THOMAS HOLLWECK is Associate Professor of German at

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the will that created it. A very important point, because in
making it the narrator implicitly denies that man is himself
part of the material world and thus at all in need of the kind of
knowledge that comes from the forbidden fruit of the garden.
Instead, in the concluding three sections a different story is told,
„a very ancient tradition of human thought, based upon man’s
truest knowledge of himself“. 59 It is the pointedly syncretistic
story of „the doctrines of the East“ of „Avesta, Islam,
Manichaeanism, Gnosticism and Hellenism“ and it „deals with
the figure of the first or first completely human man, the
Hebraic Adam Qadmo“. 60 In the myths of the „Man of Light“,
the Urmensch, man’s status as either the God-Man or „son of
man“, the prototype of the man of creation, is somewhat
uncertain. As God’s champion in the struggle against evil in
creation, he is eventually imprisoned by the forces of the evil
demiurge, estranged from his orgins, and rescued by a second
divine emissary „who in some mysterious way was the same as
himself, his own higher self“. But as the first man had been
emprisoned by the demons of matter, thus the second man and
son of God in his descent through the seven spheres partakes of
the nature of each and finally, catching sight of his reflection in
the waters of matter, he falls in love with his mirror image and
thus also becomes entrapped by matter. „In this narcissistic
picture, so full of tragic charm, the meaning of the tradition
begins to clarify itself“, the narrator continues, concluding that
man has now changed from a carrier of the divine will to a
being that is moved by longing and is „by that token guilty“.
The point of gnosis is right here. As much as the narrator later
tries to absolve man from guilt, he has identified the narcissistic
59 Joseph, 23.
60 Joseph, 23