Continuing the silly season…

The Garden of Eden has moved … again!  Last week it was in China, Somaliland, Sri Lanka or the Seychelles but I’ll let you into a secret  it was actually at the North Pole.

Sorry, that’s wrong  too because as you can see Eden  was being advertised in Florida. However its claim to be the original would be disputed because  there were other “genuine” sites for the garden  in  Ohio, Missouri, Kentucky, California and Kansas amongst others.

 

I’m sure you think I’m joking again  but honestly I’m not. As I said last week plenty of people have “proved”  that Eden was elsewhere, even in parts of the world that were unknown  to the authors of the Book of Genesis.

Read on for more about the Garden[s] of Eden in the Americas and the “interesting” people who found them…

It all started with Christopher Columbus who thought he’d found Eden upstream on the Orinoco river although it would take another blog post to explain why. [See his long letter to Ferdinand and Isabella his patrons back in Spain  for starters] Some later Spanish and Portuguese colonial historians agreed with  him including Pedro de Rates Hannequim. He believed that Adam had been born in Eden which was in Brazil and  the Atlantic  opened, like the Red Sea for Moses, so he could walk dry-shod to all the way to Jerusalem. For this and even more heretical talk Hannequim  was condemned by the Inquisition and burned in 1744.  [If you can read 18thc Portuguese you can find the account of his trial here]

But the story of Eden in the Americas really gets going in the 19thc when European settlers began to spread out across the United States  and the western hemisphere became home to a veritable hoard of theorists, usually  of increasing crankiness. Often a lot depended on where the author of the theory lived  and what they were doing when they were searching for the garden.

As  Brook Wilensky-Lanford says in Paradise Lust: “No sooner did one authoritative account come along than another popped up to supplant it.”  I think she’s too polite to simply say some of them were probably just delusional.

 

For example, the founder of the Church of Latter Day Saints, the Prophet Joseph Smith, claimed that the ancient Garden of Eden was located at Independence in Jackson County, Missouri.   but that may  have been  because his then small group of followers had just migrated there to escape persecution.

He dedicated over 63 acres to build a temple there but arguments about that led to the Mormon War in  1838, and the flight of the group over the state border into Illinois, and then eventually to Utah. 

As Smith also said: “although [Missouri], according to the prophets, is to become like Eden or the garden of the Lord, yet, at present it is as it were but a wilderness and desert.”

Not far away is Adam-ondi-Ahman where Adam and Eve lived after being expelled.  You can read how Smith had his revelations about this and its significance on the Joseph Smith Foundation website, although the story is these days played down as you can see from this account of a visit to Independence by a reporter who tried, and failed to find the Garden even after asking the Mormons.

 

For more on this see Brook Wilensky-Lanford’s article I’ve Been to the Mormon Garden of Eden, and It’s Not What You Think and for the Mormon perspective  see Was The Garden of Eden in Missouri? by Sandra Tanner. 

None of Smith’s revelations would have much effect on George Washington Brown the founding editor of the Kansas Herald of Freedom.  In 1855 he wrote a leading article modestly suggesting it was “not impossible that the Valley of the Kansas was indeed the Eden…we purpose removing every doubt from the mind of the reader.” What followed was an interesting story of how the geography described in Genesis fitted the local topography, how Cain had migrated eastwards to Missouri [well at least he had that much in common with the Mormons]  and how a new Flood was imminent.  Obviously some had doubts remaining because he republished the article word for word in July 1857.

The subject cropped again in 1859 when Brown noticed that the Chicago Times had picked up on his story and in a tone “half serious and half ludicrous” also agreed “that the Western portion of Kansas was the identical spot where our first parents were created.”  They had delved further into Biblical history declaring that recent exploration of Mayan ruins in Nicaragua found “inscriptions in characters identical with those found upon the stones in the Tower of Babel” obviously because the builders “spoke the language of the antediluvians transmitted to them through the family of Noah.”

Brown didn’t get into that controversy but explained  that Eden is “put down on the maps by the name of South Park and is in the westernmost and great mountain valley of Kansas…this natural park is a large circular valley thirty miles across. Here we find interlocked the headstreams offer of the giant rivers of the continent – Arkansas, Platte, Rio Grande and Colorado…This is the only valley in the world which, with its four rivers, and in other respects answers to the sacred geography of the Garden of Eden.”

There seems little evidence – and no images at all – of any serious acceptance of Brown’s theory and I can’t find anything useful on a map, so unsurprisingly I still have a few doubts myself!

Next up of our Eden theorists is the distinguished theologian and President of Boston University, the Revd Professor William Fairfield Warren. He took a completely different approach when he published Paradise found : the cradle of the human race at the North pole ; a study of the prehistoric world.  Claiming  in the opening sentence that  “this book is not the work of a dreamer” he analysed  every story he could find about the origins of man before concluding that the Garden of Eden  was at the North Pole, as indeed was also Atlantis, Mount Meru, King Arthur’s Avalon and Hyperborea. Warren believed all these mystical and mythical lands were folk memories of a former civilisation which existed at the Pole  when the climate was much warmer.  I’ll leave you to check out his arguments – all 500 pages of them

 

Warren’s ideas sparked yet more interest but were rebutted because, according to an advocate of another location, he “had advanced no arguments that would not apply with almost equal forces to the South Pole.”  Instead Eden was in California – to be precise in the Santa Clara Valley. You’d think this revelation would have hit the headlines world-wide, or at least USA-wide but sadly it was confined to articles by an anonymous author on an inside page in the  Evening News published in San Jose on 20th and 21st  October 1890. The writer began by summing up “scholarship” on the subject …

 

 

…before concluding that they were all wrong and that instead it was California that matched the Biblical description of Paradise. The writers of Genesis  must have known about its abundance supply of  gold, its  lush vegetation,  tall trees such as Sequoia, its equable climate  and of course the fact that it was east beyond any land.

