A Few Quotes

[Dave]

There are a few lines that have been bothering me for a while. First off -

Ritsuko: "God in heaven, what sort of monster have we made this from?"
(Direct Translation) "My god, what sort of monster have we copied from?"

Evangelion unit 01 was created from Lilith, the creator of mankind. Therefore, unit 01 was created from the worst kind of monster - human beings. Rather ironic, no? Here's another I would like to discuss:

Gendou: "Correct. This is the first human being. This is Adam."
(Direct translation) "Correct. This is the first human being. Adam."

Kind of puts a damper on that whole 'Adam and Lilith are Alien seeds' shit doesn't it? Also, if Adam is the first human being, why did it create the angels? And don't give me none of that 'plot hole' shit, I want some real answers (or at least attempted ones).

[Phaze]

Gendou: "Correct. This is the first human being. This is Adam."
(Direct translation) "Correct. This is the first human being. Adam."

What's even odder is that Adam supposedly spreads life throughout the entire universe, making him an even less likely candidate for the first human. The only feasible explanation is that it was either figurative, and that Gendo was actually suggesting that Adam was the first source of life on earth, or something to that effect, or it was simply a code word (Was he trying to mislead Kaji? Perhaps Gendo had also intentionally mislead Kaji into believing that Lilith was actually Adam, otherwise Kaji might have had figured out his plans to initiate Third Impact).

One other thing I would like to mention, although it is clearly not the answer, is that Manga Entertainment had mistranslated one of Misato's lines, (About humans all coming from Lilith, just as Adam did) and if that had been accurate, Adam would technically be the first human, prehaps Eva's staff had also got mixed up there?

[ChronoX]

There are a few lines that have been bothering me for a while. First off -
Gendou: "Correct. This is the first human being. This is Adam."
(Direct translation) "Correct. This is the first human being. Adam."

Kind of puts a damper on that whole 'Adam and Lilith are Alien seeds' shit doesn't it? Also, if Adam is the first human being, why did it create the angels? And don't give me none of that 'plot hole' shit, I want some real answers (or at least attempted ones).

if adam was the first human, wiuldn't lilth be the first female and where is eve in all of this

[Phaze]

if adam was the first human, wiuldn't lilth be the first female and where is eve in all of this

This goes back to Bible mythology, originally, both Lilith and an unnamed virgin had been rejected by Adam before God created Eve.

[ChronoX]

ok, thanks cause i was really confused about that one. but that strikes another question, why was she rejected and did lilith want revenge for her rejection??

[Phaze]

ok, thanks cause i was really confused about that one. but that strikes another question, why was she rejected and did lilith want revenge for her rejection??

She was rejected because, during sex, she wanted dominance on top. As for the second woman, Adam witnessed her creation, and witnessed all her insides and liquids and such enter her body, and in disgust, rejected her.

did lilith want revenge for her rejection??

Sort of, she was also meant to have given birth to a race of demons, and in Eva humans are the demons (or "Lilim").

[ChronoX]

ok, but then who gave birth to the angels, eve??

[Phaze]

ok, but then who gave birth to the angels, eve??

Adam. Eve doesn't exist storywise, unless you count Eva, which I remember hearing is Greek for "Eve". The unnamed virgin doesn't exist storywise either.

[ChronoX]

ok. im out of questions now, finally

[Shin-seiki]

Kind of puts a damper on that whole 'Adam and Lilith are Alien seeds' shit doesn't it? Also, if Adam is the first human being, why did it create the angels? And don't give me none of that 'plot hole' shit, I want some real answers (or at least attempted ones).

Since that whole 'Adam and Lilith are Alien seeds' business comes straight from Anno himself, I would hardly characterize it as ****; it's 100% canon. As for what is actually meant by "the first human being", I would say Gendo is either a: speaking metaphorically; or b: BSing Kaji, or c: As Sharp-kun suggests on this thread over on AN, perhaps Anno hadn't quite sorted out the whole Adam/Lilith deal, (cuz Lilith isn't even mentioned until #24), so perhaps at that point, maybe he did intend that humans derived from Adam.

[Dave]

Erm... Anno wrote that Alien seed description thing in that video game? Sorry, but after watching the series countless times, I just can't believe that's the background Anno was running off of at the time.

[Shin-seiki]

Erm... Anno wrote that Alien seed description thing in that video game? Sorry, but after watching the series countless times, I just can't believe that's the background Anno was running off of at the time.

