Origin Stories

Dear Reader, I hope you will indulge a quick note. I want to say if you practice a religion and it doesn’t hurt or vilify anyone else, if it helps you to be a better person and make more sense of this crazy world, I have the utmost respect for that. I’m a big fan of yogic philosophy, but if I had to say what my religion is, I’d say it’s communing with Mother Nature, incredible art, poetry, writing, music … and the thing that happens when you love a great dog and he loves you back. Or maybe I’d just say my religion is love. I thought I’d say this, because I’m about to go hard on Christianity, and by that I mean I’m about to play with some stories from the Bible. It’s never my intention to offend, I appreciate each and every one of you very much. If you’d rather skip this one, here is a picture of me and my dog. I miss him every second.

Been thinking a lot about narrative lately, as one does when it becomes clear that a particular narrative has poisoned the waters. I grew up without religion, or maybe it’s more accurate to say I grew up with two parents who had rejected the religion they grew up with - Italian Catholic on my mother’s side, Irish Catholic on my father’s. By the time I came along, my mother was on the other side of an affair with a man more than twice her age - a married man who’d left his wife and two children in Buffalo - to move to Manhattan and marry her. And my father, well, he was that married man. And then he was married to my mom, and then two more women after that. And in the Catholic church, divorce is frowned upon, but altar boys seem to fall outside the circle of concern. Do with that what you will.

My father would rail against organized religion, saying it was the cause of so much destruction, and that people who believed in that nonsense were brainwashed. He had a whiplashing turnaround years later, but that is what I heard most of my childhood. My mom didn’t say much about it, except she’d gone to Catholic girls’ schools from the time she was tiny to the time she graduated high school, and that the nuns always loved her because her mother - my Nanny - knit them incredible shawls every year. Apparently these shawls were the talk of the convent. All the nuns wanted my mother in their classes as a result. 

Nanny

So there was no formal religion in either household I grew up in, though we celebrated Christmas and Easter. And I should mention my dad moved in with a twenty-three-year-old when he left my mom, and she was Yugoslavian (back when Yugoslavia was still Yugoslavia) and Catholic. Her entire family disowned her as a result, because she was living in sin. And then my dad proposed to her four years later, a month after my stepdad proposed to my mom. I know it’s confusing, it was confusing for me, too, even while it was happening. And then my dad married her a month after my mom and stepdad got married, because he hated for my mom to give me anything he couldn’t. Which is a terrific reason to marry someone. Nothing says I love you like proposing to someone who has lost her whole family because she loves you - because your ex-wife is getting married. It’s like a Hallmark movie. Anyway, my stepmom was a practicing Catholic. And she was also an avid reader. She happened to save my life with books, but I digress.

Point is, you can reject religion, but the stories seep in anyway. I don’t remember the first time I heard the story of Adam and Eve, but I know I was little. I don’t remember my mom or dad talking to me about it, it was just in the ether. God created the universe, He created man in his image, and on the seventh day He rested. He, He, He, He. Hehehehe. And Adam was hanging out in the Garden of Eden, and it was beautiful, but he had nothing to do, really. I mean, you know how this goes. You can live in the most gorgeous setting, but after a while if you aren’t careful, you take it for granted. You wake up and you don’t really look at your surroundings anymore. You don’t really look at your spouse anymore. They’re just there, like the couch.

So Adam got bored. He told God he was lonely. He needed something to do, or someone to talk to, man. The Garden was cool, but like, there wasn’t anyone to hang out with. If anyone could understand, it was God. I mean, He’d been hanging out a long, long time before He thought, you know what? Being an entity floating around in nothing has gotten old. I’m gonna start creating shit. So He put Adam into a deep sleep, and made a giant gnarly gash in his side and took out a rib. Now look, this is probably a good time to mention, this is the story in Genesis 2.

There’s an earlier story in Genesis 1 where God made man and woman from the dirt of the earth, together. And “man” was Adam but “woman” wasn’t named until later, when people started calling her Lilith. Which pisses me off, because why did Adam get a name, and woman was just woman? Right from the beginning this is bullshit, but whatever. Adam and Lilith fought like crazy because neither one of them would submit to the other. Adam insisted he should be on top during sex, and Lilith needed to perform her wifely duties. Then Lilith said screw this dude and this Garden, and flapped her wings because apparently she had wings which is odd, right? And she took off. And she said GOD! as she flew away - probably in exasperation - and I guess that wasn’t allowed, the way Florida doesn’t want you to say GAY. 

