The Eliminator; or, Skeleton Keys to Sacerdotal Secrets

“We would not seek to detract from the great value of myths, for, besides their own intrinsic worth, these stories also exhibit to us many phases of ancient life and thought. Myths may be regarded as history which we have not yet been able to read. We should not discard as untrue or unhistorical any tale, biblical or other, as implying that it is false and unworthy of consideration. On the contrary, we cannot too earnestly and patiently ponder over every ancient tale, legend, or myth, as they all have some foundation and instructive lesson. Whenever an important myth has existed an important fact has doubtless been its basis.”

CHAPTER VII. THE FABLE OF THE FALL

“And calleth those things which be not as though they were.”—Rom. 4:17.

THE prevailing belief of Christendom to-day is, that about six thousand years ago, somewhere in Asia, the Supreme Creator took common clay and moulded it into the form of a man, somewhat as a sculptor forms the model from which the marble statue is to be constructed, and when shaped to his liking he breathed into the clay model the breath of life, and it became a living soul. This miraculous work is believed to have been begun and completed on a particular day; so that in the morning the earth contained not a man, but in the afternoon the full-grown, bearded man stood up in his majesty and assumed supremacy over all living things. This godlike man finding himself lonely, the Creator put him to sleep, and opened his side and took therefrom a rib, out of which he formed a woman, who was to be a companion, a wife, to the man; and from this particular couple have come, by ordinary generation, all the people dwelling upon the face of the earth. They are said to have been perfect, but, unfortunately for their progeny, this perfection did not long continue. Before they were blest with offspring they lost their Creator’s favor by eating fruit from a forbidden tree, and became fearfully demoralized, and, instead of begetting children endowed with their own angelic qualities, they became the unhappy parents of a race of moral monsters, of which we are all degraded and degenerate descendants.

The sacerdotal story of the fall of Adam and Eve is based upon the assumption that it is to be received as literal history, revealed by the Creator and written down in a book by a man specially chosen and plenarily inspired; so that there can be no error or mistake in the record. To question this narrative in its literal sense is most impious, and subjects the doubter to the charge of favoring infidelity.

While persons “professing and calling themselves Christians” cannot agree regarding many things deemed by them matters of vital importance, the fall of man is a matter in which they are fully agreed. The great basic dogma which underlies all modern systems of theology, Romish and Protestant, is the utter depravity of the human race through the fall of Adam, dooming a large majority of the human family to eternal punishment.

How evil came into the world has been the most perplexing problem of the ages. Before it the most gigantic minds have been covered with confusion and paralyzed with doubt. Why sin and suffering should have been permitted, not to say created, has never been made clear to the human reason by any system of theology, Romish or Protestant. A few years ago Dr. Edward Beecher published a book entitled The Conflict of Ages. When reviewed by Dr. Charles Hodge in the Princeton Review he entitled his paper “Beecher’s Conflict;” but it was rightly called The Conflict of Ages; it was not “Beecher’s Conflict,” and the explanation given by theology only involves the question in greater doubt and difficulty.

From the first dawning of human reason, even in the mind of inquisitive childhood, questions like these have been revolved, if not formulated: Did not God know, when he made Adam and Eve, that they would fall? Why, then, did he create them? Why did he create a subtle serpent to tempt them? Why did he create a tree the fruit of which was forbidden? Why did he make the possible everlasting ruin of innumerable unborn mortals depend on such a trivial act as the eating of a certain apple? Why did he not destroy Adam and Eve after their first act of disobedience, and thus prevent them from propagating a faithless progeny, which should increase in geometrical progression until the number should be so great as to exhaust calculation with weariness, stagger reason itself, and transcend even the powers of the loftiest imagination to conceive? Why are the teeming millions of the children of Adam held virtually responsible for this single trivial act of disobedience by an unknown remote ancestor myriads of ages ago? How could all men sin in him and fall with him in the first transgression? How could the guilt of Adam’s sin be imputed to his children?