The idea, that Adam and Lilith are beings that arrived on Earth at the time of the First or "Giant" Impact 4 billion years ago in spherical, artificial structures (the first Geofront in Antartica i.e. the White Moon of Adam, and the second Geofront at Hakone, Japan i.e. the Black Moon of Lilith) of presumably extra-terrestrial origin, is certainly present in the series, at least in the Director's Cut episodes; have you taken a good look at this shot from #21':



Note that it is identified as GF-01 (Geofront 1), and what it says at the lower right: Possibly created at the time of Giant Impact, and Surface structure clearly artificial.

There are similar hints that the 2nd Geofront in Japan is of artificial, i.e. non-human origin:
#21':
Fuyutsuki [in amazement at his first look at the Geofront]:
What is this?

Gendo:
A cavern left behind by someone, who was not us.
Though eighty-nine percent of it is buried.

Fuyutsuki:
An underground cavern that was originally a neat spherical shape...
Is this the same as the underground cavern at the South pole?!

Gendo:
The data from them are virtually identical.

[Dave]

Once again, I can not bring myself to believe that those 'moon's were created as things sent by some alien race to populate Earth. Perhaps I am just too attached to the whole 'Evangelion IS religious' idea. Hell, I don't even think Anno coming up to me and saying: "this is exactly what I had in mind you idiot!" would let me believe that. But then again, creating a work of art is a lot like raising a child. Whatever your intentions, the end result is never what you imagined.

[Reichu]

Evangelion unit 01 was created from Lilith, the creator of mankind. Therefore, unit 01 was created from the worst kind of monster - human beings. Rather ironic, no?

While EVA-01 is the sole Eva created using Lilith, there's actually no reason why she still can't be the same as other Evas in being Adam-derived. See my theory on the matter here.

Once again, I can not bring myself to believe that those 'moon's were created as things sent by some alien race to populate Earth. Perhaps I am just too attached to the whole 'Evangelion IS religious' idea.

Why not? I started to predict that Adam and Lilith were created by an alien race before NGE2 came out, so it was hardly a surprise when it turned out to be the truth. NGE is sci-fi that uses religious elements. There are statements from the creators that refute the idea that the religious content has any actual religious meaning; but you probably wouldn't buy those, either.

This goes back to Bible mythology, originally, both Lilith and an unnamed virgin had been rejected by Adam before God created Eve.

Lilith has nothing to do with the Bible. While the concept of Lilith as a demoness of a night is much older, she first appeared as Adam's first wife in The Alphabet of Ben Sira. Although this is not even a rabbinic work, and is even considered by some to be anti-Semitic, the story of Lilith has nonetheless become ingrained in Jewish tradition and even appears in the Haggadah.

As for the other lady, I can't remember where that story comes from...

[Carl Horn]

I don't know much about geology, but if objects had arrived on Earth at the time of the First Impact (several billion years in the past) it seems very likely to me they got moved around quite a bit in the interm, in the shift of layers of rock strata, not to mention the breakup and move of entire continents. So Hakone and Mt. Markham would be more like where they ended up, rather than where they started.

I think some of the discomfort in saying EVA is "actually" an SF story rather than a "religious" story depends on interpretation. You know, in some ways EVA's use of scientific terminology is as much "window dressing" as its use of religious terminology. That is, I don't think EVA is a hard-SF series any more than it is a reflection of orthodox religion. Just as cannons firing positrons would be a most unwise weapon to use in Earth's atmosphere, our current understanding of evolution requires no such beings as Adam and Lilith--any more than it requires a Garden of Eden.

Well, of course, EVA is fiction, but it's a show of miracles, signs, and wonders that we take for granted as viewers. If you want to know how a jet plane or a computer works, how it is built, what scientific principles underlie their construction, you can do that. Not so the Evangelion Units and the Angels as seen in any typical fight, let alone the apocalyptic events of THE END. How, even, do the Angels float in the air? You can say it's anti-gravity, but how does that work? Or you could say they're favoring a wave over a particle form, but how does *that* work?

Arthur C. Clarke famously said that sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic, but you could also say "from miracles." We live in a civilization built from science more than faith, so we're more comfortable, perhaps, giving things scientific rather than prophetic sounding terms. But using the terms doesn't necessarily make the science real, any more than saying "Their rings were full of eyes round about them four," or "His face was as it were the sun, and his feet as pillars of fire," makes what the prophecies of Ezekiel and Revelation said about angels real.

