Till death rips us apart

By Gábor Vona

In this book, I am searching for the why of human culture. Not what we do, not how, but why. In my work, I have tried to incorporate the findings of many disciplines into my cultural history model, but I have really brought together five things: my studies in history, my political experiences, existential psychology, terror management theory and network theory.

"Adam and Eve took a bite of the forbidden fruit, and now we know what became of it. But what if Adam and Eve return to Paradise after a long wander and there is nothing there? In fact, it turns out there never was. It turns out they made it all up. What does that imply? Well, that is the most important question of the twenty-first century."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Vona Gábor
• Release date: Aug 27, 2022
• ISBN: 9786150157696

Book preview

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Gábor Vona

Till death rips us apart

Budapest, 2020

© Gábor Vona, 2020

Responsible publisher: the managing director of Vlog Influence Kft.

Editing: Edina Laboncz, gregzi

Cover: thyillustration

ISBN 978-615-01-5769-6

For my son,

to understand why we are in distress

Preamble

As I’m doing the finishing touches to this book, the family and I have been sitting at home for weeks, and there’s a coronavirus epidemic raging outside. It’s a strange and depressing feeling, because no one has any idea what the outcome will be. Will it subside in a few days and be quickly forgotten like a nightmare, or will it usher in a whole new era where we have to get used to the threat of death that comes on a yearly schedule? We don’t know. It’s a joy in the sorrow that in this situation we don’t have to pester the muses for inspiration, writing a book about the distress of death is now a truly authentic experience. Not a distant and unknown inconvenience, but a tangible reality. The routines and preoccupations of everyday life have been turned upside down; we have been pulled out of the monotonous grind of our lives, breathless and collectively watching the latest news. As my wife put it, her little world and its perceived security had been shattered. What an accurate way of putting it! Indeed, as the world we have dreamed of around us begins to disintegrate, as the culture that gives meaning to our daily routines shatters, we are left alone to face something that causes us excruciating distress. I had no idea that the fate of this book, which has been tumbling with me for fifteen years, would eventually make it so topical, although I would frankly have preferred to give it up. But let’s really start at the beginning!

There are defining moments in each of our lives that we remember clearly and distinctly. In the autumn of 2005, I was sitting in the car near the small airport in Dunakeszi, reading Nietzsche’s Supplement to the Genealogy of Morals¹ , and suddenly I had an epiphany. Let’s just say, at the time I thought. At the time, I was working as a salesman, which is incredibly draining for brooding philosophers like me. So as compensation I escaped from the worldly and material profanity of the job into the ethereal world of great thinkers whenever I could. Basically, everything was fine around me, I was twenty-seven years old, young, loving husband, excitedly expecting our child, earning well, yet waking up every day with the thought that something is missing from my life. I felt that my job was degrading me, making me feel dirty, holding me captive, and that even though I was making a living out of it, it was closing my life off from me. So I looked for meaning in philosophy. Not just in a casual way, but very much. Almost obsessively. To life and death. I wrote notebooks full with my notes, my thoughts, and my musings, which I have kept to this day. I was so searching for the meaning of my life that on that day I suddenly found the meaning of the entire world. I wrote down these lines then: The consciousness of death is what makes us human. What we call human civilization, with all its creations, is an escape from death. If the consciousness of death were eliminated from the mind of man, our race would slowly return to the laws of the animal world."

