What is your Gordian Knot?

Question

Thanks for adding the explanation and background....

Again, what is YOUR Gordian Knot?

Answer 1

LOL.....I love it when that happens.
Very good question, by the way.

MY Gordian Knot..........
should I stay or should I go?

Answer 2

The Gordian Knot is a legend associated with Alexander the Great. It is often used as a metaphor for an intractable problem, solved by a bold stroke ("cutting the Gordian knot").

See more at the link below.

Answer 3

Well, I don't usually solve my problems with a bold stroke, unless it has something to do with what causes hair to grow on the palms of one's hand. I use the Gordion knot when I put on a tie, although is hard to undo. Didn't this have something to do with Alexander the Great, or maybe it was Melvin the Mediocre? One of the two, anyway.

Answer 4

Gor·di·an knot (gôr'dē-ən)
n.
An exceedingly complicated problem or deadlock.
An intricate knot tied by King Gordius of Phrygia and cut by Alexander the Great with his sword after hearing an oracle promise that whoever could undo it would be the next ruler of Asia.

Gordian knot

A complex knot tied by a Greek king. According to legend, whoever loosed it would rule all Asia. Alexander the Great, according to some accounts, undid the Gordian knot by cutting through it with his sword.


By extension, to “cut the Gordian knot” is to solve quickly any very complex problem or to get to the heart of a problem.

The legend
According to a Phrygian tradition, an oracle at Telmissus, the ancient capital of Phrygia, decreed to the Phrygians, who found themselves temporarily without a legitimate king, that the next man to enter the city driving an ox-cart should become their king. Midas, a poor peasant, happened to drive into town with his father Gordias and his mother, riding on his father's ox-cart. Before Midas' birth, an eagle had once landed on that ox-cart, and this was explained as a sign from the gods. Midas was declared a king by the priests. In gratitude, he dedicated his father's ox-cart[1] to the Phrygian god Sabazios, whom the Greeks identified with Zeus, and either tied it to a post or tied its shaft with an intricate knot of cornel (Cornus mas) bark. It was further prophesied by an oracle that the one to untie the knot would become the king of Asia (today's Asia Minor).

The ox-cart, often depicted as a chariot, was an emblem of power and constant military readiness. It still stood in the palace of the former kings of Phrygia at Gordium in the fourth century BC when Alexander arrived, at which point Phrygia had been reduced to a satrapy, or province, of the Persian Empire.

In 333 BC, wintering at Gordium, Alexander attempted to untie the knot. When he could find no end to the knot, to unbind it, he sliced it in half with a stroke of his sword, producing the required ends (the so-called "Alexandrian solution"). Plutarch disputes this, relating that according to Aristobulus, Alexander pulled the knot out of its pole pin rather than cutting it. Either way, Alexander did go on to conquer Asia, fulfilling the prophecy.

The knot may in fact have been a religious knot-cipher guarded by Gordium's priests and priestesses. Robert Graves suggested that it may have symbolized the ineffable name of Dionysus that, enknotted like a cipher, would have been passed on through generations of priests and revealed only to the kings of Phrygia.

Unlike fable, true myth has few completely arbitrary elements. This myth taken as a whole seems designed to confer legitimacy upon a dynastic change in this central Anatolian kingdom. To judge from the myth, apparently the new dynasty was not immemorially ancient, but had widely remembered origins in a local, but non-priestly "outsider" class, represented by the peasant Gordias in his oxcart. Other Greek myths legitimize dynasties by right of conquest (compare Cadmus), but the legitimizing oracle in this myth suggests that the previous dynasty had been a race of priest-kings allied to the oracle deity.

Answer 5

Well, based on the explanations above, I would have to say my belt and the first 3 buttons on my jeans.