by Bob Curran
The basic idea of an Otherworld was to form many other beliefs concerning lost lands and mystical realms. Out of the vague and nebulous concept— whether it be splendid Paradise or terrifying Hell, or simply some other illdefined form of reality—many other concepts grew and it is to some of these that we now turn.
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The Garden of Eden
Now The Lord God had planted a garden in the east, in Eden, and there He put the man that He had formed. And the Lord God made all kinds of trees to grow out of the ground—trees that were pleasing to the eye and good for food.
—The book of Genesis
No mysterious realm symbolizes the concept of an earthly Paradise more aptly than the biblical legend of the Garden of Eden. The story, which is found in the book of Genesis, not only speaks of a wonderful realm in which all is perfection, but also provides an explanation for the origins of Mankind. It also explains the reason for Mankind’s current inability to enjoy this realm through our ancestors’ disobedience of God’s edicts, and through what has become known as the doctrine of original sin.
Creation
The creation story of the Garden of Eden is a common theme in the Abrahamic religions that emerged out of the early Semitic tradition, taking their name from the patriarch Abraham, the first post-Flood leader to reject idolatry in favor of a single God. It is used to explain not only the creation of Mankind, but also the entrance of sin into the world, as characterized in the Fall from Paradise.
In essence, the story states that Man (usually known in the legend by the name Adam), and his companion Woman (usually known in the legend by the name Eve) were created out of the dust of the Earth, and were placed in an earthly Paradise, which lay somewhere in the East. Here they acted as gardeners and attendants, and were given free run of the entire Paradise with one notable exception. They were not to eat the fruit that grew on the Tree of Conscience (rendered as the Tree of Knowledge in the Christian version of the tale). The Paradise, however, also harbors an evil spirit that takes the form of a serpent, and this tempts Woman to eat the fruit of the forbidden tree, and for Man to do likewise. God discovers their disobedience, and casts them out of the Paradise into the wilderness beyond, and forbids them or their descendants—that is, humanity—ever to return.
Theories About Eden
Although Eden is referred to as a “garden,” it is suggested that it is a much larger territory than a simple plot of land or enclosed orchard. Indeed, the name is thought to have derived from a very ancient proto-Persian language meaning “hunting ground or estate.” This was thought to have been a specially designated area where ancient kings carried on their hunting, tended to by stewards. This may give the impression that God was equivalent to a monarch, with the Garden as his estate. Adam and Eve are therefore to be counted as stewards or wardens of the land, reflecting ancient Persian custom. However, in some of the early Semitic literature, it might appear as something else. In the biblical work The Song of Solomon for example, it appears to be a garden, a walled enclosure in which plants of various kinds are grown, but in some other texts it is described as a park or orchard, an enclosure where fruit tress are grown.
The idea of a beautiful garden, where all is perfection and bliss, probably comes in part from Greek tradition. Taking the Otherworld as their example, the Greeks spoke of a realm inhabited by nymphs and other aerial spirits known as the Garden of the Hesperides. This was a place of utter tranquility where there was only beauty and goodness. The Hesperides were benevolent, winged spirits who bore more than a passing resemblance to Christian angels. Similar to Eden, their Garden was allegedly located in various places. Some tales located it in the Arcadian Mountains in northern Greece, while others suggested that it might lie somewhere amid the Atlas Mountains in Libya. There were even those who asserted that it lay on a blessed island somewhere in the Mediterranean close to “the edge of the world.”
The Greek writer Hesiod suggested that an old name for Cadiz in the Iberian Peninsula (Spain) was Erythea, which signified the land in which the Garden of the Hesperides lay. The Greek geographer Strabo placed it in an area that he called Tartessos, which roughly corresponds to the area of modern-day Andalusia, also in Spain. There seems to be little doubt that the Greek idea of the Garden of the Hesperides probably served as a template for the concept of the Garden of Eden, and that these two ideas may have fused into the biblical story that we know today. In the ancient mind, the Garden became equated with some form of terrestrial Paradise, evidenced by the emerging Semitic word Eden, which is taken to mean “delight” or “extreme or intense satisfaction.” Although now referred to as a “garden,” there is little doubt that Eden was not simply confined to an enclosed space, but was perhaps envisaged almost as a kingdom in its own right.
Inside the Garden
There appear to have been two major trees within this realm: the Tree of Life (from which, it is assumed, both Adam and Eve could eat) and the Tree of Conscience (from which they were forbidden to eat). It was their eating from the latter that led directly to their expulsion from the Garden, which in some Christian belief systems counts as the original sin, and which doomed their descendants to a permanent exclusion from Paradise. According to the tale, they appear to have been exiled into the wider world, implying that there were other lands somewhere beyond the Garden, where their children grew up. One of their sons, Cain, killed his brother Abel and was exiled into “the Land of Nod,” which seems to have been another realm lying to the east of Eden. The word “Nod” is simply an ancient Hebrew root word meaning “wandering” (the passage is usually recognized as a simple mistranslation—Cain was cursed “to wander forever,” rather than going to an actual land), and it is possible that his descendants were simply a nomadic people.
