'Not always benign,' Hiro says, remembering a friend of his who died of AIDS-related complications; in the last days, he had herpes lesions from his lips all the way down his throat. 'It's only benign because we have immunities.'
'Yes, sir.'
'So did Lagos think that the Asherah virus actually altered the DNA of brain cells?'
'Yes. This was the backbone of his hypothesis that the virus was able to transmute itself from a biologically transmitted string of DNA into a set of behaviors.'
'What behaviors? What was Asherah worship like? Did they do sacrifices?'
'No. But there is evidence of cult prostitutes, both male and female.'
'Does that mean what I think it does? Religious figures who would hang around the temple and fuck people?'
'More or less.'
'Bingo. Great way to spread a virus. Now, I want to jump back to an earlier fork in the conversation.'
'As you wish. I can handle nested forkings to a virtually infinite depth.'
'You made a connection between Asherah and Eve.'
'Eve - whose Biblical name is Hawwa - is clearly the Hebrew interpretation of an older myth. Hawwa is an ophidian mother goddess.'
'Ophidian?'
'Associated with serpents. Asherah is also an ophidian mother goddess. And both are associated with trees as well.'
'Eve, as I recall, is considered responsible for getting Adam to eat the forbidden fruit, from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Which is to say, it's not just fruit - it's data.'
'If you say so, sir.'
'I wonder if viruses have always been with us, or not. There's sort of an implicit assumption that they have been around forever. But maybe that's not true. Maybe there was a period of history when they were nonexistent or at least unusual. And at a certain point, when the metavirus showed up, the number of different viruses exploded, and people started getting sick a whole lot. That would explain the fact that all cultures seem to have a myth about Paradise, and the Fall from Paradise.'
'Perhaps.'
'You told me that the Essenes thought that tapeworms were demons. If they'd known what a virus was, they probably would have thought the same thing. And Lagos told me the other night that, according to the Sumerians, there was no concept of good and evil per se.'
'Correct. According to Kramer and Maier, there are good demons and bad demons. 'Good ones bring physical and emotional health. Evil ones bring disorientation and a variety of physical and emotional ills…. But these demons can hardly be distinguished from the diseases they personify … and many of the diseases sound, to modern ears, as though they must be psychosomatic.''
'That's what the doctors said about Da5id, that his disease must be psychosomatic.'
'I don't know anything about Da5id, except for some rather banal statistics.'
'It's as though 'good' and 'evil' were invented by the writer of the Adam and Eve legend to explain why people get sick - why they have physical and mental viruses. So when Eve - or Asherah - got Adam to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, she was introducing the concept of good and evil into the world - introducing the metavirus, which creates viruses.'
'Could be.'
'So my next question is: Who wrote the Adam and Eve legend?'
'This is a source of much scholarly argument.'
'What did Lagos think? More to the point, what did Juanita think?'
'Nicolas Wyatt's radical interpretation of the Adam and Eve story supposes that it was, in fact, written as a political allegory by the deuteronomists.'
'I thought they wrote the later books, not Genesis.'
'True. But they were involved in compiling and editing the earlier books as well. For many years, it was assumed that Genesis was written sometime around 900 B.C. or even earlier - long before the advent of the deuteronomists. But more recent analysis of the vocabulary and content suggests that a great deal of editorial work - possibly even authorial work
- took place around the time of the Exile, when the deuteronomists held sway.'
'So they may have rewritten an earlier Adam and Eve myth.'
'They appear to have had ample opportunity. According to the interpretation of Hvidberg and, later, Wyatt, Adam in his garden is a parable for the king in his sanctuary, specifically King Hosea, who ruled the northern kingdom until it was conquered by Sargon II in 722 B.C.'
'That's the conquest you mentioned earlier - the one that drove the deuteronomists southward toward Jerusalem.'
'Exactly. Now 'Eden,' which can be understood simply as the Hebrew word for 'delight,' stands for the happy state in which the king existed prior to the conquest. The expulsion from Eden to the bitter lands to the east is a parable for the massive deportation of Israelites to Assyria following Sargon II's victory. According to this interpretation, the king was enticed away from the path, of righteousness by the cult of El, with its associated worship of Asherah - who is commonly associated with serpents, and whose symbol is a tree.'
'And his association with Asherah somehow caused him to be conquered - so when the deuteronomists reached Jerusalem, they recast the Adam and Eve story as a warning to the leaders of the southern kingdom.'
'Yes.'
'And perhaps, because no one was listening to them, perhaps they invented the concept of good and evil in the process, as a hook.'
'Hook?'
'Industry term. Then what happened? Did Sargon II try to conquer the southern kingdom also?'
'His successor, Sennacherib, did. King Hezekiah, who ruled the southern kingdom, prepared for the attack feverishly, making great improvements in the fortifications of Jerusalem, improving its supply of drinking water. He was also responsible for a far-reaching series of religious reforms, which he undertook under the direction of the deuteronomists.'
'How did it work out?'
'The forces of Sennacherib surrounded Jerusalem. 'And that night the angel of the LORD went forth, and slew a hundred and eighty-five thousand in the camp of the Assyrians; and when men arose early in the morning, behold, these were all dead bodies. Then Sennacherib king of Assyria departed…' 2 Kings 19:35-36.'
'I'll bet he did. So let me get this straight: the deuteronomists, through Hezekiah, impose a policy of informational hygiene on Jerusalem and do some civil-engineering work - you said they worked on the water supply?'
''They stopped all the springs and the brook that flowed through the land, saying, ''Why should the kings of Assyria come and find much water?'' 2 Chronicles 32:4. Then the Hebrews carved a tunnel seventeen hundred feet through solid rock to carry that water inside city walls.'
'And then as soon as Sennacherib's soldiers came on the scene, they all dropped dead of what can only be understood as an extremely virulent disease, to which the people of Jerusalem were apparently immune. Hmm, interesting - I wonder what got into their water?'
31
Y.T. doesn't get down to Long Beach very much, but when she does, she will do just about anything to avoid the Sacrifice Zone. It's an abandoned shipyard the size of a small town. It sticks out into San Pedro Bay, where the older, nastier Burbclaves of the Basin - unplanned Burbclaves of tiny asbestos-shingled houses patrolled by beetle-browed Kampuchean men with pump shotguns - fade off into the foam-kissed beaches. Most of it's on
