“The Alexandrian Gnostics have sufficiently divulged the secret of initiations, and their records are full of “the sliding down of Aeons” in their double qualification of Angelic Beings and Periods: the one the natural evolution of the other.
Oriental traditions are as full of allegories about the downfall of Pleroma, of that of the gods and devas.
One and all, they allegorized and explained the FALL as the desire to learn and acquire knowledge – to KNOW.
This is the natural sequence of mental evolution, the spiritual becoming transmuted into the material or physical.
The same law of descent into materiality and re-ascent into spirituality asserted itself during the Christian era, the reaction having stopped only just now, in our own special sub-race.”
H. P. Blavatsky
The Mark Of God: Understanding Your "I AM Presence" 