Good one you can’t have your cake and eat it…

You are either drawing from Gnostic views or you aren’t…
As you rightly point out, mixing Gnostic views of the Eden tale and then turning around and incorporating those which you opposed in the first place is rather ludicrous

the classical Gnostics of course liked to turn things on their head and smash things down. Much like the Buddhists do.  However the idea was that through tearing down conventions and smashing things apart, it forced a person to THINK. It was about getting beyond the detritus and superfluous garbage, like how big Adam’s toe nails were and his age when he grew his first set of nostril hairs.

Eden then as everyone probably knows, became a tale of being trapped in a place of ignorance, by a false God. Sophia then humbled herself and acting as a syzgy (spelling Nazi please) making the serpent Sophia and Christ…informed Adam and Eve they were in ignorance… thus the fall becomes an act to escape ignorance and to return to Gnosis.

Of course in the end if you compare the standard story versus the Gnostic story of Eden we really have the same thing. It is a story about how mankind has to return to a former state of being. Or arguably it is about remembering….

But whatever your language and take, we can arguably see that the Eden tale has the same “resulting pattern.” We see this same pattern in the life of Christ and the Buddha of course. We see this in the Western Occult story of the life of Christian Rosenkreutz. For Gnostics we see this in the apocryphal tale (used to this day in India by Christians) found in the acts of Thomas, known as the Hymn of the Pearl or the Hymn of the robe of glory.

This cycle is three fold. Creation destruction redemption.
Again, depending on what tradition and what angle you are looking at, this three fold pattern is the same….For the hymn of the pearl we can summarize:

creation

a child is born into a special family

destruction
the child is restless and seeks adventure, he leaves the comfort and confines of his family. In so doing he forgets his family and who he is. He faces many trials and temptations.

Redemption

The child having faced trials, renounced temptation…returns home with his prize. His prize is to remember who he truly is…he has gained the Pearl.

…..

This is then, the story of Christ, Buddha and Christian Rosenkreutz, Aladdin and his magic lamp! And I am sure a great many others. Thus the Eden tale is far more than just a mere creation story, it is a universal motif than can be seen to be the very story of mankind itself and what we were, are and will be. Of course there are many ways to see the Eden tale.

Gnostics of course tended to not take their cosmology all that seriously. They understood that Edenic tales, such as “Hypostasis of the Archons” or “On the Origin of the World” etc were all ways of seeing things…in effect ways to understand things, not the things themselves. Gnostics tended to not be literalists. Mar Mani for example, the founder of the 1000 yr long running Heresy, the Manichaeans, refused to actually commit to answering the big questions. Despite what is stated online at the likes of WIKI websites, if one digs deep enough we find that Mani had no grand plan or cosmological picture. When pressed about the nature of the Universe, what is God’s nature, how many toe nails does Satan have…questions such as these, Mani refused to answer. As a Gnostic Mani knew such questions were unanswerable, any answer would merely be stating the position of an opinion, a stance, a model..A cosmological map. Maps and models after all are not the things they are portraying.

Seth of course was a rather important figure for many Gnostic groups, not just the so called Sethians.

It is I who am you, it is you who are me. Wherever you are, I am there. I am sown in all; you collect me from wherever you wish. And when you collect me, it is your own self that you collect.