Motherhood in the Second Garden

The Papers say less about these mothers than the suggestion you heard assumes.

Here is the passage: “Eve was made the head of a commission of twelve on race improvement, and before Adam died this commission had selected 1,682 of the highest type of women on Urantia, and these women were impregnated with the Adamic life plasm.” (76:4.8) The method is not described. The idea that these women died in childbirth comes from outside the text. The record follows the children: “Their children all grew up to maturity except 112,” and “These children were born and reared in the tribal surroundings of their respective mothers.” (76:4.8) That last line reads most naturally as children growing up among their mothers’ own people. It fits surviving mothers, though it stops short of saying so.

Laotta’s death is stated plainly: “Laotta, the mother of Sansa, perished at the birth of her daughter; Eve suffered much but survived, owing to superior strength.” (76:0.2) Both Cain and Sansa were of Adamic and Nodite parentage. A later passage adds: “Eve did not suffer pain in childbirth; neither did the early evolutionary races. Only the mixed races produced by the union of evolutionary man with the Nodites and later with the Adamites suffered the severe pangs of childbirth.” (76:4.2) The two passages sit in tension, since Eve “suffered much” with Cain. One reading is that 76:4.2 describes her pure-line births, while Cain’s birth followed the mixed pattern. The Papers do not reconcile the two.

For the 1,682 mothers, 76:4.2 is the relevant passage. Theirs were mixed-line births, the category the Papers associate with severe pangs. Pain and death are different outcomes, and the Papers report neither for these women.

Caesarean delivery is never mentioned. The early surgery the Papers describe is trephining, setting fractures, and opening abscesses, and “the shamanesses became adept at midwifery” (90:4.4). That passage concerns evolutionary medicine, and whether Adam and Eve brought obstetric knowledge from Jerusem is not disclosed. I would hold the Caesarean idea loosely. Nothing in the text points to it, and your hope that the mothers survived stands without it.

The strongest support for your view is Eve herself. She headed the commission. She had nearly died in a mixed-line birth, and she took Laotta’s motherless daughter “to her bosom” (76:0.2). A commission led by a woman with that experience had every reason to guard the mothers’ lives. That is my reflection on the text; the Papers leave the outcome open. They also do not record how the women regarded their selection.

The Papers place fandors at the first Garden. On their third day, Adam and Eve viewed Eden from the air: “From the large passenger birds—the fandors—Adam and Eve looked down upon the vast stretches of the Garden” (74:3.4). On the seventh day, “the passenger birds were swiftly winging to bring them to the temple” (74:4.4). The second garden has no mention of them.

The extinction date leaves the question open. Bon’s group trained the fandors as passenger birds, “but they became extinct more than thirty thousand years ago.” (66:5.6) Adam arrived 37,848 years before 1934 (74:0.1) and lived 530 years (76:5.5), so the commission worked roughly 37,300 to 37,800 years ago. That falls inside “more than thirty thousand,” so the birds may or may not have survived into the second-garden period.

The exodus points toward ground travel. The caravan took “almost a full year” to reach the Euphrates (76:1.1) and brought “extensive herds and some of all the domesticated animals” (76:3.6). Fandors are not listed among them. Silence is not proof of absence, but nothing places the birds with Adam after the default.

Your question also assumes the women came to the Garden. The text says the mothers “were selected from all the surrounding tribes” and that “These children were born and reared in the tribal surroundings of their respective mothers.” (76:4.8) Where the women were impregnated is not stated. “Surrounding tribes” suggests they lived nearby, which would make long-distance transport unnecessary.

If fandors were still available, they could have carried the women. The general description of such birds is that they could “carry one or two average-sized men for a nonstop flight of over five hundred miles” (52:1.5). The idea fits the capability, but the second-garden narrative never mentions the birds, and the mothers came from nearby. I would leave it as an open possibility the text neither supports nor rules out.

You are right about “surrounding.” The Papers use the word with a wide reach: Kenan “instituted the foreign missionary service to the surrounding tribes, near and far.” (76:3.4) I read too much proximity into it.