Locating Eden
So, if the Garden of Eden truly existed (as some claim that it did) where was it located? A general consensus is that it lay “somewhere in the East” (the book of Genesis simply states: “God planted a garden eastward in Eden”), and so various locations have been suggested, such as Sri Lanka, Japan, Java, and the Indian Ocean. There have also been some more bizarre suggestions, such as Florida or Jackson County, Missouri. Some more reasoned speculations have suggested Ethiopia, but one of the favored locations is ancient Mesopotamia. This is based on fragmentary ancient texts that mention the Garden, many of which also appear in the book of Genesis. It is stated that a river flowing through the Garden separated into four branches within its confines. The four rivers that flowed out of the Garden were the Hiddekel (an ancient name for the Tigris), the Euphrates, and two other more obscure torrents, the Pishon (or Pison) and the Gihon. This would place the Garden directly in the northwest corner of ancient Mesopotamia, and would correspond to the location of another fabled land—the realm of Havilah. Havilah, it is said, had a thriving civilization of Mesopotamian origin, and was an agricultural Paradise, irrigated by a number of rivers. The modern-day Egyptologist David Rohl has identified the Pishon with the Uizhun River in Iran, which may well have been one of the main tributaries of Havilah. Therefore, this fabled realm and the Garden of Eden would seem to correspond to each other in many ways. Rohl has identified the site of the Garden as a lush valley that lies about 10 miles east of the Iranian city of Tabriz. He points out that Uizhun is known locally as the Golden River, and is mentioned in works of great antiquity. Also of note, the Golden River merges with another river, the Araxes, which he suggests may be the Gihon.
Other historians, however, disagree, and place the Garden at the site of the development of the Sumerian civilization, now modern-day southern Iraq. The Mesopotamian and the later Sumerian civilizations flourished from roughly 9000 B.C., with the first major city states appearing around 4000–3000 B.C. From around 10000 B.C. however, there is evidence that many of the hunter-gatherer groupings in the Iran-Iraq area were coming together to form permanent settlements, particularly around rivers, and were domesticating wild animals and beginning to till and manage the
land. This continued down the years so that, at the height of its power and influence, the Sumerian civilization had a solid agricultural base that depended largely on the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. This, argue some historians, provides the basis for the Garden of Eden story and moves the location of the Paradise into Iraq (ancient Persia). They argue that the two mysterious rivers mentioned in Genesis—the Pishon and the Gihon—were in fact not rivers at all, but were artificial irrigation canals constructed by the ancient Sumerians using the waters from the Tigris and the Euphrates. Apparently, such canals were extremely successful in fertilizing and refreshing such a dry and arid area, and were used to produce wonderful fields and gardens; hence, perhaps, the basis for an idea of Eden. It also fits in well with the idea of ancient Havilah, which was fabled as an agricultural Paradise.
There is, of course, another connection with the Sumerian civilization. Parts of the book of Genesis closely resemble the Enuma Elish, a Sumerian creation tale; in fact, there are so many similarities that some have argued that Genesis has borrowed from the Sumerian text. The Enuma is a Sumerian creation story written around the 12th century B.C. in cuneiform on at least seven clay tablets that were discovered by archaeologists in the middle of the 19th century in the ruins of the palace library of Asurbanipal (now Mosul, Iraq). These tablets are written in Akkadian (a Semitic language spoken in Mesopotamia), and detail an extremely ancient Sumerian creation story. There are such striking parallels between this and the book of Genesis that scholars have suggested that the two texts (including the Garden of Eden story) may come from an earlier single source, which might be Sumerian; however, this is merely speculation and nothing has actually been proved.
Another line of thought sites the Garden in modern Turkey. Such theorists argue that because the Tigris and Euphrates flowed out of the Garden, it may lie far to the north of the Sumerian civilization, which was centered around the confluence of these rivers. This, they argue, places it in a mysterious Armenian region of eastern Turkey. The idea of the rivers of Gihon and Pishon may simply have been idealized far-away lands rather than actual rivers in that region.
And of course, some historians have argued that the Garden of Eden must be situated somewhere in Egypt. They argue that the characteristics of the great river flowing through the Garden roughly correspond to the Nile. Ancient texts speak of parts of the Garden being shrouded in a mist, which came from the river and aided the growth in the Garden. Those who put forward Egypt as a possible location state this could only have been because the Nile, which flows underground at certain points and releases vapors into the upper air. They dismiss the Tigris and Euphrates simply as distractions or mistranslations.
Others have also tried to make a particularly strong case for the land of Israel as a site for the Garden. The argument runs that God’s Chosen People (the Jews) could only have emerged from Eden, and, to prove this, a number of Jewish scholars have interpreted the river that ran through the Garden as the Jordan, which, they assert, was much longer in those days. The Gihon, they interpret as the Nile. Therefore, this theory states that Ancient Havilah would lie on the Arabian Peninsula, and would form a part of the Garden itself. They largely discount the Mesopotamian or Sumerian theories for the Garden’s location.
