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CHAPTER 1
The Last Giant Man of Eden
In the beginning, millions of years ago, the Lord God planted a garden northward, in Eden. There was an abundance of sunlight, sequoias, and electricity, and all the biological conditions were most favorable.
William Fairfield Warren did not look like a candidate to discover the location of the Garden of Eden. He wasn't an explorer. He stood only five feet six, when he stood at all. In his role as the first president of Boston University, he spent much of his time sitting behind his desk, speaking with the faculty, students, and trustees in a soft, husky voice. Though he was only forty when appointed to the position, his pale bespectacled face, framed by thinning gray hair and a trim beard, made him look much older. Known as a diplomat, Warren insisted on perfect courtesy and friendship between faculty and students. He held the job for thirty years.
But Warren was also a trained Methodist minister, and he continued teaching in the School of Theology throughout his tenure as president. In his classroom, behind the podium, William Warren seemed to grow. His usually restrained speaking voice became louder and more resonant. His prominent forehead began to flush. He made bad jokes. He had a penchant for creating and acting out fake Socratic dialogues and reciting long passages from Emerson. And instead of playing the courteous diplomat, Warren became a defender of the faith.
The faith needed defending after 1859, when the post-Darwin furor over human origins was in full blaze. Evolution suggested that man had ascended over time from our less intelligent and more animalistic primate origins. Christianity had been insisting for millennia that man had descended, through original sin, from near-divine heights in the Garden of Eden to the miserable, depraved society of the late nineteenth century.
In 1872, an overeager German philosopher proclaimed that man was an animal, no different from a monkey; human thoughts were just emanations of the brain, "like bile from the liver." These shock tactics gave Warren ammunition against the evolutionist heresy, and his already scheduled lecture on "Scripture Inspiration" provided him with an opportunity to attack.
Warren began with an ultimatum. If any human in the audience believed himself to be an animal, he declared, "it will be eminently fitting to postpone all arguments with him until he shall become a man. Lunatics, we are told, should never be contradicted." Man is a spiritual creature, Warren declared, created by God. And God hadn't just stepped back after the creation, exhausted, and "sunk into an eternal swoon." Nor was He "locked up in the sky-parlor of the universe." No, the Creator God was still around, and he was keeping busy. "I assume that, as the air inspheres all trees, so God all souls."
Warren's own faith never wavered, but his position had him trapped. As a modern man, the president of a major university, he knew science was coming. But his Methodist theology, like that of most Christian denominations, required humans to be sinners always reaching backward toward a more perfect, Edenic past. How could he maintain both points of view?
He refused to take the easy way, refused to shake the Bible in the face of the heathens. Dogmatic, overanxious defense of Christianity was to his mind worse than no defense at all. Besides, he'd served as a missionary himself in Germany, and he knew those blunt tactics wouldn't work. Make transparent arguments based on a literal reading of the Bible, Warren warned, and you'll "fatally disgust many an ingenious mind."
Within the theology department, Warren specialized in comparative mythology, which he described as "the science of the oldest traditional beliefs and memories of mankind." He knew the great epic folklore of the Hindus, the Celts, the Chinese, and the Persians. In the nineteenth century, this was a rare, esoteric body of knowledge, full of metaphoric echoes of Bible stories. So Warren didn't have to point to the Bible and say, "God said so"; he had corroborating evidence from all over the world.
Warren knew that to have the best chance at conversion, you needed to speak in the language of the potential convert. So he began to learn the language of science. He would examine fossils, not just Bible verses. He quoted Darwin, not just Augustine. And he always kept an eye toward the gaps in the young body of knowledge accumulating around Darwin. What did the Darwinists not know?
What they didn't know, and wouldn't for almost a century after Darwin, was where on Earth the first Homo sapiens had appeared. How could you know how man began unless you knew where man began? How could you move into a brave new future with so many questions about the past? The archaeologists, historians, and anthropologists, though they continued working, tentatively, found themselves "in the dark," and Warren saw his opportunity to shine some theological light.
He promised his students not to try to defend "metaphysical absurdities" like angels and hellfire. Christianity didn't need fire and brimstone; it could simply state the truth. "Nothing is so persuasive as honesty."
And God's honest scientific truth was: the Garden of Eden is at the North Pole.
Or at least it had been, before the Flood. Warren's theory began with one true scientific premise. Millions of years ago, the Earth had been much warmer. Back then, the North Pole would not have been frozen. It might have been, if not tropical, then at least, perhaps, habitable. And as all the paleontologists of Warren's time could confirm, the oldest life-forms on Earth seemed to emerge directly out of a primeval paradise — fantastic creatures at once familiar and mythical, like the woolly mammoth, the dinosaur, and the giant sequoia —"flora and fauna of almost unimagined vigor and luxuriousness." The North Pole must have been a place of abundance and perfection, just as the Garden of Eden should be: Genesis says that Eden contains "every tree that is pleasant to the eye or good for food." Warren translated the Bible into science: Eden was "the one spot on Earth where the biological conditions are the most favorable."