So God was pissed and He sent three angels to retrieve her. They found her in a cave giving birth, and told her God said she had to go back to the Garden - but she refused. So they said they were going to kill one hundred of her babies each day. Which is also weird, because how many babies was she having, and also, wouldn’t you think angels sent by God would be pro-life? I was definitely envisioning different bumper stickers for them, but this isn’t my story. So they killed her babies, and then she tried to go back to Adam in the Garden, because maybe she thought if she had to choose between her independence and getting to be on top once in a while - or getting to have babies and be protected in the Garden - maybe having babies in the Garden would be worth her freedom and an occasional orgasm. Maybe she felt since her options were limited, subservience was her next best move.

Photo by Gaston Roulstone on Unsplash

But then she got to the Garden, and there was Eve. Adam hadn’t even waited a couple of days to get a new wife, and Lilith was even more enraged than she had been, so she had sex with Adam in his sleep (and I’m not gonna change the rules here - that is what we call rape - and also, Adam must be a very deep sleeper - there’s this, and the whole rib removal thing) and stole his seed, and started creating demon babies and killing all of Adam’s sons. I gotta say, these are some very vengeful characters. God sounds controlling and sexist af, his angels are murderous, Lilith is all about the payback god bless her, and Adam sounds like a real selfish, whiny douchebag. Don’t blame me for this weird ass story, I didn’t write it. 

In any case, Lilith is later described as Adam’s first wife, because of Eve who shows up in Genesis 2 - I mentioned that earlier if you were paying attention. I found it surprising because I thought divorce wasn’t okay, and no-fault divorce seems to be on the chopping block even now, in 2024, so that seems odd for so many reasons. I’m no theologian as you might have gathered, but it sounds like God didn’t care about divorce way back in the beginning of time. Or murdering babies of women who defied Him.

So anyhoo, after Adam acted like a dick and Lilith took off, I guess Adam got bored again and whined to God, and this time God thought, well, last time when I created man and woman out of the dirt, it didn’t go too well, so this time I’ll just create woman out of Adam’s rib. She’ll be part of him that way, and I’m really only creating her so he has “companionship.” It’s not like she needs her own origin story or purpose.

I sort of want to skip this next aside because it’s so gross, but there’s a relatively new theory as biblical things go, that Eve was made from a different part of Adam’s body. I really don’t want to be responsible for sharing this with you if you don’t already know. But it has something to do with this issue of the Hebrew word for “rib” and how it doesn’t really make sense in this context, and anyway, if we go with this theory it would explain why men don’t have a penis bone. So, there, I went ahead and told you. Try not to throw up in your mouth like I did when I read it. That’s like the biblical version of saying the quiet part out loud.

Okay, so Adam wakes up, and there’s Eve, and she’s beautiful and thinks he’s great because she’s basically just an extension of him, and only exists to give him some company. And now, things are good. Adam has a beautiful, agreeable partner who’s willing to be a bottom, and they get along like…hahaha I started thinking about famous couples in time and the first one that popped into my head was Adam and Eve. So yeah, they got along great, Adam talked, and Eve laughed at all of Adam’s jokes, and she loved the Garden. Adam mansplained it to her - every creature, every plant, every everything because he was there first, obviously. 

And then one day, a serpent showed Eve this shiny red apple hanging from a tree, and she headed right for it, and Adam was like, actually, we aren’t allowed to eat that. And Eve was like, huh? Why not? And Adam said, well, because that’s the Tree of Knowledge and we aren’t allowed to eat fruit from there, it's there to tempt us. And Eve just stared at him. So he said, God told me we better not, and so, yeah, just don’t eat that. And Eve said, why did He create it and make it so shiny and perfect if we aren’t allowed to eat it? And Adam said, stop asking me annoying questions, just listen to what I said to you, you’re harshing my mellow and lowkey acting like Lilith.

