Boy, has the last month been a wild ride. I am in a more stable position now.
What is an archetype? Years ago, when I was immersed in biblical exegesis, one of the more profound personal discoveries I made was that Eden could not be a literal, physical place. In wanting to see the Bible as literal, historical truth, I was at odds with my own interpretive scheme. In the Book of Genesis, Eden exists at the headwaters of four major rivers: the Tigris (Hiddekel), the Euphrates (Perat), the Blue Nile (Gihon, which flows from the Ethiopian highlands, the origin of coffee), and a mysterious fourth river named Pihon (which some commentators have alternatively interpreted as the White Nile for etymological relationships between “Pihon” and the concepts of “seasonal overflowing” and “flax,” both of which ancient Egypt was known for, or as the Indus or Ganges Rivers in India; the ancient scholar Josephus believed that Pihon referred to the Indus River, in the west of the Indian subcontinent, which is very telling, since he was much more contemporary with the actual writing of the Bible and the surrounding cultures.) If Eden is at the headwaters of the Tigris, the Euphrates, the Nile, and the Indus rivers, then either the Bible was referring to a time in the geologically recent past when the Earth’s topography was ridiculously different, or the Bible was saying something else.

Although at the time I believed in a literal, 6-day creation, a literal Garden of Eden, a literal Adam and Eve, and that continental drift was a result of the Great Flood, how could I explain that the biblical writers (I thought Moses wrote Genesis from taking notes from God, rather than including any oral tradition or plurarlity of authors) were mashing together the headwaters of the Nile (in eastern Africa) with the headwaters of the Tigris and Euphrates, over 1500 miles to the north in Turkey? It seemed absurd. It seemed absurd to believe that the Nile actually bent around to the source of the Tigris and Euphrates. And even if extreme orogeny (mountain building) and tectonic movement had occured since the days of Eden, why would people refer to the extremely shifted waterways with the same names as they possess today? It was such an unelegant stretch of the imagination, I could not esteem the Eden story with literal, mathematical truth. To take the Bible at its word, as presenting truth that was scientifically verifiable, I had to either bend over backwards into some hyper-contorted, irrational belief, or I had to acknowledge that Eden was a non-literal place, and yet was real or true in some essential, existential way. And how coincidental that Eden hovered over the headwaters of major civilizations, Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Indus River Valley Civilization? Hmmm…

I started to think that Eden was designating not so much the literally specified origin of humanity out of nothing but rather summarizing the qualities that lead to humanity’s rise. I learned there the meaning of myth: that myths are true representations of qualities, and they do not need to correspond to what happened in specific instances. Myths are about generalities, they are abstractions. Religious fundamentalists struggle and suffer within a specified, literal—dare I say, materialistic history. They butt up against the concrete-abstract boundary, and write off abstractions, incapable or unwilling (or at least very stubborn) to internalize the ideality of faith. I’m not saying this as universally as I would like—I feel I need to say it in layman’s terms. Myths describe how things happen in general, and that does not make them false for not being literal. Their subject matter is too big to compress into individual events. Jesus represents a case in which the generality of myth marries a literal, historical individual. It is no blasphemy to Christ to say there are many such archetypal heroes in cultures around the world.

So Eden exists in a sort of metaphysical space, it is a quality of origination, the headwaters of civilization, so to speak. It is not an unreal space, it is nonlocal. Adam and Eve are not literal individuals, they are representations of primordial male and female aspects. Plato’s Ideas are not far off from the way Eden is portrayed. To my mathematically inclined brain, I found the idea of non-Euclidean space as a compelling way to understand Eden. Biblical truth could be true in a non-Euclidean space. The tangle of associations in the mind are too organic and webbed to portray in an individuated, sequential, literal sense. To be true to them, we must portray them in like manner, in terms and structures adequate and fitting to them. Art is the involution of human experience. Science is the rational discretization of human experience. Science becomes false to humanity, the spirit, the world when it disassembles the nonlinear representational approach of art. These tides exist in non-representational form. What we see in art and science is the common thread of human experience. And I saw another parallel immediately: this very approach to the human psyche is, in some sense, the paradise we have drifted from. Literalistic, materialistic representation is the Land of Nod. Sin comes from a sense of separation—the cookie jar problem: tell a kid NO COOKIES, and they will be tempted. To hold oneself in unity with all things dissolves the reason to act transgressively, disruptively. (I will get to the virtue of chaos and destruction, though.) To linearize human experience is a sin, the sin that kills the Son of God. But the Son of God rises up from within that linearization. The nonlinear is ultimately undisrupted by this futile linearization. Ra-diate. Ra-dya-te. Ra-dyeos. Ra-daewos-pater. Sky father radiates. Sky father crushes by his blinding authority, then the Son rebirths from within the ulterior darkness.

Eden is an archetypal place. Myth is archetypal. And thus other religious narratives cannot be regarded as in competition, necessarily, with the Bible. The mindset that understands where Eden is does not see other faith’s myths as rivals. That mindset involves them, relates to them, treats otherness with dignity. It is full of the Spirit, welling over like water seeping from an alpine meadow. Headwaters are both specified and generalized. Portals in the world’s psychosoma, the creative spirit in the world, leapstones. When people go to the Sierra Nevada, they are seeking either a sensory thrill or a nebulous yet palpable proximity to the forces of origination in the world. Headwaters are like minds, they summarize and generate. They radiate and converge. Follow the rivers of the world, the energy of the world, the roots of human development to their source. You end up in headwaters. They are the inspiration points of the world. Folded, enfolded, just like minds. The forces that generate mountains and rivers are the same that generate minds and cultures and species and everything else. Alpine lands belong to God, they radiate with God, with divinity, with divinities, with the spirits of the living and the dead, the spirits of the imperceivable entities. We are water, the world is water, everything is flowing and gathering and transitioning in hydraulic cycles. What we see in headwaters is akin to what we see in another’s soul, a real, real substantiality, depth, inwardness, not outwardness. We see matter that recedes into the infinite. Forest of rocks and trees and water. Minds are mountains, mountains minds.

The Eastern Mediterranean is like California, Saudia Arabia like the Mojave, Mesopotamia the Central Valley, Baghad is Fresno and Kuwait is Bakersfield, Turkey, the Caucasus, Iran like the Cascades and Rockies, Zaphon is Tsowem, Tsowem Zaphon, Eden the High Sierra.