I remember feeling an amazing sense of pride, let’s say, of elation beyond death. I leaned back in my seat and thought, „Fuck, I’ve unlocked the secret of humanity." That we are really just miserable primates, beaten by evolution with the knowledge of death, and this whole chase we call history, of which we are so proud, is really a (monu)mental psychodrama. I was also fascinated by the idea because I have been extremely disturbed by the problem of death since I was a child. I was simply unable to accept that we die, especially that I die. There, in the car, my childhood anxieties, my studies in history, my youthful search for God and my philosophical adventures all came together in one point and exploded. The result of the explosion was the above idea, which I felt had enormous significance. It’s laughable now, but at the time I thought I had discovered something that the whole world should know about. With amazing enthusiasm, I began to systematically explore the question of death from the perspective of various sciences. I wanted to find proof for my thesis, but I quickly realized that this was not necessary, as this idea had been expressed by many before me. Fortunately, this did not dampen my spirits or my creative energy, because the question was still there: if this is the case, if we know this in principle, why are we not talking about it? Why don’t we face the fact that our human existence is a child of the idea of passing? Why do we run away not only from death, but also from the idea of death? The answer, of course, was recognition itself. Because the whole culture² is built on the rejection of the fact of death. We understand the connection, but we don’t want to hear about it, because it is by denying this connection makes us human. History begins with a great common and complicit repression. I vowed to turn my musings into a book.

However, the writing of the book was put off the schedule for a long time, although it was not long afterwards, in 2006, that I was sucked into the world of politics. I had already been involved in politics as an academic, my name was relatively well known, I had made a brief detour in Viktor Orbán’s civic circle, from which I was the only one to leave, but the real change came in 2006. My political party, Jobbik, unexpectedly for me, elected me as president. From then on, a period of concentration began which made deep reflection impossible. The idea for a book on the cultural history of death was gathering dust in a drawer, and the hope of rounding up the notes into a coherent whole was fading. Yet, somewhere inside me, I always felt I would write it. Not for others, but for myself. For years, only my wife, to whom of course I reported my „death distress theory", knew how important this book was to me. But as party president, you have no time for anything… But just as life and death are causes of each other, the ‚death’ of my political career, the 2018 defeat in the elections, was the reason why the possibility of writing this book finally came to light.

But the long political detour was not at all unnecessary. Although I did not have the opportunity to explore my hypothesis further in an academic and theoretical sense, in the daily reality of public struggles I experienced a great deal in a practical sense about the meaning of life and death, about people, communities and myself. After two years of dusting off my notes, I supplemented my earlier reflections by studying authors such as Ernest Becker, Ajit Varki, Martin Heidegger, Guglielmo Ferrero, Rollo May, Irvin D. Yalom, Peter L. Berger, Merlin Donald, Eric Voegelin, Norbert Elias, Georges Bataille, Yuval Noah Harari, István Bibó, Albert-László Barabási, Elemér Hankiss and many others. Some of you will probably say to me: here is this ex-politician who now thinks he is a scientist, but where are his publications, where is his academic work? The only excuse I can give them is that, for the time being, nowhere, since those years, when I could have been writing my articles on the functioning of human culture as a scientific author, I was in the sphere of politics, which encompasses the deepest recesses and highest peaks of human culture. Whether one can learn more about man in the library or at party meetings is for each person to decide.

Some say that men go to war, do politics, chase glory and write books because they can’t give birth. I don’t know how much truth there is in that, especially in today’s world where gender roles are changing. What is certain, however, is that we all desire immortality in some form or other. It’s also certain that I can’t give birth. Maybe to a book at most. I am grateful that life has been kind to me, allowing me enough time to rummage around my desk and bookshelves, but also enough time to push me into the world’s most bustling public life. In this book, I am searching for the why of human culture. Not what we do, not how, but why. In my work, I have tried to incorporate the findings of many disciplines into my cultural history model, but I have really brought together five things: my studies in history, my political experiences, existential psychology, terror management theory and network theory.

Dear Reader, let us now embark together on the journey whose motto is: who seeks the meaning of his/her life must first find an answer to the meaning of his/her death.