The circumstances connected with the degradation of man are so extraordinary that it is not unreasonable to inquire whether the narrative of the fall is a matter of supernatural revelation based upon an historic occurrence, or whether it is purely mythical, portraying the conceptions of the human mind as to the origin of evil at some remote period of the world’s childhood. For the support of the dogma of total depravity through the fall of Adam theologians rely primarily upon the account in the book of Genesis. It is a notable fact that Adam and Eve are not historically recognized in any other portion of the Old Testament, and their very existence was totally ignored by the Teacher of Nazareth, if the Gospels said to contain the only report of his teachings are to be credited. Nobody pretends that Moses, the doubtful author of the Pentateuch, wrote from personal knowledge; but it is claimed that he wrote under inspiration of God, though there is not a single intimation in Genesis or any other book that he was so inspired, or that God had anything more to do with his writings than he had with the writings of Homer, Herodotus, or John Milton. But the assumption that the dogma of the fall through the sin of Adam was first revealed to Moses—at most not more then eight or nine hundred years before the Christian era—is plainly exploded by the fact that this story existed among many nations centuries and centuries before Moses is said to have been born or the writing called Genesis existed.

It is not within the lines of our general purpose to here give in detail the numerous legends—substantially the same, though differing in particulars—regarding the introduction of sin into this world, found in the writings of Hindoos, Persians, Etruscans, Phœnicians, Babylonians, Chaldeans, Egyptians, Thibetans, and others. Any man who would now dare to deny this statement regarding the prevalence of the story of the fall centuries before the writing of Genesis existed would justly subject himself to the charge of ignorance or dishonesty.

Dr. Inman states that Adam is the Phallus and Eve the Yoni—in other words, that Adam and Eve signify the same idea as Abraham and Sara, Jacob and Leah, man and woman; thus embodying in the Hebrew the Hindoo notion that all things sprang from Mahadeva and his Sacti, my lady Sara. This deduction enables us at once to recognize, as did the early Christians, the mythical character of the account of the fall; and we must conclude that the story means that the male and female lived happily together so long as each was without passion for the other, but that when a union took place between them the woman suffered all the miseries inseparable from pregnancy, and the man had to toil for a family, whereas he had previously only thought of himself. The serpent is the emblem of “desire,” indicated by the man and recognized by the woman. “There is a striking resemblance between the Hindoo and Hebrew myths. The first tells us that Mahadeva was the primary Being, and from him arose the ‘Sacti.’ The second makes Adam the original, and Eve the product of his right side—an idea which is readily recognizable in the word Benjamin. After the creation, the Egyptian, Vedic, and Jewish stories all place the woman beside a citron or pomegranate tree, or one bearing both fruits; near this is a cobra or asp, the emblem of male desire, because these serpents can inflate or erect themselves at will.”

General Forlong thus discourses upon this subject: “Most cosmogonies relate a phallic tale of two individuals Adam and Eve, meeting in a garden of delight (Gan-Eden), and then being seduced by a serpent Ar (Ar-i-man), Hoa, Op, or Orus, to perform the generative act, which it is taught led to sin and trouble, and this long before we hear of a spiritual god or of solar deities. These cosmogonies narrate a contest between man and Nature, in which the former fell, and must ever fall, for the laws of Sol and his seasons none can resist.”… “The Jews learned most of their faith and fables from the great peoples of the East; especially did they get the two cosmogonies, and that solar fable, mixed with truth, of a serpent tempting a woman with the fruit of a tree, of course in the fading or autumnal equinox, when only fruit exists and all creation tries to save itself by shielding all the stores of nature from the fierce onslaughts of angry Typhon when entering on his dreary winter. The Gan-Eden fable was clearly an attempt by Zoroastrians to explain to outsiders the difficult philosophical problem of the origin of man and of good and evil. Mithras, they said—and the Jews followed suit—is the good God, the incarnation of God, who dwells in the beauteous orb of day; to which Christian Jews added that he was born of a virgin in a cave which he illuminated.”

