
11

Quarta, Cosimo, Homo Utopicus: on the need for utopia, Utopian Studies, Vol-7, No-2 (1996): 162
Henke, W. and Tattersall, Ian, (edt), Handbook of Paleoanthropology, Vol-1, Springer Books, New York, (2007):
125-126.
12

attempt to over-throw his forefathers gods end up reinvesting in it so deeply that ultimately what
comes out as the creation is the ideas more and more symbolized and crystallised into certain
archetypes that involves simultaneous deconstruction and reconstruction of the frameworks.
Placing ones personal childhood innocence inside a universal framework gives one the idea of
Eden. The codification of loss. Along with it, is the eternal tussle between the philosophical or
rather philosophised forces of entropy and enthalpy that creates and destroys at the same time,
balances through destabilizing and becomes a potent force in myth building where one remolds
the reality by adding, rejecting, changing, magnifying, reducing various elements. Its a popular
motif that man builds houses to recreate his mothers womb, the ultimate shelter; a creation that
both preserves and negates the presence and the past, a motion simultaneously backward and
forward in time. Thus its the establishment of dialectic. One of the most central dialectic in
mans historical loci and foci, that is the dialectic of utopia-dystopia; holding the central tensive
spot for Eden and its tropes that has operated as both a genre and something that might be
denoted as a meta-theme in the scope of comparative studies, especially in literature and
theology.
Freud had argued13 that in being civilized, man sacrificed a large part of his instinctive happiness
to get security through rules and codes imposed upon himself. Civilization is thus like the
Blakean symbol of tyger where both the chain and hammer works to enforce freedom through
restraints14. From here man can walk in either of two directions. One is the road of anarchic
rebellion, where man rejects civilized constraints in favour of his instinctive freedom, and be a
romantic idealised hero akin to Prometheus. Those who view Adams fall from this angle can

13
14

Freud, Sigmund Civilization and Its Discontents (1930)

What the hammer? what the chain,
In what furnace was thy brain? Blake, William The Tyger, Songs of Experience (1794)

argue that it wasnt a fall but a subconscious rebellion of choosing sexual-instinctive freedom
over the utopian limitations that had forced the couple to be unaware to all erotic connotations of
love and with it their fundamental inherent aptitude; making it a Freudian fight against the
security of Eden, provided by God against any form of satanic harm that can roughly be seen as
the birth of the subjective where man realizes his subject-ness. And as that security itself fails
with the serpents intrusion into Gods plan, the rebellion for free disorder over artificial order
becomes somewhat inevitable. This is just what Efraim Sicher says: The Fall from Grace is,
after all, preferable to enforced happiness. 15
The other road that lies before man is a plunge into existential crisis, as the cognition of the
unsolvable tension between security and instinct, along with the human self-consciousness and
the void it creates within itself, can give rise to the acute state of Kiekegaardian anxiety where
one questions and finds hollow the entirety of being. Following Kierkegaard, then, if the ego
surrenders to God, the trapped tension is released with a spiritual urge for salvation and an
existential urge for paradise, the starting utopia or dystopia from where everything went wrong.
In Eden he is free; he gets a second chance to start all over anew from the blankness of so-called
reality. But this is certainly not escapism, as unlike the romantic idyllic Arcadia, Edenic utopia
carries within itself the same dialectic tension (between free-will and providence) as in the real
world, albeit in a much more authoritative texture and with far more clarity, at least for a postinnocence soul.

15

By Underground to Crystal Palace: The Dystopian Eden Comparative Literature Studies, Vol. 22, No. 3,
(Fall 1985), pp. 377-393

Axis Mundi: tale of two trees

Every utopia or dystopia has an object or symbol or codified idea in its centre around which the
rules and action in the tale occurs. For Terry Gilliams 1985 movie Brazil its the Ministry of
Information, for Huxleys novel Brave New World, its the bokanovsky process of human
cultivation, and for Eden its the two trees as depicted in the Book of Genesis. Though generally
its considered there is a single tree in the middle of the garden, Genesis 2:9 tells us - the tree
of life was also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. 16 The
entire process of God commanding Adam and Eve, the serpents words, fall and eviction of the
couple out of Eden is centered on the two trees. It is curious to know that Lord only forbade
Adam to eat the fruits from the tree of knowledge and not from the tree of life; this can be
interpreted as a mechanism to keep man from developing a conscience and ego, to grow past the
infantile innocence, be corrupted and thus fall. Thus Eden was like a womb where contact with
external experience was nullified by the divine commandment. Same is the case with literary
depictions of utopias where the ruling factions keep the populace isolated behind both physical
barriers like wall, and also ideological and psychological barriers, away from contact with the
outside world, lest the all-encompassing aura of the utopia be dimmed and man be corrupted
with knowledge thatll make them outgrow the utopian conventions.
The tree of life can be interpreted as the vessel of human soul, a way to be immortal that Adam
and Eve were before the fall. But this immortality wasnt ontological but situational, as soon
after they were evicted out of Eden, out of supply of the fruits of life, mortality plagued them to

16

Holy Bible New King James Version (NKJV)

death. Why did God say Behold, the man has become like one of Us, to know good and evil.
And now, lest he put his hand and take also of the tree of tree of life, and eat, and live forever?17
So it wasnt merely eating the fruits of either of the trees, but a simultaneous partaking of both
the fruit of knowledge and life that was to go against Gods will. Why? What was the synthesis
of the two fruits, which would have broken down providence?
The answer can be compartmentalization, as the combination of immortality and knowledge
would have made man a potent force in the cosmos and along with his free will, if he would have
rebelled, like Lucifer, against God, maybe another war of the heavens would have been ensured.
Compartmentalizing immortality away from knowledge prevented it, ensuing in a mental
infinitude being trapped inside physical finitude, which, as described before, resulted into man as
we know today, a vehicle of aspiration, dreams and achievements; becoming a partner of neoteny
and acting as the central role in the aporia that man is. The serpent clearly lied when he said
you will be like God, knowing good and evil. 18, as simply differentiating between good and
evil is not divine, its just being stably into the Blakean state of experience where man uses his
free will to go either way, but what is most important to take note here is that may be for the
serpent what was divine or at least god-like was to be aware of the choice, to be conscious. Itll
only through the third tree in the Christian belief, not in Eden but in Golgothathe cross, that
man will have the chance to enter the final state of higher innocence, at-one with God,
redeemed, and ready to enter the higher-Eden or Paradise. Thus whatever may be the ulterior
motive of God regarding the fruits, the trees are clearly the foci of the utopia of Eden, or rather
the entire spiritual history of mankind. Thus its of no surprise that the trees too, have become

17
18

Genesis 3:22 (NKJV)

Genesis 3:5 (NKJV)

another archetype in human socio-cultural psyche and had been used and reused time and again
in religious and literary depictions of all sorts of utopias and dystopias.
Quran doesnt name the tree, but keeps it as the central code of the garden. Mesopotamian postAkkadian cylindrical ceramic seals with visual narratives of man, woman, tree and snakes had
been found dating back to 2200 B.C. though some specialists have rejected such Edenic
connotations and have denoted the serpent as the Akkadian deity Nirah and the narrative to be
one of fertility worship, though the central depiction of the tree in all such Akkadian and postAkkadian cylinders is of much importance. Apart from Sumerian and Semitic examples, in the
Indo-European cultures too the trees play similar roles in uto-dystopian cosmology; as said
before, in the Norse mythologys prose and poetic Eddas there are mentions of an immense ashtree called Yggdrasil around which the nine worlds existed, and gave a magical spring of
knowledge and youth that the realms drank from the tree, thus the tree here partially plays the
role of Elohim-like almighty himself. Also the tree archetype had been used by many literary
practitioners, especially J.R.R.Tolkien, who, in his middle-earth legendarium, loaning heavily
symbolically and linguistically from different strands of Indo-European and Semitic
mythopoesy, has used both a unitary and a non-dualist binary approach towards using the motif
of trees. The primal deity, Eru Ilvatar, created the two trees of Valinor, Tolkiens own Eden in
Ardahis imaginary world. Telperion and Laurelin were the names of the great trees and they
brought light into the land in the first age of middle-earth (Arda); they were destroyed by the
giant spider Ungoliant, on the behest of the satanic antagonist Melkor or Morgoth who had
committed his satanic rebellion by refusing the almighty and highlighting his own creativity by
creating discord in the music of the ainur19 that resulted in Ardas genesis. The last fruits and

19

Tolkien, J.R.R, Ainulindal The Silmarillion (1977).

flowers of the trees were made into the sun and moon by the angelic figures of Valar. 20 This is
clearly a parallel high-fantasy counterpart of Edenic symbols and philosophical ideas using the
same non-dualist binary representation of the two trees. Tolkien also used a unitary method
elsewhere in his legendarium to depict the Edenic trees under the figure of a single tree, the
White Tree of Gondor, the last free kingdom of men on Arda, which was a perpetual symbol of
hope. Hope of mans freedom from tyranny of Mordor, the evil kingdom, hope of Gondor getting
a legitimate kingdom on its throne, just like the Christian worlds hope of the second coming of
Christ, the king of heaven and earth, symbolized by the continued placement of hope on the tree
of Golgotha and emphasizing less on ego and individuality but more on the community and the
communion, something that lies in the centre of the utopian-dystopian dialectic and the core of
the subject-object aporia that man himself is.
Thus the factors of light, white and hope, as in Tolkiens legendarium so in the Holy Bible,
combine to form the element of axis mundi, a compass that sets the rest of existence into order
and harmony, a symbol of pristine divine connectivity and glory. Another form of axis mundi
can be found in Le Guins novel The Dispossessed where the instantaneous inter-planetary
communication device ansible, invented by Dr. Shevek, finally becomes a mechanism to link
between the two worlds of Annares and Urras and becomes the foundation of future in the two
utopias. 21 The trees everywhere connect the realms of the heaven and earth, bringing the words
and brilliance of the Creator into the realm of the created, like upon Gods commandment and in
His physical absence from the garden, the trees acted as the de facto divine figurehead for Adam
and Eve, thus to violate God, satan first needed to violate the axis mundi and thus set on a
domino effect of corrupting the world and making a dystopia of self-consciousness, mortality,
20
21

Tolkien, J.R.R, Lord of the Rings (1954-55) and The Silmarillion (1977).
Le Guin, Ursula K, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia, (1974)

experience and free will, until man can achieve, albeit and allegedly through divine grace, a
second and higher Eden, the Paradise, and his salvation through the new axis mundi that replaces
the two treesChrists cross. Thus establishing a utopia or de-establishing it (or in other words
discovering the true dystopian nature of the hitherto accepted utopia) are equally impossible
without the establishment and de-establishment, respectively, of the axis mundi.

