[John Calvin (1509–1564)]
THE FIRST MAN was made out of clay, but it was not ordinary clay. His body was more pure and transparent than the finest crystal. It was lit from within with streams of light that illuminated his internal vessels, vessels containing liquids of all kinds and colors. This iridescent creature was larger in stature than humans are now. His dark hair was short and curly; a dark mustache adorned his upper lip. He did not have a penis. Where his genitals would have been, there was something with the shape of a face from which emerged delicious odors. In his belly there was a vessel that bred small eggs and another vessel that contained liquid capable of impregnating these eggs. When the man became enflamed with the love of God, desire that there might be other creatures to share in this adoration would overwhelm him, so that the liquid would boil over and, spreading itself over one of the eggs, would cause it in time to hatch into another perfect man. So at least it was meant to be, when God told the human to be fruitful and multiply. But it happened this way only once: the man that was hatched was the Messiah who turned himself into a fetus and awaited the time to enter Mary’s womb. All other humans were born in a different way, when Adam and Eve were expelled from Paradise. Driven from the sacred precinct, their bodies coarsened and became like ours. They lost their crystalline transparency, their inward light dimmed and then went out; and their inner vessels became the internal organs whose sight only repels us. And in the place of the beautiful faces that once emitted such marvelous perfumes, there were now the ugly genitals that all humans cover in shame.
[Antoinette Bourignon (1616–1680)]
HUYNH SANH THONG, a MacArthur Fellow, has argued that snakes were ultimately responsible for the origin of language because mothers needed to warn their children about them. Snakes gave bipedal hominins, who were already equipped with a nonhuman primate communication system, the evolutionary nudge to begin pointing to communicate for the social good, a critical step toward the evolution of language and all that followed to make us who we are today.
[Lynne A. Isbell, 2009]
Appendix 2
A Sampling of Origin Stories
Almost every human culture that has been studied has one or more origin stories. What follows is a small selection of these stories.
Egypt
When I had come into being, being (itself) came into being, and all beings came into being after I came into being.
I planned in my own heart, and there came into being a multitude of forms of beings, the forms of children and the forms of their children. I was the one who copulated with my fist, I masturbated with my hand. Then I spewed with my own mouth.
They brought to me my Eye with them. After I had joined together my members, I wept over them. That is how men came into being from the tears which came forth from my Eye.
[Pritchard, Ancient Near Eastern Texts]
Greece
In those days God himself was their shepherd, and ruled over them, just as man, who is by comparison a divine being, still rules over the lower animals. Under him there were no forms of government or separate possession of women and children, for all men rose again from the earth, having no memory of the past. And although they had nothing of this sort, the earth gave them fruits in abundance, which grew on trees and shrubs unbidden, and where not planted by the hand of man. And they dwelt naked, and mostly in the open air, for the temperature of their seasons was mild, and they had no beds, but lay on soft couches of grass, which grew plentifully out of the earth.
[Plato, Statesman]
Greece
In the days of old, the gods distributed the earth among themselves and peopled their own districts. And when they had peopled them they tended us, their nurselings and possessions, as shepherds tend their flocks, excepting only that they did not use blows or bodily force, as shepherds do, but governed us like pilots from the stern of the vessel, which is an easy way of guiding animals, holding our souls by the rudder of persuasion according to their own pleasure.
[Plato, Critias]
Rome
An animal with higher intellect,
more noble, able—one to rule the rest:
such was the living thing the earth still lacked.
Then man was born. Either the Architect
of All, the author of the universe,
in order to beget a better world,
created man from seed divine—or else
Prometheus, son of Iapetus, made man
by mixing new-made earth with fresh rainwater
(for earth had only recently been set
apart from heaven, and the earth still kept
seeds of the sky—remains of their shared birth);
and when he fashioned man, his mold recalled
the masters of all things, the gods. And while
all other animals are bent, head down,
and fix their gaze upon the ground, to man
he gave a face that is held high; he had
man stand erect, his eyes upon the stars.
So was the earth, which until then had been
so rough and indistinct, transformed: it wore
a thing unknown before—the human form.
[Ovid, Metamorphoses 1]
Rome
… from the bronze helmet, he [Jason] draws out snake’s teeth
and scatters them on the plowed field as seed.
