Dear diary,
Then Yahweh God went astray from the God Conglomerate. He staked out his own domain on the earth, and established a garden for himself. I think other gods must have done this also, but I focused my attention on Yahweh. He’s a volcano-god, which I find fascinating.
This was before any plant of the field had ever grown a trunk, and there were no herbs yet. For Yahweh God had not caused rain to fall on the land. And there was no man to till the soil. But a mist went up from the earth, and moistened the mud.
So Yahweh God took some of this mud and sculpted an image of himself. This was not a creation via voodoo-logos: he just used his bare hands to sculpt. Then he breathed into the nostrils of the statue, and his breath, his air, his wind, his spirit entered into the statue, and the statue came alive: This self-portrait’s eyes were glistening with wickedness; it was like gazing into a looking-glass.
Beholding this pair from the narrator’s point of view, we see what resembles nothing so much as twin Davids by Michaelangelo.
So that’s how man inherited his soul and his pneuma. And he also received the divine spark from Yahweh.
Now this garden that Yahweh God planted was located in a place called Eden, which is eastward of any place you might know; and there he put the man whom he had formed.
And out of the ground made Yahweh God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food; the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
And Yahweh God took the man and stationed him in Eden to pose as its gardener.
And Yahweh God instructed the man, saying: “Of every tree of the garden, you may freely eat: but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you shall not eat of it: for in the day that you eat thereof, you shall surely die.”
Then Yahweh God thought aloud to himself: “It is not good that the man should be alone. I will make him an help meet for him.” And, using large forceps, out of the ground Yahweh God pulled every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; all covered with afterbirth (this wasn’t as gross as it sounds: for it was not real blood and flesh, but just water and dirt; as they had been gestating in the earth); and Yahweh brought these creatures unto the man, to see if he would accept their hand in marriage – or their hoof or talon, as the case may be.
But for Man there was not found an help meet for him.
And when Man would call to the beasts, using nicknames like “Rocinante” and “Adam” and “Moby-Dick,” Yahweh God would correct him, and remind him that whatsoever he, Lord Yahweh, christened every being, only that was the name thereof. (But he was just ribbing Man, trying to get him accustomed to disputing the groundless and unpersuasive claims of authority, so that he might learn to think strongly and creatively for himself.)
So Man eventually became more playful and poetic; and he took pleasure in the acts of renaming and misinterpretation. But this very antinomian stance left him adhering even more adamantly to any “law” that he did find convincing. (And we keep that word law within scare quotes because there is ultimately no such thing but only wisdom.)
So, to solve this problem of Man sadly lacking a concubine, the god Yahweh caused a deep sleep to fall upon his new friend, and Man slept: and Yahweh took a sharp stone, and performed brain surgery: he cut off the forehead of the man, and removed out from his skull the womb (for, until this medical procedure, Man was an exact duplicate of Yahweh, whose brain contains a fully functioning uterus), and cast it at his feet; then closed up the flesh instead thereof; and from this womb, which Yahweh God had taken from man, he builded a woman.
Then Man awoke and saw the new being that his doctor had concocted, and he exclaimed: “This is what I like. Much better than having a rooster or a zebra. Maybe a black panther would suit me fine, but you don’t have any of those; so I am quite pleased with this model: this is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Manna, because she was taken out of Man.”
Yet Yahweh insisted that her name should be Woman.
And it is on account of the above scene at the operating table that every human male thereafter should leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his concubine: and they shall fuse back into one flesh, whose fresh mind shall be borne forth from the womb; just as the gods incorporated into Monotheos, and Yahweh came springing out of that new colossus: and, later, Athena would be born from the forehead of Zeus.
And they were all naked, Man, Woman, and Yahweh.
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