If you make a show full of things as wonderous, ancient, and mysterious as miracle of the Bible, you can't just pat yourself on the back and say, "But of course, we don't believe in all that ridiculous RELIGIOUS talk! We believe in this, uh, ridiculous, SCIENTIFIC talk!"

(I'm not putting down EVA, as I've always been most affected by the human, emotional, psychological dimensions of the show, which are true regardless of the series' "background," just as people's spiritual reaction to things said in the Bible is genuine regardless of whether such events in it literally occurred. Gainax is also quite capable of making both a genuine hard-SF anime *and* one which deals seriously with religious faith--ROYAL SPACE FORCE. Like EVA, however, it also has as its theme the problem of alienation).

[bp32]

Once again, I can not bring myself to believe that those 'moon's were created as things sent by some alien race to populate Earth. Perhaps I am just too attached to the whole 'Evangelion IS religious' idea. Hell, I don't even think Anno coming up to me and saying: "this is exactly what I had in mind you idiot!" would let me believe that. But then again, creating a work of art is a lot like raising a child. Whatever your intentions, the end result is never what you imagined.

But that is the problem--Eva was never meant to be religious--the religious symbols and story was just "cool" and "different" for the Japanese audience which is why Anno picked them. Especially when you think of Anno's message--man is responsible for his own happiness, NOT some being or some place called heaven--we make our own happiness, our own heaven--no one or thing makes it for us.

In the world of Eva some people may think that the Angels and third impact is rooted in religion, but I think it is just there to show how humans typically attribute things beyond their immediate comprehension to something mystical and otherworldly. For Seele (and whomever wrote the scrolls), these creatures and instrumentality and our creation was a religious phenomenon, but in actuality it was the result of a very real (meaning flesh and blood) advanced race. As the story goes only one supreme organism (Adam OR Lilith) was supposed to occupy and populate each planet--however, buy mistake they both fell to earth and spawned incompatible specie.

[Carl Horn]

Once again, I can not bring myself to believe that those 'moon's were created as things sent by some alien race to populate Earth. Perhaps I am just too attached to the whole 'Evangelion IS religious' idea. Hell, I don't even think Anno coming up to me and saying: "this is exactly what I had in mind you idiot!" would let me believe that. But then again, creating a work of art is a lot like raising a child. Whatever your intentions, the end result is never what you imagined.

But that is the problem--Eva was never meant to be religious--the religious symbols and story was just "cool" and "different" for the Japanese audience which is why Anno picked them. Especially when you think of Anno's message--man is responsible for his own happiness, NOT some being or some place called heaven--we make our own happiness, our own heaven--no one or thing makes it for us.


------------------------------------

The conflict you describe is also the conflict between the TV ending, which has the minimalism of a stage play and emphasizes psychology, and the movie ending, which feels like a big-budget action extravaganza where you literally get to see images resembling the Battle of Armageddon and the Rapture. Jesus told people, "The kingdom of heaven is within you" (Asuka would have added "...you idiot"), but also talked about hell, judgement, and tribulation to come. The TV ending was like Jesus telling parables; the movie ending was like the book of Revelation.

My point is that "man is responsible for his own happiness" is true, but a message that seems to get somewhat diminished under the weight of Evas, Angels, black moons, Spears of Longinus--not to mention the Instrumentality Project, whose premise implies the human race must (somehow) spiritually or psychically unite in a true and literal sense before we can find true happiness. How the heck are we supposed to do that? If the movie and the director's cut material is merely a gloss on the core truth of the TV ending, why bother with all the apocalyptic battles, the transfigurations, the rituals, the terms?

It's not merely that Anno chose to use terms and imagery from religion; he also chose to write a series full of miracles and secrets far outside our understanding of science. If you say that the beginning and end of man's fate will be largely determined by something aliens did billions of years ago, man is about as "responsible" as he is if his story begins in the Garden of Eden and ends in the Valley of Megiddo. One can say that EVA's story isn't that of a religion, that it's SF. But it seems that the only practical difference is that EVA doesn't have God, and therefore you never need worry about being watched as you jerk it to Asuka.

[Dave]

It's not merely that Anno chose to use terms and imagery from religion; he also chose to write a series full of miracles and secrets far outside our understanding of science. If you say that the beginning and end of man's fate will be largely determined by something aliens did billions of years ago, man is about as "responsible" as he is if his story begins in the Garden of Eden and ends in the Valley of Megiddo. One can say that EVA's story isn't that of a religion, that it's SF. But it seems that the only practical difference is that EVA doesn't have God, and therefore you never need worry about being watched as you jerk it to Asuka.