Warren could not have picked a more perfect moment for a Polar Eden. At the end of the nineteenth century, the North Pole was a rare blank spot on the world map. Despite numerous attempts, no one had been there. No one knew what it looked like. There could be an open sea, or there could be a whole other continent — no doubt cold, but still. It could be mountainous, or flat, or forested.
Surprisingly, the North Pole and the Garden of Eden had a lot in common. For one thing, both had tantalized explorers by being always, seemingly, just out of reach — and not for lack of trying. The search for Eden had been going on for centuries — without much to show for itself in the way of flag-planting territory. By the end of the nineteenth century, it was thought that fanciful locations for Eden, in exotic locales like Sri Lanka and the Orinoco, were a thing of the past. This was a newer, wiser age. Besides, so much was known about the world that there was no remote area in which to uncover an earthly paradise. We had reached the ends of the Earth. Or almost.
A race for the Pole had been going on since the 1820s — but at a glacial pace and at exorbitant financial and human costs. The Arctic region was treacherous enough even if westerners knew what they were doing, and for much of the early nineteenth century, they did not. British explorers continued to wear British wool, even though it absorbed sweat, which then froze and lost any insulating ability. Scurvy is easily avoided by eating raw meat, as the Eskimos do, but it took European explorers decades to figure this out. In the meantime, they suffered. Scurvy not only weakens the muscles but also messes with the mind, leaving early explorers convinced that they could accomplish more than was humanly possible. Yet for every failed expedition, with its loss of lives to scurvy and starvation, there seemed to be a dozen more soldiers or sailors ready to sign up as reinforcements. The Pole was magnetic in more than a geologic sense. It drew hundreds of men into its circular orbit.
The great Arctic explorer Elisha Kent Kane set a new record for reaching "farthest north," in an expedition of 1851; he also set a new standard for Arctic survival. After an eighty-three-day march across the ice, only one of his crew froze to death. Kane returned home to front-page New York Times fanfare, and his two-volume Arctic Explorations sold 69,000 copies and made him a rich man. He died in Havana (where he'd gone to recover from the effects of scurvy) in 1857, and his month-long funeral procession — from Cuba to New Orleans, up the Mississippi to Cincinnati, by train to Philadelphia, stopped at every stage by throngs of mourners — was said to be the most spectacular of the nineteenth century, excluding that of Lincoln.
William Warren rode this great wave of public Polar imagination. He stepped out of his Boston University classroom and tested his theory behind other podiums in Boston, New York, and Chicago. Everywhere he went, he enthralled audiences with his rapturous descriptions of the northern lights, the aurora borealis, or as he called it, "diluted lightning."
"Sometimes these electric discharges not only fill the whole heaven with palpitating draperies, but also tip the hills with lambent flame, and cause the very soil on which one stands to prickle with a kind of life." Imbued with still-mysterious electrical power, Warren's North Pole seemed to pulsate expectantly, as if about to give birth to a new world, and that's exactly what Warren believed had happened.
In his lectures, and in his 1882 pamphlet "The True Key to Ancient Cosmology," Warren detailed over and over again his theory of just how the world began. He was well aware of the scholarly disagreement surrounding the Eden question — as he liked to say, "The modern Babel is worse than the first!" And he was there to swoop in like a benevolent God, to provide one language that everyone could understand.
All these petty geographical disputes, Warren thought, had kept centuries of theologians from seeing the one, simple, symmetrical, northern solution. These disputes were easily overcome. He told his audiences to take a closer look at the names of those four rivers. Start with the one that is not disputed by anyone, in any Biblical translation, the one river everyone thinks he knows: the Euphrates.
According to Warren, "Euphrates" is the Greek translation of an original Hebrew name "Phrath" — a general term meaning "the Broad" or "the Deep." "The Deep" could of course apply to more than one river "just as Broad Brook is the name of many an American stream." Possibly then, the "Phrath" of Mesopotamia could have been named for some older, beloved river from the pre-Flood world, wherever that was. "That it was so," he wrote, "is the firm belief of various learned writers," whom he then went on to cite at length.
Once Warren dismantled the idea of a Middle Eastern Euphrates, he could begin building his idea of a northern Eden, starting with the original "one river that watered the Garden." According to Warren it wasn't really a river at all, but simply rain. Not having seen rain before, the "First People" believed it to be part of a "finer and more celestial stream whose headsprings were in the sky." In the center of the hypothetical "circumpolar land" there was an elevated area, a Polar mountain. If Adam and Eve stood on top of this mountain, they'd be standing in the center of the compass rose. Looking down, they'd find four separate streams flowing symmetrically in opposite directions "toward all the cardinal points of the horizon."
