Pygmy Eve Peeps God

A people in the Congo explain why God no longer speaks to them

Efe pygmy camp in the Ituri Forest, Democratic Republic of the Congo

Anthropologist Paul Schebesta’s 1936 work, Revisiting My Pygmy Hosts, offers a window into the creation myths and belief systems of the Efe pygmies of the Congo. Their explanation of the original sin bears striking similarities to Genesis and offers intriguing insights when viewed through Julian Jaynes’s theory of the bicameral mind.

In the pygmies’ camp in Apare, I was just chatting with a circle of my little friends, when a group of panting women came into the camp, their bent shoulders laden with bundles of fire-wood, which were almost heavy enough to kill them. Involuntarily, I allowed a sarcastic remark to pass my lips about the lords of creation who sat there lazily, smoking and yawning, while their wives were doing such heavy work. “It is their own fault,” said one of them rousing himself. “They have sinned.” And the following legend was related by one of the loafers in answer to my question.

“In the beginning there was only Masupa. He was quite alone, and had neither wife nor brother. Masupa created three children, two sons and one daughter. One of the sons was the ancestor of the pygmies, the other the ancestor of the negroes. God communicated with His people, spoke with them as with His own children, but never showed Himself to them. But He gave them one great commandment whose transgression would bring evil upon them—they must never seek Him out.

“Masupa lived in a large hut in which could be heard the sound of hammering and forging. He was good to his children; he failed them in nothing. They lived happily and satisfied and did not need to eat their bread through the sweat of their brows, for everything came to them and it was not necessary for them to exert themselves in the least. In a word, the people lived in an Utopia.

“The daughter’s task was to gather firewood and water and place them in front of the door of Masupa’s abode. One evening when she was placing the water-pot in front of the door, she succumbed to her curiosity which was always burning within her. Secretly she tried to seek out her father. Nobody would know, she thought. She hid herself behind a post so that she would at least see the arm of her father when he took in the water-pot. And she did.

“God stretched forth His arm, which was well covered with brass rings, outside His abode to take in the pot. She had seen it—the richly adorned arm of God. How her heart rejoiced? But alas! Her sin was immediately followed by punishment.

“The crime of the daughter was not hidden from God, who in His rage called His children and blamed them for their disobedience. He announced to them the fearful punishment they must bear, that henceforth they must live without Him and that he would withdraw Himself from them.

“All the weeping and wailing was of no avail. God gave them weapons and tools, taught them the use of the forge and many other things which would be necessary for them as they went through life alone. But He cursed their sister. Henceforward she was to be the wife of her brothers. In pain she would bring forth children and be kept to all kinds of hard toil. That is the curse which rests upon the women until this day,” emphasised the narrator, and then he continued:

“God left His children secretly, and disappeared downstream along the banks of the river. Since then no one has seen Him. But with God went also happiness and peace, and everything which he formerly offered them freely went from the people: water, fish, game and all kinds of fruit. They must work hard in order to eat their daily bread away from God. Still worse, as punishment for their sins, death was brought about with the first child born of woman.

“As the woman was filled with anxious forebodings, she herself named the child ‘Kukua kendi,’ meaning, ‘Death is coming.’ The child died two days after its birth. Since then no one escapes the avenger ‘Death.’ Thus death came into the world.”

Just as in Genesis, the initial harmony between the divine and humans is disrupted by female curiosity and desire. The prohibition against seeking God directly mirrors the forbidden fruit in Genesis, symbolizing the pursuit of forbidden knowledge. However, the Efe narrative emphasizes that the sin is seeking out God directly, which closely aligns with Julian Jaynes’s concept of understanding the nature of one’s inner voice—bicameral breakdown. This quest for knowledge or direct experience leads to the loss of divine guidance and the onset of human suffering.

I like that Jaynes explains this by natural causes rather than the caprice of the Almighty. If this were a Western, God would have told Eve, “This head ain’t big enough for the two of us,” because, well, they are one and the same. The woman behind the curtain was her. God had to leave when directly perceived; the gig was up. Once humans became reflective agents, they bore the weight of acting and planning. As duality became the norm, they could become lost in spirals within their own minds, alienated from the present moment and the material world. This is the Fall that provides the psychological foundation of the current age.

Julian Jaynes theorized that humans first identified with their inner voice around 3,200 years ago in the Near East. Before this shift, people operated under a “bicameral mind,” where cognitive functions were divided between a part of the brain that “speaks” and another that listens and obeys. Individuals perceived their thoughts as auditory hallucinations—commands from the gods. In the days of yore, one would learn about deities like Zeus, Demeter, or Yahweh as a child and then hear their voices, issuing words of wisdom and wrath. Jaynes interpreted Eve’s eating of the Fruit of Knowledge, which could “make one as the Gods,” as her realization that she was a moral agent—the one making decisions about her actions. He termed this identification with the inner voice the “breakdown” of the bicameral mind. Since the Bronze Age, humans have been enculturated to develop self-reflective consciousness from a young age.