The Papers give a world survey dated “thirty-five thousand years ago” (78:1.2), within a few centuries of the commission’s work. Combined with the Nodite locations in Paper 73, the picture around the second garden looks like this. The distances are my rough modern straight-line estimates from central Mesopotamia, outside the Papers, and ancient coastlines differed.

No pure orange or green people existed anywhere. The orange race “ceased to exist about one hundred thousand years ago” (64:6.13), and the green race was absorbed by the yellow, blue, Indian, and indigo peoples (see 64:6.18–20). Their strains survived only in blends.

Most of the diversity close to the garden was carried inside the Nodites. They “had freely mated with the Sangik races” (73:1.6), and Cain’s Nodite father was of a race “admixed with the blue and the red man and with the aboriginal Andonic stock.” (76:2.4) Within about 500 miles, the commission could find Nodites in three groups, Nodite-Amadonite mixtures, and the Mediterranean blends at the western edge. Distinct yellow, indigo, and Andonite peoples, and India’s every-race mixture, lay 800 miles or more away.

This fits 76:4.8 in two ways. The majority “were chosen from the highest strains of the Nodites,” and that stock was close at hand. But the mothers also “represented most of the races on earth.” If that phrase means distinct racial peoples rather than strains within the Nodite mixture, some women came from far off. In that case your fandor question carries more weight: at “over five hundred miles” per flight (52:1.5), Elam, Syria, and the Caspian were one flight away, and India and Turkestan two or three. The Papers do not say how the distant mothers were reached, or whether any were.

The Papers do not describe tribespeople visiting the second garden to learn. The record runs the other way. When Adam’s caravan approached, the inhabitants “fled in haste to the eastern mountains” (76:1.2). The territory was protected by a defense wall fifty-six miles long (see 76:1.3), and the Adamites were “the greatly feared tribe of Adam” (76:2.8). Teaching went outward: Kenan “instituted the foreign missionary service to the surrounding tribes, near and far.” (76:3.4) The Sethite priests taught “in the schools of the garden” (76:3.5), but the Papers do not say who attended. Whether the mothers knew the garden’s teachings beforehand is also unstated. If Kenan’s missions were active before Adam’s death, some of them could have, but the Papers do not date the missions relative to the commission.

The Papers do describe the plan on normal worlds, and it speaks to several of your points. The Prince’s staff proclaims the program, and qualified candidates “may proceed to the Garden of Eden and be there chosen” (51:5.2). They come for “voluntary mating,” and “on most worlds it is considered the highest honor to be selected” (51:5.3). The children of these unions “are educated and trained in the schools of the Planetary Prince and then are permitted to go forth to the race of their evolutionary parent” (51:5.5). A normal world provides public announcement, consent, honor, and schooling before the children go out.

Urantia departed from that plan at each point the text records. “On normal worlds the Planetary Adam and Eve never mate with the evolutionary races” (51:5.3); here the life plasm was Adam’s own. And the children “were born and reared in the tribal surroundings of their respective mothers.” (76:4.8) That sentence places the births among the mothers’ own people, so the garden as the place of delivery does not fit the text. What the women knew beforehand, whether they chose freely, and what guidance Eve’s commission gave are unrecorded.

One term needs adjusting. The Papers call these children “1,570 superior men and women” and describe the father’s contribution as “the Adamic life plasm” (76:4.8). They were Adam’s offspring by these mothers. “Genetically modified” brings in a modern technique the text does not describe.

The parallel with Mary is closer than it first appears. Mary was also chosen through a commission. Gabriel dispatched “the Family Commission of Twelve” to study Jewish family life, and it nominated three couples (122:0.2). Eve headed “a commission of twelve on race improvement” (76:4.8). Both selections weighed breadth of inheritance. Joseph and Mary had “the most ideal combination of widespread racial connections and superior average of personality endowments” (122:1.3), and Eve’s candidates “represented most of the races on earth” (76:4.8).