“The tree of life mentioned in Gen. 3: 22 certainly appears,” says Mr. Smith (Chal. Acct, p. 88), “to correspond to the sacred grove of Anu, which a later fragment of the creation-tablets states was guarded by a sword turning to all the four points of the compass; and there too we have allusions to a thirst for knowledge, having been the cause of man’s fall; the gods curse the dragon and Adam for the transgression. This Adam was one of the Zalmat-qaqadi, or dark men, created by Hea or Nin-Si-ku, a name pointing to Hea being a Nin or Creator, while Adam is called Adami or Admi, the present Eastern term for man and the lingam, and no proper name.” The impression that I get from the legends of Izdubar, or the Flood, or even the creation-tablets, is simply that these were religious revivals. Nearly every illustration of Mr. Smith’s last volume shows the serpent as an evil influence. Now, if I am right—and all I have read elsewhere tends to the same conclusion—then all the tales as to a temptation by a serpent, a fall, are phallo-pythic transmutations of faith, and have no more connection with the first creation of man upon earth than have the flood, the ark, or mountain-worship of Jews in the desert, or the destruction of Pytho by Apollo in the early days of Delphi, etc.

“The tree and serpent,” says Fergusson, “are symbolized in every religious system which the world has known, not excepting the Hebrew and Christian, The two together are typical of the reproductive powers of vegetable and animal life. It is uncertain whether the Jewish tree of life was borrowed from the Egyptians or Chaldeans; but the meaning was in both cases the same, and we know that the Assyrian tree was a life-giving divinity. And Moses, or the writer of Genesis, has represented very much the same in his coiled serpent and love-apples, or citrons, of the tree of life.

“The writer of Genesis probably drew his idea of the two trees, that of life and that of knowledge, from Egyptian and Zoroastrian story; for criticism now assigns a comparatively late date to the writing of the first Pentateuchal book. After Genesis no further notice is taken in the Bible of the tree of knowledge. But that of life, or the tree which gives life, seems several times alluded to, especially in Rev. 2: 7. The lingam or pillar is the Eastern name for the tree which gives life. But when this tree became covered with the inscriptions of all the past ages, as in Egypt, then Toth, the Pillar, came to be called the tree of knowledge.”

But it must not be supposed that all Christian theologians of the present day hold the historical and literal truth of the legend of the fall of Adam. In several of the public libraries of Philadelphia may be found a book entitled Beginnings of History, written by a learned professor of Archaeology at the National Library of France—Professor François Lenormant. It was republished by Scribner, New York, in 1886, with an introduction by Francis Brown, associate professor of Biblical Philology in the Presbyterian Union Theological Seminary of New York. It is written from a Christian standpoint, and the writer is a firm defender of the infallibility of the Hebrew Scriptures, and can never be suspected of having any sympathy with modern rationalism. He not only admits that the Edenic story of the introduction of sin, found in Genesis, is a compilation made up from the Shemitic traditions of Babylonians, Phœnicians, and other pagan peoples, but he has covered page after page with proofs of this fact by learned and accurate quotations from their numerous legends. He puts in the common plea of lawyers, known as confession and avoidance, and takes the ground that “the writer of the Hebrew Genesis took these fables from floating tradition as he found them, and cleansed them of their impurities, altered their polytheistic tendencies, made them monotheistic, and otherwise so transformed them as to make them fit vehicles of spiritual instruction by the Divine Spirit which inspired him.”

This is an ingenious device, but it will hardly satisfy sound thinkers. The question is, whether the story of Adam is historical truth or pagan fiction. The highest scholarship pronounces it fiction, while certain orthodox writers admit the fact “that God used prevailing but unreal fancies to teach important truths.”

