Disposable Lit Reviews

The Adamic Publishing Co., 1902
503 pp.
No ISBN

Out of Print
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Full Title:
The Tempter of Eve
or
The Criminality of Man’s Social, Political, and Religious Equality with the Negro, and the Amalgamation to which these Crimes Inevitably Lead.

I hope that the fact that I treat this book lightly isn’t interpreted as meaning that I am insensitive to the gross injustices perpetrated under the sway of racist ideas throughout human history. The penchant for “othering” the divergent brands of humanity is one of our ugliest inheritances, and our modern sensitivity toward that legacy is one of the few instances in which the myth “history = progress” is proved at least partly true.

Nevertheless, I can’t help but poke fun at the steadfast lunacies of the past, even if the ideas involved led to acts which were themselves no laughing matter. I refuse to take such ideas seriously, and will heckle and jeer them whenever possible, using humor to show derision while reason is demonstrating error.

You may yourself not laugh at a book which takes it upon itself to prove that not only is the Negro an ape, but that a Negro was the serpent of the garden of Eden. Me, though, I’m going to laugh myself silly.

Author Charles Carroll, himself a gentleman of the South on the wane, helpfully explains to us in the introduction how the conviction which guided all of his following research and framed his interpretation of both scripture and science came about: When he was a child, his father bought a black boy slave, and Carroll thought he looked like a monkey.

Well! If you can’t trust the convictions you reach when you’re ten years old to guide the rest of your life, what can you trust?

One would hope, though, that most other books dedicated to a proposition such as this (which must certainly have been at least marginally heterodox — while there were scores of books claiming to give a scientific basis to Eurocentric racism, not many had the temerity to rewrite the Fall of Adam) might at least not be so damnably boring. Carroll is meticulous in building his case, and thus blathers on for page after page, expanding on the story of the creation in Genesis to such a degree that the first two verses of Genesis are dealt with in twenty-four pages.

By the way, if you’re wondering why modern white supremacist groups haven’t latched onto this book and republished it, you might be interested in some of the propositions that Carroll “proves” from scripture before he even gets to his central thesis:

- That the “firmament” of Genesis is a solid barrier at the upper reaches of our atmosphere. It is solid, because otherwise the atmosphere would go spinning off into space; it is also intensely and inherently cold, because otherwise when one climbed a mountain, one would get closer to the sun and therefore become warmer.

- That both bats and ancient pterodactyls are the same “flesh” as birds, and to claim otherwise — i.e., that bats are mammals and pterodactyls were reptiles — is to be hoodwinked by the vast atheistic conspiracy. Why? Because Genesis lists the fowls of the air as being the only flying animals and fish as the only aquatic ones, and because Paul said that “there is one kind of flesh of men, another flesh of beasts, another of fishes, and another of birds.” Therefore anything that flies is a bird, anything that swims is a fish, and anyone that disagrees is an atheist.

Of course, I suppose that white supremacists could simply republish excerpts that leave out the most seriously outmoded deductions on Carroll’s part, but even his more proximate proofs of his thesis rely on a specific brand of Biblical literalism and deduction that even Christian Identity types might be uneasy about adopting.

Let’s try to follow his reasoning:

Point #1: Genesis lists “cattle” and “beasts of the field” as the major types of animal. The normative assumption has been that “cattle” refered to herbivores and “beasts of the field” to carnivores, but if one looks through the entire Old Testament and cross-references every mention of “beasts of the field,” one finds that this term is used in descriptions of both herbivorous and carnivorous behavior. Moreover, the “beasts of the field” are often implied to be a domesticated, though there are very few honestly omnivorous domesticated animals. Plus, the root word of the Hebrew term translated as “cattle” carries with it an implication of quadrupedalism; therefore, the main distinction between it and the “beast of the field” is that the latter is bipedal. What’s bipedal and omnivorous, but still qualifies as a “beast” in Carroll’s classification of life forms (thus ruling out birds)? Why, apes, of course.

Point #2: Before the fall, Adam was charged with tending and dressing the Garden of Eden. Given that the Garden contained every kind of vegetable food created for man, along with every kind of ornamental or decorative plant, it was a huge place, and it should not be expected that Adam was meant to do all of the work himself, but rather to administer and manage the work to be done. This distinction is further drawn when the Lord casts him out and declares that from this time forward, Adam would eat his bread by the sweat of his brow, implying that up until that point, manual labor had not been his lot. Therefore, Adam had had a higher form of animal which could act as his servant in tending the Garden, which ideally would have been an animal which could use tools, understand verbal instructions, and report back verbally on work that had been done.

Carroll even takes the discovery of prehistoric stone tools — the kind that normally are considered evidence for the evolution of man — as proof of his theories. Given that these tools predate the chronology of the garden of Eden, they were obviously made by a tool-using animal who had been created earlier.

