The Chamber of Guf, Souls, Adam and Lilith

[Rocko52]

Hey everyone.

With a forum this old, I'm sure these topics have been discussed before in some fashion. I've been a very long-time lurker on here, before finally making an account after my recent bout of Eva-fever. First watched Eva back in 2013 when I was 14. Anyways I've been having some thoughts lately with regard to the Chamber of Guf, and some other Eva lore:


1. Doors and Chamber(s) of Guf:
First off. So we see the Chamber of Guf opened in End of Evangelion when Instrumentality begins during Third Impact, with the Souls of all Life on Earth (Lilith-derived life, the entire "natural" biological tree of life as we know it, which evolved from the primordial soup of LCL) flowing up through the Black Moon and into the Chamber through the "Doors of Guf" on Lilith's hands. We also hear talk of the Doors of Guf opening during Second Impact, presumably Adam also opened up her own Doors. I have several thoughts and questions about all of this.

What remains unknown to me is whether both Adam and Lilith's Doors of Guf lead to one singular Chamber of Guf, or if each possess their own distinct Chambers of Guf. The first option to me would imply the sharing of Souls by life derived from both Adam and Lilith, a fundamental same "essence" further rooting the tragic connections between the Angels and Humanity (and other life on Earth). Given that Angels and humans alike possess A.T. Fields which divide and define our individuality (ego, and crucially, soul) from others, I think that would make a lot of sense actually. If there were two distinct Chambers of Guf, that would make me wonder if the souls of each Seed were fundamentally distinct. Is there any kind of consensus on the Chamber of Guf or significant perspectives on it?

In either case, the Chamber of Guf does seem to be the source of all souls, and the Moons of the two Seeds seem to serve as a conduit for these souls into and out of physical being.

2. Number of Souls, Set and Finite or Infinite:
My second major question/thought is more about the actual nature of the Chamber of Guf. So okay, this is especially based on the only other explicit reference to Guf in the show, Ritsuko in Episode 23 talks of the Chamber of Guf being empty and that being why souls were needed for the Evangelions.

Whenever they first accessed the Chamber of Guf (or Chambers) to create life, did Adam and Lilith have a limited or fixed quantity of souls? Basically, does this mean "naturally" when a being dies, its soul is recycle for another being rather than a unique soul for that being? The Evangelions were artificial "humans" cloned of Adam, and had no natural or inherent soul. As Ritsuko said, "The Chamber of Guf was empty." I'm not sure whether this means that the Evangelions theoretically could be "born" with souls but the Chamber was just empty of souls to imbue them with, OR whether it means that because the Evas were artificially made by humanity and not creations/progeny of Adam or Lilith they could not be "born" with souls. This is why the naturally soulless Evangelions required the implanting of salvage souls.

So essentially were all souls finite and set since before Lilith opened her Doors of Guf and bled her LCL to birth the Primordial Soup, before Adam opened her Doors of Guf and somehow birthed the Angels? Do these souls recycle, or are there souls particular to each individual which may or may not pass on somewhere after bodily demise precluding an Impact event summoning them back to Guf?

(And also, even if there were souls in Guf, how would those ones be taken by Ritsuko and presumably NERV? This would have been post Second Impact, I'm not sure if it is ever said for how long SEELE and NERV have been in possession of Lilith, but I can't imagine the Chamber they might've tried to access would be through Lilith. Even while Adam had her Doors opened in Second Impact, they surely would not be still open or even accessible after Adam's body was reduced to an embryo and her soul rooted into Kaworu.)

3. Adam and Lilith, the Seeds:
One last major question/thought. Adam and Lilith while being designated "Angels" by SEELE and NERV, are quantitively completely different as they are the Seeds of Life and the bearers of the Fruits of Life and Knowledge respectively. While the Angels and Lilin alike (and indeed, all Lilith or Adam derived life) seem to possess souls proven by virtue of their A.T. Fields, neither Adam or Lilith are in any way reduced from bodily form by the Anti-A.T. Fields. In fact, the Anti-A.T. Fields of both Second and Third Impact were generated by one of the two Seeds. Is it then logical to presume neither Seed themselves has a soul?

Sorry if this stuff is boring or a retread for people.

[Berserker]

The idea of two doors of guf leading to a single chamber seems ambiguous to me as both of them originates in a distinctive place, by two mediums(seeds) of distinct sort, having dissimilar amount of soul in respective chamber according to dead sea scrolls, being the source of the souls of different life form bearing distinct fruit. Both Adam and Lilith having different guf, let's say, door of guf is canonical as the classified footage from the starting of DC ep 21 has someone mentioning the guf being opened, which was closed all those years from 1st impact. Adam's guf opened, angels started kicking in, while Lilith's one opened during Instrumentality, sucking in all Lilin life. The numbers of angels, could be interpreteted as the number of souls Adam's guf holds were specified in dead sea scrolls, which Nerv and Seele knew of. They also knew that Lilith's guf is gonna run out of souls, but rather it was given as a specific time as for the guf running out IMO since it would be really weird of something written in an apocrypha saying, after this amount of souls the chamber's gonna run out and this life form's gonna go extinct unless you do some ritual, namely instrumentality which would be involving in awakening the progenitor of your life form. Also the number's gonna be huge, really huge. The souls of the seeds doesn't necessarily have to be distinct, in nature or any perspective of that sort. They're basically the carrier of essence of life, namely primordial soup, distinct essense in case of different seed, having the goal of germinating a sterile planet. The whole individual classification thing for souls seems too bizarre to me, which doesn't necessarily have to interfare in the existence of two guf. The nature and distinctiveness of a life form in any extent depends on its biology. As for a consensus, this is most probably as far as we can all agree on, in general: https://wiki.evageeks.org/Guf#Nature_of_the_Guf