The document in which the story of the fall is found is a confused, inconsistent, and absurd compilation by at least two different writers, representing each a different God, Jehovah and Elohim, the writers contradicting each other in many particulars; and this feet is admitted by candid Christian writers, and by none more frankly than the late Dean Stanley of the English Establishment. The first account of creation ends at the third verse of Gen. 2, and the second account begins with the fourth verse and closes with the end of that chapter. In the first account the man and woman are created together on the sixth and last day of creation (Gen. 1:28). In the second account the beasts and birds are created after the creation of the man and before the creation of the woman; and it was not until after Adam had examined and named all the beasts of the fields, and had failed to find among the apes, chimpanzees, and ourangs a suitable companion for himself, that Eve was made from one of Adam's ribs, taken from his primeval anatomy while under the influence of a divine anaesthetic (Gen. 2:7, 8, 15, 22). In the first account man was made on the last day, and woman was made at the same time; in the second account man was made after the plants and herbs, but before fruit trees, beasts, and birds. So it would seem that, inasmuch as woman was made after all things, she was an afterthought, a sort of necessary evil for the solace and comfort of man. These contradictions run through the whole of the first and second chapters of Genesis, and plainly show that these narratives were compiled by two different persons from vague traditions or from different written documents. Had the Creator undertaken to write or dictate an account of his own work, he certainly would not have contradicted himself six times within the limit of a few lines.

The credibility of the document in which is found the account of the fall is further impaired by the fact that it contains statements openly at variance with the demonstrations of science. It teaches not only that the world was made in six days of twenty-four hours each, but that the whole planetary system was made in a single day. “He made the stars also.” The discoveries of modern science have lately driven our sacerdotalists to a new and absurd interpretation of the story of creation by alleging that the six days spoken of were not periods of twenty-four hours each, but six indefinite periods of very long duration. But it would be easy to furnish numerous admissions of orthodox scholars that the six days of the creative week were intended by the writers to describe ordinary days, of twenty-four hours each, and not indefinite periods. Any other interpretation Professor Hitchcock has pronounced “forced and unnatural, and therefore not to be adopted without a very urgent necessity.” The venerable Moses Stuart, long professor of Biblical Literature in the Andover Theological Seminary, says: “When the sacred writer in Gen. 1 says the first day, the second day, etc., there can be no possible doubt— none, I mean, for a philologist, let a geologist think as he may—that a definite day of the week is meant. What puts this beyond all question,” the learned theologian adds, “is that the writer says specifically ‘the evening and the morning were the first day,’ ‘the second day,’ etc. Now, is an evening and a morning a period of some thousands of years?… If Moses has given us an erroneous account of the creation, so be it. Let it come out and let us have the whole truth.” The fact is, that the indefinite-period hypothesis does not, after all the quirks and special pleadings, overcome the difficulty. The question arises, Why six indefinite periods? One indefinite period is as long as six or sixty. There is nothing in geology to indicate six periods. One need only consider the attempt to reconcile Genesis and geology to plainly see that the Mosaic record was intended to be taken in its obvious sense. The forced interpretations put upon the Hebrew story to make it appear to be historical and literal truth make it more absurd than it would otherwise appear. Think of Adam created (according to one account) on the second day, and Eve on the sixth day, and then accept the hypothesis that these creative days represent indefinite periods of thousands, if not millions, of years to each day, so that four indefinite periods of thousands of years passed away before Adam had his Eve to be his helpmeet, and what a long, lonely time he must have had! Then how small the human census must have been for unnumbered ages, and how strange the fact that the same writer says that Adam “lived nine hundred and thirty years, and he died;” that is to say, he died several hundred thousand years before the rib was taken from his side to make him a wife!

But the fact must be emphasized that it is quite useless to criticise the so-called Mosaic narrative of the fall, because it is acknowledged to be a huge myth or allegory by the best scholarship of modern times. The Christian author of the Beginnings of History has with profound research actually produced and printed the stories of many ancient peoples in contrast with the narrative in Genesis. He says in the preface to his book: “This is the problem which I have been led to examine in comparing the narrations of the Sacred Book with those current long ages before the time of Moses among nations whose civilization dated back into the remote past, with whom Israel was surrounded, from among whom it came out. As far as I myself am concerned, the conclusion from this study is not doubtful. That which we read in the first chapter of Genesis is not an account dictated by God himself, the possession of which was the exclusive privilege of the chosen people. It is a tradition whose origin is lost in the night of the remotest ages, and which all the great nations of Western Asia possessed in common, with some variations. The very form given it in the Bible is so closely related to that which has been lately discovered in Babylon and Chaldea, it follows so exactly the same course, that it is quite impossible for me to doubt any longer.

