The Tree of Laws

The symbol of the “Tree of Knowledge” underwent numerous revisionist interpretations in gnostic scripture, 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. In this trajectory of the myth, the “Tree of Knowledge” becomes a receptive matrix for the projection of dualistic consciousness.

THE TERRIBLE TREE

In the absence of archontic manipulation, Adam perceived the “tree” as the convergence of infinite possibility with infinite choice:

“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.” [1]

Adam’s perceptions of the world became distorted when he became trapped in the Rulers’ illusory notions of “good” and “evil” and lost his god-like powers of free creation:

“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.” [2]

DEMONIC DOUBLE BIND

“Eat this, do not eat that” - Adam has been given a contradictory command:

“Contradictory commands are two commands that contradict each other given at the same time. ‘TENSHUN!’ The soldier automatically stiffens to the command. ‘AT EASE!’ The soldier immediately relaxes. Now imagine a captain who strides into the barracks snapping ‘TENSHUN!’ from one side of his face and ‘AT EASE!’ from the other. The attempt to obey two flatly contradictory commands at once both of which have a degree of command value at the automatic level disorients the subject. He may react with rage, apathy, anxiety, even collapse.” [3]

The Demiurge’s commandments are weapons in themselves, devices by which he keeps Adam trapped in a cycle of fruitless ontological tail-chasing:

“A double bind is a situation in which a person is simultaneously subjected to two commands or demands, each unavoidable, yet each contradicting the other or precluding its fulfillment. Added to that, the double bind makes it impossible to perceive that contradiction and thus either to adopt a critical, or some other metacommunicative stance in relation to it…” [4]

Whether or not beings such as the “Demiurge” of gnostic myth even exist is something we can only infer - perhaps it is through stories such as these (ie., the fall) that something is trying to control us by framing the terms in which we understand our own origins and existence:

“When I speak of a spiritual control system I do not mean that some higher supercivilization has locked us inside the constraints of a space-bound jail, closely monitored by entities we might call angels or demons. What I do mean is that mythology rules at a level of our social reality over which normal political and intellectual trends have no real power. Myths define the set of things scholars, politicians, and scientists can think about. They are operated upon by symbols, and the language these symbols form constitutes a complete system. This system is metalogical, but not metaphysical. It violates no laws because it is the substance of which laws are made.” [5]

FOOTNOTES

1.The Gospel of Philip, from Willis Barnstone’s The Other Bible , p. 96, pub. A.D.1984

2. Ibid

3. W.S. Burroughs, The Job, p.41, quoted in Operation Overload by Phil Hine & Dave Lee

4. Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies: Women, Floods, Bodies, History, p. 329, pub. A.D. 1987

5. Jacques Vallee in Dimensions: A Casebook of Alien Contact, p.247, pub. A.D.1988

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