Seeds, deceptions and heresies

Christianity develops ahead of Judaism and other Semitic and non-Semitic Canaanite religions as
per as the simultaneous use of the two philosophical doctrines of triune symmetry and nondualist binaries are concerned. The latter is of utmost importance in this discussion on the
utopian-dystopian nature of the Garden of Eden as the concept of divine garden is itself in the
form of a non-dualist binary, as understood through a dialectical approach.
Drawing both from Talmud and Kabbalah, one gets to the concept of the presence of two Edens,
one, the terrestrial lush garden of the Book of Genesis and Ezekiel where the innocent mortals
were placed by Yahweh and was named as lower Gan Eden. And the other garden, in the realm
of heavens where will live, according to rabbinic eschatology, the souls of the righteous people,
known as the higher Gan Eden that will appear at the end of time.22 Cognate to this tradition is
the Christian non-dualist binary of Eden and Paradise as much discussed in the New Testament,
apocalyptic literature and later by different church fathers, scholars, monks, etc. In St. Augustine
of Hippos early 5th Century theo-philosophical treatise De Civitate Dei contra Paganos or City
of God one can get perhaps the best description of Paradise, the New Zion, the garden of heaven
where the saved will get placed at the day of the last judgment. It is considered to be a place
infinitely more beautiful than Eden, where free will and Providence will achieve a perfectly
harmonious balance, reminding again of the state of higher innocence or post-experience in a
Blakean tongue, and itll reflect yet another dialectical synthesis, that of the entire habitational
history of man, that between the rural/pastoral and urban lives; perhaps a state where finally all
22

Garden of Eden, 1906 Jewish Encyclopedia - http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/5428-eden-gardenof (accessed on 03.05.14)

the aporias will be un-knotted and the object and subject will unite and no longer the need will be
there to differentiate between utopia and dystopia.
Any one-sided headstrong utopia fails owing to the rigidity of its fundamental construction, but
an utopia or dystopia that can incorporate seemingly immiscible elements together to perfection
and on the way create a constant and undeniable hope of better-ness never fails completely.
Mans past and present, pastoral life and the urbane elements, if is promised to be combined in a
future of paradise, it becomes ontologically an insuppressible wish for an ever-insecure and
neotenic psyche. Man always cherish for his childhood, as nostalgia is elementary. And even the
zenith in pessimism cant deny a subconscious wish for a better future that a life in Blakean
experience forever demands as a machinery of enthalpy trying desperately to bring order into
anarchy. These two forces add a new angle to existential crisis blossoming from that selfconsciousness and incomplete nature of knowledge which started the day Adam and Eve ate the
forbidden fruit. This crisis that can be quenched by various methods which also fuels his dream
of perfect order or disorder; and out of them, the religious vista of a promise for utopian paradise
is perhaps the most potent.
This journey through the entirety of past, present and future, becomes a huge ellipse or rather an
elliptical spiral from Eden to Paradise and from the worlds of reality, dreams and prophetic
promise, having the two foci in the trees of the fall and the cross of the salvation. Talking yet
again about archetypes, in Islamic tradition it changes and gets diluted with this elliptical
dialectic spiral becoming a non-dialectical circle, sans the concepts of either fall, original
sin23 or salvation, with a single foci of Allah himself, because unlike in the Torah or the Holy

23

Brown, Lawrence B. The concept of original sin in Judaism, Christianity and Islam http://www.islamreligion.com/articles/1776/ (accessed on 09.07.14)

Bible, man gets completely forgiven in the Quran and are reinstated in Allahs favour. Thus
though the righteous enters the Jannah24 and FirdawsJannahs highest level, the journey
remains as a linear progression of concerning simply the deeds of man (similar to Vedic
Hinduism) and not according to the combination of mans actions to get salvation and, most
importantly, Lords divine Grace. But either way, the concept of Eden-Paradise remains a
journey from utopia-to-dystopia-back to-utopia and whether this journey is an actual physical
journey or a journey of cognition and recognition is what that gives the genre of utopiancacotopian literature its prime field of variety and experimentation throughout the ages.
Man is a mixture of black and white, carrying the blood of utopia and dystopia simultaneously in
the veins of the society; if everything had its origin in the Eden then this heterogeneity must have
the Edenic times as its germination point. This was the theoretical base upon which was built the
so-called heretical theory of two seed-line or the Serpent seed doctrine which states that the
serpent mated with Eve to have Cain as the infernal offspring and thus, along with Seth, mankind
carries the blood (seeds) of both Satan and Adam. The oldest documents containing this doctrine
can be identified in early Gnostic writings like the Gospel of Philip, dating back to 350 A.D, but
Irenaeus and later mainstream Catholicism and Protestants rejected it as explicitly heretic,
though to this day it has a significant minority of adherents like Christian Identity followers,
Daniel Parker, William M. Branham and Branhamists, Arnold Murray, etc. Even in Jewish
theology, the serpent-seed theory emerged in midrashic texts like Pirke De-Rabbi Eliezer, Rabbi
David Max Eichhorns Cain: Son of the Serpent, and also in Kabbalist traditions where it was
24

The Arabic word for Eden is "'Adn," which, according to the commentators and lexicographers, means "fixed
residence," i.e., the everlasting abode of the faithful. "'Adn," preceded by "jannat" (gardens), occurs ten times in
the Koran (suras ix. 73, xiii. 23, xvi. 33, xviii. 30, xix. 62, xx. 78, xxxv. 30, xxxviii. 50, xl. 8, xli. 12), but always as the
abode of the righteous and never as the residence of Adam and Eve, which occurs in the Koran only under the
name of "jannah" (garden), although the Moslem commentators agree in calling it "Jannat'Adn "(the Garden of
Eden). Garden of Eden 1906 Jewish Encyclopedia http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/5428-edengarden-of (accessed on 03.05.14)

known as The Theory of Origins. The Zohar tells, Two beings, Adam and Nachash, had
intercourse with Eve, and she conceived from both and bore two children. Each followed one of
the male parents, and their spirits parted, one to this side and one to the other, and similarly their
characters. On the side of Cain are all the haunts of the evil species; from the side of Abel comes
a more merciful class, yet not wholly beneficial -- good wine mixed with bad.25 and postulates
that Yahweh created two Adams, one with soul and the other soulless, the latter being the
serpent or Nahash/Nachash. So, as from then on, through the lines of Cain, the cursed, and Seth,
the blessed, man has got a mixed blood of two seeds, that of Adam (from God) and that of the
serpent (from Satan), explaining both the elements of virtue and vice, sin and salvation, utopia
and dystopia.
It all springs from Genesis 3:15 that states And I will put enmity between you (serpent) and the
woman, and between your seed and her Seed; He shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise His
heel.26 This also can be considered as the first prophecy of Christs birth, because Eves seed
meaning a virgin birth, will someday conquer the seeds of Satan, thus placing the serpents seed
as an antitype to Christ, giving rise to the more popular and mainstream Christian concept of
Son of the Fallen-One. Adherents of Christian Identity theology, a radical right wing modern
day heretic sect, claim that all Jews are descendent of Cain, the cursed one, and are thus the true
progenies of the infernal serpent 27. This only helps to make the real world of today a dystopia of
communalism and nothing more. Whereas the other sects, as named before, following the dual
seed theory believe that, as the lines of Seth and Cain inadvertently mixed at some point in our
history, we all carry both the seeds of Adam and Satan, thus placing us where we truly are, in
25

Zohar 1:36b
Holy Bible (NKJV)
27
Borgeson, Kevin and Valeri, Robin Christian Identity, Terrorism in America,
Jones & Bartlett Publishers, (2008): 52-55.
26

between being the agents of utopia and cacotopia, with our free wills to guide us to our ultimate
end.
Another problem arises when an attempt is made to establish the identity of the serpent vis--vis
Satan. Were they one and the same or the snake was influenced by Lucifer? Its very difficult to
say as the Holy Bible is quite silent on any proper discussion on Satan28. Whatever maybe the
case, the serpent, prior to Gods curse and losing its limbs, is considered to have been a creature
of exquisite beauty by midrashic, Gnostic and many heretical texts. This apparent beauty helped
it to tempt Eve, primarily sexually, as in those innocent times, man was yet unaware of the
pleasurable non-reproductive functions of sex, as the original sin was not for sex but for the use
of sex just for pleasure which man discovered when he ate the fruit of knowledge, became
conscious of his nudity and sexuality and, away from the fruit of life or soul which would have
tempered the knowledge into insight and wisdom, ended up being in the state of experience, and
fell.
This concept of beauty as a weapon of deceit has been recurrent in mans thought and creativity,
for example in Tolkiens depiction of the dark lord Sauron of Mordor. Sauron, primarily an
angelic Ainur before his fall, was the lieutenant of the original satanic dark lord Morgoth, just
like the snake following Satans will. He, during the second age of Arda, deceived the races of
elves, dwarves and men, by crafting the One Ring from behind the physically and verbally
beautiful guise of Annatar, before being defeated and banished into the hideous body-less form
of the panoptic Eye of Mordor, just like the serpent being cursed in Eden by God and becoming
the reptilian as we know of it today. This concept is useful in the study of utopian-dystopian

28

Barely biblical books talk about either the devil and the serpent or of their connection. Notable difference being
Through the devil's envy death entered the world (Wisdom of Solomon 2:24).

