to the grove, but they occasionally plucked some of the apples for themselves. Hera did not trust them and added a guard to the garden. It was a never-sleeping, hundred-headed dragon named Ladon.
The same tree with forbidden fruit features in early Mesopotamian myths, going back as far as the year 669 BC. There is a myth about the Sumerian goddess Inanna who ate the fruits of a tree to acquire knowledge. She was joined by her brother Utu, the sun-god, and the Sumerian god Enki, the god of wisdom and knowledge.
There is a similar tree in Buddhism. The founder of Buddhism, later known as Gautama Buddha, sat under the Bodhi tree when he achieved enlightenment. This tree was a fig tree with heart shaped leaves.
In Hinduism the Tree of Jiva and Atman appears in the Vedic scriptures as a metaphysical metaphor concerning the soul.
The old Norse sagas also contain a famous tree, the World Tree, which is an ash tree. This tree is located at the center of the Universe and joins the nine worlds of the Norse cosmology.
Why are these symbolical trees so significant? And why is it so important not to eat their fruits, especially if eating the fruits of the tree will give us immortality and knowledge that will make life so much easier?
I think that eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is like breaking any one of the Ten Commandments – of course you can do it, but there are consequences that you must then live with.
Eating this fruit of knowledge and wisdom is exciting and inspiring, and it opens up a whole new life for us. However, there is no turning back, and that is why the fruit of this tree comes with a health