Man was created to subdue the earth and have dominion over the animals; domestic plants were God’s special gift to man; metallic implements are essential to the cultivation upon which they depend for existence. Hence, man never developed through an Age of Stone. Thus, the chipped flints of the earlier Stone Age, which furnish the most amazing proof of the truth of the Bible, have been seized upon and used as the most positive evidence of its falsity. (p. 373, all emphasis in original)

All of which brings us to the basis for the title. The idea that Eve was tempted by a literal serpent? Absurd, since there are no speaking serpents. Instead, relying on similarities between the Hebrew word for “serpent” (nachash) and the Arabic root khanasa, which has connotations of slinking and seduction, the devil, and (wait for it) apes. When you remember that Genesis describes the serpent as “more subtle than any beast of the field,” you can see how it all comes together in Carroll’s head: The tempter of Eve was a black, more specifically a negress maidservant to Eve, and thus Eve’s first sin wasn’t in eating the fruit but in listening to her domesticated animal in the first place.

In fact, the entire history of God’s interaction with the characters of the Old Testament revolves around whites, blacks, and the sin of amalgamation. Why didn’t God accept Cain’s sacrifice? Because Cain wasn’t patient enough to wait for Adam and Eve to have a sister for him to marry, and instead consorted with one of his negro chattels. What was the sin for which God wiped out the world in the flood? “All flesh” had become “corrupt,” or in other words, amalgamation was the practice of the day, whereas Noah himself was “a just man and perfect in his generations,” i.e., he was a pureblooded Adamic white.

Alas, from Carroll’s perspective, Adam’s children just won’t stop amalgamating, which is what gives us all of the races one sees in the world; each of them is the result of a certain proportion of Adamic and Negro blood in the population. And what makes the divide between whites and everyone else so wide is that mixed parentage can’t engender a human soul. After all, since God breathed into Adam and made him a living soul after all other creation was finished, Adam was the unique recipient of a soul among God’s creations (and Eve, being created out of Adam, shared in that). In Carroll’s version of spiritual biology, each parent can contribute half of the “soul germ,” which when united make the new soul of their offspring — but if a souled white procreates with a non-souled animal like a black, the half-soul as transmitted by the white finds no corresponding other half, and thus the offspring is soulless. No matter the proportion of white parentage to black, in Carroll’s view, anyone with the least amount of black blood in them simply cannot have a soul.

Because Carroll assigns the black a place in creation below that which most racists afford — not even a “lesser” race of man, but an animal pure and simple — and his declaration that amalgamation is the most heinous sin which a white can commit against God, his assessment of the utility of all mixed-bloods is correspondingly uncompromising:

…It follows that neither the mulatto nore his ultimate offspring can ever acquire the right to live; that they have no rights, social political, or religious; this is shown by God’s destruction of the antediluvians, and his command to Israel to destroy the Canaanites without regard to age or sex, and “leave nothing alive that breatheth,” and take their possessions. The immediate offspring of man and the negro is merely the result of man’s violation of Divine law, and, as such, is not a part of God’s creation. Hence, its ultimate offspring could never become so; it was corrupted flesh to begin with, and can never become pure by reverting to either man or the negro. Neither can there be any peace between God and man as long as these monstrosities are allowed to defile the earth with their presence. (p. 482)

Remember, these “monstrosities” include everyone who is neither a pureblood white or a pureblood black, including every native American, East Indian, Asian…

While Carroll’s full thesis is fairly unique (and growing moreso with each passing year, I hope), his tools of scriptural exegesis are just as common as ever, to wit:

1) Interpret literally anything in the Bible which can help your case, explain away what you can, and wholly ignore anything else. (For instance, he keeps coming back to that Pauline “flesh of beasts” verse as the foundation for his entire classification of non-vegetable life. But if he were once to reference Paul’s declaration that “by man death came into the world” and ascribe it the same literal importance, his entire framework of equating the Biblical days of creation with the geologic timeframe would utterly crumble.)

2) Decide what you want the Bible to say, and keep looking until you find it. Given enough data, the human mind can find a pattern, moreso if it’s a pattern we assume to be there. The Bible is such a huge amount of vague data, tempered by language, culture, and the varying views of its many authors, that one can always find a handful of pieces that seem to fit together. It makes you wonder, though, if (as Carroll claims) the entire thrust of the prophetic mission of the Old Testament and Christ’s ministry in the New was to turn the remaining whites from the damning evil of amalgamation, that that uniform purpose has to be dug out from hiding at such great length by people like Carroll.

(I originally picked this book up about ten years ago in a little used bookstore in Southern Utah, where the owner let me have it for only three dollars due to its condition. It seems that his parrot had gotten out of its cage and decided that the spine of this book should be his particular target. It was years later before it clicked; of course the parrot was offended by this book. The parrot, after all, is a “bird of color.”)

Nathan Shumate