Such a well-watered place would obviously be extremely fertile. Warren populated his Eden with numerous species of trees — beeches, oaks, planes, poplars, walnuts, limes; even a magnolia or two — and especially, a species of giant pine closely related to the Sequoia gigantea of California. Some of these red-bark evergreens grew 400 feet tall, and had been found to be almost 2,000 years old. Uncannily straight, and stunningly out of scale with the rest of the landscape, the last surviving sequoias are "witnesses [of] a far-off world, witnesses whose testimony [even] the most incredulous must accept." If these individual primeval trees could struggle against unfavorable biological conditions to survive for two millennia, "who shall declare it impossible that the men of the time and place of the origination of the Sequoia gigantea should have averaged more than six feet in stature, or attained an age quite surpassing our threescore years and ten?"
That's right — here in the Polar paradise, under the electric skies and alongside gigantic trees, there were people. Giant people. Adam and Eve — or "hyperborean Eocene man," as Warren called his first race — must have been "of giant stature."
Warren stated this theory over and over again. At first he was cautious. The idea of giant, long-lived people was "by no means scientifically incredible." Then he became a little bolder. So what if the oldest human skeletons known by paleontologists had been of only ordinary size, if not smaller? None of them, Warren pointed out in his own defense, had been found in Arctic regions. Darwin himself once said, "Plants and shells of the Arctic region are eminently variable." So why not humans?
Warren dismissed as small-minded anyone who as not inclined to believe in prehistoric giant Polar men. We hadn't been there; we were in no position to judge. We were like "a man who in all his life had never seen any other specimen of journalism than the North British Wool-growers Monthly Bulletin.
He reminded those provincial wool-growers who had never seen a giant man that even in 1885, and even in warmer latitudes, there was great variability in human height. Occasionally, he wrote, men appeared who were four or five times the height of the smallest adult dwarf. With that rate of variability, who knows what might have existed at the dawn of the world? "If we were to assume two and one half feet as the minimum adult stature in Polar Regions in primeval times, the still-prevailing range of variation would give us some men from seven and one half to twelve and one half feet in height." Assuming a minimum adult stature of two and a half feet must have been comforting to a man of five feet six: according to the "still-prevailing range of variation" he was not short, only average.
The physical stature of hyperborean Eocene man was matched only by his religious prowess. In the glorious early years, man was monotheistic, and in "instant personal" communication with his Creator. Humans were perfect moral creatures, living in the world's "first theocracy." They knew how to live in harmony with the land and with each other, so they lived for a long time. "Threescore and ten," that is, seventy — the traditional human life span mentioned in the Bible and taken up by Shakespeare — was just a bare minimum for hyperborean Eocene man.
These men were also strong and muscular. And it was inevitable, according to Warren, that "such a lusty race" would be restless. Not realizing what they had, hyperborean Eocene men instead "coveted experimental knowledge of evil as well as of good." Warren had learned his second language well: even the Fall of Man, the mysterious temptation at the heart of the Eden story, came out sounding like science.
What exactly did Adam and Eve "experiment" with? Debate about the symbolism of Eden's forbidden fruit could (and did) fill many libraries. But most of the interpretations have to do with sex. Before they ate the fruit, Adam and Eve were naked and unashamed; afterward, they had to cover up, and they had children: Cain and Abel. Whole medieval libraries are devoted to the question of whether or not Adam and Eve could have sex in Eden before the Fall. Some say of course they could; otherwise, how would it be paradise? Others say no, the first people had no need of such depravity. The age-old debate on sex in Eden was often connected with the debate on the species of fruit. The apple is only a late, Victorian afterthought. More sensual traditions held that Eve ate a pomegranate — blood-colored, grows in warm climates, full of seeds — or maybe a fig, softer and more fertile.
Warren stepped daintily around the question of how exactly his Adam and Eve had sinned. But there may be a clue in his ideas about the Tree of Knowledge, the Tree on which the forbidden fruit grew. If Warren's Tree was a sequoia, the forbidden knowledge probably didn't involve sex. The sequoia doesn't even have fruit; it has just small winged seedpods. Usually, the trees reproduce asexu-ally, regenerating new sequoias out of the roots of old sequoias.
Still, whatever Adam and Eve's experiment with evil was, it must have been bad, because God immediately sent down a tsunami of wrath, drowning the Polar Paradise for eternity. Perhaps it's worth noting that sequoias are famously flood-resistant.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Paradise Lust"
by .
Copyright © 2011 Brook Wilensky-Lanford.
Excerpted by permission of Grove Atlantic, Inc..
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