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Memories & Visions of Paradise: Exploring the Universal Myth of a Lost Golden Age

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Did you really think Adam and Eve were unique or unprecedented? Every human culture has a myth of the "fall" from an original golden-age of peace and prosperity to death and disease, including eskimos, aborigines and Native Americans. The author examines "fall" myths from a variety of angles, presenting all the major theories as to what they might mean. "Memories and Visions of Paradise" presents a much clearer overview of the "saddest story ever told" than any previous book on the topic. A commendable effort, well worth picking up for anyone interested in myth or religion.

"The fruit of that forbidden tree ... brought death into the world, and all our woe ... till one greater Man restore us." John Milton



Paradise Lost:
This above line from Paradise Lost, an epic by John Milton, gives an excellent summary of Genesis 3, which adds enhancing imagery, though a few unnecessary elements are included.
Many legends have paradise myths which even refer to a specific place, a lost Utopia land, a sunken island or a great isolated oasis as the lost paradise of humankind. Of which the author mentioned the lost Shambhala, as a mystical hidden kingdom protected behind snowy peaks, located somewhere to the north, as pictured in the Tibetan legend. Tibetan sages and Western discoverers have looked everywhere for Shambhala - from the Gobi Desert to the North Pole. Geoffrey Ashe alleges that the fantasy of a lost paradise began in northern Asia some 25,000 years ago, within a goddess-worshipping cult. The book is impressive, well researched, on a wide range subjects from Ancient Mediterranean mythology to Indo-European philology.

The paradise myths:
The account of Satan's (Lucifer's) rebellion and fall from heaven with all his followers takes up a major portion of the plot of Paradise Lost. The Biblical sources of this occurrence are brief, but early church writings had fleshed out these lines by the time Milton began composing his epic. The Great Traditions of which the paradise myth is a part tells us that there has been a succession of world ages. Our era is not the only one in which people have grasped at Promethean powers. Civilizations have come and gone; like the others, ours too will pass away. But the greater story continues.

Utopian Paradise?
If we are to imagine any paradise, at all, we should locate it in the future, not the past, argues the author. Other people object that, even if the paradise myth makes us feel good, it is pure wishful thinking; there is no evidence that such a condition ever actually existed. The assumption at the heart of this view is that paradise must refer to a perfect, unblemished state. Given that definition, I would agree. It is indeed preposterous to suppose that there was a time when there was no suffering of any kind, when whatever one wished for immediately became reality. The historical paradise, if it existed, was almost certainly not perfect in this absolute sense. There have been times when human society will strive more for material simplicity and spiritual depth than for wealth and power.

Visions of Paradise:
Heinberg, explores the realms of myth and prophecy, analyzing paradise tradition parallels, in the line of Eliade and Campbell's exploration of the mythical dreams, linking them to a state of recollection of infancy, or an accidental meditation through a near-death-experience. This lost homeland of a far forgotten civilization, a blissfull dream before the emergence of civilization. Each of these consciousness centered interpretations proposed by the author himself may seem to have some applicable validity. At lectures and in discussions, Heinberg mentions, he still often encounters the idea that it's psychologically, and philosophically wrongheaded to look back to an imaginary time in the past when life was somehow better. If we are to imagine any paradise, at all, we should locate it in the future, not the past. However he proposes that this thinking methodology is linked to modernism. The industrial civilization, disapproval of the paradise myth was essential to the purposes of which substituted for the universal, ancient belief in a lost Golden Age the idea continual progress from a primitive origins. Among traditional peoples, the paradise myth appears to implant a feeling of security and stability; it is perhaps the cultural equivalent of the memory of loving parents and a happy childhood. The human evolution from barbarism may well serve the purposes of a material civilization that continually destroys social bonds in order to rebuild a society that serves the interests of a capitalist elite.

A state of consciousness:
Heinberg combined religious mythology fables, applied literary criticism, with tools of both anthropology and archaeology, but arrived in the end at a New Age concept of Paradise.
Ten years ago, recalls Richard Heinberg, "I was hard at work on what would be my first book, Memories and Visions of Paradise. ... In the book, I explored how the paradise myth may refer to a state of consciousness ..., a recollection of infancy, a forgotten civilization, a time prior to devastating world cataclysms, a lost homeland, or the era before the emergence of civilization itself. It was published in 1989, and since then I have periodically looked back on it to see how my thinking has changed and how much I've learned."

An Expert's review:
"..., but Heinberg makes his arguments fairly and does not attempt to draw conclusions far afield from his data. Even if his arguments do not convince, they make one think. He posits that "the memory of Paradise represents an innate and universal longing for a state of being that is natural and utterly fulfilling, ..." Lucy Patrick, Florida State Univ.