The Archons Conspire Against Adam

When they gazed down, they realized that his intellect surpassed (their own), and they convened in counsel together with the group of archons and all angels. They took fire and earth and water, and combined them with each other together with the four fiery winds, and they worked them together and made a loud commotion, and they took him into the shadow of death, so that they could once more shape him from earth and water and fire and wind, the one whose origin is in matter, which is the ignorance of darkness and lust and their false spirit. This is the tomb for the mold of the body that the robbers used to clothe the man, the chain of oblivion, and he became a mortal man. This is the first one who descended, and the first division, but Reflection of Light, who dwelt inside him, she roused his intellect. Further, the archons brought him and placed him in paradise, and they said to him, ‘Eat,’ meaning, ‘in laziness,’ because their delight is surely bitter, and their beauty is degenerate, but their delight is trickery, and their trees are godlessness, and their fruit is an untreatable poison, and their promise is mortality. However, they had placed their tree of life in the middle of paradise, and I will teach all of you the mystery of their life, which is the plot they concocted together, which is the likeness of their spirit. Its root is bitter and its branches are mortality, its shadow is odium, and trickery dwells inside its leaves, and its blossom is the evil anointing, and its fruit is mortality, and lust is its seed, and it buds in the darkness.⁠a Those who taste of it, their dwelling place is Hades, and the darkness is their resting place. However, so that he could not gaze up toward his perfection nor realize the shame of his nudity, they remained in front of what they call ‘the tree of the knowledge of good and evil,’ being Reflection of Light. I was the one, however, who caused them to eat.” I also asked the savior: “Lord, was it not the serpent that instructed Adam to eat?” The savior grinned and said: “The serpent instructed them to eat of the evil of sexual lust and destruction, so that he could exploit him. Further, he was aware that he was disobedient to him because of Reflection of Light that dwells in him, which caused his intellect to be more accurate than the chief archon, and he desired to extract the power he had himself given to him, and he caused a ‘trance’ to overcome Adam.” I further asked the savior: “What is the ‘trance’?” He, however, said: “It is not what Moses wrote, nor what you have heard, because he said in his first book, ‘He caused him to sleep’; instead, (he caused his) perception (to sleep), because in fact he said through the prophet: ‘I will cause their hearts to be heavy, so that they do not pay attention and do not see.’