The Magic of Reality Read Online Free Page B

(or sometimes women), often of giant size and always with supernatural powers.
    The god placed Adam in a beautiful garden called Eden, filled with trees whose fruit Adam was encouraged to eat – with one exception. This forbidden tree was the ‘tree of knowledge of good and evil’, and the god left Adam in no doubt that he must never eat its fruit.
    The god then realized that Adam might be lonely all by himself, and wanted to do something about it. At this point – as with the story of Dromerdeener and Moinee – there are two versions of the myth, both found in the biblical book of Genesis. In the more colourful version, the god made all the animals as Adam’s helpers, then decided that there was still something missing: a woman! So he gave Adam a general anaesthetic, cut him open, removed one rib and stitched him up again. Then he grew a woman from the rib, rather as you grow a flower from a cutting. He named her Eve and presented her to Adam as his wife.
    Unfortunately, there was a wicked snake in the garden, who approached Eve and persuaded her to give Adam the forbidden fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Adam and Eve ate the fruit and promptly acquired the knowledge that they were naked. This embarrassed them, and they made themselves aprons out of fig leaves. When the god noticed this he was furious with them for eating the fruit and acquiring knowledge – losing their innocence, I suppose. He threw them out of the garden, and condemned them and all their descendants to a life of hardship and pain. To this day, the story of Adam’s and Eve’s terrible disobedience is still taken seriously by many people under the name of ‘original sin’. Some people even believe we have all inherited this ‘original sin’ from Adam (although many of them admit that Adam never actually existed!), and share in his guilt.
    The Norse peoples of Scandinavia, famous as Viking seafarers, had lots of gods, as the Greeks and Romans did. The name of their chief god was Odin, sometimes called Wotan or Woden, from which we get our ‘Wednesday’. (‘Thursday’ comes from another Norse god, Thor, the god of thunder, which he made with his mighty hammer.)
    One day Odin was walking along the seashore with his brothers, who were also gods, and they came upon two tree trunks.
    One of these tree trunks they turned into the first man, whom they called ‘Ask’, and the other they turned into the first woman, naming her ‘Embla’. Having created the bodies of the first man and first woman, the brother gods then gave them the breath of life, followed by consciousness, faces and the gift of speech.
    Why tree trunks, I wonder? Why not icicles or sand dunes? Isn’t it fascinating to wonder who made such stories up, and why? Presumably the original inventors of all these myths knew they were fiction at the moment when they made them up. Or do you think many different people came up with different parts of the stories, at different times and in different places, and other people later put them together, perhaps changing some of them, without realizing that the various bits were originally just made up?
    Stories are fun, and we all love repeating them. But when we hear a colourful story, whether it is an ancient myth or a modern ‘urban legend’ whizzing around the internet, it is also worth stopping to ask whether it – or any part of it – is true.
    So let’s ask ourselves that question – Who was the first person? – and take a look at the true, scientific answer.
    Who was the first person
really
?
    This may surprise you, but there never was a first person – because every person had to have parents, and those parents had to be people too! Same with rabbits. There never was a first rabbit, never was a first crocodile, never a first dragonfly. Every creature ever born belonged to the same species as its parents (with perhaps a very small number of exceptions, which I shall ignore here). So that must mean that every