And Eve didn’t like that one bit. And she said, God sounds like a jerk if He went out of his way to make something look delicious as some kind of dumb test. I’m gonna eat the apple. And the serpent backed her up and said, that’s the spirit, the apple won’t kill you. And she reached up and took a bite and it was sweet and delicious and extremely fucking satisfying. It might have been the best thing Eve ever tasted. And then she tempted Adam and he took a bite, too, and then they realized they were naked, and God showed up and yelled, “Hey, get off of my lawn you naked, ungrateful, disobedient, creatures who have stained humanity for all of time with your shameless apple consumption!” and banished them. He was a big banisher.

Photo by Milada Vigerova on Unsplash

And this friends, is the origin story about women and how their very purpose is to please men and keep them company, to obey, and to resist temptation. But of course, Eve couldn’t do it, so now we all have to pay for her original sin. Jesus, Eve, wtf? And this is why - if you’re keeping up and I have no doubt you are - we all need to understand women cannot be trusted. They just can’t walk by that fucking apple. They can’t control their appetites, their desires, their craving to suck the sweetness and juice out of life. They want the knowledge from that tree, you dig? They’re sluts. They need men to keep them in line, or they’ll be hiking up their skirts all day long. They’ll be wearing things that are tight, like leggings, things designed to turn men on. They need husbands and fathers and brothers and sons to keep them in line. Like in Afghanistan, where women are not allowed to hear one another’s voices. They aren’t allowed to leave the house without permission from their husbands. They’re not allowed to go to the park. And they may not sing.

I know, it’s all a little strange. If you can’t trust women, then you have to control them, even if they don’t like it. Which means they aren’t really equal. Men are making the rules here, first God, then Adam. And when women don’t listen, everyone pays the price. The Bible tells us so. And you can get a president-elect “merch Bible” for $60 that has the Declaration of Independence and The U.S. Constitution inside it. See what they’re doing there? They’re trying to say the Bible is an historical document just like the Declaration of Independence and The Constitution, even though some of the Bible was written a thousand years before a guy named Jesus walked the earth, and some of it was written hundreds of years after, and “the Bible” is really a bunch of different books written by different people over a very long period of time.

Imagine if I started telling stories about things that happened 400 years ago. I could take all kinds of poetic license and make it all mean whatever I wanted, and ….oh, wait. Pretty sure that’s what I’m doing, like, right now.

So, The Declaration of Independence is not like that at all, and neither is The Constitution. Those are very much historical documents. The Declaration of Independence was written in 1776 and was a list of grievances against the king of England, written to justify separation from British rule. And The Constitution was written during the Philadelphia Convention (now known as the Constitutional Convention) which took place from May 14 to September 17th, 1787. It was written by the Founding Fathers while they were in a room together over the course of many months, debating the different ways to create and protect a democracy in a world they could not possibly predict. 

(Thus the 2nd Amendment, but my god, let’s not go there. I don’t have the energy right now, probably because one of my kids was on lockdown at her high school yesterday, and for a while the SWAT team was climbing all over campus. Definitely the solution is metal detectors and thicker doors that lock, and not universal background checks and sane gun control. Maybe we can ban assault weapons and bring back muskets.)

Historical documents are different from writing about things you weren’t alive to see, insisting they happened the way you’re saying they happened. Especially if the stories you’re telling are designed to control people, to scare them and keep them in line, and get them to do what you want them to do. Which is kind of what you need if you want a whole bunch of people to follow the rules. Conversations about the best form of government have been going on for as long as people have tried to claim a bit of land and live together upon it peacefully. It hasn’t always gone well, in fact, it’s rarely gone well, but there’s been an effort to figure out what is fair, for as long as people have been thinking about such things.

Way before Christianity, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle were trying to figure out how swaths of people could live together in harmony - or if that wasn’t possible - what ways might best and most serve the common good. Plato, a student of Socrates, laid out his ideas in “The Republic” where he made a case for philosopher-kings - sage, empathetic leaders who would rule the aristocracy with wisdom and virtue. Socrates was worried about democracy as a form of government, because he thought too many people were uneducated idiots, and a demagogue could easily arise in such conditions. Food for thought. 

Aristotle, a student of Plato, believed a “polity” was the best form of government - a mix of democracy and oligarchy. He thought this way the middle class would be empowered, because neither the head of state nor the very rich would make all the rules. A government like this, he believed, would govern for the interests of all. He was like the OG when it comes to checks and balances. 

You know who you don’t hear about? Aspasia. She was the woman who taught Socrates, and she has been almost entirely wiped from the record. Socrates credited her with helping him become an excellent orator, teaching him about human relationships, household management, and economic partnership between spouses. You know when she was wiped from the record? During the rise of Christianity. 