literature as most dystopias operate behind beautiful garbs of plentitude, happiness, aesthetic
opulence and through it intoxicate human minds away from ever peeking behind the veils into
the naked and horrible state of affairs. Even Milton used this trope to construct the linguistic
deception of Satan in his epic Paradise Lost, that makes many readers fall prey to the Miltonic
trap and makes them denote Lucifer as some wronged proletariat hero; and so does Satyajit Ray
in his film Hirak Rajar Deshe (1980) where he used used diamonds as a symbol of beauty and
perfection to cover the sordid affairs of the apparently utopian but actually cacotopian utopian
kingdom of Hirak Raja.
Most fictional narratives, including utopian tales, run on a bundle of parallels and contrasts, often
overlapping, inside the fabric of their plots and philosophies. Analyzing Eden through the two
seed-line doctrine gives us such an example of striking parallel and contrast in the sexual
intercourse between Eve and the serpent and the mating of Lilith and Samael. Lilith, a female
demon from ancient Jewish folklores29, and itself derived from earlier Akkadian lilitu, lilu,
lilit, etc. and according to the 8th-10th centuries Alphabet of Ben Sira30 was Adams first wife,

29

Lilith, 1906 Jewish Encyclopedia - http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/9986-lilith (accessed on

06.05.2014)
30
After God created Adam, who was alone, He said, 'It is not good for man to be alone.' He then created a woman
for Adam, from the earth, as He had created Adam himself, and called her Lilith. Adam and Lilith immediately
began to fight. She said, 'I will not lie below,' and he said, 'I will not lie beneath you, but only on top. For you are fit
only to be in the bottom position, while I am to be the superior one.' Lilith responded, 'We are equal to each other
inasmuch as we were both created from the earth.' But they would not listen to one another. When Lilith saw this,
she pronounced the Ineffable Name and flew away into the air
Adam stood in prayer before his Creator: 'Sovereign of the universe!' he said, 'the woman you gave me has run
away.' At once, the Holy One, blessed be He, sent these three angels Senoy, Sansenoy, and Semangelof, to bring
her back.
Said the Holy One to Adam, 'If she agrees to come back, what is made is good. If not, she must permit one
hundred of her children to die every day.' The angels left God and pursued Lilith, whom they overtook in the midst
of the sea, in the mighty waters wherein the Egyptians were destined to drown. They told her God's word, but she
did not wish to return. The angels said, 'We shall drown you in the sea.
'Leave me!' she said. 'I was created only to cause sickness to infants. If the infant is male, I have dominion over
him for eight days after his birth, and if female, for twenty days.
When the angels heard Lilith's words, they insisted she go back. But she swore to them by the name of the living
and eternal God: 'Whenever I see you or your names or your forms in an amulet, I will have no power over that

before God created Eve from Adams rib. Lilith rebelled against God and mated with the
Talmudic archangel Samael, a fallen angel according to some sources, before leaving Adam and
Eden on her own accord. So following the serpent seed doctrine, a woman going against Gods
commandment in Eden and tasting the forbidden fruit of non-reproductive sexuality by being
unfaithful to her husband becomes the story of both Eve and Lilith, establishing a patriarchal
misogynist depiction of woman which ultimately shines off as being the first written-down tales
of pro-feminist rebellion in mankinds history. But this parallel string comes hand in hand with a
stark contrast in the fact that while Lilith rebelled on her own will, Eve did it on the serpents
deception, while Liliths fall left Adam unscathed, Eve offered the fruit to Adam and this time
the latter fell too. Here a metaphysical query comes into the focus, that regarding the true nature
of Yetzer Hara, but it shall be discoursed upon in a later section.
This dynamic mixture of parallel and contrasts has yet another faade to it. The fall of the
mortalsLilith, Adam & Eve has yet another, more ancient fall, linked directly to it. Its the fall
of Lucifer and the other angels after the angelic rebellion, a story dealt scantily in either
Talmudic or biblical traditions but described perhaps the best in Paradise Lost31. Satan was like
Lilith, rebelling on their own accord without any external provocation or temptation, he was very
much unlike Adam as even after his fall, Adam didnt turn away from Lord, but Satan turned
into the primary enemy of God and His angelic host. Satans fall was primarily due to the lust for
power, whereas Liliths fall, very unclearly described in any text available, was perhaps due to
her own assertion of personal conjugal freedom. Another dimension opens up with Lilith with
her being made from the same materials as Adam, thus shining light on the fact that utopia and
infant.' She also agreed to have one hundred of her children die every day. Accordingly, every day one hundred
demons perish, and for the same reason, we write the angels' names on the amulets of young children. When Lilith
sees their names, she remembers her oath, and the child recovers.
31
Milton, John, (1674)

dystopia are neither the same thing described differently and nor come dualistic binary, but the
thesis and antithesis that combine simultaneous yet opposing forces, radiating from the same
order-unto-chaos, under the spell from the same Word, yet forming the perfect aporia.
Therefore, instead of being a mono-dimensional utopian fiction, as Eden is often described to be,
its rather a very complex succession of falls between successive renewal and withdrawal of
utopian conventions on top of the sudden fissures that appear in the narrative or the meta-textual
space that helps one to glance directly onto the mechanisms of the hitherto accepted utopia and
makes one question its validity.
Yet another apocryphal heresy in the history of Judaeo-Christian thought is that of the legend of
pre-Adamites32. This legend has got nothing to do with polygenism as it is fundamentally a form
of monogeism, but which accounts for much folklore that spoke about a genesis before Genesis.
Be it the debate between Theophilus of Antioch and Apollonius Dyscolus of Egypt in 170 A.D.
regarding the age of the world and the anomalies in traditional knowledge about the creation man
or the challenge to Biblical Adamism by the theurgist Roman Emperor Julian the Apostate by
supporting the doctrine of co-Adamismmultiple pairs of Adam and Eve create by God, the
canon of Christianity and Judaism was established by deliberately erasing some parts with which
the liturgy perhaps was uneasy about, like the books of Apocrypha, story of Lilith and the idea
that man existed before Adam and Eve.
The kernel of pre-Adamites lay in Genesis 4:17 which speaks about Cain and his wife. As till
then Adam and Eve only had given birth to Cain and Abel, where did this wife come from?

32

Maas, Anthony, "Preadamites." The Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol. 12. New York: Robert Appleton Company, (1911)
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/12370a.htm (accessed on 14.07.14).

Some have said that she belonged to the race of giants or Nephilims 33 described in Genesis 6:4,
some have even said that she must have been an angel, but the theory mostly recognized ever
since the Age of Enlightenment was that of pre-Adamism. Just like Noahs family were the only
human left after the deluge, there may have been a similar catastrophe due to divine will to erase
all but few of the human beings created before Adam arose in the Eden, and who later on got
mixed into Adams line of descent, starting with Cain. This myth of successive creation,
destruction and again the creation of utopia is archetypical in human creative history, be it in the
story of Noahs Ark, the film Knowing (2009) or Richard Jefferies After London (1885).
Similarly in the pre-discussed apocalyptic event of Ragnark in Norse mythology, Lif and
Lfrasir will be the only couple of mankind left to repopulate the world, starting from the
heavenly garden under Yggdrasil. Eden is perhaps a locus amoenus even for Lord God who
fabricates a new world after the destruction of the last one, engaging thus into a never-ending
process of making utopias. This is perhaps the core idea, besides trying to physically create
dreams, behind the numerous efforts by man to set up pre-planned utopian communities all over
the world, again and again.
It is very much a normal phenomena for man to engage into realizing his dreams and wishes, to
try to erase everything and create from the scratch. Or in short, consciously or unconsciously
emulate the divine pan-creation, albeit on minuscule levels. This is the reason for the utopian
societies like Shakers of England and America in the 18th century founded upon the teachings
of Ann Lee, Society of the Woman in the Wilderness in 17th century Philadelphia led by
Johannes Kelpius, Ephrata Cloister in Pennsylvania established in 1732 by Johann Conrad

33

Nephilims were offspring of the "sons of God" and the "daughters of men" before the Deluge according to
Genesis 6:4; the name is also used in reference to giants who inhabited Canaan at the time of the Israelite
conquest of Canaan according to Numbers 13:33.

Beissel, utopia of the black-skinned people called the Exodusters in Kansas during the 1870s,
etc. Even Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey planned to set up an egalitarian utopian
community called the Pantisocracy on the banks of the Susquehanna River in the United States
during 1794, but unfortunately the plan never was materialized.
The legend of the pre-Adamites has even been put forward to clarify the question that genetics
have put against the Edenic concept of mankind descending down from two persons only. The
argument had been that, to account for the genetic variations present today in human genome, the
genetic mutation rate must be insanely high if mankind is the descended of a single couple; thus,
the presence of pre-Adamites, or even the co-Adamites, can fit Genesis doctrine snugly into
modern genetics.

