What is Seele?

[AWinters]

I thought Seele was an end of the world cult with too much power based in Germany and communicating through hologram speakers... then I saw in End of Evangelion that when Keel turned to sludge, (unlike everyone else) there were remains left behind - his spine, clothing and electrical cables and components!!
What the hell was he?? This makes me question what all the members are as we never see them.

When Kaworu spoke to them on the lake, the sound projectors were only visible to him.
This means they can manifest anywhere and be visible only to whoever they choose. So, they have superhuman abilities.

Is this something that has been answered by the creators or is it still open to interpretation?

[Blockio]

The stuff that was left behind were simply implants; Keel is implied to be a very old man who without them would have long died from all sorts of organ failures

[C.T.1290]

They are basically a secret organization that has power over the U.N. and funds NERV. And they were the ones behind the machinations of the Human Instrumentality project, and were responsible for the Second Impact. Since they got their hands on the Dead Sea Scrolls, they manipulated everyone behind the curtains through their scenarios that predicted what will happen, including the list of Angels they must defeat to get to their intended goal, which is the initiation of the Third Impact, and they developed the Evangelions for that purpose.

As for Keel Lorenz, he was basically a cyborg. Don’t know how he really became this way, but he was really old.

That’s the best knowledge of them I can come up with.

[AWinters]

Any ideas how they're able to project wherever they want and can choose to be visible only to selected people?
The Kaworu episode confused the hell out of me for this reason. It just intensified the question "what the hell ARE Seele?"

[Reichu]

Any ideas how they're able to project wherever they want and can choose to be visible only to selected people?
The Kaworu episode confused the hell out of me for this reason. It just intensified the question "what the hell ARE Seele?"

Episode 24' (the "Kaworu episode") is probably doing a mindscrew. In all likelihood, the monoliths are supposed to represent both Seele and the dead Angels at the same time. See more here. Seele would logically have discussed their plans with Kaworu before he left Germany, so what's happening in the scene is that the Angels are communicating with Kaworu using these memories, which is typical of communications involving (non-Kaworu) children of Adam. Leliel used Shinji's memories, Arael used Asuka's memories, Armisael used Rei's memories (even Rei's deeply buried memories of being Lilith are coded into the encounter), and so on. This would produce two different ways to read the scene: the "original" conversation between Kaworu and Seele, and the current conversation between Kaworu and the dead Angels. Of course, the script opts to use the sort of language that makes decoding these two 'versions" as obnoxious as humanly possible...

[AWinters]

Here's a really "out there" thought:
Is it possible that Seele ARE angels?

[Reichu]

It's not too out there -- they're Lilin, therefore a part of the 18th Angel.

But in terms of them being Adam's Children or something, nah. Seele are just -- in NGE, anyway -- your standard cult of powerful old men who secretly rule the world and believe some pretty weird stuff. Their cultish beliefs prompted them to fund the discovery of Adam -- Adam, mother of Angels, who had been frozen by the Spear of Longinus for billions of years, which let Lilith-based life conquer Earth in place of the "true successors from the White Moon" -- and trigger the incubation of the Angels by initiating Second Impact. The reason the Angels start to show up a convenient fifteen years after Second Impact is because 2I is when Adam opened her Gates of Guf and gave the Angels souls. Even if their bodies had existed prior to that point, lying around as soulless eggs or something (like, say, before Adam got speared she was working on a giant clutch that she could dump souls into all at once; Earth was a molten shithole at the time so it's not like she had any reason to rush, either), they weren't spiritually alive. Adam's Children couldn't have been infiltrating world governments before Second Impact because that worldwide cult is what enabled the Angels to be born in the first place.

There are many other reasons why the idea makes no real sense -- you can probably think of a few.