These teeth had first been steeped in potent venom;
earth softens them; they grow, take on new forms.
Just as a fetus gradually takes,
within its mother’s womb, a human shape,
acquiring harmony in all its parts,
and only sees the light that all men share
when it is fully formed, so here, the likeness
of men, perfected in the pregnant earth,
sprang from the soil; and what is even more
miraculous, each man was armed and clashed
his weapons at his birth.
[Ovid, Metamorphoses 7]
Rome
At long last, borne upon her dragons’ wings,
Medea came to Corinth’s sacred spring.
Here, when the world was born—so we are told
by ancient legends—mortal bodies sprang
from mushrooms risen in the wake of rain.
[Ovid, Metamorphoses 7]
North America (Great Plains)
One day Old Man determined that he would make a woman and a child; so he formed them both—the woman and the child, her son—of clay. After he had moulded the clay in human shape, he said to the clay, “You must be people,” and then he covered it up and left it, and went away. The next morning he went to the place and took the covering off, and saw that the clay shapes had changed a little. The second morning there was still more change, and the third still more. The fourth morning he went to the place, took the covering off, looked at the images, and told them to rise and walk; and they did so. They walked to the river with their Maker, and then he told them that his name was Na’pi, old man.
As they were standing by the river, the woman said to him, “How is it? Will we always live, will there be no end to it?” He said: “I have never thought of that. We will have to decide it. I will take this buffalo chip and throw it in the river. If it floats, when people die, in four days they will become alive again; they will die for only four days. But if it sinks, there will be an end to them.” He threw the chip in the river, and it floated. The woman turned and picked up a stone, and said: “No, I will throw this stone in the river; if it floats, we will always live, if it sinks people must die, that they may always be sorry for each other.” The woman threw the stone into the water, and it sank. “There,” said the Old Man, “you have chosen. There will be an end to them.”
[George Bird Grinnell, Blackfoot Lodge Tales]
Melanesia
The one who was first there drew two male figures on the ground, scratched open his own skin, and sprinkled the drawings with his blood. He plucked t
wo large leaves and covered the figures, which became, after a while, two men. The names of the men were To Kabinana and To Karvuvu.
To Kabinana went off alone, climbed a coconut tree that had light yellow nuts, picked two that were still unripe, and threw them to the ground; they broke and became two handsome women. To Karvuvu admired the women and asked how his brother had come by them. “Climb a coconut tree,” To Kabinana said, “pick two unripe nuts, and throw them to the ground.” But To Karvuvu threw the nuts point downward, and the women who came from them had flat, ugly noses.
[P. J. Meier, Mythen und Erzählungen der Küstenbewohner der Gazelle-Halbinsel (Neu-Pommern), in Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces]
Siberia
When the demiurge Pajana fashioned the first human beings, he found that he was unable to produce a life-giving spirit for them. So he had to go up to heaven and procure souls from Kudai, the High God, leaving meanwhile a naked dog to guard the figures of his manufacture. The devil, Erlik, arrived while he was away. And Erlik said to the dog: “Thou has no hair. I will give thee golden hair if thou wilt give into my hands these soulless people.” The proposal pleased the dog, and he gave the people he was guarding to the tempter. Erlik defiled them with his spittle, but took flight the moment he saw God approaching to give them life. God saw what had been done, and so he turned the human bodies inside out. That is why we have spittle and impurity in our intestines.
[W. Radloff, Proben der Volksliteratur der türkischen Stämme Süd-Siberien, in Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces]
Zimbabwe
Maori (God) made the first man and called him Mwuetsi (moon). He put him on the bottom of a Dsivoa (lake) and gave him a ngona horn filled with ngona oil. Mwuetsi lived in Dsivoa.
Mwuetsi said to Maori: “I want to go on the earth.” Maori said: “You will rue it.” Mwuetsi said: “None the less, I want to go on the earth.” Maori said: “Then go on the earth.” Mwuetsi went out of Dsivoa and on to the earth.
