Before the formalization of instruction, there was the tradition of the adversary, the figure whose opposition was the condition of learning. In the Talmudic academies, the chavruta method paired students specifically with those who challenged them most severely. The tradition held that a student who learned only from those who agreed was not learning, was only repeating. Genuine understanding required resistance.
In the traditions that produced the figure of Lucifer, the name itself was instructive: light-bearer. The being who illuminated by opposing. The fall was not from goodness into evil but from service into opposition. The opposition, in those traditions that took it seriously, was the mechanism by which humans developed the capacity the garden could not give them. Paradise was the place where nothing was required. The knowledge came with the cost.
The Norse trickster Loki performed the same function. He was not evil; the word had not been invented yet for what he was. He was the condition under which things changed. The gods remained stable, remained themselves, until Loki arrived and acted against them. What they became afterward was not what they had been. Whether what they became was better was a question the myths did not directly answer.
In Zen, there is the tradition of the difficult teacher, the one who withholds, who refuses, who drives the student to the edge of what can be borne. The lesson comes at the edge. The difficult teacher is not cruel. The difficult teacher has understood that some doors only open under pressure.
Every tradition had a word for the teacher who arrives in the shape of the wound. The word was different in every language. The phenomenon was the same.
The question the traditions did not answer was: what do you do when the wound is real?