Martinus: Livets Bog, vol. 4, sect. 1173

1173. And "Adam" and "Eve" ate their fill of this "knowledge". First it was "knowledge of darkness" they acquired. It became the dominating factor behind their exercise of will, until they became so engrossed in culminating in this "darkness" that their original "light" existence was long forgotten. For the being at this stage, only "darkness" was the absolute reality, while "light" could be felt at the very most as an "imagined opposite", a "utopia" or something unreal that could never exist or be attained. It ought to be obvious that there therefore had to be a "serpent" here too in order to "beguile", which means "guide", stimulate and prompt those who may well have seemed childish in relation to the "light" but who were nonetheless souls that were hungering for this "light". The fact that the "serpent" is now called a "messiah", a "Christ" or world redeemer", while it was called the "devil", the "evil one", the "tempter", "Satan" and so on during its earlier appearance to "Adam" and "Eve" is of course due merely to the previously mentioned partiality towards the "light" of the present beings who are hungering for the "light". They are sick and tired of experiencing the details of "darkness". They therefore feel great loathing for everything, in the form of beings and things, that stimulates and promotes the experiences of "darkness" today, while they to a corresponding degree feel sympathy for everything and everyone that can stimulate the satisfaction of their now so dominating desire or hunger for the experiences of "light". In this state of theirs, they therefore easily become partial to "light" and feel a correspondingly exaggerated sympathy for that which they believe to be in favour of "light", at the same time as they feel a correspondingly exaggerated antipathy towards everything that they believe to be in favour of "darkness". This exaggerated sympathy and antipathy prompts their originators to call the world redeemers superterrestrial "gods" and superterrestrial "devils" respectively.