This tale was sent to me by someone on one of the e-mail lists I belong to. I found it quite thought provoking. Perhaps you'll enjoy it, also.
"We Are the Other People"
by Oberon Zell
"Ding-dong!" goes the doorbell. Is it Avon calling? Or perhaps Ed McMahon
with my three million dollars? No, it's Yahweh's Witlesses again, just
wanting to have a nice little chat about the Bible...
Boy, did they ever come to the wrong house! So we invite them in: "Enter
freely and of your own will..." (Hey, it's Sunday morning, nothing much going
on, why not have a little entertainment?) Diane and I amuse ourselves
watching their expressions as they check out the living room: great horned
owl on the back of my chair; ceremonial masks and medicine skulls of dragons
and unicorns on the wall; crystals, wands, staffs, swords; lots of Goddess
figures and several altars; boa constrictors draped in amorous embrace over
the elkhorn; white doves sitting in the hanging planters; cats and weasels
underfoot; iron dragon snorting steam atop the wood stove; posters and
paintings of wizards and dinosaurs and witchy women, some proudly naked;
sculptures of mythological beasties and lots more dinosaurs; warp six on the
star-filled viewscreen of my computer; a five-foot model of the USS
Enterprise and the skeleton of a plesiosaur hanging from the ceiling; very,
very many books, most of them dealing with obviously weird subjects... To say
nothing of the great horned owl perched on the back of my chair and the
Unicorn grazing in the front yard. You know; early Addams Family decor.
And then, of course, it being late in the morning, you can expect Morning
Glory to come wandering out naked, looking for her wake-up cup of tea.
Morning Glory naked is a truly impressive sight, and the Witlesses look as if
she'd set titties on stun as they stand immobilized, hands clasped over their
genitals. With the stage set and all the actors in place, the show is ready
to begin.
Their mission, of course, it to save our heathen souls by turning us on to
"The Word of the Lord" - their Bible. I guess they figure some of us just
haven't heard about it yet, and we're all eagerly awaiting their joyous
tidings of personal salvation through giving our rational faculties to Jesus.
Every time they come around, I look forward to trying out a new riposte.
Sure, it may be cruel and sadistic of me, but hey, I didn't call them up and
ask them to come over; they entered at their own risk!
This time should be pretty good. After letting them run off their basic
rap while lovely Morning Glory serves us all hot herb tea, I innocently
remark: "But none of that applies to us. We have no need for salvation
because we don't have original sin. We are the Other People."
"Hunh? What?" they reply eloquently. It's clear they've never heard this
one before.
"Right," I say. "It's all in your Bible." And I proceed to tell them the
story, using their own book for reference:
Genesis 1:26 - The [Elohim] said, "Let us make humanity in our own image,
in the likeness of ourselves, and let them be masters of the fish of the sea,
the birds of heaven, the cattle, all the wild beasts and all the reptiles
that crawl upon the earth."
Elohim is a plural word, including male and female, and should properly be
translated "Gods" or "Pantheon."
27 The Gods created humanity in the image of themselves, In the image of
the Gods they created them, Male and Female they created them.
28 The Gods blessed them, saying to them, "Be fruitful, multiply, fill the
earth and conquer it. Be masters of the fish of the sea, the birds of heaven
and all living animals on the earth."
Now clearly, here we are talking about the original creation of the human
species: male and female. All the animals,plants, etc. have all been created
in previous verses. This is before the Garden of Eden, and Yahweh is not
mentioned as the creator of these people. The next chapter talks about how
Yahweh, an individual member of the Pantheon, goes about assembling his own
special little botanical and zoological Garden in Eden, and making his own
little man to inhabit it:
Gen 2:7 - Yahweh God fashioned a man of dust from the soil. Then he
breathed into his nostrils a breath of life, and thus the man became a living
being.
8 Yahweh God planted a garden in Eden which is in the east, and there he
put the man he had fashioned.
9 Yahweh God caused to spring up from the soil every kind of tree,
enticing to look at and good to eat, with the tree of life and the tree of
the knowledge of good and evil in the middle of the garden.
15 Yahweh God took the man and settled him in the garden of Eden to
cultivate and take care of it.
