/lit/ - Literature

>>6524143

The expulsion from Eden is really difficult to read in any way but that it represents nostalgia of an early agricultural civilization for pre-civilized life of humanity.

The notion that man came from idyllic state and declined into the shit contemporary world is rife in old myth. Hesiod speaks of an Age of Gold, in which people were nigh-immortal and did not do work. (Ovid actually specifically embellishes that agriculture and architecture did not exist at this time) This is followed by Age of Silver which is bunch of long lived impious assholes, Age of Bronze where everyone is just killing each other all the time, Heroic Age which is the same but it's cool guys and heroes who are killing each other, and then the Age of Iron (now) where shit sucks. Similarly early Chinese myths center around guys like Emperor Shun who legendarily establishes things like agricultural organization and magistracy, Emperor Yu who invents mass irrigation, and from then on basically it goes to shit with immoral asshole kings all the way through to the collapse of the Zhou Dynasty (i.e. times of "accurately" recorded history).

>Some, as the gnostics, have sustained over the centuries that the Fall represented the moment when humankind became self-aware (remember the description in the Bible after they tasted from the apple)

This is close but not quite right. The fall is about how humans used to be in a state where things like morality didn't exist. Literally nobody had gotten together books of rules yet saying what you should or shouldn't do, people just acted by their preferences or dispreferences, and did not have religions or laws or cultures telling them what to do. The fall is about what happened together with the end of that state, it's the rise of agricultural civilization.