The school of Alexandria in general, and Origen in particular, in the first centuries of the Church interpreted the first chapters of Genesis in the allegorical sense; in the sixteenth century the great Cardinal Cajetan revived this system, and, bold as it may appear, it has never been the object of any ecclesiastical censure.”

It is well understood among men of learning that the whole story of Eden, the talking serpent, and the sinning woman is a myth, and that all nations of sun-worshippers have had substantially the same legend, and their priests, poets, and philosophers have not hesitated to acknowledge among themselves its fabulous character. That early Jewish and Christian writers freely admitted the allegorical character of the narrative ascribed to Moses is well known. Maimonides, a learned Jewish rabbi, said: “One ought not to understand nor take according to the letter that which is written in the Book of the Creation, nor have the ideas concerning it that most men have, otherwise our ancient sages would not have recommended us to carefully conceal the sense of it, and on no account to raise the allegorical veil which conceals the truth it contains. Taken according to the letter, this work gives the most absurd and extravagant idea of divinity. Whoever shall discover the true sense of it ought to be careful not to divulge it.” Philo, the great Jewish authority, took the same ground, and wrote mainly to show the allegorical character of all the sacred books. Josephus held similar views, and so did Papias and many of the early Christian Fathers. Origen said: “What man of good sense will ever persuade himself that there was a first, second, and a third day, and that these days had each their morning and evening without the not-yet-existing sun, moon, and stars? What man sufficiently simple to believe that God, acting the part of a gardener, planted a garden in the East—that the ‘tree of life’ was a real tree, evident to the senses, whose fruit had the virtue of preserving life?” etc. St. Augustine held the same views as to the allegorical character of the so-called Mosaic account of the creation and fall, and so did Tertullian, Clement, and Ambrose. Some of the early Christian authorities carried this idea of the allegorical character of the Scriptures so far as to apply it to the Gospels themselves. “There are things therein” (said Origen) “which, taken in their literal sense, are mere falsities and lies;” and St. Gregory asserted of the letter of Scripture that “it is not only dead, but deadly;” while Athanasius admonished us that “should we understand Sacred Writ according to the letter we should fall into the most enormous blasphemies.” It seems to have been fully realized in early times that there was no rational way to interpret Moses and his writings but upon the allegorical hypothesis. As the Mosaic account of the creation and the fall of man is so evidently the same story that was suggested to the Persians and other nations by the astronomical phenomena, we are forced to the conclusion that this is the only key to unlock the mysteries of the first three chapters of Genesis. If the original story is known to have been founded upon the ancient astrological religion, the substantial copy in our Jewish Scriptures must have the same basis. All the ancient religions had their Cabala—secret words and initiations—and the Jewish and Christian Scriptures are no exceptions, as is seen upon their very surface. We may not have all their secrets—some of them may not be proper things to write about in our day—but no fair man of intelligence can successfully deny that many of those things which are absurd if taken for historical truth are at once explained by reference to the solar cults of the ancients.

Many theologians have virtually admitted that there is nothing injurious to the interests of true religion in the hypothesis here presented, but, on the contrary, there is much that is truly beautiful and calculated to elevate and inspire the devout mind. Even the distinguished Albertus, of the twelfth Christian century, surnamed the Great for his attainments as a scholastic ecclesiastic, did not hesitate to write: “All the mysteries of the incarnation of our Saviour Christ, and all the circumstances of his marvellous life from his conception to his ascension, are to be traced out in the constellations and are figured in the stars.” “The Gospel in the Stars” was the significant advertisement of a course of sermons recently delivered in a prominent Lutheran church in Philadelphia by a learned doctor of divinity, and, though many of his hearers thought that the title should have been “The Stars in the Gospel,” it was certainly an evidence of progress and increasing light to have a frank admission from such a source that all the truths of the gospel and the doctrines of the Reformation were prefigured in the celestial heavens and illustrated in the constellations of the solar zodiac.

