ABSTRACT
The advantages of transition from private to racial myth are analogous to the transition from private to public communication. The Oedipus myth will be differently read by different people, but the measure of agreement makes it a channel of public communication as Freud’s use of it has shown. This chapter uses the myths of the garden of Eden and the Tower of Babel to reinforce the expression, already implied by the Sphinx in the Oedipus myth, of attitudes of a god inimical to the gaining of knowledge by human beings whose search is felt to imperil his supremacy. In the garden of Eden, possessed by the Father, eating of the Tree of Knowledge of good and evil is forbidden. The serpent, or Satan disguised, incites the woman to defy the ordinance of the Almighty.