A few theorists have even put forward East Africa or the island of Java as the site of Eden. This, they argue, is where human life started, pointing toward anthropological evidence (skulls and hominid bones that have been found in these locations) as their evidence.
These are the more “reasoned” theories but there are a number of fanciful ones as well. Some accounts seem to state that Eden lay on some primordial supercontinent that has long since been destroyed. A prime contender for this continental landmass is said to be a massive area known as Lemuria, which was swallowed by the sea in some prehistoric cataclysm. This would mean that Eden may lie somewhere beneath the waters of the Indian Ocean. The idea of Lemuria (named after the lemur animal) has been used to explain the distribution and connections between land animals on the continents of Asia (particularly in India) and Africa. Many of those who believe say that Lemuria was probably also the birthplace of the human race, and therefore may have been the site of the Garden of Eden. Unfortunately, it is impossible to know if the supercontinent even existed, let alone the Garden within its confines. Much of the belief, however, would simply appear to be an amalgam of speculation and legend.
And there have been even more amazing claims, two of which relate to locating the Garden in America. In 1886, the Reverend D.O. Van Slyke published a small pamphlet, based on biblical and scientific research, which stated that the Garden of Eden had been somewhere in an area between the Allegheny and Rocky Mountains. Van Slyke’s theory was that it actually lay on the east bank of the Mississippi (which was the great river mentioned), and that it existed somewhere between La Crosse, Wisconsin, and Winona, Missouri. When he was put out of the Garden, Adam had not strayed too far, and in fact his descendants had continued to live in a land close to it, which would later become Wisconsin. Noah had, in fact, been living in Wisconsin at the time of the Flood, and had been carried to Mountain Ararat in the Middle East in his Ark as the deluge overwhelmed the planet. Therefore, the pamphlet claimed that the true origin of Mankind was in Wisconsin. Many contested this thesis, but until his dying day, Van Slyke maintained that it was an accurate one, although he never produced any evidence—either scientific or biblical.
The second Eden-American connection is held by some branches of the Church of Jesus Christ Latter-day Saints. This suggests that the Garden may have been situated in what is now Jackson County, Missouri. While passing through Davies County, Missouri, the founder of the Mormon Church, Joseph Smith, came upon an odd stone, which he claimed was all that remained of an altar that had been built by Adam soon after he’d been cast out of the Garden. Therefore, the original site of the Garden must have been extremely close by. Smith determined that it was about 40 miles away, near what is today the city of Independence, Missouri. At the altar, Adam had blessed his children and rededicated them to God. Smith planned to build a Mormon city there to celebrate the “discovery” of both the altar and of Eden, which he hoped to name Adam-ondi-Ahram, but the suggestion met with such resistance from locals that he was forced to abandon it. Nevertheless, several Mormon groupings still hold that Missouri is the original site of the Garden and a place where Adam and his children will one day be reunited under God.
Some even more fanciful suggestions have located the Garden not on Earth at all, but on another planet. Following a theory that human life may not have originated on Earth, but somewhere out in space, the prominent UFOlogist William Francis Brinsley Le Poer Trench, the eighth Earl of Clancarty (1911–1995), claimed that the Garden lay on the surface of Mars. The “canals” on the surface of the Red Planet, he claimed, had originally been irrigation channels used by the ancients to water the Garden. In his book The Sky People, the Earl claimed that Adam and Eve were in fact the creations of interstellar beings known as the Sky People who were conducting an experiment on the surface of Mars. This experiment was remarkably successful, and many generations of the “created” beings emerged—even Noah dwelt on Mars—until the Martian environment was accidentally destroyed by a climatic catastrophe brought about by the Sky People tinkering with the planet’s atmosphere. The survivors were then obliged to seek shelter on Earth, to which they were transported by the Sky People. These are the origins of life on our planet. Although there is literally no scientific or mythological evidence to support such a theory, it did gain some ground, and some UFOlogists still give it credence to this day. Variations of the speculation have placed Eden on one of Saturn’s moons or on the planet Venus, which God later turned into the boiling and poisonous cauldron that we know this world is today.
For a number of people, however, particularly fundamentalist Christians, the Garden of Eden did not have an earthly (or interplanetary) location. Even today, many Christians claim it to be a spiritu
al place, not of this world at all, and a kind of annex to Heaven where God sits, which therefore cannot be accessed by mortals. This was probably some sort of resurrection of the ancient idea of the Otherworld, which has already been discussed. It also served to explain why no trace of the Garden had ever been found: it had never existed in this realm of space and time. It also opened up the idea of Eden as a psychological concept.
Eden was not an actual place, but rather an aspiration—the achievement of perfection, the rediscovery of lost innocence, the ultimate embodiment of purity. Rather than simply being thought of as an actual place, the Garden of Eden now became something of an icon.