The snake awakened us.
Adam, Eve, and Eden: My interpretation.
They came as one, divided into the two. This represents the masculine and The Feminine, the yin and the yang in Taoism, and Kali and Shiva in hinduism.
The garden.
The Garden represents a state of undifferentiated bliss, pure awareness, but right now it’s the unaware bliss of an infant in status. There are no human-centric ideals attached to this awareness such as Good and Evil.
So here comes the snake, and anyone who has studied serpents in philosophy knows that they represent wisdom and knowledge all around the world.
The snake tempts Eve to eat fruit from the Tree of Life. She does.
Now, as it goes, Eve was the source of the Fall from grace to original sin at this point.
Eve was chosen for this role simply because she was fulfilling a role of women: birth.
The difference here is that we’re not talking about physiological birth, the fruit was the catalyst for the birth of conscious awareness.
Now we are separated from instinct, the ego has taken hold, and we are seemingly separate from God at this point.
Now that the ego has taken hold, we have the ability to contemplate on whether or not what we are doing is right or wrong. We now have the instruments to create the ideals of Good and Evil. Now we know "sin".
Now with this ego came great power to create, to think subjectively, and from this power came many diverse civilizations and ideas.
But, this power is also the source of anxiety, hatred, depression, and envy. The separation from Pure awareness gave us the ability to feel that we are not enough. From every light shining in this mental state, there are equal and opposite shadows cast down.
So many philosophies and religions were created to deal with the mental anguish that the ego can cause. Most of these philosophies practice ways to bring us back into pure awareness through time in nature, prayer, song, meditation, breathing techniques and so forth.
But that quickly went South as well, and people started taking religions much too seriously and started killing in the very names of those people who created those very philosophies to prevent it.
Jesus was not a Christian, nor was Buddha a Buddhist or lao Tzu a taoist. They were teachers of love.
Now, this is relevant to the new age because many of us are leaving the age of dogmatic religion and realizing that there is truth in all of them. People are choosing to become spiritual and non-denominational. Many are moving back into practicing pure awareness more often to birth love into society.
So we are now finally making our way back full circle to the garden, only this time with a new flavor of "enlightenment" through our trilogies we've experienced from our infancy til now.
When I thought about this story, I came to almost the same conclusions.