A Divine Tattoo Warns Us against Cain's Multi Earth Worldview

This blog has reinterpreted the millennia-old Cain-Abel myth because, like John Steinbeck in East of Eden, I see it as a compelling myth opposing Multi Earth powers and as a guide for One Earthers to strongly encounter and resist our contemporary situation.

That guidance emphasizes that our resistance to Multi Earthism can best happen without vengeance. Look at the myth again. Cain went from feeling superior to Abel to feeling a victim, fearing that he could be murdered himself. But Yahweh intervened to prevent the notion that One Earthers should rise up against Multi Earthers in revenge. Cain was given a mark, a divine tattoo, if you will. The divine mark on Cain, and therefore the Multi Earths story, is not like the mark on a tree designated to be cut down. The divine mark is not intended to make the Multi Earth story an easier mark for One Earthers to destroy.

The divine tatoo is intended to show us what not to follow. The better we learn the Multi Earth worldview and its mutant traits, the better we know what to look for. When we see the marks of the Multi Earth economy, then, no matter how they may be trying to lure us, we see the tatoo. It warns us, “Stay away if you deeply care for people, planet, and species.” With that kind of consciousness, we are more likely to invoke our greater capacities and choose Abel’s One Earth ways.

Cain’s ways are, after all, not the only way to live. Nor is east of Eden the only place. Choosing Abel’s worldview will empower us to bring a contemporary One Earth version of his offering which Yahweh, the Creator, found pleasing. We CAN offer such to the world, and without vengeance toward Multi Earthers. The divine tattoo tells us to spare the energy that goes into vengeance and use it to strengthen One Earth living.

"But Look at All the Good Multi Earth Ways Achieve"

“But what about the good that Multi Earth ways achieve?” people ask. The urgent necessity of separating ourselves from Multi Earther ways gets blunted for us because we can see Multi Earthers achieving good ends. Multi Earthers continually sell and defend the good they do. We dissenters focus on the bad, often from painful personal experiences. Analyzing the benefits and the costs is made more difficult because many of the benefits can happen quickly while many of the costs can take decades to appear. 

In subsequent blogs, I will acknowledge some of the benefits. But the Cain and Abel story minces no words. Those storytellers saw clearly that the Multi Earth world generates envy and murder. No sooner do Multi Earthers create hierarchies of power and wealth but that envy appears for more of Earth’s natural wealth. Acting upon that envy, Multi Earth ways murder the One Earth ways from which they were born and from which they seceded.

As I see it, today the blood of Earth’s ecosystems cry out like Abel’s blood cried out from the earth. Multi Earth living continues to murder Abel, a One Earther, and the worldview that shapes such. Yet, I am tempted to understate this antagonism of Multi Earth economics, religion, and politics toward their One Earth counterparts; or conversely, to rant against it. 

How do you see it?

'Fessing Up & Thinking Mythologically, Are You More Like Cain or Abel?

If someone were telling me the Cain-Abel story, and then asked, “Who in the story do you most identify with?” I’d hesitate. If I say “Abel,” I identify with the victim of murder. If I say “Cain” I identify with the murderer. But when I remember that Abel represents the One Earth paradigm in this myth, and Cain bears the burden of the Multi Earth paradigm, I can identify some with both.

Having already acknowledged my Multi Earth ecological footprint earlier in this blog, I know Cain lives in me as well as Abel who is that part of me questing for One Earth living. I like being the good guy in stories. But I do feel jealous and envious far more than I admit publicly; and, whether actively or passively, I have sought revenge in varying degrees. Furthermore, Cain’s notion that he could improve on One Earth ways lives in me and lives at the crux of my decisions when I choose Multi Earth ways.

Our decisions are complicated because we love creativity and improving things. Not that anything about Eden or One Earth living thwarts creativity. The question seems to be more whether our creativity is within the creational order or improving upon those orders themselves. Are we going about creating from our ego-centered, Cain-like self or are we centered in a greater Abel-like self that is in tune with Creation?

Eden as a Protest Story That Rejects Superpowers

The Jews living as captive refugees in foreign Babylon protested what they heard and saw there by compiling their own stories of how things had come to be as they were. Eden, Cain, and Abel are at their core protest stories, mythology rooted in dissent from Multi Earth ways.

