The Garden of Eden occupies a remarkably contested position across the depth-psychology corpus, functioning simultaneously as cosmogonic myth, psychological template, and perennial symbol of consciousness’s origin. The tradition’s major voices resist any univocal reading. Campbell treats the narrative as one variant among globally distributed paradise myths, insisting it be understood metaphorically rather than literally — a coded account of the emergence of dualistic consciousness through the knowledge of opposites. Edinger, following Jung, reads the Fall as the mythic signature of ego-birth: consciousness as the ‘original sin,’ the serpent as the Gnostic principle of individuation and gnosis. Jung himself approaches the Garden primarily through its alchemical and Gnostic afterlives — the dead paradise-tree, the Mercurial serpent, the albedo as regained innocence. Kalsched identifies the serpent-Trickster as the paradoxical agent who ends participation mystique and inaugurates the history of human consciousness. Peterson extends this reading into Twelve Step phenomenology, mapping Eden’s expulsion onto the alcoholic’s spiritual death and the subsequent requirement of at-one-ment. Hillman, characteristically, inverts the standard trajectory, proposing that the garden endures at the level of animal intelligence, accessible any evening the ‘bright mind cools.’ The central tension throughout is whether the expulsion represents catastrophe, necessary initiation, or both simultaneously.