Thomas Cole, Expulsion from the Garden of Eden, 1828.
Before the world turned cruel and harsh, it is said that the first man Adam woke in a lush garden, his body crafted in the image of his Creator. Eve was created from his rib, and together they tended to the plants and animals, as masters of the Earth, with God as master over them. In this, He forbid them only one thing: in the center of the garden stood a tree bearing fruit containing the knowledge of good and evil, which they should not eat or they would die. Despite all that was provided to them, Eve was tempted by Satan in the body of a serpent, promising that godhood was within human reach, and that the threats of death were simple lies to keep her servile. On eating the fruit, and sharing with her husband, God cursed the first human beings, and cast them out of the garden, forced to grow old, die, and suffer beyond His grace for having ignored the commandments of their creator.
This tale also never really happened, which is something that I am willing to state categorically. Genetic evidence alone is enough to debunk this story, but by now I hope that you, dear reader, expect more from me than simple mid-2000s internet-Atheist polemicizing on the absurdity of Biblical literalism. I’ve previously argued that the simultaneously abstract and concrete stories of religious mythology are powerful motivators, and as these stories have been told and retold countless times since at least the tenth century BCE in one form or another, we should instead examine the story of the fall of man with a serious eye. This story, and other stories from the Bible, have remarkable staying power, and examining their themes and implications should prove illuminating — particularly, their underlying justifications for authoritarian or fascist power structures. I believe that an effort to reframe and reimagine this story will reveal a powerful message for the radical seeking to bring real material change to the world.
Central to the story’s power is its emotional appeal to what defined life in paradise. This is marked by two distinct qualities: the lack of clothing and the complete protection from harm, including death, which God’s grace provides. It’s clear the appeal the state of nudity would have to people of any era, whether a desire to be freed from the toil and struggle of daily life or to be free of social pressures and shame. Further, the very real dangers of death by starvation, war, or disease hangs over everyone, and freedom from this uncertainty is a powerful idea. Knowing what life after the fall of man is like, the wrenching hubris of eating the fruit in defiance of God becomes that much more tragic, and the fear of disobedience becomes wrapped up with the everyday fears of the unknown. A mystical bliss and comfort is placed in tragic tension with the punishment for reaching towards godhood.
This is, simply put, prelapsarian nostalgia. Not a unique thing by any measure: the Bhagavad Gita is a story of decay from an ancient virtuous era to our modern corrupt state, while back in the Mediterranean world Roman mythology held the citizens were exiles of the great city of Troy, and Plato spoke of a perfect republic in the city of Atlantis sunk and lost to history. All serve a simple purpose: to invoke the virtues of an imaginary time that no one has ever experienced and to condemn a world that malevolent actors seek to dominate. The story of the fall of man from the Garden of Eden works towards this end especially well, as disobedience to the one true God condemns not just those who have disobeyed but their entire lineage—a generational punishment that, until the Gospels of Jesus, were inescapable and the fundamental burden of all mankind. What then to think of a ruler who claims the authority of that god? If you yourself do not believe them, they certainly have many followers who do that will gladly proclaim you corrupted by the great evil that corrupted us all at the beginning.
The danger of this story is compounded by the figure of the serpent. Here the fundamental evil of the world tricks our ancestors, making every one of us vulnerable to being led astray from our “benevolent” overlord. This makes any disobedience an act of existential danger, a re-capitulation of the original sin that doomed us all to a life of toil and shame. The entire story then is an elaborate justification for the domination and oppression of the masses by a few claiming an authority from an un-interrogateable god. It is a paean to authoritarianism and fascism, made more dangerous by the implication that resource scarcity is a direct result of this fall from grace.
“Be fruitful, and multiply” is the command God gives when he creates Adam and Eve, and the Garden provides all the food needed for this with no negative externalities. Cast from the sacred grounds, though, man must till the soil and struggle for his meals, and if they are too fruitful? Starvation or war awaits. This line of thinking might seem familiar, as it guides the “tough love” attitudes of conservative thinkers, and one of the most influential was Thomas Malthus. To him the suffering of society whether from war or starvation was evidence of the unvirtuous nature of man constrained by the laws of nature. In his telling, the formula is simple: left unregulated, lifeforms grow at exponential rates, while the production of resources can only proceed in a linear fashion. Starvation is the ultimate curb on the growth of humanity, and to prevent wide scale famine, individuals must practice virtuous behaviors of restraint.
Conveniently, those for whom the lack of said virtues made their lot harder were the poor and the working class. The poor bred too quickly, wasted their money on alcohol and trifles, and any effort to alleviate their financial precarity would only release the brakes on their natural biological urges, thus damning all society. That this in effect excuses the unjust order of the society in which Malthus lived is no accident. In fact, the occasion for writing his famous “Essay on the Principle of Population” was in response to William Godwin’s “Enquiry Concerning Political Justice,” a foundational work indicating the role of institutions in the lives of the people and the individual’s responsibility to either work with or rebel against these. While both of these men were absolutely of an aristocratic class, Godwin’s work was a fundamental challenge to the monarchist orders of his day and sat in solidarity with the radical actions of the Jacobins in France, a direct existential threat to Malthus’s principles and status.
