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The Takers have a knowledge that enables them to rule the world, and the Leavers lack it. This is what the missionaries found wherever they went among the Leavers. They were quite astonished themselves, because they had the impression that this knowledge was virtually self-evident.”
“This is indeed the proper knowledge of the gods: the knowledge of who shall live and who shall die.”
And to the people of this land I will say, “Grow, for this is good,” and they will grow. And to the people of the next land I will say, “Grow, for this is good,” and they will grow. And when they can grow no more, the people of this land will fall upon the people of the next to murder them, so that they may grow still more. And if the groans of my progeny fill the air throughout the world, I will say to them, “Your sufferings must be borne, for you suffer in the cause of good. See how great we have become! Wielding the knowledge of good and evil, we have made ourselves the masters of the
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And when the gods heard all this, they saw that, of all the trees in the garden, only the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil could destroy Adam. And so they said to him, “You may eat of every tree in the garden save the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, for on the day you eat of that tree you will certainly die.”
“Then why would the gods withhold the very knowledge man needs to fulfill his destiny? From the Taker point of view, it makes no sense at all.”
“The gods ruled the world for billions of years, and it was doing just fine. After just a few thousand years of human rule, the world is at the point of death.”
And if people of your cultural persuasion had authored it, this event wouldn’t be called the Fall, it would be called the Ascent—or as you put it earlier, the Liberation.”
“They got to be this way because they’ve always believed that what they were doing was right—and therefore to be done at any cost whatever. They’ve always believed that, like the gods, they know what is right to do and what is wrong to do, and what they’re doing is right. Do you see how they’ve demonstrated what I’m saying?”
“They’ve demonstrated it by forcing everyone in the world to do what they do, to live the way they live. Everyone had to be forced to live like the Takers, because the Takers had the one right way.”
“Many peoples among the Leavers practiced agriculture, but they were never obsessed by the delusion that what they were doing was right, that everyone in the entire world had to practice agriculture, that every last square yard of the planet had to be devoted to it. They didn’t say to the people around them, ‘You may no longer live by hunting and gathering. This is wrong. This is evil, and we forbid it. Put your land under cultivation or we’ll wipe you out.’ What they said was, ‘You want to be hunter-gatherers? That’s fine with us. That’s great. We want to be agriculturalists. You be
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“And if they got tired of being agriculturalists, if they found they didn’t like where it was leading them in their particular adaptation, they were able to give it up. They didn’t say to themselves, ‘Well, we’ve got to keep going at this even if it kills us, because this is the right way to live.’ For example, there was once a people who constructed a vast network of irrigation canals in order to farm the deserts of what is now southeastern Arizona. They maintained these canals for three thousand years and built a fairly advanced civilization, but in the end they were free to say, ‘This is a
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“So, though they preserved the story, they no longer fully understood it.
“But now, in 4500 B.C., the Semites are eyewitnesses to an event in their own front yard: the expansion of the Takers.”
“Leavers, yes, but no longer hunter-gatherers. They had evolved another adaptation that was to be traditional for Semitic peoples.”
“What was happening along that border was that Cain was killing Abel. The tillers of the soil were watering their fields with the blood of Semitic herders.”
What was happening there was what has always happened along the borders of Taker expansion: The Leavers were being killed off so that more land could be put under cultivation.”
But most read the story as if it were set in an historical never-never land, like one of Aesop’s fables. It would scarcely occur to them to understand it as a piece of Semitic war propaganda.”
With this story, the Semites were telling their children, ‘God is on our side. He loves us herders but hates those murderous tillers of the soil from the north.’ ”
“If the tillers of the soil from the north were Caucasians,” I said, “then the mark of Cain is this.”
“But it makes sense this way,” I insisted. “The mark was given to Cain as a warning to others: ‘Leave this man alone. This is a dangerous man, one who exacts a sevenfold vengeance.’ Certainly a lot of people all over the world have learned that it doesn’t pay to mess with people with white faces.”
“Doubtless many of these peoples had their own tales to tell of this revolution, their own ways of explaining how these people from the Fertile Crescent came to be the way they were, but only one of these tales survived—the one told by the Semites to their children about the Fall of Adam and the slaughter of Abel by his brother Cain. It survived because the Takers never managed to overrun the Semites, and the Semites refused to take up the agricultural life. Even their eventual Taker descendants, the Hebrews, who preserved the story without fully understanding it, couldn’t work up any
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‘What’s going on here is something wholly new. These aren’t raiding parties. These aren’t people drawing a line and baring their teeth at us to make sure we know they’re there. These guys are saying…Our brothers from the north are saying that we’ve got to die. They’re saying Abel has to be wiped out. They’re saying we’re not to be allowed to live. Now that’s something new, and we don’t get it. Why can’t they live up there and be farmers and let us live down here and be herders? Why do they have to murder us?’
They’re saying…“Nobody eats but us. All this food belongs to us and no one else can have any without our permission.” They’re saying, “What we want to live lives and what we want to die dies.”
They’re acting as if they were the gods themselves. They’re acting as if they eat at the gods’ own tree of wisdom, as though they were as wise as the gods and could send life and death wherever they please.
These are an accursed people! You can see that right off the bat. When the gods found out what they’d done, they said, “Okay, you wretched people, that’s it for you! We’re not taking care of you anymore. You’re out. We banish you from the garden. From now on, instead of living on our bounty, you can wrest your food from the ground by the sweat of your brows.” And that’s how these accursed tillers of the soil came to be hunting us down and watering their fields with our blood.’