I believe Jaynes’s theory is roughly correct, aside from the timeline. What surprises me is that he never looked to creation myths beyond the Mediterranean to test his model. If the entire world was bicameral 3,300 years ago, as remembered by the Jews, shouldn’t other founding myths also reflect memories of bicameral breakdown? Jaynes proposes the Jews wrote Genesis soon after becoming conscious. How would he explain the Pygmy myth being a better fit than Genesis? And further, why is it so consistently women who perceive the nature of their mind? Jaynes never comments!

Returning to Shebesta, he continues from the quote above:

The eighty-year-old Sabu, in the Maseda camp, told another legend.

“With the help of the Moon, who is always at his side, God created the first man, Baatsi, and placed him upon the earth. He made his body by kneading, covered him with a skin and poured blood into his lifeless body. Then the first man breathed and lived, and God whispered softly in his ear:

“‘You will beget children who will live in the forest. But inform your children of my command so that they may pass it on to their children. From all the trees of the forest you may eat, except the Tahu tree.’

“Baatsi begat many children, gave them God’s commandment and then returned to God in the heavens. At first the people lived happily and kept God’s commandment until one day, a woman pregnant with child, and filled with an irresistible desire to eat, craved for the luscious fruit of the Tahu. She worried her husband to bring her this fruit, but he could not make up his mind.

“But the woman craved for it so passionately that she would not be satisfied until her husband crept into the forest secretly, plucked the fruit of the Tahu, peeled it quickly and hid the peel carefully in the foliage, so that his act should not be discovered. But all the precaution was in vain. The Moon had already seen him and had told what she had seen to God:

“‘The people which thou hast created have disobeyed thy command, and have eaten of the fruit of the Tahu tree.’ God was so angry at the disobedience of His people, that He sent death among them as a punishment.”

I could not believe my ears. That was the Creation story of the Bible. The aged Sabu then said:

“I heard that from my father.” At that time any Biblical influence on the pygmies was out of the question, and even to-day they have no knowledge of, nor even any idea of Christianity or missions.

This creation myth among the Efe has been recorded by explorers, anthropologists, and missionaries for decades, all agreeing that it was not the result of contact with Christians, Muslims, or Jews. On my reading list is Pygmy Kitabu, a 1973 book by Jean-Pierre Hallet, an anthropologist who argues much of Egyptian religion is derived from the pygmies¹. Egyptian thought, in turn, formed the basis of Jewish religion, hence the story also appearing in Genesis.

The direction seems backward. These creation myths deal with the transition to Agriculture, which started in the Near East. Insights about inner life could have been discovered at the Holocene transition in the Near East and then spread from there. But who can blame an anthropologist for centering the people they study? We will let Hallet have a bit of ethnocentrism—as a treat—for living in the jungle, learning an unwritten language, and wrangling with war-torn governments (he lost his hand in one misadventure).

Many long-range comparative mythologists propose an even more unlikely model, assuming there has been no significant cultural exchange between continents other than the Out of Africa migration. They interpret similarities in founding myths about snakes and creation to go back 100,000 years or more. What a world we would live in if both the Jews and Efe had preserved a story with such fidelity for that long. Surely, we could then use mythologies to understand the invention of religion in the last 40,000 years, right?

As for Jaynes, he interpreted Genesis and Greek epics as cultural memories of bicameral breakdown. But he never took the very obvious step of trying to build phylogenies of those stories. What other cultures share them? How far back do they go? I independently had the idea that Genesis could be a memory of identifying with our inner voice or conscience. My first reaction was to try to falsify the model. If it were true, the world’s creation stories should form a phylogeny, as should the word for “I.” Self-awareness would have been taught, and thus there would have been rituals to do so. These must have spread worldwide. And, because women would likely have discovered introspection, these rituals would likely have been discovered by women. Those are a lot of specific predictions, which have fared surprisingly well upon investigation. Additionally, each one indicates the process began far before the Bronze Age, as one would expect for a gene-culture interaction that forged us into sapient beasts.

Examining the Efe creation myths alongside Genesis through the lens of the bicameral mind reveals a shared narrative about the origins of consciousness. For more in this series, see:

Genesis in Togo

Lucifer in Myanmar

1. I’ll hopefully get around to writing a review