When observed from a psychological angle the Adam and Eve myth encompasses probably the most significant event in human history, that event being the rise of self consciousness. In the story both Adam and Eve are told to not eat from the tree of knowledge for they "shall surely die". However when they do eventually eat from it they don't die, nonetheless something extremely significant still ends up happening. Instead of expiring all of a sudden after consuming the fruit they instead become aware of their vulnerability and ultimately of their mortality. The consequence of their actions is the fall from Eden. The awareness of one's finite existence and a moral scale to measure good and evil is what separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom.
“Nature has protected the lower animal by endowing them with instincts. An instinct is a programmed perception that calls into play a programmed reaction. It is very simple, animals are not moved by what they cannot react to. They live in a tiny world a sliver of reality. One neorochemical program that keeps them walking behind their nose and shuts out everything else. But look at man the impossible creature. Here nature seems to have thrown caution to the winds along with the programmed instincts. She created an animal who has no defense against the full perception of the world.” 1
When your originally thrust into this world you exist in the Eden like state. You have no awareness of death & no concept of time. You live as the rest of the animals in the natural world, simply reacting to what's in front of you and taking in sensory information. This is the state as adults we yern to re-capture the blissful frame of mind often referred to “as living in the moment.”
The poet Thomas Traherne so beautifully captures this Eden like state of childhood in his poem 'Centuries of Meditation':
"The corn was orient an immortal wheat, which never should be reaped, nor was ever sown. I thought it had stood from everlasting to everlasting. The dust and stones of the street were as precious as gold: the gates were at first the end of the world. The green trees when I saw them first through one of the gates transported and ravished me, their sweetness and unusual beauty made my heart to leap, and almost mad with ecstasy, they were such strange and wonderful things....Boys and girls tumbling in the street, and playing, were moving jewels. I knew not that they were born or should die; But all things abided eternally as they were in their proper places. Eternity was manifest in the Light of the Day, and something infinite behind everything appeared which talked with my expectation and moved my desire. The city seemed to stand in Eden, or to be built in Heaven."2
Without self consciousness, without the knowledge of death the child exists in a blissful ignorant state gazing in awe at the eternal beauty that is creation. It's not that the child is destined to live forever and be immortal but he may as well be while encapsulated in his shell of jovial ignorance. This is the state Adam and Eve lived in before their ejection from paradise.
They like the human child were not destined to live forever and would have eventually succumb to their mortality. This is evidenced by the presence of the tree of life within the garden. A tree they never ate from but would have granted them eternal life. This requirement (consuming fruit from the tree of life) to gain immortality implies that God intended for his creation to have a finite amount of time to its existence.
The return to this blissful state of mind the return to Eden is the ultimate purpose and journey of faith. The promise of eternal life, the transcendence of death is the gold rewarded to the victor of this holy quest. The weight of the knowldge of death and its significance, the transference of existence from this physical world to another has been a burden on the human mind since the beggining of time.
Archeological sites in Sungir, Russia dating back all the way to the upper paleolithic (approx. 32,000 years ago) evidence the practice of elaborate burial rituals.
" Two of the burials are of adolescents laid in shallow graves dug into the permafrost; the corpses were placed on their backs with their hands folded across their pelves. One of these bodies, said to be that of a boy, was covered with strands of beads. 4,903 in all; he also had a beaded cap with some fox teeth attached. Around his waist was the remains of a decorated belt with more than 250 canine teeth of the polar fox; a simple calculation shows the minimum number of foxes (63) - animals that must be individually trapped or hunted - required to supply so many teeth. In addition the boy was buried with a carved ivory pendant in the form of an animal, an ivory statuette of a mammoth, an ivory Lance made from straightened mammoth tusk, a carved ivory disc with central perforation and other items. The lance was probably to heavy to serve a practical purpose. The adjacent burial, said to be that of a girl, was accompanied by no fewer than 5,274 beads. If White is correct in estimating in that it took more than 45 minutes to fashion a single bead the beads in this female burial took more than 3,500 hours to make." 3
These burials show the emphasis we placed on death as early as the stone age. Barely out of the grips of our animalistic nature we had already been cast out of Eden and forced to gaze into the abyss that is our mortality. David Lewis the author of "The Mind In The Cave" in which the Sungir burials are described goes on to say:
"I suggest that, in Upper Paleolithic communities, representational art and elaborate burial practices were both associated with different degrees and kinds of access for different categories of people to 'spiritual' realms (that is, realms of mental imagery) and, as such, had a common foundation in a type of consciousness that the Neanderthals lacked."
