RE: [ejlist] The trees of life and the titans

["Thomas Friese" <tfriese@intergate.bc.ca>]

> If the catacomb school is the
>> titanic one, are not the titans obsessed with knowledge rather than
>> immortality? Or is it rather that knowledge is accessible to their
>> technigues but life is not and thus they focus on what is not allowed
them?
>> Comments?
>I think the second one is right. Titans are obsessed with inmortality
(gods).
>They want to reach inmortality through "their" knowledge
>(technology). And this is what they are trying; will they suceed?
>But, I am not sure about equaling catatombs with titanism, if so,
>then the forest school is gods-troops:-), isn´t it?. Would you like to
>explain it further?


Thomas, I didn´t understand your point either, would you mind to explain it
further?
I made this assumption based on 1) Junger's characterisation of Vigo and
Bruno as turned towards the Gods and the Titans respectively; "one towards
the forest, the other towards the underworld"' and 2) this paragraph:

	"As little can be expected from evolution as from any progress. The great
change transcends not only the species, but the entire bios. It is a crucial
loss that mere fragments have come down to us from the most ancient
documents. The difference between the forests and the catacombs seems to be
that in the former one experiments at the Tree of Knowledge and in the
latter at the Tree of Life."

Moreover, there are numerous indications in Eumeswil (apart from the obvious
physical similarity) that the catacombs equate to the underworld and that
this is the realm of the Titans. It is in the catacombs that scientists are
playing with fire, with magic (technology) to create new forms of life.
Bruno wants to move "beyond knowledge" while Vigo hates technology and would
"rather not know" about what is going in the underworld.

Attila is interesting in this respect: he has clearly been involved in the
Titanic underworld, yet he is also knowledgeable about the forests. In his
forest ordeal near the end of Eumeswil, he sees how Proteus has so easily
created what the Titans worked for so hard in their laboratories. In fact,
it is with respect to this traverse of the forest en route to the ocean that
Attila says: "The road back from the Tree of Knowledge to the Tree of Life
is a sinister one. But there was no returning to the desert that lay behind
me. There, death was certain. " This desert that he refers to contains the
wreckage of titanic "progress" - the remnants of a nuclear holocaust.
Finally, he finds refuge in the interior of a tree and is reborn therein -
the Tree of Life? The "meanwhile" between his entering the tree, almost dead
and his awakening "reborn" is described as "a pause ... between two forms of
existence. " Attila's response: prayer.


>> By the way, in the Sumerian conception, the two trees were one - the
fruit
>> conferred life and knowledge - divinity. How did they get divided?
>
This is a fascinant issue and a very interesting one to talk about but I´m a
little confused. Where did you get this info?

I got this from a Joseph Campbell book called "Primitive Mythology" in the
"Masks of God" series. But I don't have it with me and to be honest I do not
recall the images he referred to, nor the period. I will look it up when I
have a chance to access my library again.

I can be mistaken but I´ve
been looking for this info today and haven´t been able to find it out.
Unfortunaly I left my selection of sumerian texts in NY so I couldn´t check
it out. I have with me the Dictionnaire des mythologies et des religions des
sociétés traditionnelles et du monde antique and found nothing about this
tree.Some other scholars, such as Eliade or Graves seem to talk about a
special kind of grass that give us inmortality. I found this idea of a
single tree extremly interesting, could somebody give us more info on this?

Speaking of single trees, would Yggdrasil be so described? I'm quite
ignorant as yet on Nordic mythology.

    As Waltrer pointed out it's true that the tree of life wasn´t mentioned
before the fall, which is also very interesting. Eliade seems to believe the
tree staid hidden until the apple was eaten, so you first needed some kind
of knowledge in orden to see the tree. This theory makes even more
interesting the role of the snake. Was the snake eager to eat from the tree
of life? Did the snake need Adam and Eve in order to be able to find the
hidden tree? Anyway the idea of hidden is pretty common among the first
cosmogonies, think of Gilgamesh grass or Golden Apples in Hesperides, as
also the image of two trees instead of one.

A speculation which may be utter rubbish: would a dragon represent the snake
that found and ate of the Tree of Life? Before he reaches his Tree, Attila
sees snakes that are mating with tree trunks and  "obviously demonstrating
the transition to dragons".

Thomas Friese