---

1 Friedrich Nietzsche: Adalék a morál genealógiájához (Addendum to the Genealogy of Morals). H. n, 1996, Holnap.

2 It is very important to clarify here at the very beginning what I mean by culture in this book. The term has many definitions, and there is also talk of animal cultures in the scientific literature. By the latter, we mean the common patterns of learned behavior characteristic of a species. Of course, in this sense there are animal cultures, and I do not wish to dispute this, but in this book I use the term culture to mean a phenomenon that is unique to man, the essence of which is a partial separation from biological evolution, from animal existence. Culture for me is software that runs only on the hardware of man.

1 . Why did the God of forgiveness not forgive Adam and Eve?

„Fear of death,

it seems to me, is a mistake of evolution."

(Carlo Rovelli)¹

1.1 Are we born guilty?

Culture is an artificial Eden that we create for ourselves, so that we can pretend that there is no death². But why couldn’t we have stayed in the Garden of Eden? In the blissful tranquility of eternal life? The answer to this question is illuminated with cathartic light by the Book of Genesis and the myth of the Fall. We usually overlook the story of Adam and Eve, saying it is just an old story we have heard a thousand times before. It’s old, it’s mythical, that’s a fact, but it’s about reality. For, by digging beneath the surface, we find a deeper explanation of the real human condition than we could ever have imagined.

The story of the Fall is known to everyone, and there are countless similar myths outside the Jewish and Christian traditions³. God, the creator of the world, places the human couple, made after his own image, in the Garden of Eden, where they live in complete peace, immortality and harmony with the heavenly world. Their task is to rule the living world, to fill the earth and to cultivate Paradise. In the Garden of Eden, the Lord had planted all kinds of trees for their nourishment, but He declared one tree forbidden, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, from which they were forbidden to eat, „because on the day you eat of it, you die."⁴ But the wily serpent tempts curious Eve to eat from that tree, encouraging her to become like the gods. Eve yields to the temptation and gives Adam some of the forbidden fruit, which God of course notices. As a punishment for their disobedience, He casts them out of the Garden of Eden, they lose their immortality, their successors bear all the consequences of original sin, and so human history begins.

The story has inspired countless commentaries, thousands of explanations, inspired countless works of art and has always captured people’s imagination.⁵ But the loss of paradise has almost always been seen from the perspective of sin, as a moral parable. It was seen as the fallibility of the disobedient, evil-disposed man who betrayed God. But the myth raises a number of strange questions. Why did God not want man to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil? Why was knowledge a sin? If the Lord threatened Adam that he would die if he ate of the fruit, why did he survive? Why did the Creator cast them out, and why could He not forgive? Why did He then close the Garden of Eden forever? In the middle of Paradise there was another mysterious tree, the tree of life. What was its significance? Many questions that most commentators overlook. One might say, what is the point of spending so much time on a tale that is thousands of years old, does it matter what is written there? It matters. We would argue that the story of the Fall is not a moral parable at all, but a symbolic yet very accurate psychodrama of man’s emergence from the animal world and the birth of culture. It is not about innocence and sin, but about the contradictory nature of human existence - its relationship to immortality and mortality.

Let’s first look at how we interpret the symbols. The Paradise is nothing else but the pre-cultural period of man’s development, that is, before the consciousness of self and death. In essence, it is the time when man lived with nature without animal carelessness, as an advanced primate, without a defined self. Adam is the body itself, the biological part of man, from the „dust of the earth".⁶ Eve is the soul, the cognitive skills that are highly developed in humans.⁷ The serpent is the time, whose unstoppable flow will sooner or later bring the cognitive skills (Eve) to a limited consciousness.⁸ Tasting the fruit of the forbidden tree is therefore nothing other than an awakening to the self. The tasty fruit that brings curse on man, that forces him out of the Garden of Eden, out of unity with nature and God, and that brings him death instead of immortality: self-consciousness.⁹ Why? Because it goes hand in hand with the consciousness of death.

Now, let’s slow down a bit and look at each of the dilemmas I mentioned at the beginning. Why did God not want man to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil? The Creator knew that there was a great risk for man in acquiring divine understanding,¹⁰ that is, the knowledge of himself.