The announcements did not precede conception in Mary’s case. “Gabriel’s announcement to Mary was made the day following the conception of Jesus” (122:3.4), and he told her that “the conception within you is ordained by heaven” (122:3.1). Elizabeth was told she “will shortly bear a son” (122:2.3); the timing relative to her conception is not stated. Neither account describes consent being sought. The stated grounds for Mary’s selection are her lineage and personality endowments (see 122:1.2–3); devotion is not named as the qualification. Her dedication followed the event: after three weeks with Elizabeth, she “returned home more fully dedicated to the call to mother the child of destiny” (122:2.6).

Your concern about children growing up different has direct support. After Abel’s death the Papers draw this lesson: “Good social environment and proper education are indispensable soil and atmosphere for getting the most out of a good inheritance.” (76:2.6) The same paragraph says an inferior environment “virtually neutralized” Abel’s ideal inheritance, and Abel grew up in the second garden. Children of Adam reared in tribal settings faced a harder version of that problem. Cain’s troubles had other causes: mixed parentage, Abel’s taunts, and a “natural bellicose inheritance” (76:2.4), together with the quiet resentment of a community to whom he was “symbolic of the default” (76:2.8).

The outcome the Papers report is favorable. All but 112 reached maturity, and they “constituted the early beginnings of the mighty Andite race.” (76:4.8) How these children fared among their peers, and whether the garden kept contact with them or their mothers, is not recorded. Your description of the second garden as a garden of human life fits the text: its priesthood was “a threefold undertaking, embracing religion, health, and education,” and its priests served “as physicians and sanitary inspectors” (76:3.5). Care and guidance from Eve’s commission is a reasonable expectation, given that setting and the normal-world practice in 51:5.5. The Papers leave it to the reader’s reflection.

One correction first: I did not propose Adam traveling beyond the walls. I said the method is not described and that the births took place in the mothers’ tribal surroundings. Your reflection does name real possibilities, and the text bears on each.

Women brought to the garden has a precedent. When the Prince’s staff received the life plasm of one hundred Andonites, the contributors “were assembled from widely separated places by co-ordinated Thought Adjuster direction and seraphic guidance at the threshold of the planetary headquarters of the Prince.” (66:2.7) The adjustment is timing. The children “were born and reared in the tribal surroundings of their respective mothers” (76:4.8), so women who came to the garden went home before delivery.

Adam going out to the tribes has no support in the text. The wording also differs from the Laotta account, where Adam “sought out Laotta” and “with premeditation committed the folly of Eve” (75:5.2). For the 1,682, the Papers say only that they “were impregnated with the Adamic life plasm” (76:4.8). Elsewhere the Papers treat life plasm as transferable by procedure: the Nodites arose from modifications “in the life plasm which had been transferred from the bodies of the Andonite contributors to those of the corporeal staff members by the Avalon surgeons.” (77:2.6) That opens a third possibility, a procedure in which either the plasm went to the women or the women came to the garden, with no union involved. The Papers do not say such a procedure was used, or who could have performed it after the default.

Your thought about mothers who died fits the text, since “reared in the tribal surroundings of their respective mothers” covers a child whose mother did not survive. The one recorded case went differently: when Laotta died, “Eve took Sansa, the child of Laotta, to her bosom, and she was reared along with Cain.” (76:0.2) That was before the second garden and before the commission existed.

The pace also bears on the logistics. Seth was born in the second garden 129 years after Adam’s arrival, and Adam lived 530 years (76:3.4, 76:5.5), so the commission worked for at most about four centuries. Spread evenly, 1,682 selections come to about four women a year by my arithmetic. A program of that scale could manage individual escort, care, and return.

I read the two-class structure the way you do for the penultimate sentence, and I read the final sentence as covering all the children.

