Coincidance - Principia Discordia

COINCIDANCE 39
YOUNG WITCH:
Apples have been desired by you
Since first in Paradise they grew;
And I am moved with joy to know
That such within my garden grow.
Freud commented tersely on this exchange: "There is not the slightest
doubt what is meant by the apple-tree and the apples." In fact, a nice
apple-dumpling shop is Cockney slang for a pair of firmly rounded breasts.
Some readers will be thinking of the Garden of Eden at this point, and
they are probably right. It has long puzzled and provoked scholars that both
Eve in that story, and the Goddess Eris in Greek mythology, are associated
with apples and that the apples in both cases made a great deal of trouble. In
the Hebrew story, Eve insists on eating a certain apple (actually, Genesis
only says fruit, but tradition has always identified it with the apple), and
Yahweh, the local volcano-god, is thrown into a fury and curses her and all
mankind, for reasons that are far from perfectly clear. In the Greek story,
Zeus slights Eris by not inviting her to a banquet on Olympus and she gets
her revenge by manufacturing a golden apple inscribed KALLISTI ("To the
prettiest one") and rolling it into the banquet hall. Immediately all the
goddesses begin squabbling, each claiming to be the prettiest one and
entitled to the apple; this quarrel worsens until men as well as gods are
drawn into it and eventually the Trojan War results. Eris became known as
the goddess of chaos and the golden apple is called the apple of discord.
The similarities here—the role of the female, the presence of the apple,
the sequence of supernatural calamaties—suggest that there might be a
common origin to these myths. Such is indeed the case, according to Joseph
Campbell's monumental four-volume study, The Masks of God. The Genesis
text is very late and has altered the original myth to fit the patriarchal
context of the religion of Yahweh. Originally, Eve was not Adam's wife, but
his mother; she was not a human, but a goddess; and the outcome was not
tragic, but triumphant—after the magic fruit was eaten, Adam himself
became a god. (There is still a hint of this in the Genesis version, in which
Yahweh says nervously, "Behold, the man has become as one of us [the
gods], to know good and evil.") What was originally involved was probably a
psychedelic sacrament, like the Eleusinian festival in Athens, in which the
worshipers ate certain (hallucinogenic) foods and became one with the
Mother Goddess Demeter. Eve and Eris, in short, are negative patriarchal
versions of the bona dea (good goddess) of Rome, the earth-mother whose
milk covers the sky at night, the Isis of Egypt, Ishtar of Babylon, the
all-protective figure who has descended directly from the huge-breasted
Veus of Willendorf—that numinous deity who is just an extension on the