Cain and Abel

Cain and Abel are not primary symbols at Knatz.com. they are however important secondary symbols, and, since I just used Genesis with its Adam and Eve in a slightly new way, I'll also update a twist on Cain and Abel. pk has already repeated the point that since Cain was a herdman and Abel a tiller of the ground, the "brothers" symbolize agriculture overwhelming nomadism, but with the symbols backwards: this herd follower may have murdered that farmer; but it was not herding that destroyed farming; quite the opposite: farming destroyed herding: consumed the habitat, replaced free herds with domesticated beasts, tethered or caged.
That point had been made by Isaac Asimov to name only one synthesizer to deal with these issues. What I am about to add about Cain and Abel is original pk this 2005 Saturday, February 19.

God created Adam: in his own image no less. We associate creativity with God, and intelligence, sentience ... goodness. Therefore we may associate those qualities with man. That is, we already associated those qualities with men (with whatever degree of justification) and therefore we projected them onto god with a capital G. God embodies those attributes in the purest possible form ... and we let our imaginations run wild. So far, I can buy into that view with only moderate raspberry blowing.
Then God created Eve: from Adam's rib.

Zero becomes one. (Zero already was "one": therefore 1 = 0 + 1.) Now one becomes two. (God + world includes God, male, and female – God: Adam / Eve.) This is already a very different world from just zero: God alone, no world. This is also a very different world from God alone with just Adam (and Adam just alone) (except for God.) I'm not getting into gender in this post, so we proceed: Eve bore Cain and Abel. One world: one man, one woman, two brothers. Ah, a family. A society! Chaos is come again.
God made the world from chaos: and chaos remade itself: immediately: parading as Order.

Cain slew Abel. Et cetera.

How's that for brotherhood. Fraternity, equality ... what can any of that mean?

A side word: None of these myths make for very good science. We need more of biology than "Adam and Eve." We need more of cosmology than "In the beginning, God." But never mind; we have fairly good biology, good evolution, and fairly good cosmology, fairly good and improving theories of chaos, gender, multi-body problems ... My point is to exploit how rich (how open, how readable the myth is.

God and man is vastly more complex than just God. Indeed, how complex would one find God without man? (How do you like that "one" thinking in nothing?) Male and female is vastly vastly more complex than biology without sex. And once they breed: watch out: Flatland just exploded into M Theory. Especially once the breed interacts, takes, spoils each other's resources, crowds their turf.
Actually, Flatland just exploded into M Theory with Darwin, Freud ... Leary, Wilson, Diamond ... as exponents.