As for the number of souls, the statement "the chamber of guf is empty" could plausibly mean one thing, the amount of soul is limited, which also explains why the Evas don't have souls from their birth. Rei and Kaworu having one from birth is pretty self explanatory, as Rei got Lilith's partial (arguably whole) soul and Kaworu's got Adam's, in both case the reason is their birth during contact experiments. The idea of the souls being recycled and implanted in a new body naturally as whole new being after reincarnation is interesting(a classic Hinduism belief as far as I know), though which would need everything to be thought all over again from the beginning and would raise a lot of questions and result in new implications and hypotheses such as the Adam's guf could only holds one soul as it could be recycled into a new body after each one's physical death and wouldn't need more than one as we don't see two or so angels running over the places simultaneously. Resident souls of Evas are implanted through the contact experiment, a process which results in the donor/subject being totally merged with the one being contacted with, in this case Evas. The result of Yui's contact experiment was intentional by Yui, generally taken. Kyoko's one is arguable as it could be either the cause of the experiment going horribly wrong or the same as Yui. Both ways, something had gone wrong, intentionally or unwillingly. So for the implantation of souls in Evas, access of the guf via the seed isn't necessary at all, as you probably can yank a soul out of a recent dead body in eva-verse(according to some speculation of how extracting soul out of a body works in, again, eva-verse).

About the anti A.T field thing, if I say for some instances, shooting a cannonball out of a cannon doesn't damage the cannon itself, at least for a certain amount of time. Electromagnetic pulse generators don't fry themselves up when they generate the pulse. Sometimes, the epicenter of an earthquake or hurricane can be less affected than anything that's within its radius of destruction. So yeah, anything that causes something deleterious doesn't necessarily have to damage itself in the process. I believe there are infinite examples on this, some more efficacious ones than these, but these are the ones that came in top of my head right at the moment. The time MP Evas generated anti A.T field collectively in conjuction with Eva 1, it didn't make Shinji and Yui turn into LCL, although Eva 1 being at the epicenter of it. Eva 1 manifested 4(or 6. I can't remember) wings of light at the point, implying it didn't reach the same pseudo godlike state as GNR yet, still having no effect from the anti A.T field whatosever, again, at the moment the MP Evas started the anti A.T field burst. So if Eva 1 could handle it like it was nothing, it's self explanatory how the seeds did, being the ones who generated it in the first place. For info, it's stated that a certain type of power of the S2 engine creates the anti A.T field. The theory of the seeds lacking soul would create millions of question, mostly which wouldn't make sense at that point like who's soul Kaworu and Rei hold then and how can a soulless being go rogue like Lilith did and why would you need a Lance of Longinus to control a soulless being so on.

[Rocko52]

As a brief addendum for now, I feel very stupid for forgetting how explicitly Kaworu possesses Adam's soul...which very obviously means Adam has a soul, likewise with Rei and Lilith.

[StrokeMeGoat]

I presume Adam's Chamber of Guf contained individual souls for Herself and the Angels that are born, whereas Lilith's Guf either only contained two souls... one being Hers, the other being a singular soul that the first Lilin-based life form and then life forms wound up using to live and in the process of gestation and birthing their own offspring, produced the baby's soul within the womb on an individual case-by-case basis.

Rei's connection with Unit-01 is revealed to a greater degree in the Manga. Unit-01 is considered both a direct clone of and the only legitimate offspring of Lilith. Think of this like how a mother cell undergoes mitosis and the result is two daughter cells that are genetically identical to one another... the art pretty much confirms that this is the way Unit-01 is "birthed" on a larger scale. The contact experiment between Yui and Unit-01 results in the merging of Yui's soul with Unit-01, but somehow results in Lilith's soul being "salvaged"/transferred to a genetic clone of Yui in a process that mirrors and is the converse of Yui+Unit-01.

So, you have to ask, why is Lilith without a soul throughout the series until the middle of EoE, and how did her soul wind up in a clone of Yui after Yui made contact with Unit-01, which is a direct clone of Lilith? The answer is that Unit-01 inherited Lilith's soul, making Unit-01 not so much another Lilith as it was Rei in the form of an Eva. The reason that "only Rei was born with a soul" is that Rei inherited Lilith's soul, which was the only Soul actually contained within Lilith's Chamber of Guf, and anything not born of natural means but through artificial birth, such as Rei's clones, don't inherently possess souls because they aren't gestated in a Lilin womb or at the very least, not conceived of in a Lilin womb through the merging of a Lilin sperm and egg cell. The Chamber of Guf was already empty due to Lilith's soul being in Rei, so there were no other souls that could be "salvaged" into her clones without Rei or another human dying and being willing/capable of merging with another body. It's quite possible that only Lilith's soul is capable of doing this given the clones being composed of Particle-Wave Matter... or rather, it's only possible for a Seed of Life to do which explains why Adam/Kaworu and Lilith/Rei are the only two people ever to be clones with souls transferred into them.