But in addition to saying “No” to Babylon and empires, these stories also plotted a new direction for themselves. Living under Babylon’s Multi Earthers, the Jews saw anew the wisdom of the One Earth worldview. “How had they gotten so far away from it?” they wondered. Shunning the Babylonian Enuma Elish creation story in which humans and empires rise out of acts of violence among the gods, the Jews told stories that reconnected their own origins to an incredibly good Creation brought forth by powerful, nonviolent words of the Creator. They compiled Genesis as their anthology of their origins, including origins of what went wrong. 

Once I knew how and where the Eden, Cain, and Abel stories came to be, I recognized them as stories that know our situation today. The authors had lived in the bitterness of Multi Earth conquest more deeply than I have. They knew what it feels like to be living in the Multi Earth culture of a superpower and having to listen to its self-justifying stories. The stories they created in protest then, energize my turning from the Multi Earth story today and to make the story for One Earth living more fully my own. 

And now, I’d love to hear your comments on how retelling the stories of Cain, Abel, and Eden in this way radically reorients their significance for you facing the macro-issues today. 

Wes Howard-Brook Retells Eden for One Earth Living

My assertions about those who first told the stories of Cain, Abel, and Eden, come from scholars whose writings I have sought out to answer my own questions about why so many people feel more attracted to Multi Earth living rather than One Earth living. One such scholar, Wes Howard-Brook, distinguishes between empire religion and creation religion, rough equivalents of Multi Earth and One Earth worldviews.

One day, when I opened the Catholic Agitator, the newsletter of the Los Angeles Catholic Worker, I read a highly affirming review by Frank Cordero of Howard-Brook’s book, “Come Out, My People!” God’s Call Out of Empire in the Bible and Beyond. I recognized quickly that this book was important to my quest. 

Howard-Brook teaches theology and scripture at Seattle University. He gives a long, well-researched answer to the question, “Just who were these storytellers who told the tales of Eden, Cain, and Abel?” I wanted to know who, when, and why they were told. Were they living in the cities that adherents to Cain’s worldview built or were they back-to-the-land peasants?

The short answer is they were Jews living in the grand city of Babylon in the 6th century B.C.E. when Babylon was the center of the dominating Babylonian Empire. These stories were their protest stories, protesting what was for them the highly offensive stories they heard in Babylon to justify the Babylonian empire of conquest and domination.

I’ll unpack this short answer in blogs over the next days. 

If We Free Cain & Abel to be Myth, Then All of Us Get Indicted

Once I understood the brothers, Cain and Abel, mythologically, freed from history, I began to make other connections. The more I learned about the two worldviews they embodied, the more I recognized how Abel represented those who saw Earth as a great commons, providing enough for all through the highly cooperative human work of herding and a nomadic, migratory lifestyle. Cain, on the other hand, represented those who believed that improvement came when humans worked the soil to produce enough so that settlements could happen. Villages, and then cities, followed.

Increasingly, these settlers enclosed the commons, evolving practices allowing for private ownership. Their gains competed directly with the interests of migratory communities. Enclosing the commons continued as a trend, increasing over centuries into the present. Today, people with wealth, corporations, and richer nations follow in this centuries-long pattern of bringing commonly held land into private, highly-profitable ownership. Doing so has been essential to Multi Earth “success.” It’s a primary way that the worldview of Cain has thrived through countless incarnations into the present.

The storytellers who conceived of the Cain and Abel story show dazzling understanding of how worldviews create sharply contrasting worlds. Just as they understood Abel and Cain to represent the two distinct big-picture stories of their time, so also today, life on our planet is defined as a choice between two macro-stories, Multi Earth and One Earth, “descendants” of Cain and Abel. Whether then or now, when Cain killed his brother, Abel, it expresses the deep and murderous separation that happens every time the Multi Earth story splits anew from One Earth ways, believing itself to be a superior way. But if we keep the brothers locked up in a historical story, then Cain is only the prototype of murderers, the ones we criminalize, not the kind of murder with which all of us Multi Earth practitioners kill life on our planet.

Question: How does freeing Cain and Abel to be myth instead of history make them far more dangerous to Multi Earth living?

Cain, the Murderer? Sure ... along with All Multi Earthers! Ouch!

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.)