One of the reasons that I am such an ardent student of world mythologies is that they reveal so much of our psychology today. Why? Because human nature hasn’t changed since the beginning of human time. To put another way, we haven’t progressed.
There’s no denying our technological advancements and exponential achievements, but the question is to what end are they if, psychologically, we are not improving as humans; indeed, if we’re possibly regressing?
Ultimately, talking about this regression would extend beyond psychology and include a moral dimension: There’s been an increase in evil in our modern world.
We don’t like to use this kind of vocabulary, like “evil,” today because it sounds absolutist and judgmental. Instead, we say things like, “That is unacceptable.” Human regression over time, however, is something that the myths around the world talk about a lot: a descent from the Golden Age of humankind to Silver, to Bronze, and, finally, to an age of Iron, when evil is rampant.
Mythologies Addressing Humankind’s Decline
In their book “Doubt and Certainty,” cosmologist Tony Rothman and physicist George Sudarshan consider the Hindu version of this myth:“Each cycle consists of four ages, each degraded from the last. The Fourth Age, which comes first in the Indian reckoning, is the ‘golden age,’ a beatific epoch of prosperity and justice in which dharma, or duty, law is respected. In the Third Age only three-quarters of the dharma is observed; humans now know suffering and death. The Second Age follows in which only half the dharma exists on earth, and evil and suffering increase; the human life span grows shorter. We, of course, live in the final Evil Age (the Kali Yuga), where wealth becomes the sole criterion of virtue, sex replaces love and calculators replace minds. At the end of the four ages, which last a total of 12,000 divine years or 4,320,000 human years, there is a dissolution, a general cleansing.”
This pattern of moral deterioration is common. The quintessence and, arguably, the oldest myth of is the Fall of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden (Genesis 3). Things were once perfect—golden—and now, they are not.
Psychological Pathologies
Before looking at the story, let’s establish what I mean by psychological issues or disturbances, or, to use current jargon, pathologies. There are many of them. We find them in the news all the time, as some crime or atrocity is attributed to one or other of them. Here are an important few that exhibit negative mindsets: control of reactions, repression, blame, identification, sublimation, withdrawal, projection, rationalization, numbing, denial, and so on.All these strategies are defense mechanisms designed to protect our own egos from being exposed to something that threatens or that it feels threatens its security or existence. But not all pathologies are equal; some are worse than others.
The Biblical events in the Garden of Eden identify three psychological pathologies that human beings were prone to, and still are— since our nature has not changed.
Blaming
Adam and Eve have done wrong by disobeying God’s explicit instruction. Adam blames Eve and Eve blames the serpent. It’s not their fault!
Blame transfers accountability to another; in other words, it says, I am not responsible for my action. Someone else is to blame for it. Indeed, blame may be said to be the most endemic, the most pernicious, and the most destructive of all the psychological vices that beset mankind. It is the kingpin of all that is negative within us. Small wonder, then, it wreaks such havoc. It’s also very difficult to counter.
On committing a fault, a more honest response would be to say: “Mea culpa”—my mistake. But this, alas, is relatively rare. What studying the myth does is help us to see how deeply enrooted this vice of blaming others is. From a very broad perspective, we find that nations blame nations, and grudges can last centuries.
We may not be able to stop our own nation from doing this, except perhaps at the ballot box, but how can we—individually—stop blaming others?
If we delve into the Garden of Eden events, they can take hold of our imaginations and become a do-it-yourself personal development program. We can see this problem for what it really is: in us.
An extra, crucial aspect of why blaming is so bad is that—in the jargon of the personal development movement of the last 50 years—it is a little understood fact. Every time, we blame others, we are quite literally killing ourselves. In blaming others, there’s a sort of self-death, because we are denying a part of reality that has been created with us and by us and through us, and saying we have no part in that.
Essentially, we are denying ourselves as co-creators of reality and, with it, that acceptance of things as they are. For this reason, blaming is a kind of blasphemy. We are denying our god-like powers to co-create. In short, we are exiting and isolating ourselves from the consciousness or Tao or God that drives the universe that we are a part of.
Projecting
Adam and Eve are clearly unaware of the seriousness of their sin, even as they are being thrown out of Eden. They project their guilt onto the serpent. There is no evil in them, they think, but there is evil in the serpent.
Denying
At the root of these crimes, denial is going on, a virulent denial of truth, of reality, of life. With the Greeks myths, the worst crime of all is hubris, which is also a form of denying the truth: the truth of who we are, and who we are in respect to the gods themselves. It is a fault of exceeding our limitations as mortal beings.
These myths—the Garden of Eden in particular—flatly contradict modern notions of progress and human perfectibility. We would do well to pay more attention to them; if we did, we would have a much greater insight into what is going on in the world, and what is going on in our own hearts.
As professor and philosopher Terry Eagleton expressed the matter: “What is needed … is a recrudescence of myth which will put paid to the secular spirit of progress and optimism, currently beguiling the masses.” Amen to that.