Dissecting the dialectics anatomy

How to divide something with zero without getting error for the result? Similarly how to analyze
the heavenly garden on the lines of utopian-dystopian literature? Its akin to standing on ones
head because most of the factors that underlie all depictions of utopia or dystopia in fiction
almost fully germinate, consciously or unconsciously, from the archetypical forefatherEden
(combining the complete mythopoeic journey as described in the first section of this dissertation)
which is the kernel of the collective unconscious kept alive through racial memory and
generations of verbal and textual repetitions. Also the placement of it before the development of
basic human cognition and properly formed self-consciousness makes it even more difficult to
draw any definite line without calculating uncertainty.
Almost all literary utopias are planned cities/states, generally they succeed a phase of anarchy or
war or any disaster after which, following pre-determined vistas, the new nations are built using
set guidelines, the main aim is to avoid the condition which the utopias have replaced to come
into being; and the societies are constructed with a definite and rigid hierarchial pattern, much
like the case of Eden. In Orwells 1984 the three super-states Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia rise
after a global war, using set philosophical guidelines of English Socialism, Neo-Bolshevism and
Death Worship respectively. This thing holds true even for real-world utopian nation building,
e.g. Hitlers Third Reich was built with nazism on the foundations of an economically and
politically devastated post-WWI Germany, U.S.S.R. was in its turn built with communism on the
ruins of Tsarist Russian Empire, etc. It holds true for Eden too. Before Lords pan-creation The

earth was without form, and void; and darkness was on the face of the deep.34 This is the
material and ideal chaos, even a chaos of consciousness, which, unlike Greek mythology, wasnt
divine itself, but just the petri-dish on which God cultured His creations. This chaos itself sprang
from absolute zero through creatio ex nihilo35 as per Genesis 1:1 In the beginning God created
the heavens and the earth36, thus contradicting the classical philosophical foundation of ex
nihilo nihil fit meaning that out of nothing comes nothing. But how was Eden itself constructed?
Genesis 2:8-15 describes quite meticulously the planting of the trees, placing of the different
animals and birds and most importantly the origin of the four rivers of EdenPishon, Gihon,
Phrath and Hidekel. Thus, being the forefather of all codified utopias, Eden arose from the most
unimaginably violent state possible, nothingness and chaos, following the Almighty Creators
detailed plan whose blueprint is present in Torah, Holy Bible, Kabbalah, etc. and the founding
philosophy was of course the Word which came from God and was God Himself. 37
Intimately woven into the plannedness of the utopias construction is its isolation from the
outside world. This isolation is what that saves it from a broader philosophical implication of the
second law of thermodynamics. From entropy. The enforced order of utopia, to be constructed
over disorder, requires the input of significant amount of energy, which, if left in direct and open
contact with the surrounding low-energy state of disorder, dissipates due to its inherent entropy
and falls back to the chaos it once emerged from. Thus it must be isolated and carefully guarded.
Plainly speaking, if not properly isolated, itll go the way Rome went in the hands of the Goths,
Visigoths, Vandals, etc. Judeao-Christian tradition, even Paradise Lost, holds that Eden was built
atop a steep-walled hill amidst a vast plainbeing a perfect visual metaphor for order rising
34

Genesis 1:2 (NKJV)

creation out of nothing (Latin)
36
Holy Bible (NKJV)
37
Gospel of John 1:1-3 (NKJV)
35

amidst chaosguarded by the angels with flaming sword which turned every way 38 Even the
Sumerian joyous garden of Dilmun39, their holy land and from where they supposed to have
arrived in Mesopotamia from and where creation itself is said to have taken place as per the Epic
of Enki and Ninhursag40, was said to have been located amidst the middle-eastern deserts and
upon a raised ground akin to a table-top mountain, the desert and the cliffs both acting as
isolators. Like the isolating mechanism in the Matrix film trilogy41 was neuro-stimulated virtual
reality or that in Tolkiens Mordor (a dystopia)42 were the physical barriers of mountains,
swamps, fortified gates and walls, Edens isolation was a combination of various factors like the
steep walls of the hill, angelic vigil, etc.
Utopias and cacotopias are congenital binaries. Whatever maybe the end results, the former carry
potent traits of the latter and vice-versa. These archetypical traits can be traced back to the
Edenic legends with varying degrees of success. Dystopias need constant policing and, if
possible, 24 hours surveillance to ensure the smooth running of the principles upon which it had
been founded; it being a constant struggle against entropy that is present not only outside the
realm but also in the dystopias own habitants who, if somehow discovered the basic fault of the
cacotopia, can pose the greatest threat. In the 1985 movie Brazil we find that through secret
police, speedy arrests, torture and information black hole, the state exterminates the dissidents,
quite similar to U.S.S.R. under the Stalinist purge or Haiti with its Tonton Macoutes. In 1984,

38

Genesis 3:24 (NKJV)

Scholars disagree on the exact location of Dilmun, ideas varying from the western Arabian littoral to the land of
modern day Bahrain and though in the 1950s the Bahrain necropolis was unearthed and subsequent excavations
have shown that the Umm an-Nar culture to have been settled since the 2100 B.C. or so and that this Bahrainian
Dilmun have been the trade and commerce hub of the Bronze age, concrete material proof of its linkage to the
Sumerian civilization is almost non-existant.
40
Epic of Enki and Ninhursag - http://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/cgi-bin/etcsl.cgi?text=t.1.1.1&charenc=j# (accessed on
06.01.14).
41
The Matrix (1999), The Matrix Reloaded (2003), and The Matrix Revolutions (2003)
42
Lord of the Rings (1954-55)
39

the Thought Police, telescreens which spied on everybody and the dreaded room no.101, a
psychosomatic torture chamber, worked in a similar and devastating fashion. Though these are
archetypical codes, their genesis in Eden is pretty much covered in ambiguity because in spite of
God being truly the Almighty, unlike any dystopian dictator, He didnt enforce something like all
day and night-long surveillance to monitor the couple, or else the serpent would have never been
able to fulfill his scheme of sabotage. Though angels guarded the garden, none came to arrest
either Lilith or Eve. Was it due to faults in divine omnipotence and omniscience? Or was it
deliberately done by Yahweh to uphold mans freedom of will? Either way, a dystopian label
fails to stick so straight-forwardly to Eden, at least based on this criterion. And even the
punishment dished out to the couple and the snake wasnt savage or overt like what one
encounters in real world and literary dystopias; being the active defaulter, the serpent lost its
limbs and was cursed to slither on forever43, being the primary passive defaulter Eve was
punished with the pain of childbirth and male-dominance44, and lastly Adam, being the
secondary passive defaulter, was burdened with all the harshness of physical labour in the
wilderness of the world outside Eden45. No beheadings, lobotomy or psychological torture, rather
a forced entrance to the inevitable stage of experience and carrying even then46, a hope for future
redemption through Christ, as if codifying even through the punishments the dialectic nature of
the whole structure.
Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew that they were naked 47was
this the exact point of genesis of human self-consciousness? Was the fruit of knowledge the

43

Genesis 3:14 (NKJV)

Genesis 3:16 (NKJV)
45
Genesis 3:17-19 (NKJV)
46
Genesis 3:15 (NKJV)
47
Genesis 3:7 (NKJV)
44

progenitor of it? Or was it just a catalyst to something, the self-reflective psyche that was there
from beforehand? This question is directly linked to the exact nature and relation between man
and God in Eden, and also to the possible application of Hegels master-slave dialectic48
Dostoevsky, in his novel The Brothers Karamazov (18791880) speaks of a parable popularly
known as The Grand Inquisitor, dealing with the nature of human freedom and the fundamental
ambiguity related to it owing to the overlapping of a constant human need of a dominant figure
to rule over and protect him, and the constant rebellion that mankind undergoes owing partially
to his neoteny and partly to his internal entropy towards anarchy. Freud traced back the human
need for a master to "the fact of their origin from the primal horde. The leader of the group is still
the dread primal father; the group still wishes to be governed by unrestricted force; it has an
extreme passion for authoritya thirst for obedience."49 This Grand Inquisitor is the central
figure in almost all of utopian-dystopian literary corpus to whom the populace owe their
allegiance, an allegiance that stems from their id and a rebellion only occurs when the mutuality
of Hegels master-slave dialectic is fulfilled and man moves past this bondage into the actuality
behind the veil of the ever-powerful state emulating divine impermeability. In Edwin A.
Abbotts Flatland (1884) the rebellion of the square starts against the priestly circles, the
ruling elites, after, with the help of sphere, he understands the fallacy behind their limited
knowledge about dimensions. But Eden poses a problem into this scheme, as the ego that is
required to move past the allegiance to the Grand Inquisitor is simply not present before
committing the original sin. Thus the mutuality of Hegels Lordship and Bondage dialectic
breaks down and it becomes an one-sided game, which, even after the awakening of Adam and
Eves ego, doesnt take hold because a newly developed ego first turns inwards into its own
48
49

Hegel, Georg W. Friedrich Self Consciousness Phenomenology of Spirit (1807)

Freud, Sigmund Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921)

being before trying to look outside the being and measure the outside with the scale of the
inside. Thus, after eating the fruit, the couple was ashamed of their own nudity and it wasnt an
intended rebellion against God the Inquisitors control, rather the aforementioned scheme
enshrines perfectly if one takes the serpent or Lucifer as the fulcrum of the fall as he is not only a
part of the Hegelian dialectic but enforces upon mankind, along with God, a battle between two
hegemons and their apparently distinct, yet not-so actually, ideological fabric.
This relation to the central ruler also involves the factor of love and a curious interplay between
its three types: filia, eros and agape. Dystopias propagate by making love an one-way and
unstoppable relation between the populace and the state which is essentially a mixture between
filia and eros and precisely for that, the central authority is always personified to whom the oneway love, almost sexually devotional, reaches from the people, binding them to the dictatorial
father figure.50 For example 1984s Big Brother, Brave New Worlds Ford, Hirak Rajar
Deshes Hirak Raja, etc. Dystopia represses the primal instincts of sexuality and through it, the
thirst for freedom and individuality. Sex is either rationed to increase the need exponentially
which will then be subconsciously directed towards the authority as absolute bondage, or its
made available in such copious amounts that it loses its primal appeal and becomes just another
cosmetic pleasure that a man must indulge in from time to time; thus dystopia functions by
placing man in either of the sexual extremes and thereby making a slave out of his instinctive id.
Intimately linked to it is the concept of individuality thats the base of ones healthy ego, and its
shattered and erased by the state, to be replaced by a strong communal feeling which ultimately
fortifies the authorial position of the Grand Inquisitor who becomes the living metaphor of that
communal feeling, thus becoming such a pseudo-organic part of the peoples own selves that to

50

Rieff, Philip, Freud, the Mind of the Moralist, University of Chicago Press (1979): 235.