He knew that this would dramatically burden the mind of a living being, which in the lack of a stable sense of time and space had not been confronted with the dilemma of death and immortality until then. Not only does it see itself from the outside, it becomes aware of its own existence, but at the same time it understands its inevitable finitude. Who is unaware of death is immortal, who is aware of it is mortal. Adam and Eve’s first reaction after tasting the apple was that „their eyes were opened, they realized they were naked."¹¹ In other words, the first pair of humans realized their biological being, ergo their impermanence.

Why was knowledge a sin? The truth is that sin here is a bad and misleading term that has contributed fundamentally to Christianity’s negative view of man¹² and the dogma of original sin. It says that we all come into the world as sinners because of what Adam and Eve did.¹³ The idea has led to much debate and theological discussion, with nuances ranging from the ungrateful man to childish ingratitude.¹⁴ What they have in common is that the commentators saw sin not in the tasting of the fruit, i.e. knowledge, but in disobeying the divine command, thus positing man as a creature bent on evil. In fact, however, there is no such thing in the Book of Genesis where the Lord says you can never go against my word. The Creator did not warn man against disobedience, only against the fruit of that one tree, the tree of discernment, the tree of judgment.

According to our interpretation, the commission of the „sin", that is, the evolution of the human psyche (Eve) over time (the serpent) to the point of consciousness (tasting the forbidden fruit), could not be avoided. What is not avoidable is not sin. It was not God who forbade man the knowledge, but the god whom the confused man had invented for himself. The realization of self was encoded in the evolution of life, and it was as much a curse as a blessing. Through it, man stepped out of nature, rose above it, but in doing so he lost its security, that is, the Garden of Eden. The acquisition of consciousness is therefore not a sin, but an existential paradox. The conflict between the consciousness of death and the sense of immortality in us. It makes us both stronger and weaker than all other living beings, and we pass this contradiction on to our children. We are not born guilty, but we are all confronted with this existential paradox we come into the world with. We have no original sin.¹⁵ What we have is the inherent contradiction within us. And with that, fear has moved into the very depths of our being.¹⁶

Why did Adam survive if God threatened him with death? The answer can be deduced from the above, but of course the symbols must be interpreted correctly. Eating from the tree of knowledge did not mean losing immortality at all, for there was nothing to lose. Man, like other living beings, was never ever-living. Adam and Eve were mortals before they tasted the apple, but they did not know it, for they were not aware of their own existence. The animal world is mortal, but without consciousness it lives in a kind of tranquil ‚immortality’. The fruit of the realization of the self, therefore, made the ignorant mortal a conscious mortal. So this is what the threat of sentence that when they tasted the fruit, they would die instantly.

Why did God cast out the wicked pair of men, why did He not forgive them, and why did He surround the Garden of Eden so that they could not return? Of course, reading the Bible as a historical myth rather than as a psychodrama of human development is not helpful here either. It was not God who cast them out, but the capacity for self-consciousness that made the Garden of Eden unlivable for them. Awakened to the consciousness of death, man had to leave nature, so he entered history and had to build a new security for himself. This became culture. A replacement Garden of Eden. But there was no way back. There was no getting rid of the sense of self. You cannot say to yourself that I am not, because anyone who can say that to himself is. There was no return to the lost Paradise. Not because of God, but because of ourselves.

