These religious myths -- deeply embedded in an otherwise secular society's consciousness -- are the notion of original sin and the one concerning the impossibility of an spiritual return to anything like an original paradise:
Genesis 3: 24 He drove out the man, and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim and a flaming sword that turned every way to guard the way to the tree of life.
The two are in fact interrelated. They stand in anti-thesis to any point of view that might be considered shamanistic -- that is, for instance in antithesis to the works of Nietzsche and Bataille, both of whom allow that there are (generally) hidden depths of human consciousness to be plumbed, and that to explore that which is hidden (Nietzsche) or (looked at from the point of view of Catholicism) expressly forbidden (Bataille) is the origin and source of all human joy in living.
But one does not, indeed ought not to "return" to a state or attitude that is marked by "original sin". This is the Bible's alternative and countervailing truth. Lacan's difference from Bataille is seen most pronouncedly in that Lacan embraces the Biblical precepts concerning human nature and what is good for it: "Thou shalt not return to thy origins, thy sinner. (You will only make yourself worse for trying)." Bataille, despite having earlier embraced orthodox Catholicism, resists the authority of orthodoxy in pronouncing, "Thou shalt" and "Why not?"
Bataille and Nietzsche are beyind a movement to open up the doors to the unconscious -- to states of mind and self-enjoyment that have been explicitly forbidden by the Christian tradition.
They are a reinstatement of the older shamanistic tradition of spirituality, that had been superceded by Christianity and its ascetic mores.
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