overthrow him will be analogous to killing oneself for the populace. Even more dangerous is a
radical identification of the I, which is a very curious case and seldom encountered in literary
pieces. One example can be stated of the point of pointland in Abbotts Flatland to whom his
own I was all that there ever existed, a fine example of solipsism or rather an overtly literal
illustration of vedantic advaitabad where the selfbrahman and the cosmic soulatman
are one and indivisible, the rest being illusion or maya. This is dystopia too, as such pseudonihilism of everything except the I places man nowhere and places him in the centre of the
collapsing nova of uto-dystopian aporia.
Eden can be interpreted on the same lines until the concept of eros comes into play. God, being
the central authority, talks seldom of love but frequently of rage and jealousy in Judaism. But
placing Eden in Christian perspective makes it far more suitable for the present argument as its
all about love, or agape to be precise. In Christian theology agape is considered to be the
dialectical synthesis of filia and eros, where the sexual elements (even the infantile sexuality of
filia), or rather the pleasure metaphor associated to it by post-lapsarian man, is cleansed by the
devotion towards Lord and by Christs blood which has cleared man of the original sin which, as
described earlier, is primarily the use of sex as a source of non-reproductive joy and a selfconscious rebellion against Yahwehs supreme authority. This is similar to what dictators of
dystopian states generally demand out of man. But can Edenic state be equated literally with
infantile condition? Otherwise the question of individuality, sexuality and rebellion dormant in
Adam & Eve even before tasting the fruit does not arise at all. Thus the thesis of God repressing
the eros and individuality of the couple to rule them absolutely maybe negated out because one
cant suppress something thats absent. So rather its the hegemonic dictatorial Lords way that
goes a step further than other dictators in the trick that prevents the development of eros without

breaking His commandment at first. Further the ambiguity remains when man falls because of
that eros only and development of their self-conscious individuality.
One of the most important touchstone for a utopia is the abundance of happiness and resources
which doesnt let the dystopian sense of purpose to grow as the latter element stems out of the
scarcity of resources, especially in over-populated and post-apocalyptic dystopias, and the state
uses it to keep the hungry population diverted towards that purpose instead of taking up arms
for their basic demands. Eden, on the other hand, is the universal and archetypical metaphor of
plentitude. Its filled with trees, animals, pastures, rivers, etc. with no rule to bind any being,
except Gods commandment of not touching the fruit of knowledge. Even then, this abundance
didnt make it the so-called Leisure-Dystopia as man wasnt an idle enjoyer of the lushness but
had the duty to tend and keep it51 So E. M. W. Tillyards portrayal of Adam and Eve as Old
Age Pensioners enjoying perpetual youth 52 and the rebellion coming from the saturation of
inaction is not fully correct. And perhaps this balance of work and happiness was the reason
why, according to medieval scriptural studies, that man managed to keep himself alive and build
civilizations when banished outside of Eden, because idly enjoying a pastoral life, like a hapless
parasite, was something absent from his blood even from the pre-lapsarian era; making Eden, as
far as this criterion is concerned, again not a dystopia per se.
Prior to the discovery of Gbekli Tepe53 historians, anthropologists, sociologists, etc. alike held
on to the hypothesis that it was only after the Neolithic Revolution of discovery and spread of
farming that man freed his mind from the need to constantly forage for food and could settle
51

Genesis 2:15 (NKJV)

Tillyard, E. M. V. Paradise Lost: The Conscious Meaning and The Unconscious Meaning, Milton,
Chatto & Windus, (1930): 282.
53
Mature/pre-farming Neolithic mountain non-habitational sanctuary found in Anatolia in 1963 and properly
excavated by Klaus Schmidt in 1994.
52

down and build large proto-urban communities, develop intricate ideas, build civilizations, etc.
But the discovery of elaborate shrines, non-habitational and ritualistic use of space in Gbekli
Tepe from at least eleven millennia B.C. puts that theory to the backside. Along with this one
must consider the Late Upper Paleolithic Model or Upper Paleolithic Revolution that posits the
hypothesis that it was around 50,000 years ago that man underwent the most important
evolutionary revolution till date, that is the development of cognition and the development of the
symbolic psyche as per Lacanian jargon, vis--vis proofs of this in the Paleolithic cave system of
Chauvet in France, etc. where through non-eidetic representations of animals in cave paintings
and anthropomorphic imagery and presence of musical instruments like flutes made from animal
bones. Thus Adam and Eve may represent the hunter gatherers, blessed under Gods unlimited
bounty, and the post-lapserian man is the farmer who relies not on the bounty but on his own
intelligence and skills, therefore violating Gods commandment and taking the idyllic Garden as
beastly dystopia and his hard-earned, though faulty, civilizational impulse as his non-utopian
utopia. So even if one disregards Zarins in his idea about the presence of Eden in the glacial age
Gulf oasis it is definitely not too hard to see that the Genesis narrative might be an infinitely
condensed narrative of mans proto-history and his cognitive and occupational revolutions,
progressively symbolized and modified as it got handed down from the Neolithic people of
Anatolia, possibly Africa and hinterlands of Eurasia through the Copper wielding people of
Ubaid-Samrran culture and finally into the age of writing to the Sumerians, Babylonians,
Hebrews, etc.
Man dissatisfaction with the mundane world and the boring cohabitation with himself has led to
the discovery and usage of different narcotics like marijuana, tobacco, opium, etc. but the most
potent type of it is surely the hallucinogens which alter reality, and take the bored man to a place

where he creates and discovers his own new world simultaneously. Here one must take into
consideration the Entheogen Theory as proposed first by Terence McKenna 54 which deals with
the use of psychoactive hallucinogenic substances like peyote, marijuana, datura, ambrosia, etc.
in religious, shamanic, or spiritual contexts for the deliberate creation of trance, visions, deeper
wisdom, etc. throughout mans history. This has been an active trope in various dystopian fiction
like in 1984 the drug-like serum soma55 is used to control people by diverting their excess
energy that, if unchecked, can destabilize the state, and also to force them to overlook the
deficiencies of the Fordian world-state. But in the Edenic context this turns upside down. As
McKenna proposes, the fruit of knowledge of good and evil may have been a reference to such
psychotropic fungi, lichen or fruit, which played a central role in human intellectual evolution.
Thus entheogen was not used to bind man to the divine utopia-dystopia, rather it was the thing
that freed him. Almost a parallel line can be drawn between this and the pre-Judaic Sumerian
myth of Adamu and Havva, created by the God Enki, where the couple were deliberately
cheated by the divine pantheon by not allowing them to partake in the fruit, which was not at
all forbidden or poisonous, but rather the source of magical immortality, thus giving a clearer
non-entheogenic basis for the Edenic fruit of knowledge and a complete reversal of the trope
used in the literary tradition which is not at all surprising owing to the fact that much of the
Torah had been not only derived from Sumero-Akkadian traditions but had been crafted in a way
that deliberately subverts certain crucial elements to posit the Judaic monotheism over the
polytheism and titanomachy of the elder religions or as Conrad Hyers said it was to repudiate

54

Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge - A Radical History of Plants, Drugs, and Human
Evolution, Bantam Books, (1992)
55
Hinting to the Indo-Iranian entheogen of soma (Vedic) or haoma (Avestan) that might even have links to the
Bactria Margiana Archaeological Complex or the Oxus Civilisation.

the divinization of nature and the attendant myths of divine origins, divine conflict, and divine
ascent.56
Newtons first law of motion states that motion remains constant unless acted upon by an
external force. Utopian-dystopian traditions incorporate this law through the concept of
outsider and prophet, the former being a person who, being physically or ideologically alien
to the realm of the dystopia or hidden-dystopia, enters the realm and sets into a motion an
inevitability and irreversibility that either destroys or permanently alters the dystopia. The latter
is generally the protagonist of the story who, either through the outsider or through his own
efforts, discovers the ugly truth behind the veil of the hidden dystopia and finally becomes the
prophet of a new age that again, either destroys or forever mutates the dystopia. Often both the
concepts of an outsider and a prophet are found to be realized in a same person. This is again an
archetypical trend in the entirety of human civilization to mark some people as the others and
continue to live until someone from that sphere of otherness intrudes and sets off a domino
effect. In Brave New World Bernard Marx is the prophet and John the savage is the outsider, and
though either of them fails to do something to the Fordian world, their intrusion and rebellion
surely mars the dystopia just as the sphere and the square changes the land of Flatland. In
Edenic mythology, as discussed earlier, this binary of the outsider and the prophet is
fascinatingly built around simultaneous strings of contrasts and parallels. The Edenic utopia is a
successor and parallel to the higher utopia of Paradise and both of them encounter cataclysmic
falls which their inhabitants undergo due to the destabilizing forces applied by different sets of
outsiders and prophets. The first prophet of change in Paradise was the archangel Lucifer who
was the first in Abrahamaic cosmic history to disobey God and fall as a result, along with many

56

Hyers, M. Conrad, The Meaning of Creation: Genesis and Modern Science, John Knox Press, Ed.-1, (1984): 53.

other angels. This change in the flow of heavenly utopia was without any outsider as then no
outside existed at all to harbour any outsider. Satans anomaly lay in the fact that the angels
from their very creation are placed on the pedestal of higher-innocence, thus having the concepts
of sin inside them ontologically inseparably, thus a little amount of free will easily caused him to
disobey, and due to his mastodontic ego, never repent. Thus, with his fall, Satan became the first
outsider and hell was the first outside; thus revolving just opposite the narrative of traditional
dystopian fiction.
Parallel to it is the first rebellion in the second utopia, that of Lilith in Eden. Repeating what has
been discussed earlier, Lilith was a female demon from ancient Jewish folklores and mentioned
quite a number of times in Babylonian Talmud, Akkadian myths, Epic of Gilgamesh57, ArslanTash amulets, Kabbalist traditions, Midrashic texts, Book of Isaiah58, and according to the 8th10th centuries Alphabet of Ben Sira she was Adams first wife. Though, this story about her
being Adams wife is debated by some scholars to be of pre-Christian times. She, unlike Eve,
was made from the same clay as Adam and thus refused to submit to him stating their mutual
equality, making her ideologically an outsider in spite of being physically an insider. However,
this wasnt the end of her rebellious spirit which went on to commit the first sexual anomaly in
Gods plan by deserting Adam and Eden and mating with the Talmudic archangel, or a fallen
angel

according

to

Christian

church

fathers

and

Rabbinic

scholars,

named

as

Samael/Sammael. Thus, again, exactly like Satan, being both the prophet and the outsider and
shattering the harmonious flow of the divine utopia. But unlike Satan, Liliths case is even more
problematic because as she is supposed to inhabit the same infantile state as Adam, without any

57
58

Tablet XII, 600 B.C.

