How do we know the serpent wasn’t our God and wise sage, and we were previously pets to the devil, who kept us naked in a garden?

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Allegory is just one way of talking about religion, one that I never really got fluent in. Modern-day allegory, things like books and short stories, are way easier to relate to, analyze, and derive meaning from.

Bless the Christians for being willing to put up with the Bible.

I imagine an experienced theologist could give you a much more interesting answer to this question.

When I was younger, I got into the teachings of a few Indian spiritual gurus, Osho and UG Krishnamurti. Osho’s writings were filled with allegory, trying to pierce through all that didn’t seem like a worthwhile endeavor, being that the whole way I got into Osho was through The Rajneesh Bible, some random book I picked up somehow, somewhere, I can never remember where.

In this book, Rajneesh described his early days, how he became a spiritual teacher, his struggles to become well-known and accepted, his personal philosophy in words rather than riddles. It made the allegorical content of his published work way way easier to understand once I understood the playful mind behind it all.

The thing about allegory is that it’s designed to hide meaning, not expose it. It plays a trick on you to get you so that you can take your mind outside of the world of logic and reason, and into a spiritual mindset where nothing is what it seems and anything can be true.

We attach narratives to allegory so as to better understand it. Allegory contains within it a certain ineffable truth, the narrative is a little jewel lens you put on top of it that gives the truth definition. The truth of the allegory is eternal, absolute, and rich, narratives are only little tools to help you get at parts of that rich truth. It is not temporal, logical, and concrete, as the narrative you’ve crafted of the Garden of Eden suggests.

There was no Garden, no serpent, and no Adam or Eve, not in the sense that can be gotten at by “how do we know.” The more religion holds on to dogma, the less spiritual we all get.