The knowledge of good and evil occupies a singular position in the depth-psychological corpus, functioning simultaneously as mythological cipher, developmental threshold, and ethical aporia. Its locus classicus is, of course, the Genesis narrative, which the corpus reads not as a historical event but as a symbolic account of the emergence of human consciousness from an undivided, paradisiacal unity into the tormented awareness of opposites. Jung, working through the imaginative idiom of the Red Book, treats this knowledge as an ‘insurmountable curse’ that paradoxically cannot be renounced: once the poles of good and evil are distinguished, the psyche is condemned to navigate between them. Von Franz sharpens this into an ethical demand: the relativization of opposites through self-knowledge does not dissolve the categories but makes ethical decision more exacting, not less. Campbell reads the Fall as cosmogonic—the necessary shattering of primordial oneness that makes individuation possible. Maximos the Confessor, via the Philokalia, locates the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in the visible created world itself, identifying sensory engagement with the mingling of good and evil in experience. McGilchrist holds the tension between coincidentia oppositorum and the irreducible reality of moral distinction. Across these voices, a persistent tension obtains: whether this knowledge is curse, gift, developmental necessity, or all three simultaneously.