Indeed, there is no doubt that a lot of spiritual awareness and metaphysical prowess has been lost over the millennia.Originally posted by PurpleLama
As a practical example, there was a talk show — with some music interspersing the interviews — here on a local television show in the early 1990s, in which the show's host gave a team of engineers and scientists an assignment at the start of the very first episode of the show, namely to plan and calculate the construction of the Great Pyramid of Cheops with today's technology and knowledge.
At the end of the episode, he went back to the team and asked them about their findings. The startling conclusion was that they would have needed at a bare minimum 35 years longer to construct an identical pyramid today than the Egyptians themselves had needed thousands of years ago.
Your distinct categorization of the two metaphors Satan and Lucifer is very interesting. Of course, Lucifer as an entity is a pure concoction of the Catholics, because Lucifer as a fallen angel was never mentioned anywhere in the original Abrahamic scriptures until the mistranslation from Latin to English under King James.
The actual passage with the mistranslation/misinterpretation was part of a sarcastic letter written by Isaiah to the then-king of Babylon — a very mortal man — in which Isaiah confronted said king with his moral corruption and metaphorically described him as a fallen angel.
Later on, John Milton wrote his "Paradise Lost" and took this metaphor — the Latin word "light-bearer" literally taken over in the King James Bible as the proper name Lucifer — as the name of the first angel ever created and "loved above all others", who then corrupted the minds of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden out of spite towards the Creator. Although the Roman Catholic Church initially would not acknowledge that the Satan of the Old Testament was in fact the first and originally highest-ranking of all angels, they later on adopted Milton's description as dogma, despite the absence of any existing canonical references.
Later on still, the Gnostics — I know modwiz is going to disagree with me on this — adopted the story of Adam and Eve into their own mythology regarding the creation of mankind, including the appearance of the serpent that told Eve to eat the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge, except that in the Gnostic vision, the snake was not a fallen angel, but merely an animal that was temporarily possessed by Sophia in order to inform Eve that the being Adam and Eve thought was the Creator of the entire universe, was actually the Demiurge, who through his laws prevented humanity from gaining knowledge, so that he could continue ruling over them.
Regardless of all the above, both stories are only mythology and metaphors, but they do lead to an interesting spiritual conundrum. In the Catholic metaphor, Lucifer corrupted Adam and Eve. In the Gnostic metaphor, Lucifer — in reality, Sophia — enlightened Adam and Eve, as per your own distinction above.
The conundrum is that both interpretations of the metaphor can be considered valid at the same time, depending on one's viewing angle.
- If the mind is not ready to receive certain knowledge, then this knowledge can be considered corruption, or otherwise put, a loss of innocence. As an example, I am now for instance thinking of something I posted on another thread recently, with regard to very young children who were sold by their parents to human traffickers for deployment in the child prostitution and child pornography industry. I doubt whether anyone would dare to contest that this would be a clear-cut case of murdered innocence. Even if those children were rescued from the claws of their heartless overlords, they will never be the same again as they were before it all happened, or as other children of their age are who did not end up as sex fodder for perverts.
But it doesn't have to be so nasty. There are yet other ways in which knowledge could corrupt, and possibly take away one's innocence. Imagine that you'd have a time machine and you went back to the middle ages, where you would be sharing modern technology — among which assault rifles — to the locals. Then you too will have changed their knowledge and deprived them of a certain innocence, by giving them the tools that, for lack of wisdom, could lead them into their own destruction.
This interpretation of the metaphor was later on reiterated in some versions of the Bible — the ones I've read over here did not have this passage — as the story of the 200 Grigori who came down to Earth, mated with the Daughters of Man and taught men how to make weapons, as well as teaching women how to fashion makeup and jewelry in order to seduce men.
- If on the other hand the knowledge withheld from humanity were something completely different, as for instance knowledge regarding genuinely benevolent subjects such as spiritual enlightenment regarding the oneness of all and how all humans are equal and free, then the metaphorical Lucifer — or the snake possessed by Sophia — can be regarded as a liberator, and the deity whose law was broken as an oppressor. This is the Gnostic vantage.
The big conundrum is that these two interpretations are not necessarily contradictory. They can be one and the same thing, depending on the nature of the imparted knowledge and the spiritual maturity of the recipient. So in the end, perhaps one should best stop seeing the metaphor of Adam and Eve eating from the Forbidden Fruit and their resulting exodus from Eden as either a good thing or a bad thing. It was merely a thing that metaphorically happened. Mankind obtained knowledge that it either wasn't ready for, or that it desperately needed in order to break free from a tyrant.
And if you then regard that in and of itself as a metaphor, then it starts looking very much like the coming of age, when children move out from underneath their parents' wings, leave the parental house, and start a life of their own — a life in which they will encounter situations they're not ready for yet, and/or that sets them free from their controlling parents.
In my own and very personal case, moving out of my parents' house was both of those things at the same time. And the then-young lady involved could indeed in some regards also in retrospect be regarded as either a corrupt fallen angel, or as Sophia and her wisdom — she was good and (very) evil all at the same time. Fact is that for better or for worse, my life would not have been the same if that situation had not happened.
In the end,there can be only oneit all boils down to assuming responsibility and owing up to one's actions. And judging by the daily news, humans aren't very good at that. So perhaps the metaphor of the Satan/Lucifer would be more applicable to the vast majority than the metaphor of Sophia freeing Adam and Eve from the Demiurge's deception and tyranny, while for a select few, it would be the latter that applies.
"Shove me in the shallow waters
Before I get too deep"
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