The last question is about the meaning of the other mysterious tree mentioned in the Book of Genesis, the tree of life. According to Scripture, only the tree of knowledge was forbidden to Adam and Eve, off the other, the tree of life, which gives eternal life,¹⁷ they could eat. However, after the Fall, there was no demur, God closed off the Garden of Eden and made it impossible for man to access it again. Through the reflective consciousness, man was confronted with his own destiny, thus losing his animal naivety, his sense of immortality, the possibility of eating from the tree of life. Yet who eats from the tree of life without eating from the tree of knowledge is immortal: who lives without self consciousness, like the animals or the human couple before the „Fall", feels to be immortal. Homo sapiens, however, could not return to the self-absorption of nature, which the Lord had shut off from him with cherubim and sword of fire.¹⁸ He gave orders to the homeless man to cultivate the land from which he had been made.¹⁹

The original meaning of the word culture is precisely the cultivation of the land.²⁰ God has therefore not only driven the human couple out of Paradise, but has also marked out their new task. Blessed and beaten man with self consciousness leaves the Garden of Eden to create culture. An artificial Garden of Eden. Culture is therefore not an option, but a destiny. A refuge to be built by „divine command". When the historical man steps on the stage, the certain sense of death works in him, and on the other hand - albeit precariously - a sense of immortality. In his mouth he tastes two tastes, the bitterness of forbidden fruit and the sweet memory of the tree of life. It is this duality of human existence that creates the existential paradox²¹ that compels us to culture. Here is a particular interpretation of the myth of paradise.²²

1.2. The glorious self-consciousness

There are many factors that are often identified as crucial to our way of becoming human: uprightness, tool-making, fire use, language, work, thinking, conscience, etc., which are constantly debated among experts. This debate is obviously the result of different assessments of scientific data and findings, different methodologies in the various disciplines, but it also involves the fact that in order to answer the question, we must first decide: what man is.²³ This seemingly banal question is of crucial importance. Everyone will look for the separation of human life from the animal world in what they think of man beforehand. Scientific objectivity is preceded by a subjective assumption. We are of course no exception.

For us, man is not the same as Homo sapiens. All humans are Homo sapiens, but not all Homo sapiens are humans. Homo sapiens is a highly evolved primate that walks upright, makes tools, uses language, is an intelligent hunter²⁴, but these alone do not explain what has happened in the last hundred thousand years. The essence of man is to be found in his self-consciousness. The only living being that can not only think, but can think about thinking.²⁵ I think, therefore I am. (Cogito, ergo sum)²⁶ Behold, self-consciousness.²⁷ It is obviously difficult to form a picture of how an animal perceives itself, but various mirror-image experiments show that even the most advanced primates do not have the confident self-representation that we humans have.²⁸ Moreover, we acquire it relatively quickly after birth.²⁹

The process of human evolution is clearly linked to an increase in brain size. Homo species with increasingly larger (and more complex) brains are out-competing their competitors.³⁰ (Neanderthals and Homo sapiens had essentially the same brain size, so the outcome of the duel between the two may have been for a different reason³¹). Somewhere and at some point in the development of the brain, self-consciousness appears. Exactly how this happened, what aspects, conditions and how they played a role is still a matter of serious scientific debate.³² One thing is for sure, it did appear, and in doing so it opened up huge evolutionary possibilities for man. Homo sapiens was able to separate himself from his environment, to reflect on himself, on his fellow creatures, on the world, in a way that no other creature could.³³ This enabled him to plan and perfect his behavior. The impact of this on communication, group functioning, tool use and preparation, hunting, safety and other areas cannot be overstated. The awakening human is taking a giant step: stepping out of nature. For the first time in the history of evolution, someone stops to look around and says: what is this all about?! This innocuous moment brings a huge shift for the whole planet. It’s safe to say that an evolutionary leap has been made.³⁴

Self-consciousness is crucial to understanding the human essence, but it is a mistake to think that we have unlocked the secret of Homo sapiens.³⁵ This incredibly important step explains a lot about how we become masters of the planet, but it does not in itself answer a crucial question. How does the primate, which seemingly wins the evolutionary jackpot with self-consciousness, become a problem animal? And yet this story started out so nicely. Man has not only adapted to the circumstances, like the other animals, but has begun to transform the world. Because he saw himself and his environment from the outside, he was able to change, to plan, to rethink, which made him superior to all other living beings.³⁶ Civilization spread inexorably through the globe. On the one hand, we seemed to be witnessing the glorious and confident triumph of the image of God, but at the same time, deep down, another process was underway. Man lost his identity and with it his secure place in the world.³⁷ As a result of self-consciousness, Homo sapiens rose to the top of the animal kingdom, gaining abilities like no other, but by the time he reached the top he had become a miserable animal like no other. Why? Something important must have happened.

