Do you not know the story of Alexander and The Gordian Knot, not so much a story per say, but a legend ostensibly based on one of the myriad exploits of the famed Alexander The Great. There are at least two interpretations of the story, and thus there are at least three lessons to be learned from it.
A little background to begin with, at a time when Phrygia was without a king, an oracular prophecy led to the selection of one Gordias, formally a farmer who had come to the city upon a cart, Gordias was succeeded as king by his son Midas, who took the cart upon which his father arrived, tied it in the city square, and consecrated it to the gods of his people. There it stood for many years, and in time Phrygia was absorbed into the Persian Empire, but the cart, and it's symbolic representation of the Phrygian monarchy and their gods yet remained.
In time, the great Alexander, who was not yet quite Great, but had begun the path of conquest that would ensure that even we would know his name, came to Phrygia to liberate it from Persian subjugation and instead place it under the dominion of Macedonia. When Alexander, for reasons which are themselves debatable and intractably lost to history, sought to untie the knot which bound the sacred cart in place, he found he could not. Legend says he took his sword and severed it. Soon afterward, an Oracle/Propagandist in Alexander's employ made a prophecy that whoever had undone that royal knot would himself become king of the Eastern provinces, which Alexander, having planned to do so anyway, then proceeded to do. Now the term a "Gordian Knot" has come to mean an insoluble riddle or puzzle, or rather one that requires lateral thinking to overcome (that is "thinking outside the box" for those of you who will insist on "buzz words".)
That is indicative of the course of thought which seems to generally hold as to how the story is taught and the perspective our civilization has on this bit of history. That Alexander, confronted with a tangled, complicated issue, took decisive action, ignored the nuance and significance of the problem itself and cut straight to the heart of the matter as it were.
There is however another school of thought on this matter, reliant on the idea that knots can be used to hold meanings, either as a coded representation of a message, or as a mnemonic device for telling a story. When you were young, just learning to tie your shoes, you may recall someone going through some little story of a rabbit running over and under a log and getting it's ears tangled, or something along those lines, it was a very simple story that produced a knot which is easily undone. It is surmised that the Gordian knot may have been part of the consecration of this wagon, that locked inside the composition of the knot was a story of significance to the gods of Phrygia, who had used this wagon as a tool in the appointment of their chosen monarchs. That Alexander, in cutting this knot, not only symbolically deposed the old line of kings, but also thus removed the local religion from it's own ties to the rulership of the land. He broke the power of the local gods and caused the secrets of their faith to fade into the obscurity of forgotten myth.
These ancient religions understood the power of knowledge, and jealously guarded the secrets of their gods, which gave the faithful understanding and power over their world.
We come now to the third lesson I had in mind for this historical event, and that is the lesson of multiple valid interpretations depending on one's own historical context, and the realization that the meaning according to our various contexts is necessarily quite different from the context of those who had been contemporary to the events of history, the telling of which is handed down and not neccessarily accurate to the actual events that occurred.
