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Genesis 3

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1 And the serpent hath been subtile above every beast of the field which Jehovah God hath made, and he saith unto the woman, `Is it true that God hath said, Ye do not eat of every tree of the garden?'

2 And the woman saith unto the serpent, `Of the fruit of the trees of the garden we do eat,

3 and of the fruit of the tree which [is] in the midst of the garden God hath said, Ye do not eat of it, nor touch it, lest ye die.'

4 And the serpent saith unto the woman, `Dying, ye do not die,

5 for God doth know that in the day of your eating of it -- your eyes have been opened, and ye have been as God, knowing good and evil.'

6 And the woman seeth that the tree [is] good for food, and that it [is] pleasant to the eyes, and the tree is desirable to make [one] wise, and she taketh of its fruit and eateth, and giveth also to her husband with her, and he doth eat;

7 and the eyes of them both are opened, and they know that they [are] naked, and they sew fig-leaves, and make to themselves girdles.

8 And they hear the sound of Jehovah God walking up and down in the garden at the breeze of the day, and the man and his wife hide themselves from the face of Jehovah God in the midst of the trees of the garden.

9 And Jehovah God calleth unto the man, and saith to him, `Where [art] thou?'

10 and he saith, `Thy sound I have heard in the garden, and I am afraid, for I am naked, and I hide myself.'

11 And He saith, `Who hath declared to thee that thou [art] naked? of the tree of which I have commanded thee not to eat, hast thou eaten?'

12 and the man saith, `The woman whom Thou didst place with me -- she hath given to me of the tree -- and I do eat.'

13 And Jehovah God saith to the woman, `What [is] this thou hast done?' and the woman saith, `The serpent hath caused me to forget -- and I do eat.'

14 And Jehovah God saith unto the serpent, `Because thou hast done this, cursed [art] thou above all the cattle, and above every beast of the field: on thy belly dost thou go, and dust thou dost eat, all days of thy life;

15 and enmity I put between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; he doth bruise thee -- the head, and thou dost bruise him -- the heel.'

16 Unto the woman He said, `Multiplying I multiply thy sorrow and thy conception, in sorrow dost thou bear children, and toward thy husband [is] thy desire, and he doth rule over thee.'

17 And to the man He said, `Because thou hast hearkened to the voice of thy wife, and dost eat of the tree concerning which I have charged thee, saying, Thou dost not eat of it, cursed [is] the ground on thine account; in sorrow thou dost eat of it all days of thy life,

18 and thorn and bramble it doth bring forth to thee, and thou hast eaten the herb of the field;

19 by the sweat of thy face thou dost eat bread till thy return unto the ground, for out of it hast thou been taken, for dust thou [art], and unto dust thou turnest back.'

20 And the man calleth his wife's name Eve: for she hath been mother of all living.

21 And Jehovah God doth make to the man and to his wife coats of skin, and doth clothe them.

22 And Jehovah God saith, `Lo, the man was as one of Us, as to the knowledge of good and evil; and now, lest he send forth his hand, and have taken also of the tree of life, and eaten, and lived to the age,' --

23 Jehovah God sendeth him forth from the garden of Eden to serve the ground from which he hath been taken;

24 yea, he casteth out the man, and causeth to dwell at the east of the garden of Eden the cherubs and the flame of the sword which is turning itself round to guard the way of the tree of life.

   

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Divine Providence # 310

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310. 1. What our own prudence is and what the prudence is that is not our own. People are devoted to their own prudence when they convince themselves that the way things seem is the way they really are, and particularly when they accept as truth the appearance that their own prudence is everything and that divine providence is nothing but a generality; though as already explained [201], no such generality could exist without being made up of specifics. They are then caught up in illusions as well, since any appearance that we take to be truth becomes an illusion. Further, to the extent that they justify themselves with illusions, they become materialists to the point that eventually they believe only what they can apprehend with one of their physical senses. They rely primarily on sight because it especially interacts with our thinking. Ultimately they become sense-centered; and if they come down decisively in favor of the material world and against God, they close off the inner levels of their minds and put a kind of veil in the way. From then on, they think underneath this veil, as though nothing above it existed. The ancients called sense-centered people like this "serpents of the tree of knowledge." In the spiritual world they say that as they become fixed in their opinions, people like this close the deeper levels of their minds all the way to the nose. The nose means our sense of what is true, and that sense is lacking.

Now I need to describe what these people are like.

[2] They are exceptionally adroit and shrewd, ingenious debaters. They call their ingenuity and shrewdness intelligence and wisdom and see no evidence to the contrary. They look on people who differ from them as simple and stupid, especially if those people revere God and acknowledge divine providence. In the deeper principles of their minds--which they themselves know very little about--they are like the people called Machiavellians, people who trivialize murder, adultery, theft, and perjury as such. If they do argue against such crimes, it is only to be careful that their actual nature does not become obvious.

[3] As far as our life in this world is concerned, the thought that it might be different from that of animals never crosses their minds. They think of our life after death as a kind of living mist that rises up out of the corpse or the tomb and then sinks back down and dies. This insanity leads to the belief that spirits and angels are made of air. Any of these materialists who are obliged to believe in eternal life believe that this is what our souls are like. This means that our souls do not see, hear, or speak, that they are blind, deaf, and mute. All they do is think in their own bit of air. "How could the soul be anything more?" materialists ask. "Aren't the outer senses dead along with the body? We won't get them back until our souls are reunited with our bodies." They cling to these conclusions because they can think about the state of the soul after death only in physical terms, not in spiritual terms. Without their physical concepts they would have lost their belief in eternal life.

They particularly justify their own self-love, calling it the fire of life and the spur to the various useful activities in the state. This makes them their own idols; and their thoughts, being illusions based on illusions, are false images. Since they approve of the pleasures of their obsessions, they are satans and devils. We call them satans because they inwardly justify their obsessions with evil, and devils because they act them out.

[4] I have also been shown what the shrewdest sense-centered people are like. Their hell is deep down at the back, and they want to be unnoticed. So it looks as though they are flying around like ghosts (which are their hallucinations). They are called demons. Once some of them were let out of hell so that I could find out what they are like. They promptly attached themselves to my neck just below the base of my skull and from there moved into my feelings. They did not want to enter my thoughts, and adroitly evaded them. They altered my feelings one at a time, shifting my mood imperceptibly to its opposite, into obsessions with evil; and since they were not touching my thoughts at all, they would have distorted and inverted them without my noticing it if the Lord had not prevented it.

[5] That is what becomes of people who in this world do not believe there is any divine providence, and who pay close attention to others only to find out what their urges and desires are and in this way influence them until they have complete control over them. Since they do this so subtly and shrewdly that others are not aware of it, and since they keep the same nature after death, as soon as they arrive in the spiritual world they are dismissed into this hell. In heaven's light they seem to have no noses, and strange as it may seem, even though they are so shrewd, they are still more sense-centered and superficial than anyone else.

It is because the ancients called sense-centered people "serpents" and because people like this are more deft, shrewd, and clever at debating than others that it says, "The serpent was made shrewd beyond every beast of the field" (Genesis 3:1) and, "The Lord said, 'Be prudent as serpents and simple as doves'" (Matthew 10:16). So too the dragon, who is also called the old serpent, the devil, and satan [Revelation 20:2], is described as "having seven heads and ten crowns, and on the heads seven diadems" (Revelation 12:3, 9). The seven heads mean shrewdness, the ten horns the power of persuasion by distortions, and the seven diadems the holy values of the Word and the Church profaned.

  
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Thanks to the Swedenborg Foundation for the permission to use this translation.