ADAM LIVED WITH THE IGBO FATHERS - Onyeji Nnaji

 The Harmony of the First Father and the Sons of God

There was a sense of harmony among the inhabitants of the earth those early days. Of course, many may think that these forbearance of the human population existed in parts. Yes, in a way, but not completely separate as hostile member of a community. Adam was however kept separate and secluded in the garden fashioned in the east. But when he fell he was sent out of the garden to live with other inhabitants, but with certain level of consciousness as a mortal being. With the birth of Cain humanity began to increase. Adam was one hundred and thirty years before the birth of Cain. Cain and Seth all got married and gave birth to children according to their kind, although Moses did not tell us anything about where they took their wives. 

We cannot draw conclusion from a vacuum since no record had said anything regarding to where they took their wives. What was remarkable with the Nri creation story was that the inhabitants of the earth shared mutual coexistence and harmony through marriage. Moses agrees to this when he said this,

And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born unto them, that the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose. And the LORD said, My spirit shall not always strive with man, for that he also is flesh: yet his days shall be an hundred and twenty years (Genesis 6:1-3).

The Bible now concurs to the claim by Nri creation story. The harmony among the early patrons was on their intermarriage. This is why I said earlier that Moses willingly or not chose to overrule some vital information in a bid to promoting his oral tradition. He did not say anything about the presence of the sons of God until this chapter. Yet, touching the area, he did not give elaborate account of their existence before taking the daughters of men for wives.

What this harmony with the descendants of Adam paid the sons of God with death. Startling parallels exist between this aspect of the Bible story and the Igbo folklore detailing a period which Adiele Afigbo calls the “Eternal Day(s)”, the Age of innocence and timeless presence in a realm of Light and Eternal Glory, where the Igbo ancestors were sustained by God-substance and maintained unbroken communication with God their Father and never slept (perpetual consciousness). Death came from their marital relationship with the descendants of Adam. The quotation below affirms it.

And the LORD said, My spirit shall not always strive with man, for that he also is flesh: yet his days shall be an hundred and twenty years (Genesis 6:3).   

People usually interpret this part of the Bible wrongly. Many presume that this punishment was for Adam’s descendants. It is not. The punishment meant for the man who was created from the earth was pronounced immediately as he was found in the opposite direction from the creator’s intention. This time, the punishment is for the sons of God; the god-men who took to the mortal daughters for wives. God said that His spirit shall not always struggle with man because man is earthly from every dimension. 

The god-men were not expected to share conjugal union with mortal beings. They were different from the men of the earth even though they were kept on the earth for certain function of bringing to earth what was in heaven. Their role was to make the mortal man live a godly life in extolment of the creator’s art through him. But with the fall of the devil and his jealousy for the man whom God had esteemed above every earthly creature by giving him a concerned treatment, man was defeated. He influenced man and he yielded to his scheme. So, for the sons of God to ingratiate themselves with the mortal persons for conjugal reasons, they infuriated God’s anger.

Marriage is a union of selves’ assimilations. Its depth is broader than we think to know it. And to a man who understands this, God could not bear it. See what Nnamani said about marriage,

The activity involved in our heart towards attaining endless honeymoon is an increase improvement transcending from one degree of transformation to another. This is achieved through the constant reflection on our unveiled feeling and love for each other. Our residue shall come unto perfection after we have changed from one degree of love to another, ever increasing until we take the likeliness of ourselves; a perfect level where our minds are made unveiled to each other. By the reflection of the love for ourselves I mean the get-together feelings for each other which perpetually remain a day-to-day activity in us, ever increasingly. This means attaining immortality in our mortal existence. At this point the equation becomes wholly balanced thus:

                 a + b = o

             → a = o – b and

                  b = o – a

In the whole we have a =b and b =a.

In this condition they are equal. At this point we achieve the mind of the maker for instituting marriage as a concept devoid of dispute or separated nature to make one’s life a fulfilled one. God is God and not a man. He desires unity among us because in Him there is no division. All things are made one in Him who only is one.

It is vice versa, exchange of life is universal as long as conjugal union is concerned. As the sons of God shared union with the daughters of men, they lose some fraction of their spirituality to the mortal women and in return they acquired also a fraction of carnality. Of course, although they were immortal beings, by having affairs with the daughters of men they become mortal halfway. It is clearer thus, “for that he (my spirit) also is flesh.” Put in another way, for that reason my spirit also becomes a flesh. By this, the sons of God were no longer fit to access the totality of the spirit realm as before. 

They did not lose their knowledge of their spirituality, but became subject to the supremacy of divine option to display certain spiritual characteristics. That was how the ancestors of the Igbo race lost their spirituality. And as generations passed, the descendants seeking to return to the spiritual nature of their ancestors invented rituals. Chesi, reflecting on the source of ritual in the Igbo societies asserts thus, “People say that in former times all men carried a share of the gods in them, and vice versa. The task of the ritual is to activate and to intensify these shares so as to enable man to be divine for a certain period of time.”

Another punishment the sons of God acquired from their relationship with the mortal human was the denial of eternity possession. They lost out of eternity. Like mortal men, they became submissive to death and their days were numbered “yet his days shall be an hundred and twenty years”. Living for a hundred and twenty year started with the sons of God, not the descendants of Adam. Of course, if it was for the mortal beings Adam would not live up to nine hundred and thirty years. The successful generations had the same long live. 

According to Moses, all the generations of Adam from Seth to Methuselah (exception of Enoch) lived more than Eight Hundred years. Adam even lived eight hundred years after the birth of Seth. Moses did not give attention to the activities of the descendants of the sons of God perhaps because it was not relevant to his oral tradition.

From the above discussion, it should be clear now that the world did not begin with Adam; nevertheless the generation of men began with the creation of Adama. The reason for the confusion brought about by non-serial documentation of the human history properly to reflect the actual situation in the creation account may be blamed upon the same factor lamented by Ottenberg:

considering the size and importance of the Igbo, very little research and publication has been undertaken on them, not only in history but in anthropology and other fields, compared to, say, the Yoruba or Ashanti (p. 120).

We have taken time to exemplify other archives containing the same information that was shrouded in the Genesis. If the Jewish Cabbala could as well say the same thing as revealed in other ancient books, then we have no option than to accept the accounts via comparative processes. This goes a long way to clarify that oral tradition is everywhere the same except for certain changes in names, time, precision of events and reportorial differences. When I was writing my previous book, Aspects of the Ancient African Metaphysics, I came across The Catholic Encyclopedia which gave me additional information about the global history. I was researching for any possible proof of reincarnation in the Christian Bible.

Commentaries in The Catholic Encyclopedia clarified that reincarnation was contained in the mystic books of the scripture collectively referred to as Originism. Originism, according to the book, contained everything concerning the origin and creation of the world. But during the Constantinople Conference of 325 AD it was removed from the Christian Bible after a series of disagreement amidst the Catholic Bishops in Rome. See also The Great Law, (p. 116) or Esoteric Christianity. From these ideas, it is possible that Moses may have included issues connected to Adama and other details pertaining to the lives of the sons of God, but during these periods of church conferences which was targeted at modifying the scripture they were affected so that other world population would not know that they too shared in the human history of early settlement rather than the monopolistic archive of Adam. Of course, since Originism was affected, everything would follow suit.