Nevertheless, what our primitive poet meant by the Fall and the Redemption was probably something entirely different. The Fall to him was the fall into misfortune, not into sin: the Redemption to him was the redemption from misfortune, not from sin. And his Redeemer would be, therefore—whom? Perhaps it is impossible for us to imagine the nature of such a being.
This is not an interpretation, but an attempted explanation of the story of the Fall.
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Interpretations
How inexhaustible is myth! In the story of the Fall is a meaning for every age and every creed. The interpretation called Original Sin is only one of a thousand, and not the greatest of them. Let us dip our bucket into the well.
The tree of the knowledge of good and evil—that was the tree of morality! And morality was then the original sin? And through it Man lost his innocence? The antithesis of morality and innocence is as old as the world. And if we are to capture innocence again, if the world is to become æsthetically acceptable to us, we must dispense more and more with morality and limit its domain. This, one desperate glance into the depths of the myth tells us. Instinct is upheld in it against isolated reason and exterior law. Detached, "abstract" Reason brought sin into the world, but Instinct, which is fundamentally Love, Creation, Will to Power, is forever innocent, beyond good and evil. It was when Reason, no longer the sagacity of Instinct, no longer the eyes of Love, became its opponent and oppressor, that morality arose and Man fell.
Or to take another guess, granted we read Original Sin in the Fall, must we not read there, also, the way to get rid of it? If by Original Sin Man fell, then by renouncing it let him arise again. But how renounce it? What! Cannot Man renounce a metaphor?
Yet how powerful is metaphor! Man is ruled by metaphor. The gods were nothing but that, some sublime, some terrible, some lovely, all metaphors, Jehovah, Moloch, Apollo, Eros. Life is now stained through and through with metaphor. And there are further transfigurations still possible! Yet we would not destroy the beauty already starring Life's skies, the lovely hues lent by Aphrodite, and Artemis, and Dionysos, or the sublime colours of Jehovah and Thor. But the heavy disfiguring blot tarnishing all, Love, Innocence, Ecstasy, Wrath, that we would rather altogether extirpate and annul. Original Sin we would cut off as a disfigurement and disease of Life.
Or, again, may not the myth be an attempt to glorify Man and to clothe him with a sad splendour. And not Original Sin, but Original Innocence is the true reading of the fable? Its raison d'être is the Garden of Eden, not the Fall? To glorify Humanity at its source it set there a Superman. The fall from innocence—that was the fall from the Superman into Man. And how, then, is Man to be redeemed? By the return of the Superman! Let that be our reading of the myth!
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