Definitely a fictional account of Eden, loosely based on Warren’s North Pole theory, was published  by pioneer science fiction writer Willis Emerson in 1908. The Smoky God or a Voyage to the Inner World tells the story of 95 year old Olaf Jansen who had an extraordinary tale to tell of a voyage to the Arctic as a young man where he discovered the Garden of Eden.

His boat was sucked into a whirlpool and went deep into the ocean but rather than drowning Jansen emerged in an inner earth which housed a much higher level civilisation than lived on the surface and contained  the Garden of Eden. So  it wasn’t at the North Pole as Warren thought  but under it!

Emerson said the story showed  that “Mr. Warren almost stubbed his toe against the real truth, but missed it seemingly by only a hair’s breadth, if the old Norseman’s revelation be true.”

Warren’s  idea was then taken up later by Dr. George C. Allen who apparently told the Yorkshire Evening News in February 1921 [not yet digitised by the British Newspaper Archive unfortunately] that “Scientific research convinces him, that Adam and Eve dwelt on the banks of what is now the Ohio River…. 6,000 years ago. In the huge ice-flows, growths that come from tropical climes have been found” and “it has been proved that the point called the North Pole moves entirely around the world every 25,000 years” so “careful mathematical computations bring the original paradise where Ohio now is!”

Once again the first go-to place for more information is an article by Brook Wilensky-Lanford,  The Last Great ExplorerWilliam F. Warren and the Search for Eden.  It’s on Public Domain Review a wonderful source of informative if often quirky subjects, and definitely worth investigating further if you don’t know it. 

Another clergyman, Rev. Edmund Landon West,  would have disagreed with all of these claims.  A pastor in a  small German Baptist church in Ohio  he wrote in 1908 “There is now, yet to be seen on the Earths Surface, and near Lovetts Post Office, in Adams County, Ohio, the figured lesson of a large Serpent, which gives wonderfully clear and faithful testimony to the facts given by Moses.” 

This is actually an ancient Native American earth construction, thought to be have been made around 1100,  created in the shape of a snake. Known as the Serpent Mound its massive body stretches for 1348 ft and West believed it represented the Biblical serpent of Genesis and had been placed here, perhaps by God Himself, to mark the location of the Garden of Eden and to be  “an everlasting object lesson of man’s disobedience, Satan’s perfidy and the results of sin and death.” He even identified four local streams that flowed nearby as the four rivers.  The site is now a public park and one of its supporters came up with a great [but so far unused] tourist slogan : “Ohio: The Place Where Sin Was Born.”

West’s story, although generally dismissed at the time still echoes there, and its definitely worth reading more about it in  Brook Wilensky-Lanford article  “Adam and Eve at home in Ohio”, or taking a look at the website of the Trust who look after it.

Instead how about Eden being in Florida? The 1935  Republican candidate for Governor  Elvy Edison Callaway was also the author in 1966 of  In the Beginning, which “corroborated by nature, science, and other unimpeachable evidence,  conclusively proves that the Garden of Eden was located east of the Apalachicola River, between Bristol and Chattahoochee, in Liberty and Gadsden counties, Florida.”

He also spelled out his reasoning in a 1972 TV interview, [which you  can watch here]. in which he asserted, for example,  that 27 of the 28 trees mentioned in  the Bible were found in his own Garden of Eden including the endangered  Torreya taxifolia which he thought was the gopherwood out of which Noah constructed the Ark.

He argued the reason that people think Eden is in the Middle east is because after Noah  had floated half way round the world from Florida to Mount Ararat he remembered the names of the four rivers from before the Flood and  used them to name rivers in his new home.

Callaway  even opened the garden  to the public where for $1 plus 10 cents tax visitors could walk the trails overlooking the Apalachicola River and see signs marking the Birthplace of Adam; the Site of Adam and Eve’s First Home; Where God Discovered Adam Was Lonely and Where Noah Made the Ark of Gopher Wood.

He then went one stage further and in 1967 got permission to build  a replica of Noah’s Ark but in the end couldn’t raise enough money. Callaway died  in 1981 and his Eden closed but those wanting to visit it and see the endangered Torreya trees can still do so thanks to the Nature Conservancy’s Apalachicola Bluffs and Ravines Preserve.

Also open to the public is the Creation Museum in Kentucky founded by Bible literalists where you can take a walk through the garden and if you can’t get there in person you can instead take a 360 degree virtual tour. As Brook Wilensky-Lanford points out in Paradise Lust, in her chapter “Evolving Creation” this is very scary for any rational person.

So after this round-up of eccentrics I’d suggest, for once you don’t google to try and find the answer, but instead read what another pioneering feminist [and eccentric] Victoria Woodhull Martin [who I’ve written about before] said in her 1890 book The Garden of Eden: or the Paradise Lost and Found   “Why dwell longer upon this mass, geographically considered, of physical impossibilities and absurdities. Any school boy of twelve years of age who should read the description of this garden and not discover that it has no geographical significance whatever, ought to be reprimanded for his stupidity.”

For more information the best places to start are the well-researched  and very readable Paradise Lust or any of the many articles on the web written by Brook Wilensky-Lanford   and if you want something really detailed and academic but still accessible without a huge amount of prior knowledge then try Jean Delumeau’s History of Paradise: The Garden of Eden in Myth and Tradition. [sadly not available on-line but I picked a copy for just a couple of £ online]