“ONE OF THE CLEAREST INDICATIONS that these two stories were not authored by your cultural ancestors is the fact that agriculture is not portrayed as a desirable choice, freely made, but rather as a curse. It was literally inconceivable to the authors of these stories that anyone would prefer to live by the sweat of his brow. So the question they asked themselves was not, ‘Why did these people adopt this toilsome lifestyle?’ It was, ‘What terrible misdeed did these people commit to deserve such a punishment? What have they done to make the gods withhold from them the bounty that enables the
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“Do you know what Adam means in Hebrew? We can’t know the name the Semites gave him, but presumably it had the same meaning.” “It means man.”
The relationships in the story have to be understood metaphorically, not biologically. As they perceived it, the Fall divided the race of man into two—into bad guys and good guys, into tillers of the soil and herders, the former bent on murdering the latter.”
How does Eve figure in all this?” “Her name means what?” “According to the notes, it means Life.”
Adam was tempted by Life.”
you’re ready to do some more reconstruction. You can see that these tillers of the soil have no sense of restraint when it comes to expansion. They don’t control their population; when there isn’t enough food to go around, they just put some more land under cultivation.”
The Semites, like most nonagricultural peoples, had to be wary of becoming overbalanced between the sexes. Having too many men didn’t threaten the stability of their population, but having too many women definitely did.
“But what the Semites observed in their brothers from the north was that it didn’t matter to them. If their population got out of hand, they didn’t worry, they just put more land under cultivation.”
prerogative of deciding who shall live and who shall die. But when Eve presented Adam with this knowledge, he said, ‘Yes, I see; with this, we no longer have to depend on the bounty of the gods. With the matter of who shall live and who shall die in our own hands, we can create a bounty that will exist for us alone, and this means I can say yes to Life, and grow without limit.’ What you should understand is that saying yes to Life and accepting the knowledge of good and evil are merely different aspects of a single act, and this is the way the story is told in Genesis.”
When Adam accepted the fruit of that tree, he succumbed to the temptation to live without limit—and so the person who offered him that fruit is named Life.”
“Whenever a Taker couple talk about how wonderful it would be to have a big family, they’re reenacting this scene beside the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. They’re saying to themselves, ‘Of course it’s our right to apportion life on this planet as we please. Why stop at four kids or six? We can have fifteen if we like. All we have to do is plow under another few hundred acres of rain forest—and who cares if a dozen other species disappear as a result?’ ”
I’ve never heard an explanation that made any sense. I think the way most people understand it, the gods wanted to test Adam’s obedience by forbidding him something, and it didn’t much matter what it was. And that’s what the Fall essentially was—an act of disobedience.”
“But the people of your culture have never been able to understand the explanation, because they’ve always assumed that it was formulated by people just like them—people who took it for granted that the world was made for man and man was made to conquer and rule it, people for whom the sweetest knowledge in the world is the knowledge of good and evil, people who consider tilling the soil the only noble and human way to live. Reading the story as if it had been authored by someone with their own point of view, they didn’t stand a chance of understanding it.”
“But when it’s read another way, the explanation makes perfectly good sense: Man can never have the wisdom the gods use to rule the world, and if he tries to preempt that wisdom, the result won’t be enlightenment, it will be death.”
Adam wasn’t the progenitor of our race, he was the progenitor of our culture.”
“This is why he’s always been a figure of such importance to you. Even though the story itself made no real sense to you, you could identify with Adam as its protagonist. From the beginning, you recognized him as one of your own.”
For the most part, we’re a very ‘new’ people. Every generation is somehow new, more thoroughly cut off from the past than the one that came before.”
“Mother Culture says that this is as it should be. There’s nothing in the past for us. The past is dreck. The past is something to be put behind us, something to be escaped from.”
“Why don’t you teach them what works well for people?” “I’d say it’s because we don’t know what works well for people. Every generation has to come up with its own version of what works well for people. My parents had their version, which was pretty well useless, and their parents had their version, which was pretty well useless, and we’re currently working on our version, which will probably seem pretty well useless to our own children.”
The Takers accumulate knowledge about what works well for things. The Leavers accumulate knowledge about what works well for people.” “But not for all people. Each Leaver people has a system that works well for them because it evolved among them; it was suited to the terrain in which they lived, suited to the climate in which they lived, suited to the biological community in which they lived, suited to their own peculiar tastes, preferences, and vision of the world.”
“People can’t just give up a story. That’s what the kids tried to do in the sixties and seventies. They tried to stop living like Takers, but there was no other way for them to live. They failed because you can’t just stop being in a story, you have to have another story to be in.”
“That’s exactly the point. The gods plant only what you need. You will plant more than you need.”
“That is the whole goddamned point! When you have more food than you need, then the gods have no power over you!”
“Yes. But obviously there are still some things that aren’t in our hands. We wouldn’t be able to control or survive a total ecological collapse.” “So you’re not safe yet. When will you finally be safe?” “When we’ve taken the whole world out of the hands of the gods.”
Far and away the most futile admonition Christ ever offered was when he said, ‘Have no care for tomorrow. Don’t worry about whether you’re going to have something to eat. Look at the birds of the air. They neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, but God takes perfect care of them. Don’t you think he’ll do the same for you?’ In our culture the overwhelming answer to that question is, ‘Hell no!’
