earticle

영어

The tree of knowledge, which is said by the Bible to have existed in Eden, has often been often interpreted as that of knowledge of good and evil. Among many knowledges, the knowledge of sex was archaically considered the primitively predominant one in that it was the first one which mankind could observe to perceive in one’s naked eyes. The picking of the forbidden tree of knowledge and thus sex and life has been reinterpreted, however, as the cause of death; hence the negative attitude and superficial down-play of knowledge and over-appreciation of wisdom in Western culture. Behind this paradoxical notion lies the phenomenological observation that where life is, death there is. Snake, actually the godly master of knowledge tree in ancient Christian as well as Sumero-Babylonian Western culture, has undergone such negative transformation: Lordly snake was transformed to Satan and sometimes perceived as Eve and curiously became a death agent/giver. If snake has been regarded as the agent of evil and death, it is mainly because it was associated as the emblem of pagan god. However, the revisionary reading of snake and knowledge gives us wholly different notion of them. The acceptance of knowledge that not only Sumerian Enki and Greek Zeus but also Christian YHWH and sometimes even Jesus himself have been personified as snake reflects the idea that snake was originally an amblematic animal of life. The trite phenomenological notion that we have death because we have life is proven to be one of ex post facto reasoning, or post hoc ergo propter fallacy. With the insightful idea that snake was simultaneously a symbol of death and life, one can step closer to the uroboric realization that life entails death and death again is life. The acceptance of snake as a symbol of knowledge and wisdom, together with the consequential realization that there is no wisdom which is not based upon knowledge and that neither can be separated from each other, directs us to the spiritual awakening and healing consolation that one may regard death as a preparatory process of a different new life. Snake thus tells us that when one can fully meet death, one can have a good and hearty life.