Now this next is crucial: note Yahweh's precise words:
16 Then Yahweh God gave the man this admonition, "You may eat indeed of
all the trees in the garden.
17 Nevertheless of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you are not
to eat, for on the day you eat of it you shall most surely die."
Fateful words, those. We will refer back to this admonition later.
Then Yahweh decides to make a woman to go with the man. Now, don't forget
that the Pantheon had earlier created a whole population of people, "male and
female," who are presumably doing just fine somewhere "outside the gates of
Eden." But this setup in Eden is Yahweh's own little experiment, and will
unfold to its own separate destiny.
21 So Yahweh God made the man fall into a deep sleep. And while he slept,
he took one of his ribs and enclosed it in flesh.
22 Yahweh God built the rib he had taken from the man into a woman, and
brought her to the man.
Right. Man gives birth to woman. Sure he does. But that's the way the
story is told here.
25 Now both of them were naked, the man and his wife, but they felt no
shame in front of each other.
Well, of course not! Why should they? But take careful note of those
words, as they also will prove to be significant . . .
Now this next part is where it starts to get interesting. Enter the
Serpent:
Gen. 3:1 - The serpent was the most subtle of all the wild beasts that
Yahweh God had made. It asked the woman, "Did God really say you were not to
eat from any of the trees in the garden?"
2 The woman answered the serpent, "We may eat the fruit of the trees in
the garden.
3 "But of the fruit of the tree in the middle of the garden God said, 'You
must not eat it, nor touch it, under pain of death'"
4 Then the serpent said to the woman, "No! You will not die!
5 "God knows in fact that on the day you eat it your eyes will be opened
and you will be like gods, knowing good and evil."
What a remarkable statement! "Your eyes will be opened and you will be
like gods, knowing good and evil." The Serpent directly contradicts Yahweh.
Obviously, one of them has to be lying. Which one, do you suppose? And, if
the serpent speaks true, wouldn't you wish to eat of the magic fruit?
Wouldn't it be a good thing, to become "like gods, knowing good and evil"? Or
is it preferable to remain in ignorance?
6 The woman saw that the tree was good to eat and pleasing to the eye, and
that it was desirable for the knowledge that it could give. So she took some
of its fruit and ate it. She gave some also to her husband who was with her,
and he ate it.
7 Then the eyes of both of them were opened and they realized that they
were naked. So they sewed fig leaves together to make themselves loincloths.
The author makes an interesting assumption here: that if you realize you
are naked you will automatically want to cover yourself. Further implications
will unfold shortly...
8 The man and his wife heard the sound of Yahweh God walking in the garden
in the cool of the day, and they hid from Yahweh God among the trees of the
garden.
9 But Yahweh God called to the man. "Where are you?" he asked.
10 "I heard the sound of you in the garden," he replied. "I was afraid
because I was naked, so I hid."
11 "Who told you that you were naked?" he asked. "Have you been eating of
the tree I forbade you to eat?"
And so the sign of the Fall becomes modesty. Take note of this. The
descendants of Adam and Eve will be distinguished throughout history from
virtually all other peoples by their obsessive modesty taboos, wherein they
will feel ashamed of being naked. It follows that those who feel no shame in
being naked are, by definition, not carriers of this spiritual disease of
original sin!
12 The man replied, "It was the woman you put with me; she gave me the
fruit, and I ate it."
Right. Blame the woman. What a turkey!
13 Then Yahweh God asked the woman, "What is this you have done?" The
woman replied, "The serpent tempted me and I ate."
So of course she blames the serpent. But just what did the serpent do that
was so evil? Why, he called Yahweh a liar! Was he wrong? Let's see...
21 Yahweh God made clothes out of skins for the man and his wife, and they
put them on.
Out of skins? This means that Yahweh had to kill some innocent animals to
pander to Adam and Eve's new obsession with modesty!
And now we come to the crux of the Fall. Yahweh had said back there in
chapter 2:17, regarding the fruit of the tree of knowledge, that "on the day
you eat of it you shall most surely die." The Serpent, on the other hand, had
contradicted Yahweh in chapter 3:4-5: "No! You will not die! God knows in
fact that on the day you eat it your eyes will be opened and you will be like
gods, knowing good and evil." So what actually happened? Who lied and who
told the truth about this remarkable fruit? The answer is given in the next
verse:
22 Then Yahweh God said, "See, the man has become like one of us, with his
knowledge of good and evil. He must not be allowed to stretch his hand out
next and pick from the tree of life also, and eat some and live forever."