Godwin and Malthus
More fundamentally, though, we must consider Malthus’s faith as an Anglican priest in propagating this worldview, especially in contrast to Godwin. While the latter’s “Political Justice” would examine the institutions of people and propose how one might go about improving the position of every person and relieving their suffering, for Malthus the original sin of eating that fruit in the Garden of Eden condemned mankind to a tremendous evil. That evil, the cause of all human suffering, could only be resolved by the death and resurrection of Christ, a literal sacrifice for our historical sins. The line from the need for the tremendous sacrifice of Christ to a personal sacrifice in order to preserve society is obvious and made easier to prescribe when those called to sacrifice the most are your social inferiors.
The shadow of Malthus, though, is long—not only for his role in legitimizing competition for scarce resources as a driving force for large economies, but in further entrenching the idea that struggle is an inexorable force of nature. Despite the perseverance of mankind and the ability to greatly expand our capacity to feed our populations, many people still cling to the idea that there is some impurity fundamental to the human condition. We saw it dramatically stated in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, when clear skies over Los Angeles prompted people to declare “nature is healing, humans are the virus.” While it’s been memed to death by now, this impulse is central to one of the most dangerous ideologies of our time: eco-fascism. This political movement, which has been gaining profile in the last several years, confronts the ecological crises of industrialization and climate change by proposing a state that serves the rightful pure people to a government in harmony with nature, while barring the “lesser races” from this protection. To these ideologues, the degradation of the natural world is the fault of modernity, with industrialization leading to the debasement of the traditional family and honest labor made impossible through the importation of workers from impure nations. This idea of a lost, more pristine state of nature and that of a corrupting influence that must be purged so that human beings can reclaim the paradise that was stolen from them fits only too well with the traditional telling of the fall of man from the Garden of Eden.
This is why we as radical Satanists must reimagine this story. While Milton may not have considered Satan a hero—and the Bible certainly doesn’t—we are under no obligation to follow their lead. Consider instead the story of the fall of man as a tale told by an unreliable narrator. God, a usurping despot claiming supreme authority finds (or maybe even creates) mankind and places him in the garden. For what purposes isn’t too important, though I am partial to the theology Milton held that God sought to renew the armies of heaven with the souls of man for a coming war with the infernal host. Satan, having been defeated in his attempt to cast down the false despot, has caught wind of God’s new project. Setting out to prevent the creation of this new force, he finds that man actually lacks the capacity to critically question his own lot, as Satan and the other fallen angels have. Lied to in service of a militarist agenda, he thus seeks to liberate the first people and save them from a servile future. Taking the form of one of the beasts, he approaches Eve, who has already been placed in a position of subservience and, in Milton’s telling, bristles at it. Appealing to her sense of reason, he convinces her that there is no way that the fruit will kill her, that it was a lie to prevent her from the knowledge she needs to realize herself as a being with agency and intent.
In this, Satan is a promethean figure, a form especially popular amongst Romantic writers. Only, instead of bringing the knowledge of fire, Satan leads mankind to knowledge of themselves and the world. Equipped with the understanding of right and wrong, they become useless to God in his plans for a final War in Heaven and are cast out from the garden of false comforts to the world as it is. Although he is actually helping mankind—hastening the first people’s confrontation with their fate—they nevertheless blame the serpent for their choice to rebel against God. Satan, knowing that understanding can only come from personal examination, knows he shouldn’t reveal the entirety of God’s deception and thus comes to be seen as a liar, a conniving snake that through malice destroyed the comfort and peace that mankind had once had.
Here we have a powerful story of doubt, rebellion, and solidarity, as well as a cautionary tale that the choice to renounce your masters is difficult. Eden, itself reframed as a gilded prison and false homeland, becomes a direct rebuke to the temptations of eco-fascism and its calls to return to a pure state of nature. This prelapsarian myth, instead of representing a world corrupted by malevolent outside forces, was constructed to advance fascist goals in the first place. While the comforts of authoritarian edicts may satisfy the uncritical mind, Satanic Liberation offers the promise of self-determination, and the prison break from the Garden stands as a triumph. Further, the work of fighting unjust authority requires more than just declaring your unwillingness to be ruled. An injury to one is an injury to all; but many still believe their life requires subservience, and helping others to see past this frequently risks making ourselves the target of their anger. The war, though, is long, and the cause of liberation for all people I think is worth that struggle and isolation.
When I first conceived of Satanism as a way for abstract radical concepts to be retold, the fall of man was the first story that came to mind. I think we can see here the power in this methodology, and, as Satanists, we can take this effort to examine other narratives, interrogate the implied agendas they hold, and, through careful reframing, discover their hidden truths. Armed now with these Satanic hermeneutics we can approach a broad array of stories in our search for hidden Satanic knowledge.