34:14 (NKJV)

ego or concept of vice, how did she manage to rebel the way she did without any external
tempter if Yetzer Hara isnt ontologically present?
The next installment of rebel and fall is the better known and well documented case of the
serpent and the couple. If the serpent is taken to be Satan himself, then clearly a conventional
outsider motif is established as per the tradition of dystopian narratives, but if the snake is
accepted as just being a creature consciously or unconsciously influenced and controlled by
Satan then the outsider metaphor is bifurcated as being the combined effort of an outsider from
outside and an outsider from inside. Moreover, here, the serpent becomes both an outsider and
the primary prophet of change in Eden as it too rebelled against God by instigating Eve, and
suffered the punishment of Genesis 3:14. On the secondary layer Eve becomes the prophet and
when she gives Adam the forbidden fruit, and she in turn becomes the tertiary outsider, and
finally the trioAdam, Eve and the serpent falls when the utopian motion is disrupted by this
barrage of outsiders and prophets and man is relegated into this mortal world, which he has
termed as dystopia ever since. Curiously in Sumerian literature from where the Genesis story
might have been sourced from the case is strangely as medley of insiders in which the sage
Adapa is divinely tricked into refusing the gift of immortality. In the Myth of Adapa or Adapa
and the Food of Life, earliest attestation from the 14th century B.C. Kassite accounts, the god
Enki creates Adapa as the first human being and the latter brings civilization and kingship to the
city of Eridu, gifting him with immense wisdom. But when the mighty god Anu proceeded to
bestow upon Adapa the gift of immortality, Enki tricks him into voluntarily refusing it and thus
rendering mankind forever mortal.59 Thus its purely and simply a dystopian scenario where the

59

Adapa was the king of the city of Eridu and, the myth tells us, went fishing one day in the Persian Gulf when
the south wind suddenly capsized his boat and hurled him into the sea. Furious at this, Adapa broke the wing of
the south wind and for seven days the wind could not blow. The sky god Anu is angered by this and sends for

people who rule miserly bestow upon the ruled gifts in such ways that never makes it possible
for the ruled to either reach the podium of power at par with the ruler or even get to know how
he is being denied that. Researchers disagree on any unanimous decision on the possible reasons
of the change that occurred when Adapa got transmuted into the figure of Adam but it might be
for the fact that the Kohanim or the Jewish priests writing 60 those parts of the Genesis during the
time of Babylonian exile under Nebuchadnezzar might have done that deliberately to highlight
the difference between the deities of Babylonian polytheistic pantheon and the one true God of
theirs as in choosing between gods who trick and a God who punishes their choice was obvious
as per as their pride and ego were concerned as exiles in a foreign land.

Adapa to explain himself. Adapa receives counsel from Ea on how he should behave in the court of the gods. As Ea
is Adapa's father-god and creator, Adapa trusts him to tell him the truth. But Ea fears that Anu is apt to offer Adapa
the food and drink of eternal life and Ea is intent on making sure that Adapa does not accept the offer.
First Ea tells him that he should flatter the guardians of the gates, Tammuz and Gishida (two dying and reviving
deities) by making it known that he remembers them, that he knows who they are. If Adapa does this then the
guardians will let him pass without difficulty and will speak favorably of him to Anu. Once Adapa is in the presence
of Anu, Ea further tells him, he should refuse any food or drink offered because it will be the food of death and the
drink of death which will be offered as punishment for Adapa breaking the wing of the south wind. However, Ea
says, Adapa may accept oil to anoint himself and accept whatever clothing is offered.
Adapa does exactly as Ea suggests, respectfully honoring Tammuz and Gishida and refusing the food and drink
offered by Anu (though anointing himself and accepting a robe). Anu, puzzled that the man should refuse the food
and drink of life and the gift of immortality, sends Adapa back to earth where he must live out his life as a
mortal Mark, Joshua, The Myth of Adapa, Ancient History Encyclopedia http://www.ancient.eu/article/216/ (accessed on 25.04.15).
60
As per the Documentary Hypothesis.

Fear and ambiguity: battle of two

hegemons
Fear is another powerful primal sphere like love which has been used repeatedly in reality and in
literature alike to control, modify and mutate. In fact the portrayal of Lord throughout the Old
Testament is that of an angry and jealous God who controls people through commandments and
fear.
A man will starve and let himself be imprisoned if he is scared well enough. This is the maxim
that many in the authorial position have used since the time man discovered the art of untruth
and hyperbole. Its nothing but the cold war propaganda tactic used by both the U.S.S.R. and the
U.S.A. who kept their own citizens and allies terrified about the presence of their enemy and an
impending and inevitable attack; and under this guise of the ultimate enemy they imposed more
and more tax on the public, fertilized their war industries; in short profited to the maximum
extent from the industry of fear. This fear, alongside a heightened sense of patriotism made the
people very readily accept any sort of bullying and crime that their own countries imposed upon
them. Le Guin depicted this in the mutual paranoia between the people of Annares and Urras in
The Dispossessed, whereas Orwell depicted it even better in 1984 where he mapped the very
psychological core of this phenomenon through the depiction of a forever unseen foe of the state
Emmanuel Goldstein. The Big Brother held the people of Oceania in a death grip by spreading
propaganda about the danger from Goldstein and the people thanked him for protecting them
from that imaginary enemy and allowed all sorts of tortures and low quality commodities to be
sold under the decadent and malignant wrappers of patriotism and brotherhood. This mechanism

of propaganda and fear is usually linked to a back story which is in its turn linked to the
condition of the state before the utopia/dystopias construction.
Eden is further ambiguous due to the presence of such an account of fear which, unlike in many
dystopias, is perfectly legitimate. This back story is the tale of Satans and other angels rebellion
against God and their banishment into hell. God could have very easily used this story and
Satans enmity for him to keep Adam and Eve forever under His control and thus in Eden, but
He didnt. In fact, there is no mention any propaganda or any such negative speech by God in the
Book of Genesiss creation-chapters. And as told before, neither did He survey the garden all the
time, nor did He order the cherubs to do so in spite having the power and scope for its execution.
In the face of the genuineness of the satanic evil, this divine inactivity makes it even more
difficult to apply either of the tags of utopia or cacotopia, rather it creates a plethora of conscious
and subconscious archetypes being on the plane of eternal ambiguity.
Of every tree of the garden you may freely eat; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and
evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die...61 This forms perhaps
the first commandment of Yahweh to man, long before the time of Moses and his ten, and in here
one can witness the first example of a hegemon who injects his authority into his subject/s
without the need of a direct and coercive portrayal of power. Just like the ancient Greek citystates, God found an indirect leash on his creation to be better than a direct one, more so for the
fact that prior to the fall, or rather prior to the schism between the signifier and the signified,
the passivity of the yet unawakened consciousness has it subject-ness encoded into it from
beforehand, thus literally positing ideology (the Abrahamic divine logos) outside space-time. In
between the quoted utterance and Eves temptation by the serpent the tree of the knowledge of
61

(Genesis 2:16-17)

good and evil continued to act as an alter ego for God the hegemon, a screaming-silent symbol of
his authority, or as Althusser would have defined it an Ideological State Apparatus62, which is
any institution such as education system, the church, family, media, trade unions, and law,
which, though are formally outside state control, but serve to transmit the values of the state, to
interpellate those individuals affected by them, and to maintain order in the society via a
continued propagation of means of production of wealth and power, keeping the ruling class in
its secure podium. An ideology is a set of unconscious ideas and their conscious projections and
reflections that constitute one's goals, expectations, justifications, understanding and actions.
From the view of a Marxist analyst ideology, that is the dominant one, defines the superstructure
that helps the ruling class of the society or any proto-societal structure to propagate its rule over
the base/margin/dominated/exploited. This leash is not partly but wholly subconscious and
encoded throughout codes of culture, religion, entertainment, laws, etc. that acts in peculiar ways
into the psyche of a dominated one and helps to formulate a subject out the individual that is
best suited for the propagation of power and control for the ruling class. To a question pertaining
to the nigh cent percent success of the interpellation of an ideology one must venture into studies
that incorporate codification and decodification of socio-cultural play of signifier and signified,
and also perhaps into Jungian concept of a racial memory where master-slave archetypal patterns
never stops to function.
But what about Adam and Eve? Analysis of the Judeo-Christian creation mythology would bring
into foray the concept of Yetzer Hara or Yetzer Ra that is the inherent inclination towards evil
in a mans soul, and whereas one argue about the possibility of Yetzer Hara being dormant in