Get that? Yahweh himself admits that he had lied! In fact, and in Yahweh's
own words, the Serpent spoke the absolute truth! And moreover, Yahweh tells
the rest of the Pantheon that he intends to evict Adam (and presumably Eve as
well) to keep them from gaining immortality to go with their newly-acquired
divine knowledge. To prevent them, in other words, from truly becoming gods!
So who, in this story, comes off as a benefactor of humanity, and who comes
off as a tyrant? THE SERPENT NEVER LIED!
This story, to digress slightly, bears a remarkable resemblance to a
contemporary tale from ancient Greece. In that version, the Serpent (later
identified as Lucifer, the Light-Bearer) may be equated with the heroic titan
Prometheus, who championed humanity against the tyranny of Zeus, who wished
for people to be mere slaves of the gods. Prometheus, whose name means
"forethought," gave people wisdom, intelligence, and fire stolen from
Olympus. Moreover, he ordained the portions of animal sacrifice so that
humans got the best parts (the meat and hides) while the portion that was
burned to the gods was the bones and fat. In punishment for this defiance of
his divine authority, Zeus condemned Prometheus to a terrible punishment for
an immortal: to be chained to a mountain in the Caucasus, where Zeus'
gryphon/eagle (actually a Lammergier) would devour his liver each day. It
would grow back each night. Zeus promised to relent if Prometheus would
reveal his great secret knowledge: Who would succeed Zeus as supreme god?
Prometheus refused to tell, but history has revealed the answer...
The interesting thing about all this is that the Greeks properly regarded
Prometheus as a noble hero in his defiance of unjust tyranny. One may wonder
why the Serpent is not so well regarded. On the contrary, snakes are loathed
throughout Christiandom.
23 So Yahweh God expelled him from the garden of Eden, to till the soil
from which he had been taken.
24 He banished the man, and in front of the garden of Eden he posted the
cherubs, and the flame of a flashing sword, to guard the way to the tree of
life.
So that's it for the Fall. But the story of Adam and Eve doesn't end
there.
Gen 4:1 - The man had intercourse with his wife Eve, and she conceived and
gave birth to Cain...
2 She gave birth to a second child, Abel, the brother of Cain. Now Abel
became a shepherd and kept flocks, while Cain tilled the soil.
3 Time passed and Cain brought some of the produce of the soil as an
offering for Yahweh,
4 while Abel for his part brought the first-born of his flock and some of
their fat as well. Yahweh looked with favor on Abel and his offering. But he
did not look with favor on Cain and his offering, and Cain was very angry and
downcast.
Well, why shouldn't he be? Both brothers had brought forth their first
fruits as offerings, but Yahveh rejected the vegetables and only accepted the
blood sacrifice. This was to set a gruesome precedent:
8 Cain said to his brother Abel, "Let us go out;" and while they were in
the open country, Cain set on his brother Abel and killed him.
Accursed and marked for fratricide,
16 Cain left the presence of Yahweh and settled in the land of Nod, east
of Eden.
We can assume that the phrase "left the presence of Yahweh" implies that
Yahweh is a local deity, and not omnipresent. Now Eden, according to Gen.
2:14-15, was situated at the source of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers,
apparently right where Lake Van is now, in Turkey. "East of Eden," therefore,
would probably be along the shores of the Caspian Sea, right in the
Indo-European heartland. Cain settled in there, among the people of Nod, and
married one of the women of that country. Here, for the first time, is
specifically mentioned the "other people" who are not of the lineage of Adam
and Eve. I.e., the Pagans.