Agree wholeheartedly. Perhaps that is what I was getting at... perhaps not. Either way, what you said makes perfect sense to me. All you non-believers, take this mans words to heart!

[bp32]

It's not merely that Anno chose to use terms and imagery from religion; he also chose to write a series full of miracles and secrets far outside our understanding of science. If you say that the beginning and end of man's fate will be largely determined by something aliens did billions of years ago, man is about as "responsible" as he is if his story begins in the Garden of Eden and ends in the Valley of Megiddo. One can say that EVA's story isn't that of a religion, that it's SF. But it seems that the only practical difference is that EVA doesn't have God, and therefore you never need worry about being watched as you jerk it to Asuka.

Agree wholeheartedly. Perhaps that is what I was getting at... perhaps not. Either way, what you said makes perfect sense to me. All you non-believers, take this mans words to heart!

Sorry, I am a non-believer extrodonaire :) Seriously though, I can see what you are saying--I guess for me I tend to cut through the symbols, etc. and simply see the idea about man is responsible for his own destiny, his own happiness. I would disagree with the notion stated by Carl that Aliens deteremined our fate millions of years ago--the fact that two life forms ended up on the same planet was an accident, therefore aliens didn't determine anything--it is an accident of history, an unintended consequence--now Seele and the crew see history as having an endpoint--a preordained destination. But I think Anno's point was that this was bullsh*t--transforming humanity into an ego-less blob doesn't get us anywhere--pain is a part of life and neccessary for us to feel in a meaningful way--being sentient means being exposed to both pleasure and pain. That is life and we shouldn't try to escape it--it is the lesson Anno learned and (I feel) what he was trying to teach all of us---but, again, its just my opinion

[Carl Horn]

It's not merely that Anno chose to use terms and imagery from religion; he also chose to write a series full of miracles and secrets far outside our understanding of science. If you say that the beginning and end of man's fate will be largely determined by something aliens did billions of years ago, man is about as "responsible" as he is if his story begins in the Garden of Eden and ends in the Valley of Megiddo. One can say that EVA's story isn't that of a religion, that it's SF. But it seems that the only practical difference is that EVA doesn't have God, and therefore you never need worry about being watched as you jerk it to Asuka.

Agree wholeheartedly. Perhaps that is what I was getting at... perhaps not. Either way, what you said makes perfect sense to me. All you non-believers, take this mans words to heart!

Sorry, I am a non-believer extrodonaire :) Seriously though, I can see what you are saying--I guess for me I tend to cut through the symbols, etc. and simply see the idea about man is responsible for his own destiny, his own happiness. I would disagree with the notion stated by Carl that Aliens deteremined our fate millions of years ago--the fact that two life forms ended up on the same planet was an accident, therefore aliens didn't determine anything--it is an accident of history, an unintended consequence--now Seele and the crew see history as having an endpoint--a preordained destination.



But I think Anno's point was that this was bullsh*t--transforming humanity into an ego-less blob doesn't get us anywhere--pain is a part of life and neccessary for us to feel in a meaningful way--being sentient means being exposed to both pleasure and pain. That is life and we shouldn't try to escape it--it is the lesson Anno learned and (I feel) what he was trying to teach all of us---but, again, its just my opinion

I don't necessarily disagree with you, although I think fate can be out of our hands due to accident, too--like if a powerful meteor strike really did devastate us without warning, it would still be an accident, but our history would be just as over. I think you're right that we see considerable conflict in EVA over visions of human destiny; but the point is, EVA shows us a world where, even if you *shouldn't* bring about the end of the world, it is *possible* to do so.

In other words, the very fact that something like the Instrumentality Project can be attempted in EVA, that the Geofront exists in EVA, that the Angels exist in EVA, suggest that much of what we know about the "real world" is wrong. In this sense, the unrealism of what EVA actually does goes against the value of what it says.

The TV ending lacks this "problem" (I put it in quotes because I highly respect the movie ending as well), because it comes out and says the previous 24 episodes were just an anime show, so not only was the plot unreal, the show itself was in a sense unreal--or, perhaps, that the things you thought were important about the show were unreal. The sense of the "plot" and "mystery" and "secrets" of EVA being metaphors for something real is present in the film, too, but much more present and immediate in the TV ending.