In the penultimate sentence, “they” continues the subject “the majority,” so the Andite clause belongs to the Nodite mothers and their line. Paper 78 confirms this: “The earliest Andite peoples took origin in the regions adjacent to Mesopotamia more than twenty-five thousand years ago and consisted of a blend of the Adamites and Nodites. The second garden was surrounded by concentric circles of diminishing violet blood, and it was on the periphery of this racial melting pot that the Andite race was born.” (78:4.2) The minority from other races would not fit that Adamite-Nodite definition.

The final sentence works differently. “These children” needs a prior mention of children, and the penultimate sentence names only mothers. The one explicit antecedent is “Their children all grew up to maturity except 112” in the third sentence, which covers the offspring of all 1,682 women. The penultimate sentence reads as a qualification about the mothers’ origins, and “these” resumes the whole group after it. “Respective” points the same way: it distributes the children among mothers from many tribal settings, which matches “selected from all the surrounding tribes.”

On that reading, the minority’s children were also reared among their mothers’ own peoples, wherever those were. That fits the stated purpose of benefiting “the world after his death.” The Nodite children formed the Andite nucleus on the garden’s periphery, and the others carried the same inheritance farther out.

The case is grammatical, and the alternative cannot be ruled out entirely. A reader who attaches “these children” to the nearest group would limit the sentence to the Nodite majority, and the text would then be silent on how the minority’s children were reared. I find the reach back to “Their children” the stronger reading, since nothing in between supplies a narrower set of children.

The passage’s vocabulary is the place to start. For Laotta, the Papers use the language of union (see 75:5.2). For the 1,682, they use the language of procedure: the women “were impregnated with the Adamic life plasm” (76:4.8). The Papers record such procedures elsewhere. The Andonites “contributed their human germ plasm” to the Prince’s staff (66:4.15), and the Avalon surgeons performed the transfer (see 77:2.6). A plasm transfer performed by someone is the reading the wording supports best.

Life Carriers are largely ruled out. Once will appears, “they may manipulate the evolving life no further” (36:3.8), and they “must either leave the planet or take renunciation vows” (65:1.8). They state the consequence directly: “That which we, the Life Carriers, do toward fostering and conserving the life strains before the appearance of human will, man must do for himself after such an event” (65:3.6). There was one exception: they “petitioned Jerusem and Edentia for permission to transplant the life plasm” of the Andonite contributors (66:2.6). That shows a transfer could be authorized, but 76:4.8 names Eve’s commission as the agent and mentions no Life Carriers or authorization. Adam, by then “reduced to the status of the common flesh of the realm” (76:3.1), fits 65:3.6’s description of man doing this work for himself.

Direct union is the possibility you did not list, and the wording does not strictly exclude it. Two things weigh against it. “The violet race is a monogamous people” (51:5.5), and the Papers call Adam’s union with Laotta “the folly of Eve” (75:5.2). Union with 1,682 women, under a commission Eve herself headed, would sit poorly with both. That is an inference; the text does not address it.

Frozen sperm is the modern analogy for conveying plasm outward, and the Papers say nothing of preserving it. By general reference, outside the Papers, semen stays viable only briefly without special preservation, so carrying it hundreds of miles would require a technique the text never mentions. One textual point bears on this. The sentence says “before Adam died this commission had selected 1,682,” and then that “these women were impregnated.” The time limit explicitly governs the selection, and a reader could take “leave behind as much of his life plasm as possible to benefit the world after his death” as preserved plasm. I read “after his death” as referring to his descendants’ benefit to the world, which is the plainer sense.

Midwayers are the “something else” the text does attest. They moved people when needed: “the midwayers, being able to do such things, transported Adam and Eve to the Father’s temple” (74:4.4). Whether they served the commission is not stated.

For your question about the mothers, the evidence leans toward their coming to the garden. The wording points to a procedure, and Adam and Eve were the anatomists qualified to perform it (see 74:3.8). No preservation technique is recorded. There is a precedent for assembling contributors “from widely separated places” at a planetary center (66:2.7), and at about four women a year the program could manage individual travel. On this reading, each woman came to the garden, received the plasm, and went home before delivery, as 76:4.8 requires. The Papers do not state any of this, and the reading rests on the cumulative weight of these details.