62

Louis Althusser, Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans.
Ben Brewster,
http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/althusser/1970/ideology.htm (accessed on 30/10/13)

prelapserian man, a better analysis would be to replace the Judeo-Christian concept of evil with
entropy, signifying the progression towards disorder (having enthalpy as its binary opposite
force that stands for a measure and tendency for intelligent order or design), that would snugly fit
it as an existential inclination inside every point of being balancing itself against any form of
order brought about by some intelligence or so-called scientific-design that can either be intrinsic
or extrinsic. Thus one can argue that similar to the subconscious roots of ideology, that pushes a
man in favor of the hegemonising forces, our soul or psyche carries motions or elements of
disorder inherent to its structure that can vehemently turn hegemony upside down, here can
being the highlighted factor for as long as this anti-idelogical force remains subconscious, just
viscerally dormant, the individual never achieves freedom from being a subject and merely acts
as an anomaly in a state-matrix who has to be then forcefully removed or rectified (punished and
redeemed, as per Judeo-Christian system) by the state or the power center using one of its
Repressive State Apparatus, as hegemony is as much a phenomenon enslaved to consent as it is
to coercion. Thus when the hailing comes a concrete individual is interpellated, and to counter
the force of hegemony it can be either unheard or misplaced by the individual, in which case the
state will continue its hailings through its multiple Ideological State Apparatuses until the subject
is successfully formed (or rather recognises itself as one), or even after hearing the hailing the
individual can actively refuse to respond to it. It is this second case that places us into the
problematic when Adam and Eve partook in the fruit of the forbidden tree.
As discussed before, factions of Judeo-Christianity, theologians and mystics could never agree
on the relation between the Edenic serpent and the identity of Satan. Whereas some posit that
they were but one, others opine that the serpent was merely another one of Gods creations who
was influenced somehow by Satan, owing to the latters well described deceitful nature and his

past not-so-smug relationship with Yahweh, and in turn the former tempted Eve to eat the fruit
and offer it to Adam, thus breaking Gods command. For the sake of the present argument about
a relationship between ideology and hegemony, let us take the second model to bring into
forefront the multiple cases of hegemonising forces each colliding with each other in the story of
Genesis. Lucifer was the first character in Abrahamic mythology to have acted consciously and
actively against Gods hegemony but was defeated by Gods divine army of angels that can be
very well taken to be an example of what Althusser defined as Repressive State Apparatus which
being those elements of a society like the courts, military, police, etc. are there to
physically intervene and thereafter act in favor of the ruling class by repressing the ruled class
through violent and coercive means whenever Yetzer Hara or the inherent entropy makes the
marginalised throw off the yokes of repressive rule after the veil of ideology breaks down
somehow and the individual no longer relies on those imaginary relationships to define and
justify his/her present exploited state. But Lucifers rebellion was not so much of a protosocialist one as much as it was for the establishment of himself as a parallel hegemon vis--vis
God, and this brings into foray the dual hegemonising force that of entropy and enthalpy, of
order and disorder, of rigid design and nihilistic destruction in whose midst was and still is
caught the man, the woman and the unknown, feared and hated other (the snake). In this age
past postmodernism one can say both the hegemonies of enthalpy and entropy are very much
similar in their functions as whereas the rule of God places the logos as an all-encompassing
truth/ideology (outside space, outside time), the Satanic call to rebellion places mere anarcy, or
more precisely nihilism, as an all-pervading self-certified truth/ideology (deconstructing spacetime as such). The fall resulted in Adam and Eve being forcefully evicted from their utopian
abode and caused the poor snake to suffer from divine amputation of all its limbs and thereafter

being banished from Eden as all other creations of God suffered the lapse with man. Thus merely
refusing to recognise one instance of interpellation doesnt defeat hegemony, as the dialectical
tension between a concrete individual and a states dominant ideology is not a point-occurrence
but is sort of an elongated and dilated dialectical dialogue where the onus is always on the ruling
side. This gets particularly well illustrated through the concept of Felix Culpa or Happy Fall.
Drawing primarily from Enchiridion of Augustine of Hippo and secondarily from the Exsultet of
the Easter Vigil63 and writings of Thomas Aquinas, Felix Culpa describes the fall as one that is
actually beneficial for mankind as it carries the divine grace in disguise because it gave rise to
the three most important thing for mans existence in this world free will, concept of
conscious evil and the opportunity for the Son of God to arrive as Jesus Christ and for the
foundation of a road back to Eden, or rather a higher form of it, i.e. the Paradise. This is the point
where the primarily coercive Yahweh of the Old Testament gets transformed into a more
matured hegemon of the New Testament and free will and consent comes into play as the overarching nature of hegemony is fully established that closes the all-encompassing loop of
ideology, the Word64 in this case.
Free will, as good as it may sound, is ideologically constructed too as it is just a rigid synthetical
result out of the binary that Felix Culpa creates: evil and Christ, or in other words eros and
Sarcalogos. As the primary loci of a Christian ideological interpellation is a placement in
heaven with unbelievable perks, the so-called free will ultimately gets bent unidirectionally
towards the path of Christ, and the threat of eternal damnation robs free will of its free-ness. As
this dialectical structure would fall in absence of a proper antithesis, evil or the presence of Anti-

63
64

Roman Catholic rite.

Gospel of John 1:1-4

Christ, the parallel hegemon, is not only possible but of utmost necessity as the Gramscian model
of cultural hegemony posits that the threat of some external (even internal) enemy is one of the
primary codes necessary for the state to generate consent for its rule. The margin, self-reflexively
weak and under ideological illusions, always spares the center the horrors of vehement coercion
in face of some partially or completely imaginary foe. This is nothing but the Cold-War model
between the two blocks. Viewing this entire structure from the point of view of Lucifer would
result in a similar scenario where the margin, the man, the exploited, is nothing but the base on
whose back one or other hegemon keeps ruling, with revolutions either refueling hegemony or
changing from one hegemonic fuel to another. Perhaps the solution is a better analytical foray
into the model of posthegemony where concepts of class and people gets diluted into the
multitude thriving in a Post-postmodern world of deconstructed myths and myriads of
perspectives. Perhaps the way out is battling and replacing dialectics itself with metaxy. But as
long as our racial memories will keep on playing the archetypal Edenic dream over and over
perhaps being caught between the two hegemons of essential duality itself will keep man forever
busy in encoding and decoding and forever hegemonised into an ever-increasing spectrum of all
sorts of ideological illusions and delusions.

Fall to utopia, or a rise to dystopia?

Is man just a pawn on the chess board of Eden in the game of control between God and Lucifer?
Such questions are often asked by those who place Gods test and the serpents temptation on the
same platter to be examined, and therein lay the fallacy of such an argument. A test is always
passive and involves larger share of freedom on the part of the examined person, whereas
temptation is always active. When God warned Adam and Eve to never touch the fruits of the
tree of knowledge of good and evil it was fundamentally a test taken by God over His own
creations, the passivity and human freedom were displayed when, without the temptation, the
couple didnt touch the fruits at all as they had the rest of the vast garden to enjoy. It can be
considered as a proof of the essential goodness, rather the power to obey, in pre-lapserian man.
But with the serpents words, came an active goading towards breaking Gods commandment in
the name of being free to revolt. Christianity, as said before, preaches not of good-evil dualism,
but of the non-dualist binary of good, which is existentially and essentially absolute, and evil,
which is present only in mind in the shadow of divine light. Therefore, maybe the evil wasnt
from an active agent of the serpent but was just the mutation of the couples mind, and the
temptation was merely from within, just like the case of Lilith who came from the same dust as
Adam. In Judaism, Yetzer Hara or Yetzer Ra (opposite of Yetzer Hatovgoodness) is the
souls natural inclination to evil which is thought to have come from the fruit, but if the case of
Lilith is considered, this inclination becomes ontological to man and becomes synonymous with
entropy which, when placed alongside free will, makes Adam and Eve perfect contenders to be
falling on their own accord, having the serpent within themselves and only becoming conscious
of it after partaking in the fruit.

If not being so radical, then at least this may be considered that the serpents temptation acted as
a catalyst to free will to give rise to the Yetzer Hara, long before the couple actually tasted the
fruit itself. Along with this the element of neoteny might be considered which must have been
the most potent in that pre-experience Edenic state. As neoteny too, goads man to push the limits
of action and thought, without thinking about any moral dimensions it makes man a rebel by
heart who always runs towards achieving more. Thus in the saturation of Edenic pleasure,
neoteny may have propelled man to experience something beyond that saturation, not to prove
something or deliberately being evil, but just for the sake of reshaping the boundaries. All these
concepts place utopian and dystopian elements, like the doctrine of two seeds, side by side in
Eden itself which in turn becomes the archetypical forefather to all such traditions.
If Eden is to be considered as a utopia with all the possibilities of becoming a dystopia hidden
inside it, maybe it is what God had planned all along. Maybe our fall was necessary, like a harsh
yet important lesson to be learnt in school. St. Augustine defined this thought with the concept of
Felix Culpa or the happy fall that tells us that the fall was necessary to let the humans
benefit from Lord's infinite grace because had humankind not been given the capacity for evil,
the fundamental notion of choice, meaning, through free will, to either love and obey God or not
would have not gotten its complete meaning. Augustine states in his 5th century work
Enchiridion, God judged it better to bring good out of evil, than to allow no evil to exist.65
echoing the hymn Exsultet66 of the Easter Vigil, O happy fault that merited such and so great a
Redeemer."67 This concept of God letting man to fall just to bless us with Christ the divine
redeemer had been dealt with by others like Thomas Aquinas, St. Ambrose, etc. but, seen with a

65

Enchiridion xxvii
Roman Catholic rite
67
Roman Missal (eBook) - www.universalis.com/n-orderofmass.htm (accessed on 02.02.15)
66

secular eye, places God swiftly into the seat of a master manipulator, akin to maniac dictators or
king-makers, destroying and rebuilding utopias and dystopias on their own accord which the
populace, out of one or other sense, finds ways to be justified.
Felix Culpa is fortified with the fact that though Genesis 3:17-19 talks about Adam banished
from Eden and out in the world toiling in the heat and dust in inhospitable conditions with only
thorns, thistles and wild bush to cultivate, the real condition wasnt that much arid, even if we
consider the middle eastern rough lands. Eden was a lush heaven of plentitude, thats true, but
the world in which Lord placed man next is full of resources too if we place the Edenic story into
the context of the history of the entire world. He punished man, but even then gave him a world
thats blessed with millions of species of flora and fauna. And the fact along with Adam & Eve
all other animals fell too, though has been pointed out as unjust on Lords part by many, can be
considered as a help to make the life of the couple as smooth as possible. And the seemingly
savage punishment of sweat68 and toil69 is precisely the thing that has made human
civilization possible along with the power to think, that, as per as Edenic myth, had come from
the fruit. As the conception of God had been portrayed by many religion as a play-master, it can
be viewed as an elaborately fabricated narrative to make man undergo the necessary phase of
learning the different experiences outside the protective isolation of womb-like Eden, to reach
the stage of learned unlearning or the Blakean higher-innocence where, if one accepts honestly
his/her sins, salvation is provided with a chance to get back into an even better avatar of Eden
the Paradise, completing the vast ellipse of history.

