The serpent in Genesis is good.
o the Necessity that whirls life through its cycles tempted matter, the woman, first and she in turn tempted man, and together they were driven down out of the celestial Paradise - to toil on earth. But why the symbol of temptation? Again a misguided theology has worked ruin with a hidden symbolism. Both in the Old Testament and in Jesus’ life the myth of temptation has been involved in grossly unwarranted morally evil connotations, as if forsooth God aimed deliberately to trap man and cause his "fall". The Good Law of life has no intent to "tempt" man, but it does have the very definite intent to "try" him out against resistance, in this case furnished by the inertia of matter. He does intend to pit unevolved powers of consciousness against opposition which is exactly calculated to arouse latent capacity to function. "Temptation" should really be thought of in the form of "tentation" as from the Latin "tento", to try, try out, test. We are sent here to meet enough opposition to make us grow.
And how does the Serpent of Life tempt man to incarnate? Through the proffered gift of the juice of the fruit of the Tree of Life and Knowledge held in the hand of the Woman. Here again is a symbolic rock over which theology has stumbled most outrageously and been tossed into next to loutish stupidity. And all because it was not known that Jehovah, as feminine, represented the natural forces into which the soul is represented as being lured, as a bit of poetic imagery. Now for the first time it becomes clear why these Jehovah powers, non-sentient, non-intelligent, purely material energies, balk at forming man as a spiritual being, and refuse to sanction his drinking of the juice of the fruit of the forbidden Tree which the Woman, physical life, holds out to lure him. The reason is obvious and clear. They could not! They could not endow man with the intellectual faculties or capacities which they themselves did not possess! Their recalcitrancy in undertaking to frame spiritual man is unmistakably shown by their statement of disinclination to make man capable of becoming equal to the gods. They disclaimed responsibility for the venture.
New Lectures on the Ancient Wisdom--No 7.