This author admits the identity between the tenets of the astro-theology of ancient sun-worshippers and the present dominant theology of Christendom, but assumes that the original construction of the celestial heavens and its fanciful division into constellations had reference to, and in fact prefigured, what was literally fulfilled in Christianity. He finds in the solar zodiac of Esne in Egypt as clear predictions of the coming of Christ as he finds in Isaiah or any other Jewish prophet. Thus, he “gives away” the whole argument, and unwittingly admits the natural origin of all the distinctive tenets of modern dogmatic theology. This last craze may well be regarded as a compound of scientific trifling and theological, moonshine.

But it is said by theologians that man is depraved, and that the present moral status of humanity confirms the dogma of total depravity by descent through fallen and depraved ancestors. This involves the question, What is depravity?

That man is not perfect in morality is as true as that he is not perfect in body nor in mentality. But does not every one know by his own experience and observation that human shortcomings mainly arise from a want of perfect development and the influence of environment, rather than from essential, innate viciousness? What is called “sin” should be known as “undevelopment,” and, as real as is the law of heredity, it is no more real than the law of environment. Where there is evidence of hereditary evil tendencies it is not necessary to go back more than two or three generations to find the source.

But the fact must here be emphasized and continually kept in mind that the story of Eden and the fall is substantially found in the annals of many nations anterior to the existence of the Jewish tribes, varied only in trivial matters. The story of the serpent in Eden is probably of Aryan source, to which the conception of the satanic origin of evil was attached after the Jews came into close contact with Persian dualistic ideas. To doubt which was the original and which the copy, shows, regarding the well-established facts of history, a want of information so great as to make argument on this matter quite useless.

The conclusion is inevitable that if the fall of Adam is a fiction, then the entire system of evangelical theology is based upon a fiction; and the fruit must be natural to the tree—a fictitious tree can only bear fictitious fruit. Orthodox theologians, especially of the logical Presbyterian stamp, realize that if they give up Adam and Eve as progenitors of the entire human race, they give up the very foundation-stones of the “redemptive scheme.” This accounts for Presbyterian opposition to the doctrine of evolution. They are logical enough to see that the second Adam as a Saviour in the evangelical sense must share the fate of the first Adam; and so Professor Woodrow of South Carolina has recently been degraded on account of his theory of evolution.

The world moves, and, as Professor Marsh of Yale College has well said, “The doctrine of evolution is as thoroughly demonstrated as the Copernican system of astronomy.”

In the Popular Science Monthly for October, 1890, we have a very able article from Andrew D. White, LL.D., ex-president of Cornell University, showing how completely science contradicts theology in regard to the Edenic story. He shows that the tendency of the race has always been upward from low beginnings. He further shows that Archbishop Whately and the Duke of Argyll championed the Bible story, but were so conclusively answered by Sir John Lubbock and Tylor that the views of the archbishop were seen to be untenable, while the duke, as an honest man and a sound thinker, was obliged to give up his former views and adopt the scientific theory. The light thrown upon this subject by Herbert Spencer, Buckle, Max Müller, and scores of other great scholars is among the glories of the century now ending. The public declaration of the celebrated Von Martius, of his conversion to the scientific view of the story of the Fall, ought to make smaller men less confident of their views on a subject they have never studied.

In 1875, Commodore Vanderbilt endowed a university in Tennessee, and it was put in charge of the Methodists. Dr. Alexander Winchell was called to the chair of Geology. He was distinguished in his specialty by his successful labors in another university. He openly taught “that man existed before the period assigned to Adam, and that all the human race could not have descended from Adam.” The Methodist bishop told him “that such views were contrary to the plan of redemption.” The Methodist Conference resolved “that they would have no more of this,” and Professor Winchell was summarily dismissed from the chair, and the position, with its salary, assigned to another. The State University of Michigan recalled him to his former chair in that institution, where he could teach science regardless of the impotent thunders of theology.