The Tree of Laws
The “Tree of Knowledge” was not a positive symbol for all gnostics but instead underwent numerous revisionist interpretations, sometimes several times within the same text; according to one passage in the Gospel of Philip, the “fall” occurred when Adam’s consciousness was turned against itself in a double-bind, crippling his ability to exercise his free will:
“God planted a Garden. Man was put into the Garden. There were many trees there for him, and man lived in this place with the blessing and in the image of God. The things which are in it I will eat as I wish. This garden is the place where they will say to me, “O man, eat this or do not eat that, just as you wish.” This is the place where I will eat all things, since the Tree of Knowledge is there. That one killed Adam, but here the Tree of Knowledge made men alive.
The law was the tree. It has power to give the knowledge of good and evil. It neither removed him from evil, nor did it set him in the good, but it created death for those who ate of it. For when he said, “Eat this, do not eat that,” it became the beginning of death.” [1]
NOTES
“If you’re a child who wants to succumb to “temptation” anyway, banishing the god who can peer under blankets must be at least a bit easier (especially in a dark room where you’re not so afraid of eyes) than blocking out the sensory perception of the product of the pleasure taken in your body… The “all-seeing” god lives inside your own skin, in your peripheral areas, in your body’s orifices and musculature. He is a part of the perception of pleasure itself; he is the one who converts pleasure into anxiety. The punitive god-figure owes his effectiveness… to the fear that phenomena of dissolution may occur along the borders of the body. The same fear makes the protective god-figure possible.” [2]
“The point is that the one-god universe is a dead-end horror. All right, he’s all-powerful and all-seeing. It means that he can do everything and he can do nothing. Doing implies opposition. He can’t change because change implies introspection and action in opposition to something. In other words, this is the classic thermodynamic universe. It’s bound to run down by definition. That’s what I’m talking about. The magical universe, which is unpredictable and spontaneous, is a living universe. The one-god universe is dead.” [3]
- ”The Gospel of Philip.” . Ed. Willis Barnstone. Harper San Francisco, 1984. 96. [↩]
- Theweleit, Klaus. Male Fantasies: Women, Floods, Bodies, History. University of Minnesota Press,1987. 413. [↩]
- Herman, Jan. “Interview with William S. .” Straight U2 June, 2005. [↩]
