Bacon converted Eden’s divine punishment into a license for scientific dominion

Evidence

Due to the Fall from the Garden of Eden (caused by the temptation of a woman), the human race lost its “dominion over creation.” Before the Fall, there was no need for power or dominion, because Adam and Eve had been made sovereign over all other creatures. In this state of dominion, mankind was “like unto God.” While some, accepting God’s punishment, had obeyed the medieval strictures against searching too deeply into God’s secrets, Bacon turned the constraints into sanctions. Only by “digging further and further into the mine of natural knowledge” could mankind recover that lost dominion. — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, 675

Categorization

• XREF: Directly serves the polyad’s law/institutions and storytelling strands — how a religious narrative frame (Fall, dominion) was repurposed into a charter for colonial-style extraction; connects to settler-colonial land claims drawn from Genesis. — connects to: Bacon’s utopia authorized the manipulation of living organisms for experimental gain — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology,…, 732; Bacon framed scientific method as the capture and enslavement of a female nature — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology,…, 676; Bacon welded natural magic, mining, and patriarchy into an ethic of nature exploitation. — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology,…, 656 (+4 more)
• SEED: Angle: the Fall narrative as the original template for ecofeminist readings of scientific ‘recovery of dominion’ — could be an essay thread tracing dominion-language from Genesis through Bacon to modern geoengineering rhetoric.

Broader Connections

• Bacon welded natural magic, mining, and patriarchy into an ethic of nature exploitation. #corroborates (0.92) — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, 656
• Bacon framed scientific method as the capture and enslavement of a female nature #corroborates (0.88) — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, 676
• Bacon’s utopia authorized the manipulation of living organisms for experimental gain #expands (0.85) — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, 732
• Bacon explicitly outlined engineering artificial plant and animal species #expands (0.85) — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, 726
• Unregulated capitalism with amoral science converts the Eden myth into its obverse #expands (0.80) — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited, 931
• Stewardship theology absorbed Bacon’s rapacious mining language wholesale #expands (0.75) — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, 921
• Engels’s primitive-communism narrative secretly repeats the Eden-and-fall myth #expands (0.75) — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 481