The myth and the symbol of the ‘Tree of Knowledge’, also called ‘Tree of the Science of Good and Evil’, is found in many Holy Scriptures, thus testifying to the universality of the occult Tradition in the interpretation of the dogmas of religions. This Tree always appears in a garden and an earth of the sky, coupled with another tree, that of Life .

 

The two trees were venerated by the Persians, the Babylonians, the Ancient Egyptians, in India, and in some traditions it is said to be a single tree. Without doubt, in our Old and New Testament, this myth, obscure to many but revealing to few, assumes, for us, a profound meaning. Please bear with us while we work it out together.

 

The Genesis of Moses, reconstructed by him from the previous traditions of the patriarchs and of the Babylonian an Egyptian esoteric schools, describes the creation of the world, then, of Adam and Eve in the image and likeness of God, but in such a way as to form a single entity or Androgyny. Genesis (chpts 2 and 3) reveals that the Eternal made the Cosmic Adam the keeper of Eden, the garden of delights, where our progenitors could feed on the fruit of all the trees, in particular, the Tree of Life, but they were forbidden to taste the fruit of the Tree of the Science of Good and Evil’, because if they did they would die.

 

 

But Eve let herself be tempted by the serpent, who persuaded her that they could become like God, she tasted the forbidden fruit, gave it to Adam to eat, and so they were banished from Paradise. Then, the entrance to the ‘Tree of Life’ was barred by the cherub. God Himself gave the order to the archangel of the flaming sword, because if Adam and Eve had eaten the fruit of that Tree they would have become immortal in the Luciferic state or else would have had to atone with the evolutive process before eating it.

 

To understand well the doctrine which is hidden in this forbidden Tree of Knowledge it is necessary to turn to the traditional, secret teaching of the Prophets of Israel, the Kabbalah , and study its texts, above all the Zohar (Book of Splendor), the esoteric commentary on the Bible. The Zohar identifies this allegorical Tree with the tree of the Sefirot, which we will explain in a special booklet on the Kabbalah.

 

The Zohar says: “God created man with the intention that he would not change, would not be subject to any vicissitudes, would have a balanced and immutable humor for eternity, due to his Faith. For this, he put him close to the ‘Tree of Life’. Adam and his mate sinned, attached themselves to the ‘Tree of the Science of Good and Evil’, to the regions of variations; thus they fell into the vicissitudes of Good and Evil, of Mercy and Rigor…they looked for the variety…..And this love for the variety caused the death of Adam and all his descendents…Man became the butt of passions and vicissitudes; one moment, good, now, bad; now, angry, now, pleasant; acting with rigor or mercy, now, living, now, dead. All these variations stem from the ‘Tree of Good and Evil’ to which Adam adhered. But, in future times, human beings will be ripped from this Tree and placed under the Tree of Life and so death will disappear from the world”.

 

 

Clearer then this the Kabbalists could not be. The original sin, the sin of Adam, was to stop contemplating God and the lack of attraction to the life of the sanctifying Grace (Tree of Life) which would have made him immortal and immune from the torments of the descent into the material. The nature of the original sin is obvious if we draw a distinction between the ‘intelligence’ oriented towards the coincidence of opposites which flows in ‘Humanity’ and in the identification with God through ‘grace’, and the ‘reason’, discursive thought, which is based on the logical principles of contradiction or dialectic and of formal identity, so, keeping one away from God, also because it applies itself to the multiplicity.

 

Regarding this, for Saint Paul the spiritual man has the “intelligence of Christ”, the wisdom taught by the spirit (1, Corinthians, 2:10- 16). “The intelligence”-Evagrius writes in -Gnostic Centuries –“lives in the heart, the thought in the brain”.

 

 

If the human intelligence of Adam had continued to participate with the intelligence of God then the fall and the flight from the Eternal with the consequence of the becoming, the struggle, suffering, birth, death, and the beginning of history, would not have happened: the interplay of the contradiction of opposites, like the Chinese doctrine of Yin and Yang and of the Tao, the point of coincidence of the opposites. Yang is Activity and Yin is Inertia.

 

 

The redemption from the original sin is possible when human intelligence shares the intelligence of Christ. So, for Archeosophy, the ‘Tree of Knowledge’ is the symbol of the ‘opposites’, of ‘dialectic’, and, to use a Yoga term, could be called the ‘Tree of Karma’, or, in other words, of the law of cause and effect.

 

 

In the mythical Tree there was a snake, which means, ‘intelligence without wisdom’, contrary to the Snake of Good, which is the ‘Shining Intelligence’. Nahash (in Hebrew, ‘snake’) is, therefore, intelligence without wisdom, the egoism which has a hold over Eve (the volitive faculty of Adam).

 

In conclusion, the forbidden fruit was not a sexual sin but an apostasy of Adam from God and the progressive yielding to the action of Karma, set into operation by him, which led him to walk take the descending spiral of involution, then, of the evolution in the materialization. The consequences of turning away from God, becoming an apostate from God, are a continuous chain of various aspects of dualism: sin of naturalism, absurd self-sufficiency, pride, black magic, etc. In spite of all this, even though he made his descendents slaves of lust, pride and egoism, Man will be saved in Christ because he always bears the Divine image.

The ‘Tree of the Science of Good and Evil’ has on its branches (as pointed out by the Kabbalist Tradition), six ‘fruits’, called Sefirot in Hebrew. The fruits of the ‘Tree of Life’ are 4. Man must not concern himself with the 6 divine powers, the punishment being the fall in the alternate movement of the becoming, the phenomenal world. The Tradition states that in the olden times the initiates were called holy Trees, Trees of the Lord. This information is given in the ‘Commentary on Daniel’ by Saint Hippolytus of Rome, who lived in the 3rd century. Also the prophet Ezekiel regards the trees as the symbols of men (Ez. 31:18).

 

Thus, the ‘Tree of Knowledge’ means also the man in the state of transformation between good and evil, the man who uses the powers badly, and the fruits are what are called in India and Tibet chakras and korlos, the awakening of some being the ruin of the individual.

 

 

Tommaso Palamidessi

excerpt from 40^th Booklet of Archeosophy