Paper 73 Overview: The Garden of Eden

The Garden of Eden was built to welcome Adam and Eve, who were special beings coming to help improve earth. The Life Carriers, who helped life grow on earth, asked for these special helpers when they saw that human development had reached its highest point biologically. The garden was carefully planned and built to be a beautiful home for Adam and Eve, where they could begin their work to help all humans on earth.

Adam and Eve needed a special place to live because they were different from regular humans, so their helpers made them a beautiful garden. The garden was on a peninsula in the Mediterranean Sea and was filled with plants, trees, and beautiful buildings. It had the tree of life, which helped special beings like Adam and Eve live for a very long time. The garden was later destroyed when it sank beneath the waters.

The Life Carriers noticed that human biological development had reached its peak about forty thousand years ago. They asked for permission to send biologic uplifters, a Material Son and Daughter, to help earth. After inspection by Tabamantia, Adam and Eve arrived less than one hundred years later to help the planet, which was in trouble after the rebellion.

Ten thousand years after the rebellion, almost all the progress from the Prince's time was gone, and people were barely better off than if he had never come. Only the Nodites and Amadonites kept some of the culture and traditions from Dalamatia. The Nodites were descendants of the Prince's rebel staff members, while the Amadonites were Andonites who stayed loyal to Van and Amadon.

These two groups often had trouble working together because of old enemies. The Nodites split into three main groups that lived in different areas, while many of the followers of Van and his loyal people lived north of Mesopotamia. Before Adam and Eve arrived, the Nodites and Amadonites were the most advanced and cultured people on earth.

For almost one hundred years before the inspection by Tabamantia, Van and his friends had been teaching about the coming of a promised Son of God. Van told his close friends about the Material Sons on Jerusem and, eighty-three years before Adam and Eve arrived, they decided to build a garden home for them. Van gathered more than three thousand willing workers who promised to help prepare for the coming Son.

Van split his volunteers into one hundred companies with a captain for each one and put Amadon as his own helper. These groups began their work, and a special committee went to find the perfect spot for the Garden. Even though Caligastia and Daligastia tried to cause problems, almost ten thousand loyal midway creatures worked hard to help move the project forward.

The location committee was gone for almost three years before reporting on three possible places for the Garden. These were an island in the Persian Gulf, a river location that later became the second garden, and a long, narrow peninsula stretching west from the eastern shores of the Mediterranean Sea. The committee almost all agreed on the third choice, and it took two years to move the world's cultural center there.

This Mediterranean peninsula had good weather because of the surrounding mountains and the fact that it was almost an island. It rarely rained in Eden, but every night, water would rise from irrigation channels to water the plants. The coast was high above the sea, and the land was only connected to the mainland by a narrow strip that was twenty-seven miles wide. A great river flowed through the Garden and was fed by four smaller rivers that started in the coastal hills.

When Material Sons come to a developing world, their home is often called the Garden of Eden because it looks like the beautiful gardens of Edentia. Van made sure the whole peninsula would be the Garden, with animal raising on the nearby mainland. Only birds and tame animals were allowed in the park, and no animals were ever killed there. All meat eaten by Garden workers was brought from herds kept on the mainland.

The first job was building a brick wall across the neck of the peninsula. After that, they could start making the landscape beautiful and building homes. They also made a zoo by building a smaller wall just outside the main wall, with wild animals living in between as another defense. The zoo had twelve large sections, and paths led between these groups to the twelve Garden gates. Only people who volunteered worked on the Garden, and they received food from believers who lived nearby.

In the middle of the Eden peninsula was a beautiful stone temple to the Universal Father. To the north were the administrative headquarters, to the south were homes for workers and their families, to the west was land for schools, and to the east were homes for Adam and Eve and their children. The Garden was designed to have homes and plenty of land for one million humans.

When Adam arrived, the Garden was only one-fourth finished but already had thousands of miles of irrigation ditches, more than twelve thousand miles of paths and roads, and over five thousand brick buildings. The Garden had very good sanitation systems to keep the drinking water clean. Before Adam and Eve came, many fruits, grains, and nuts had already been greatly improved, though many food plants were later lost to the world.

In the center of the Garden temple, Van planted the tree of life, which he had been guarding for a long time. This tree's leaves were for healing, and its fruit had kept Van alive on earth for many years. Van knew Adam and Eve would need this tree to stay alive after they came to earth in physical bodies. The tree of life was not a myth; it was real and existed on earth for a long time.

This special plant stored energy that prevented aging in certain beings. Its fruit was like a super battery that released life-extending force when eaten. The tree grew in the temple courtyard during the Prince's rule, was regrown by Van after the rebellion, and was moved to the Garden for Adam and Eve. When the Nodites later took over Eden, they tried to use the tree but it did nothing for them because they lacked what was needed to benefit from it. The tree was eventually destroyed by fire during one of their wars.

After Adam left the first garden, it was occupied by various groups including the Nodites. The northern Nodites who opposed working with the Adamites lived there for almost four thousand years. Then, when volcanoes became active and the land bridge to Africa sank, the eastern floor of the Mediterranean Sea dropped, taking the entire Eden peninsula underwater. This wasn't a sudden event - it took several hundred years to completely submerge the peninsula.

This sinking of the Garden was a natural event, not a result of Adam and Eve's mistakes. It seems to have been timed to happen around the same time that there were enough violet race people to begin improving the world. The Melchizedeks had advised Adam not to start mixing with other races until his own family numbered half a million. The Garden was never meant to be the permanent home of the Adamites - they were supposed to spread out and help all the races of the world.