Lewis is referring to a time which is backed by archeological evidence when humans (homo sapiens) and Neanderthals existed side by side. More specifically in what is now France where a majority of the sites to support this theory exist. Lewis tacitly suggests that even other species of homo such as the Neanderthals didn't possess the type 'consciousness' that we humans do. The consciousness endowed on Adam and Eve by the tree of knowledge. One of the elements of that consciousness being the acute awareness of death.
Indeed it is more than possible that the 'cave people' of the upper paleolithic did have some form of religion. Given the anthropological evidence of existing hunter gatherer societies having rituals and spirituality as well as the archeological and historical evidence for shamanism and other forms of spirituality before the emergence of organized religion. It would be safe to assume the idea of God was implanted on the primitive mind onward.
Shamanistic traditions often involved altered states of consciousness. Achieved through sleep deprivation, fasting, physical exhaustion, etc. Sometimes however these states were achieved through the use of hallucinogenic plants. North American indigenous tribes weren't much different than their shamanistic brethern. Their rituals too involved altered states of consciousness. Again sometimes these states were achieved by utilizing plants with vision inducing side effects. One of these substances used by some tribes in North America was peyote.
Aldous Huxley, one of the most influential authors of the twentieth century had his own personal experience with peyote. To be more precise with mescaline which is the psychoactive ingredient in peyote. Huxley recorded his experience in his book "The Doors of Perception".
"I took my pill at eleven. An hour and a half later, I was sitting in my study, looking intently at a small glass vase. The vase contained only three flowers—a fullblown Belle of Portugal rose, shell pink with a hint at every petal’s base of a hotter, flamier hue; a large magenta and cream-colored carnation; and, pale purple at the end of its broken stalk, the bold heraldic blossom of an iris. Fortuitous and provisional, the little nosegay broke all the rules of traditional good taste. At breakfast that morning I had been struck by the lively dissonance of its colors. But that was no longer the point. I was not looking now at an unusual flower arrangement. I was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation—the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence." 4
Shortly after taking "his pill" in which Huxley is referring to the mescaline dose his state of consciousness is altered. In his own words:
"The other world to which mescalin admitted me was not the world of visions; it existed out there, in what I could see with my eyes open. The great change was in the realm of objective fact. What had happened to my subjective universe was relatively unimportant."
After the mescaline takes affect Huxley is stunned by the beauty of the three simple flowers sitting on his desk. He is transported back to Eden back to seeing "What Adam had seen on the morning of his creation - the miracle."
Huxley's description of his blissful frame of mind runs parallel to the description of childhood conveyed in Traherne's poem. A state of shock and awe at the miracle that is creation. Thus we can state the frame of existence experienced by Adam and Eve in Eden is parallel to the state of mind occupied during childhood and is one of the states of consciousness sought after by the pagan faiths and their practices. Furthermore it is the ultimate goal of faith to transcend death and return to Eden. In the words of Robert Greene author of "The Laws of Human Nature":
"In the end, what we want is to fuse the curiosity and excitement we had toward the world as children, when almost everything seemed enchanting, with our adult intelligence." 5
On top of being a simple creature entrenched in this jovial state of mind the infant also has instilled in them a sense of omnipotence. Every need and want is taken care of with a cry or simple look of discomfort. A grimace summons a colorful rattle that amuses him, a cry makes food appear, a grunt frees him of the grips of his wet diaper. He is all powerful, however as time goes on the awareness that his mother must divide her attention between him and other duties becomes apparent. As the years further progress he begins to become aware of his frailty and the illusion of his omnipotence begins to fade since his needs now become one more complex and two anything he desires can no longer be summoned with a simple grunt or cry. This phenomenon is why some psychologists believe children will imagine themselves as having super or magical powers. Their attempting to supplement for the loss of their omnipotence and cover up the unconscious realization of their frailty.
Eventually it hits the child that this ominous thing called death exists. It may be through the death of a family member, a pet, a conversation, media, etc. Whatever the exposure inevitably the child becomes aware of this thing that takes people and animals away forever never to be seen again. Than eventually the truly horrid epiphany comes that death takes everyone away, including him. This is when the fruit has been consumed and the knowledge fully implanted in the brain. This is when the child falls from the paradise of Eden into the harsh reality of the world. After one realizes the inevitably of death they can no longer inhabit paradise.
Footnotes:
Ernest Becker, “The Denial of Death”, Free Press, 1973
Thomas Traherne, "Centuries of Meditation"
David Lewis Williams, "The Mind in the Cave", Thomas & Hudson LTD, 2002
Aldous Huxley, "Doors of Perception", Harper Collins, 1954
Robert Greene, "The Laws of Human Nature", Penguin Books, 2018