By the time I was learning the Cain and Abel story in the 20th century, the purpose of the first storytellers centuries earlier had been lost on me. The conflict between nomadic herders and settled farmers had been long forgotten in the history I learned in school and church.
So I was well along in my journey of viewing how history portrays the struggle between Multi Earth and One Earth paradigms when I first began to feel the power that the story of Cain and Abel had originally as a story of the great divorce between the herder-hunter-gather, nomadic way of being in the world and the settled agriculturalist way, between those preferring decentralized power to those eager to concentrate it in cities.
Once I could listen to the story with this awareness of why its first storytellers told it, I realized I was coming to a deeper truth. As I’d heard the story taught, preached, and misused, Cain was presented as the first murderer, a dark example of fallen human nature. Nothing much more. But he and his brother are so much more. Cain and Abel were and are representative characters of a drama that changed how our species lives on Earth. Thinking of them as historical offspring of Adam and Eve could never deliver that truth.
Question: Ray Anderson, late CEO of Interface Corporation, tells how his change of consciousness toward One Earth living involved recognizing that he’d been a predator. All of us Multi Earthers are, no? How are we murderers? (Sorry to ask such an pleasant question.)