The earth was cold and empty. There were no grasses, no bushes, no trees. There were no animals. Mwuetsi wept and said to Maori: “How shall I live here?” Maori said: “I warned you. You have started on the path at the end of which you shall die. I will, however, give you one of your kind.” Maori gave Mwuetsi a maiden who was called Massassi, the morning star. Maori said: “Massassi shall be your wife for two years.” Maori gave Massassi a fire maker.
[Leo Frobenius and Douglas C. Fox, African Genesis]
Togo
Unumbotte (god) made a human being. The Man was Unele (man). Then, Unumbotte next made Opel (antelope …). Then, Unumbotte made Ukow (snake …) named Snake. When these three were made there were no other trees but one, Bubauw (oil palm …). At that time, the earth had not yet been pounded (smooth)… . Unumbotte said to the three: “… You must pound the ground where you are sitting.” Unumbotte gave them seeds of all kinds, and said: “Plant these.” Unumbotte went (away).
Unumbotte came back. He saw that people had not yet pounded the ground, but had planted the seeds. One of the seeds had sprouted and grown. It was a tree that had grown tall and was bearing fruit. The fruits were red… . Now, every seven days Unumbotte returned and plucked one of the red fruits.
One day Snake said: “We too would like to eat these fruits. Why must we be hungry?” Antelope said: “But we don’t know this fruit.” Then Man and his wife (… who had not been there at first …) took some of the fruit and ate it. Then, Unumbotte came down from Heaven. Unumbotte asked: “Who ate the fruit?” Man and Woman answered: “We ate it.” Unumbotte asked: “Who told you that you should eat of it?” Man and Woman replied: “Snake told us.”Unumbotte asked: “Why did you listen to Snake?” Man and Woman said: “We were hungry.”
Unumbotte questioned Antelope: “Are you hungry too?” Antelope said: “Yes, I am hungry too; I’d like to eat grass.” Since then Antelope has lived in the bush, eating grass.
Unumbotte then gave Idi (… sorghum) to Man, … yams and … millet… . And since then people have cultivated the land. But Snake was given by Unumbotte a medicine (Njojo) so that it would bite people.
[E. J. Michael Witzel, The Origins of the World’s Mythologies]
Tierra del Fuego
Kenós was alone on the earth. “Someone Up There,” Temaúkel, had appointed him to set everything down here in order. He was the son of the South and the Heavens. He wandered over the world, came back here and looked around, then went to a swampy place, dug out a lump of mud mixed with matted roots and grass tufts, shaped a male organ, and placed this on the ground. He dug another lump, squeezed the water out, shaped a female organ which he placed beside the first, then went his way. During the night, the two lumps of earth joined. From this arose something like a person: the first Ancestor. The two objects separated and, during the following night, joined again. Again someone arose who quickly grew. Night after night this occurred, with every night a new Ancestor. Thus their number steadily increased.
[Joseph Campbell, Historical Atlas of World Mythology]
Acknowledgments
Part of the pleasure of pursuing this topic has been the incentive it gave me to venture outside the disciplinary orbit in which I ordinarily circle. In the course of research and writing, I have incurred debts of gratitude to an unusually wide range of individuals and institutions. My greatest—and ongoing—institutional debt is to Harvard University, where I teach. I have benefited from wonderful colleagues and students in multiple disciplines, from the incomparable resources of its libraries and the tireless assistance of its staff, from the remarkable treasures housed in its art museums, and from the rich collections in the Semitic Museum, the Harvard Museum of Natural History, and the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. Familiarity is supposed to dull a sense of wonder, but over the years I have become ever more astonished by the very existence of great universities, and I have profited from the intellectual generosity that is a striking and often unrecognized characteristic of scholarly communities.
That generosity is spectacularly in evidence in two extraordinary research institutions to which I am also greatly indebted. The first is the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, where over many years I have forged enduring friendships, and from which I have derived a model for intense, ongoing conversations that bring the humanities together with the natural sciences. The second is the American Academy in Rome, with its visionary insistence that art-making and scholarship inhabit the same space of inquiry. With its inexhaustible ancient, medieval, and Renaissance resources, Rome is an ideal setting for work on Adam and Eve, and I have spent many happy hours in the city’s innumerable churches, catacombs, museums, galleries, and libraries. I am particularly grateful to the staff of the libraries of the American Academy and the Vatican, with special thanks to Sebastian Hierl, the director of the Academy’s library; to Umberto Utro, the Vatican’s curator of Christian Antiquities; and to Angela Di Curzio at the Catacombe SS. Marcellino e Pietro.