So let's look at this story from another viewpoint: There we were, around
six thousand years ago, living in our little farming communities around the
Caspian Sea, in the land of Nod, when this dude with a terrible scar comes
stumbling in out of the sunset. He tells us this bizarre story, about how his
mother and father had been created by some god named Jahweh, and put in
charge of a beautiful garden somewhere out west, and how they had gotten
thrown out for disobedience after eating some of the landlord's forbidden
magic fruit of enlightenment. He tells us of murdering his brother, as the
god of his parents would only accept blood sacrifice, and of receiving that
scar as a mark so that all would know him as a fratricide. The poor guy is
really a mess psychologically, obsessed with guilt. He is also obsessively
modest, insisting on wearing clothes even in the hottest summer, and he has a
hard time with our penchant for skinny-dipping in the warm inland sea. He
seems to believe that he is tainted by the "sin" of his parent's
disobedience; that it is in his blood, somehow, and will continue to
contaminate his children and his children's children. One of our healing
women takes pity on the poor sucker, and marries him...
17 Cain had intercourse with his wife, and she conceived and gave birth to
Enoch. He became builder of a town, and he gave the town the name of his son
Enoch.
With both of their first sons not turning out very well, Adam and Eve
decided to try again:
25 Adam had intercourse with his wife, and she gave birth to a son whom
she named Seth...
26 A son was also born to Seth, and he named him Enosh. This man was the
first to invoke the name of Yahweh.
Now it doesn't mention here where Seth's wife came from. Another woman
from Nod, possibly, or maybe someone from another neolithic community
downstream in the Tigris-Euphrates valley. But her folks also, cannot be of
the lineage of Adam and Eve, and must also be counted among "the other
people."
But whatever happened to Adam? After all, way back there in chapter 2:17,
warning Adam about the magic fruit of knowlege, Jahweh had told him that "on
the day you eat of it you shall most surely die." So, when did Adam die?
Gen. 5:4 - Adam lived for eight hundred years after the birth of Seth and
he became the father of sons and daughters.
5 In all, Adam lived for nine hundred and thirty years; then he died.
Hey, that's pretty good! Nine hundred and some odd years isn't bad for a
man who's been told he's gonna die the next day!
Well, the story goes on, and maybe next time the Witlesses come to visit
I'll tell more of it. But suffice it to say that those of us who are not of
Semitic descent (i.e., not of the lineage of Adam and Eve) cannot share in
the Original Sin that comes with that lineage. Being that the Bible is the
story of that lineage, of Adam and Eve's descendants and their special
relationship with their particular god, Yahweh, it follows that this is not
the story of the rest of us. We may may have been Cain's wife's people, or
Seth's wife's people, or some other people over the hill and far away, but
whichever people the rest of us are, as far as the Bible is concerned, we are
the Other People, and so we are continually referred to throughout. Later
books of the Bible are filled with admonitions to the followers of Jahweh to
"learn not the ways of the Pagans..." (Jer 10:2) with detailed descriptions
of exactly what it is we do, such as erect standing stones and sacred poles,
worship in sacred groves and practice divination and magic. And worship the
sun, moon, stars and the "Queen of Heaven." "You must not behave as they do
in Egypt where once you lived; you must not behave as they do in Canaan where
I am taking you. You must not follow their laws." (Lev 18:3) For Yahweh, as
he so clearly emphasises, is not the god of the Pagans. We have our own
lineage and our own heritage, and our tale is not told in the Bible.
We were not "made" like clay figurines by a male deity out of "dust from
the soil." We were born of our Mother the Earth, and have evolved over aeons
in Her nurturing embrace. All of us, in our many and diverse tribes, have
creation myths and legends of our origins and history; some of these tales
may even be actually true. Like the descendants of Adam and Eve, many of us
also have stories of great floods, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and other
cataclysms that wiped out whole communities of our people, wherein "I alone
survived to tell the tale." Nearly all of our ancestral tribes (and
especially those of us who today are reclaiming our own Pagan heritage) lack
that peculiar obsessive body modesty that seems to be a hallmark of the
original sin alluded to in the story of the Fall. We can be naked and
unashamed! Why, our Goddess even tells us, "as a sign that you are truly
free, you shall be naked in your rites." Not being born into sin, we have no
need of salvation, and no need of a Messiah to redeem our sinful souls.
Neither heaven nor hell is our destination in the afterlife; we have our own
various arrangements with our own various deities. The Bible is not our
story; we have our own stories to tell, and they are many and diverse. In a
long life, you may get to hear many of them...
May you live long and prosper!