68
69

Genesis 3:19 (NKJV)

Genesis 3:17 (NKJV)

In this discourse one shouldnt give the Apocalypse of Adam70 a miss because it shows the
Edenic utopia-dystopia in a violently different light, far away from what any mainstream or
heretic branches of Judaeo-Christianity, except the Cathars, have ever stated. Apocalypse of
Adam is a Sethian Gnostic work written in early Coptic language, forming a part of the Nag
Hammandi scrolls, and it gives a version of Adams last words to his son Seth, differing radically
from the non-Gnostic apocryphal works like Life of Adam and Eve, Testament of Adam, etc. It
deals primarily with the concept of a sort of Neo-Platonic demiurge who is essentially evil and
thus forms a true dualist binary with Lord God. In his 700th year Adam tells Seth that it was the
demiurge Yaldabaoth, and not the higher and greater almighty God Yahweh, who created
everything out of chaos after the act of creatio ex nihili was performed by the Lord, and that
Yaldabaoth was malevolent, as being directly linked to the material world and has always tried
to destroy mankind. The Eden created by the demiurge was essentially a dystopia, where Adam
and Eve were together with the possession of the great word of knowledge of the Almighty
which they lost when they escaped from Eden and Adam was separated from Eve, thereby losing
that knowledge, until three mysterious strangers, probably angels sent by God, caused Eve to
beget Seth and thus the knowledge of the divine was preserved in human blood which can only
be destroyed if the demiurge can bring about a total apocalypse. Adam prophecies to Seth about
the demiurges future attempts to cause this apocalypse through the deluge, great fire, plagues,
etc. until the true God will return to earth as the great Illuminator and make the earth a
paradise. Thus making the journey of mankind from dystopia-into-reality-to-utopia.

70

Nag Hammandi library, codex V.5, discovered 1946.

The concept of a demiurge is quite common to other branches of Neo-Platonism and Gnosticism,
and even Blake creates a demiurge of his own in the image of Urizen71, but such an explicit
depiction of the demiurge as radically evil, fulfilling almost all the stereotypes of a dystopian
tyrant, and the portrayal of Eden as clearly a cacotopia, thereby making the sad fall a joyous
escape, is curiously unique to Apocalypse of Adam and to the Cathars who believed that it was
Satan, or Satanael, who has hijacked and corrupted Gods name and action by creating this
material and dystopian world, and its the duty of the prophets and the righteous to unmask this
fact and wait for the true utopian paradise.
Without contraries is no progression. Attraction and repulsion, reason and energy, love and
hate, are necessary to human existence. wrote William Blake in his The Marriage of Heaven
and Hell72. He is perhaps the only poet in the world to have shown through his own mythopoeia
and orphic symbology the dialectic development of human soul, and its being in entirety, to
reach the gates of paradise, and his Songs of Innocence and Experience73 shows it the best. The
first stage of soul is innocence which is divine in its own right, away from any taint of
corruption or complexity of knowledge. Its best symbol is The Lamb. This is the state of prelapserian man in Eden before the fruit opened mans eyes to the so-called realities of adulthood,
placing man in the antithetical state of experience, symbolized the best through The Tyger that
involves both active and passive tasting of sin, sadness and ego. Thus Adam and Eve were
created as pure lambs, harking back to the idyllic pastoral age, in Eden, which was an incomplete
utopia as pure innocence without the tempering fire of experience is incomplete, as incomplete

71

The Book of Urizen (1794), The Book of Los (1795), The Book of Ahania (1795), The Four Zoas (1797-1807), etc.
composed 1790-93
73
Songs of Innocence (1789), Songs of Experience (1794)
72

as Thel74 who ran away from the mere scenes from the stage of experience beneath the Vales of
Har (Blakes own sketch of Eden). Thus neither Eden is a complete utopia, nor this earth is
absolutely a dystopia, they are rather the two contraries waiting for the eventual synthesis into
something, the final state of the soulthe true utopia, that might be termed as the Higher
Innocence or where man rebuilds innocence with the knowledge of experience, just like the City
of God75 is a synthesis between a garden (childhood-Eden-purity) and a city (adulthoodcivilization-corruption).
Somewhat analogous to this Blake-ian concept is the famous triptych, painted by earlyNetherlandish master Hieronymus Bosch, known as The Garden of Earthly Delights76, from
1490-1510 A.D. It has three panels showing three different scenesGod presenting Eve to
Adam, a world of hedonistic pleasure and a hellscape of hedonistic disaster. Whereas the outer
wings, with the flanking panels closed over the center panel, show the earth during the time of
genesis. It is a brilliantly executed chronological and spatial depiction of the progression from an
apparent Edenic utopiaat a glance the corollary of innocence; to a dystopia of pleasurethe
corollary of experience; and then to the ultimate dystopia of terrorthe antipode to higher
innocence. In the left panel depicting Eden, a closer look gestates surprising accounts, like why
is God portrayed with a darker skin tone than either Adam or Eve? This is highly unorthodox in
Judaeo-Christian tradition. Why are Adams feet nudging God physically? Thats more
unorthodox, even scandalous. Why is Eve chastely trying to avoid Adams gaze upon her nude
body, when the awareness of nudity itself is supposed to be absent? Added to these is the open
sexual connotation thats clear from the pose of Eves body and Adams expression and which

74

Blake, William, The Book of Thel (1789)

St. Augustine of Hippo, De Civitate Dei contra Paganos (early 5th century)
76
Museo del Prado, Madrid.
75

art historian Walter S. Gibson describes as seductively presenting her body to Adam. 77 Though
the serpent is present in the panel, its relegated to the background, painted almost down to the
point of being invisible and portrayed already as limbless, before Lords curse. It may be
interpreted as the presence of sexual & self awareness and the entropic factor of Yetzer Hara
from the beginning of Edenic life, supporting Freudian thesis of infantile sexuality. All these
minute elements rob Eden of its state of utopian innocence and along with the growth and
decadence of sexual hedonism in the successive panels the triptych portrays a journey of
sexuality, free will and sin through a worsening progression of different varieties of dystopia.

77

Gibson, Walter S, Hieronymus Bosch, Thames and Hudson, (1973): 25.

Sonata and noise: a trijunction of

comparative methodology
After almost seven millenniums of being highly civilized, man has finally discovered ways to
exterminate himself as a species completely, deconstructed God and analyzed Eden and Paradise
into dystopias of divine whims. But can he still see what the theologians have described as Gods
meta-cosmic ideas and actions? Can he define the reason, if any, behind them? Even through
denial can he escape the archetypes that define his very kernel of being? Or is it that Milton-s are
still needed to justify the ways of God to men.?78 Reason and logic have been always the
sharpest spear against the soft body of theist doctrines and religio-cultural myths. But
epistemology has eroded that sharpness by questioning the validity of knowledge and logic itself,
and faith has tried forever to transcend the complete paradigm of logic. Whatever may be the end
result of this struggle, cognition and consciousness of Homo sapiens has always been trapped
within the space-time continuum of four dimensions, and the seven remaining dimensions, of the
total eleven dimensions now being proposed by super-string theorists, our mind simply cant
conceive of, rest alone analyzing them to any extent. This cosmological structure of eleven
dimensions may have been described, albeit esoterically, in the late ancient to medieval times in
the Zohar of the Jewish, Christian and syncretic Kabbalists where the concept of the ten or
eleven79 sephirots (enumerations) of the divine emanations through which God or the Ein Sof
(the Holy Infinite) reveals Himself to the mortal senses and undergoes a process of perpetual
physical and metaphysical creation. Though the fact remains that we just cant conceptualize and
78
79

Paradise Lost Book I (line 26)

When Da'at or Daas, signifying assimilated intellect and being the state & location where the other ten sephirots
meet, is considered a separate sephirot itself.

internalize any more than four dimensions, its very interesting to note that the Zohar
diagrammatically symbolizes the sephirots as a tree with the name of Etz ha-Chayim or the
Tree of Life, immediately bringing into mind the Tree of Life in Eden which also symbolized
progression through the stages of life, just like Etz ha-Chayim denotes a meta-cosmic progress
through the dimensions until the mortal and divine realms are joined together for the ultimate
enlightenment, or in other words, being the axis mundi like the Edenic trees, holding together the
Creator and His creation.
According to Kabbalah, the topmost sephirot in the Tree of Life called the Keter or
Kether80, which is the divine crown, is the manifestation of Gods word and is completely
incomprehensible to man. And the day when man will get the light of Keter will be the day
when even a mortal eye shall behold Paradise or the ultimate utopia of higher-experience.
Speaking out of this esoteric jargon, whereas logic and reasoning disassembles Eden into a
loosely connected series of dystopian archetypes, faith tries to defend it as a utopian reality.
Neither of them positing any decisive and axiomatic thesis. But in this admixture of millennias
worth of history, traditions, imagination and transmission what is of peculiar nature is the core
dialectic of utopia-dystopia that not only transcend language but it eschews time and space in its
modality. Comparative Literature as a discipline might be posited at the trijunction where this
dialectic posits itself as a genre based framework, or a historiographical vista or even as a broad
thematic view, but one must bring into question the somewhat non-dialectical nature of this
dialectics as instead of any synthesis all one can get is a state of in-between-ness amidst the
utopian motion and its dystopian parallel; whereas it remains to be seen where does this takes
one in the future, the task that should get the onus of analytical and explorative scrutiny is a

80

Laitman, Michael, The Zohar, Laitman Kabbalah Pub. (2007): 22-23.

regressive journey back to the origins of all the Garden of Eden related archetypes and patterns,
somewhere in the murky depths of mans racial subconscious. Simply because it all remain as a
continuous search for locating the archetypical markers in the various of and varieties in Edenic
legends and myths and codified proto-history for the sake of understanding mans never-ending
quest for utopian symphony and its cognate attraction to dystopian cacophony, both residing in
the deepest niches of our socio-cultural traditions and collective unconscious.

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