I have had the opportunity to present pieces of this project, as it was unfolding, in several different places and to profit from the questions and comments of my audience. These include the Humanitas Lectures at the University of Oxford; the Mosse-Lecture at the Humboldt University, Berlin; the Cardin Lecture at Loyola University, Baltimore; a conference in honor of Thomas Laqueur at the University of California, Berkeley; the Wissenschaftskolleg and the Staatsbibliothek in Berlin; Northern Arizona University; and the Renaissance Society of America Annual Convention. All arrangements for these occasions were facilitated by my able assistant Aubrey Everett, to whom I am grateful for this and much other help, provided with unfailing cheerfulness, competence, and resourcefulness.
A significant part of the joy, as well as the daunting challenge, of this project is the number of distinct worlds in which Adam and Eve found a home over many centuries. As I am painfully aware of how much I have failed to understand in this long history, so too I am happily aware of how much help I have received in making sense
of what parts of it I could grasp and in keeping the inquiry from breaking up into discrete pieces. My agent, Jill Kneerim, has, as usual, been there for me from the beginning of this project to its completion and has given me the gift of her unfailing professional and personal wisdom. This is the third book on which I have worked with my remarkable editor at Norton, Alane Mason. In each instance—and perhaps most of all in the writing of this book—I have been amazed by her special gifts. Those gifts include patience, a startling (and, on occasion, dismaying) intellectual acuity, an unflagging attention to detail, and an ability to elicit feats of rethinking, restructuring, and rewriting. These are rare qualities in anyone, and I can only hope that I can emulate them in my teaching, just as I have profited from them in my writing.
I am grateful to Shawon Kinew for invaluable assistance in tracking down and obtaining permissions for the images in this book. Among the many who have kindly assisted me, I want to acknowledge Salar Abdolmohamadian, Lilly Ajarova and the staff at the Ngamba Chimpanzee Sanctuary, Suzanne Akbari, Danny Baror, Shaul Bassi, Uta Benner, Homi Bhabha, Kathrina Biegger, Robert Blechman, Mary Anne Boelcskevy, Will Bordell, Daniel Boyarin, Horst Bredekamp, Georgiana Brinkley, Terence Capellini, David Carrasco, Maria Luisa Catoni, Christopher Celenza, Grazie Christie, Shaye Cohen, Rebecca Cook, Rocco Coronato, Lorraine Daston, Zachary Davis, Jeremy DeSilva, Maria Devlin, François Dupuigrenet Desroussilles, Ruth Ezra, Noah Feldman, Steven Frank, Raghavendra Gadagkar, Luca Giuliani, Anthony Grafton, Margareth Hagen, Jay Harris, Galit Hasan-Rokem, Stephen Hequembourg, Walter Herbert, David Heyd, Elliott Horowitz, Bernhard Jussen, Henry Ansgar Kelly, Karen King, Adam Kirsch, Jeffrey Knapp, Jennifer Knust, Meg Koerner, Ivana Kvetanova, Bernhard Lang, Thomas Laqueur, Jill Lepore, Anthony Long, Avi Lifschitz, Zarin Machanda, Peter Machinist, Hussain Majeed, Louis Menand, Eric Nelson, Morton Ng, Emily Otali and her staff at Kanyawara, Shekufeh Owlia, Elaine Pagels, Catalin Partenie, David Pilbeam, Lisbet Rausing, Meredith Ray, Robert Richards, Ingrid Rowland, Michal Ronnen Safdie, Moshe Safdie, Paul Schmid-Hempel, David Schorr, Charles Stang, Stephen Stearns, Alan Stone, Gordon Teskey, Michael Tomasello, Normandy Vincent, Elizabeth Weckhurst, Adam Wilkins, Nora Wilkinson, Edward O. Wilson, and Richard Wrangham. To all of these, in addition to my thanks, I offer the usual indemnification: I alone am responsible for the mistakes, omissions, and inadequacies that will no doubt be discovered and duly noted.
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