Martinus: Livets Bog, vol. 4, sect. 1176

1176. The "Adam" and "Eve" of the "Bible" were thus a form of life or the living being at a stage where it was entirely ignorant of "good" and "evil", and lived in great peace and harmony with its species, its fellow beings and its immediate surroundings, so that these surroundings and its entire existence was a "paradise", a "Garden of Eden". And we can see from this that the "Bible's" account of the living being's first appearance on Earth was not a contemporary account, but an account that emerged only thousands, if not millions, of years later, indeed, at such a late point in time that the entire mission of the "serpent" – world redemption's idealisation of the animal principle – had had its day. When the first words or sentences of the "Bible" emerged, "Adam" and "Eve" (in this case terrestrial mankind) had already eaten so much of the "tree of knowledge" for so long that this function and form of life had become, not merely a theory learnt from the "serpent" that one feverishly began to live in accordance with, but on the contrary a realistic, sovereign "C-knowledge" or automatic function. The infringement of the laws of life had become an all-conquering power behind the being's exercise of its will. It had already at that time become an incipient genius at killing, murdering, mutilating, destroying, hating and annihilating. This is how it was itself, and how its parents and children were, and how in short, its neighbours or surroundings were. In truth, it could more than satisfy its appetite with the "fruits of the tree of knowledge".