The people who just elected the guy who is choosing some very terrifying people to be on his team? They want to protect girls and women from trans women in public bathrooms. They’re very worried about that. And in their efforts to protect women and girls, they voted for an adjudicated rapist who likes to grab women by the pussy. And they also chose his running mate, a man who has no respect for women at all. He has made that abundantly clear, even when any sane person would have thought he might try to hide his disdain and mommy issues a bit more. Vance is an Adam-descendant, a guy who thinks women belong in the bedroom and the kitchen, and older women exist to take care of their grandkids. Women like Lilith who don’t want to submit, well, they are ruining the country. Women who like other women? Oh, heck no, we can't have that. He and his friends need to step in and make it so women can’t choose the apple, they can’t take flight and leave the Garden, no sir.

And for Attorney General, the president-elect has nominated a man who sleeps with minors, and crosses state lines with them to do it. There’s a whole report about it, but Mike Johnson doesn’t want you to see it because of ethics. Something about how the ethics committee is only okay for people who are serving in Congress, but if they are nominated for AG then you should definitely not know if they’re degenerate, disgusting lawbreakers who commit statutory rape. It totally makes sense, he’s just trying to protect you. And rape is already acceptable, I mean, the majority of the voting public decided that when they voted for the president-elect, again. So, message received, but in case you like to know things, Matt Gaetz was thirty-five at the time, the girl was seventeen and there are witnesses. And illicit drugs involved, and bribes, too. This is totally the guy to head the Department of Justice. This is what it looks like when you shake things up, and it’s great for people in Gaza. If you can’t figure out how it helps, just don’t think about it too much, it’s fine.

If you want to make it exceedingly clear that you think it’s acceptable to dominate girls and women, this is what you do. You keep nominating men for the highest positions in the land, men who have been credibly accused or convicted of sexual assault. How else to explain the Combover King’s nominee to head the Department of Defense - Pete Hegseth - a man who paid a woman who accused him of rape, and also potentially of drugging her, to please be quiet back in 2017? Which is what lots of innocent men do when they haven’t done anything wrong, because that also totally makes sense. Oh, and he’s a white nationalist, but so are lots of members of the cabinet.

Maybe next week we can dig into how Christianity and white nationalism became bedfellows, because I must be really confused. I thought Christianity was about empathy and kindness and treating your neighbor as you would like to be treated yourself, but is that only for straight, white, male people? That would be kinda weird because Jesus wasn’t white, and he seemed to enjoy the company of spirited, independent women like Mary Magdalene, and I’m pretty sure he tended to the most vulnerable people he came upon in his travels. But what do I know? Anyway, yeah. Protecting women from themselves is definitely the thing here. 

Or … just hear me out, could it be that, actually, everything makes sense when you realize it isn’t that they want to protect Eve, it’s that they want to destroy Lilith? They want to make sure she can’t leave the Garden, she can’t tell Adam she doesn’t want to submit, she can’t decide on her own whether to have babies or not, she isn’t going to be granted the same rights as men, and if she doesn’t like it, too bad. She can’t even be trusted to know what’s good for her. When I think about it that way, it all tracks. Eve is with Adam, she always has been. She’s happy to see herself as an extension of “her man” - she was waiting for him to complete her, just ask Cameron Crow.

It’s the rest of us who are the problem. Those of us who keep grabbing that apple and letting the juice drip down our chins, who laugh with our heads thrown back, and wonder what else there is for us to do, say, experience, before the ride is over. And maybe the Adam and Eve narrative we’ve been hearing all our lives, even if it’s just along the edges, or swimming below the surface, or evident when all the stores are filled with Christmas lights and stockings, but no representations of other faiths and beliefs…maybe it’s seeping in more than we realize. 

And maybe we need to tell ourselves a much better story.

If you’d like to meet me in real time to talk about origin stories and narratives, especially the ones that flow through the waters we’re all swimming in, I’ll be here 11/22/24 at 11:15am PST. The podcast version will go out Saturday as usual. And if you want to do something crazy, you could meet me in Croatia in June. Or you can meet me in the comments section. Basically, I love meeting up with you. And I’m so grateful for you. And I hope you’re okay out there. Lots of love x