1.3. The cursed self-conciseness

Through self-consciousness, man reflects not only on himself but also on the external world separate from himself³⁸- his fellow beings, other living beings, his environment - and when he does so, he actually perceives two frameworks in which things appear to him: one is space, the other is time.³⁹ The development of the perception of space and time is in fact linked to the development of the two most basic cognitive skills: perception and memory. At some level and in some form, animals also perceive the world around them and also have memory.⁴⁰ Depending on their level of development, animals therefore have consciousness, even self-awareness, but no self-consciousness.⁴¹ Humans, on the other hand, have consciousness; we are not just aware of space and time, but also aware of how we perceive space and time.⁴² That is, we become aware of the quality of space and time. All this has led to an explosion in our thinking, opening up huge horizons of design, modeling, and imagination.⁴³

It is amazing how a pride of lions can carry out a coordinated hunt,⁴⁴ but this is not really the result of team planning, but of inherited skills, in which the genetically stored and passed-on knowledge of generations is revealed. The big cat team is in fact running an innate program on which it can make little changes, and is not really forced to do so. The human herd, on the other hand, was already capable of creating entirely new forms of behavior from experience stored in his own memory, from successful patterns learned from others or even from plans conceived in its mind, in addition to the innate knowledge it had acquired or learned from its parents. This could even be the opposite of what he inherited or learned from his ancestors.

It is a well-evidenced phenomenon that humans are able to act in direct opposition to the information stored in their genes. A neighbor offers us fresh cherries picked from his garden, which makes our mouths water, but we learn that he voted for another political party, we will reject that offer. If a neighbor offers our dog a tasty bone, it will gladly accept it, regardless of which politician has made it dizzy. To do something quite different from what our instincts dictate, just because our thinking tells us it is right, was a revolutionary innovation in the living world. Of course, changing something is no guarantee that it will be successful, and, as biologists say, evolution is very conservative, and sticking to what has been proven effective in the past.⁴⁵ But human cognitive evolution has given us such revolutionary flexibility in adapting to the environment that we have been able to conquer every corner of the globe, from the Arctic to the tropical desert. Homo sapiens, by gaining self-consciousness about the fact that he could not only perceive but also understand the world around him in four dimensions, and that he could express this with language tools, had an evolutionary advantage that proved irreplaceable.

The emergence of self-consciousness and the development of space and time consciousness certainly interacted back and forth. It seems very logical that the perception of space and time that began in the animal world reached a stage in man where the two intersected, man awakened to himself, and thus to his self-consciousness, in the given place, in the given body (space) and in the given moment (time). This great evolutionary moment, as described above, marked the explosive beginning of man’s success story, but, as also indicated, it also set in motion an ordeal that needs explanation. Standing on the podium of space and time, we received the gold medal of evolution, but it was also under the cross of space and time that our calvary began. What happened? The conscious man was relatively soon confronted with a very unpleasant side effect.

When a herd of antelope loses one of its members to predators, it obviously causes great stress to the others who witnessed the event. For a while. But it doesn’t result in any change in their behavior. The next morning, the herd goes on with their life, grazing in the same place as if no serious tragedy had occurred the day before. They don’t reflect on their loss, they don’t mourn, they don’t contemplate their own finitude, and they certainly don’t plan their lives anew. When a member of a human herd is snatched by a predator, the stress was detectable not only during the traumatic event and the hours that follow, but persisted afterwards. The sound of bones crunching in the teeth of the beast and the terrified death scream, the sight of blood gushing from the wound, the smell of spilling entrails and the bitter sense of helplessness that accompanied it all must have haunted our ancestors for a long time. And just when they thought they had forgotten all about it, a small memory would be enough to bring it back to the forefront of their minds in a matter of moments. This not only caused bad moments, but also raised very unpleasant questions.

