Staying with the theme of NeW Beginnings, we decided to share a Jungian perspective on Adam and Eve’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden as our Story of the week. In the series ‘Good Omens’ the powerful image of two human beings holding a flaming sword, leaving the lush abundant Garden of Eden and entering the space beyond the protective wall into the barren desert, evokes the archetypal energy of endings, passage and new beginnings. As the story goes… Adam and Eve were forbidden by Yahweh to eat the fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil (see our post about tree symbolism later this week). The serpent (see our post about serpent symbolism later this month) tempted Eve to eat the fruit which led to their expulsion from paradise.

Arthur George, cultural historian and mythologist, writes on the Garden of Eden as a myth of the transformation of consciousness as follows: “Adam and Eve’s acquisition of this knowledge constituted an enlightenment and transformation into a higher psychic level, that of full ego-consciousness. Before that, they were mired in a lower psychic state dominated by the unconscious that Erich Neumann (1954) famously called the ‘uroboros,’ (the snake with its tail in its mouth) where all is one and there are no pairs of opposites (pp. 5-38). Yahweh’s warning that Adam would ‘die’ upon eating the fruit, may well render this moment a kind of initiation scenario, with the old human dying and entering a new state of being.” Read more https://www.depthinsights.com/Depth-Insights-scholarly-ezine/jung-in-the-garden-of-eden-a-myth-of-the-transformation-of-consciousness-arthur-george-j-d/ .

Carl Jung (CW 9.2, para. 230) wrote that “cosmogonic myths are, at bottom, symbols for the coming of consciousness.” Cosmogonic refers to the theories about the origin, history, structure and dynamics of the universe of which creation stories can be seen as metaphors. Such myths have psychological meaning for humans as they illuminate dynamic archetypal behavioral patterns in the psyche and symbolically explain the reality of humankind’s psychic existence.

Written for @jungsouthernafrica

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