As per the post I linked, the fact that there's the wrong number of monoliths (in that scene, and ONLY in that scene), only Kaworu can see and hear them, he's inexplicably going to the lake-crater where Armisael (would-be resurrector of the Angels) was killed to have this conversation that he logically would have had before being dispatched into a hostile "enemy territory" -- those all scream "there's something very strange going on here". Kaworu standing on a statue that partly represents his true nature as Adam, Seele being German for "soul", and monoliths being used elsewhere in NGE as grave-markers makes the intention all the more clear IMO. The dialogue in that scene is also really weird even by Eva standards. "There is a man who isn't one of us" -- interesting how that and many of the other lines seem deliberately phrased so that they'd make sense whether Seele or an Angel was saying it.

[Analyzor]

We know that Kaworu and Rei are almost the same: Human body with a Seeds soul. We also know that Rei 'shows up' at the start of the anime and at the end of EoE; so my theory is they may have some sort of powers alowing them to fly and project themselves somewhere, and that would explain how he was able to speak with SEELE without Misato seeing them.

Another explaination is, SEELE showed up in a way only Kaworu could see them. He is not a simple human, he can sense as he did with Misato.

[AWinters]

That's a fantastic explanation of how the 2nd Impact gave souls to the rest of the Angels, it clears it up a bit.

When Seele asserted that the spawns of the white moon were the rightful successors, I got the impression that they were bullshitting Kaworu, trying to sound like they're on his side and devising a plan for his benefit. I believe that was a totally dishonest conversation they had.

Another thought had crossed my mind: what if the members of Seele don't actually have human bodies? Maybe that's why we only ever see one of them who turned out to be some kind of Cyborg all along. Might the speakers themselves actually be machines that their souls have been transferred into?
Or maybe at the other end of the speakers, they're just brains in jars of LCL with wires sticking out

I'm getting carried away...

[AWinters]

Something just occurred to me:

What we know about Seele on the surface is that they're 12 rich old men with money, power and a lot of hidden political influence.
They're an "inner circle" of a society and only they know the FULL truth while the outer circle do their dirty work. They're religious fanatics who are preparing for the end of the world and their ultimate goal is to become gods.

This is also a description of the Mormon "Quorum of Twelve".
Potential influence?
(As an ex Mormon, I should've realised sooner that this sounded way too familiar).

[Analyzor]

Something just occurred to me:

What we know about Seele on the surface is that they're 12 rich old men with money, power and a lot of hidden political influence.
They're an "inner circle" of a society and only they know the FULL truth while the outer circle do their dirty work. They're religious fanatics who are preparing for the end of the world and their ultimate goal is to become gods.

This is also a description of the Mormon "Quorum of Twelve".
Potential influence?
(As an ex Mormon, I should've realised sooner that this sounded way too familiar).

https://wiki.evageeks.org/FGC:OP_B

https://www.crystalinks.com/dss.html

In the storyboards, not only does the logo look slightly different, it is said to belong not to Seele, but “Essene”. Considering the timing issues Wigs mentioned back in 001a, it seems odd that the name of the collective baddies hadn't been decided yet — but, then, Seele is not even mentioned until episode #14 (we are only dealing with the Instrumentality Committee before then). Interestingly, "Essene" is actually quite a bit more meaningful than “Seele”… Some quick Googling yielded the following:

The Essene brotherhood had its inception at the time of Melchizedek, the great spiritual master who lived on this planet around 1973 B. C. and was the incarnation of Jesus. … The development of the Essene brotherhood over the next two thousand years is embodied in the development of the Jewish religion. The Essenes were a Jewish sect representing an esoteric aspect of Judaism, or Jewish mysticism. The Jewish mystics studied the Kabbalah, which taught belief in reincarnation, astrology, channeling, prophecy, soul travel, psychic development, and angels, and which organized itself around the Tree of Life. (Source)

Hmm, any of that sound familiar? Also interesting is that the Essenes are often credited with the actual creation of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

It is fun to theorize which, if any, real-life occult organizations Seele is supposed to be, and this, even though it was changed in the end, provides the most “definitive” answer we are going to get. Ever since I made this finding, I've become increasingly fond of the idea that Seele represents a modern-day incarnation of the Essene: a radical Kabbalist sect mutated by the discovery of real-life "supernatural" beings and artifacts that provide tangible justification for their "faith"... and provide a means to attain the goals set forth within their "sacred texts".