Could I be taken by a predator tomorrow? Could it be that tomorrow it is my death that others are watching? What pain will I have to live through? What will happen to me then? Will the world I now sense disappear? Like other dead people, will I never return? Where will I be then? But even if I survive tomorrow, will I die sooner or later, like others? Can’t this be avoided? If I die anyway, what’s the point? Who am I? Why am I here? Why do I have to live through this? What can I do to relieve this distress? Imagine these agonizing questions flooding your mind, not while reading a book in a soft armchair, but on the savannah, preparing for the hunt the next day, in the night echoing with the hyenas’ giggles. The man, who yesterday was a champion of consciousness, has suddenly shrunk into a troubled, even anxious animal. It was only a matter of time before the self-consciousness called forth the consciousness of death.

Imagine the situation, as if you were about to take possession of the new house you’ve worked so hard for, and you were happy to open the door to the most beautiful rooms, but when you get to the last door, you find a dark, smelly figure behind it saying: hi, I live here too. That’s exactly what happened to us. The awakening to our self not only made us the most successful species of animal, but also confronted us with a disturbing dilemma that proved crucial to the survival of the human race. An unexpected and disgusting guest, the thought of passing away, knocked rudely and firmly on the beautifully carved door of our minds, essentially upsetting the peace of our mental habitat forever. And this sense of distress is not a problem that one can leave behind once it has been resolved. Because it cannot be solved. The result of a hunt may have caused serious distress, but once the hunt was done and was successful, that distress was gone. But consciousness of death is not like that. It comes with us everywhere and, as they say, we cannot get it out of our minds. We can distract ourselves, we can suppress our fears, we can find an explanation, but whatever we do, the sense of the finite nature of ourselves is always lurking there behind our thoughts. Always. This is for sure the most important and dramatic point of our becoming human. It is this sense of torment, this contradiction in our species that we have long believed to be an original sin. But we are not born with the indelible stamp of sin, but worse: we are born a dying god.

---

1 Carlo Rovelli: Az idő rendje (The order of time). Budapest, 2018, Park, p.207.

2 Think of Boccaccio’s Decameron, where seven women and three men fleeing the plague epidemic create an imaginary world for themselves by telling stories instead of the terrible reality.

3 Quran, Gnosticism, Zoroastrianism, Alavites, etc.

4 1 Moses 2,17.

5 Delumeau gives an overview of the European ideology linked to Paradise and its loss. Jean Delumeau: A paradicsom története (The history of Paradise). Budapest, 2004, Europe. See also Elemér Hankiss, Félelmek és szimbólumok (Fears and Symbols). Budapest, 2006, Osiris, pp. 131-148.

6 1 Moses 2,7.

7 The name Eve in Hebrew means living, life, life-giving. If Eve is created by God from Adam’s rib, from his body, the soul is both material and divine.

8 It is interesting that there is no mention of Satan (or the devil) in the Book of Genesis, but hardly any in the whole Old Testament. This is certainly related to the fact that monotheism of Judaism tried to resist many dualistic tendencies. Perhaps this is why the biblical tempter became a serpent. The reptile has a very rich symbolism. In ancient Egypt, Aphopis, the demon of darkness, the enemy of the sun god Ra, was also a serpent. But Ureus, the ancient cobra, is the protector of the sun god. And Uroboros, the serpent biting its own tail, is the symbol of the cosmic rotation. For the Mesopotamians, Tiamat, the embodiment of darkness and chaos, is a female serpent killed by the god Marduk, creating heaven and earth. After Gilgamesh has obtained the grass of immortality, it is stolen from him by a serpent during a rest. In the Book of Genesis, the