The Urantia Book
PAPER 76
THE SECOND GARDEN
Presented by Solonia, the seraphic "voice in the Garden."
76:0.1 WHEN Adam elected to leave the first
garden to the Nodites unopposed, he and his followers could not
go west, for the Edenites had no boats suitable for such a
marine adventure. They could not go north; the northern Nodites
were already on the march toward Eden. They feared to go south;
the hills of that region were infested with hostile tribes. The
only way open was to the east, and so they journeyed eastward
toward the then pleasant regions between the Tigris and
Euphrates rivers. And many of those who were left behind later
journeyed eastward to join the Adamites in their new valley
home.
76:0.2 Cain and Sansa were both born before
the Adamic caravan had reached its destination between the
rivers in Mesopotamia. Laotta, the mother of Sansa, perished at
the birth of her daughter; Eve suffered much but survived, owing
to superior strength. Eve took Sansa, the child of Laotta, to
her bosom, and she was reared along with Cain. Sansa grew up to
be a woman of great ability. She became the wife of Sargan, the
chief of the northern blue races, and contributed to the
advancement of the blue men of those times.
1. THE EDENITES ENTER MESOPOTAMIA
76:1.1 It required almost a full year for the
caravan of Adam to reach the Euphrates River. Finding it in
flood tide, they remained camped on the plains west of the
stream almost six weeks before they made their way across to the
land between the rivers which was to become the second garden.
76:1.2 When word had reached the dwellers in
the land of the second garden that the king and high priest of
the Garden of Eden was marching on them, they had fled in haste
to the eastern mountains. Adam found all of the desired
territory vacated when he arrived. And here in this new location
Adam and his helpers set themselves to work to build new homes
and establish a new center of culture and religion.
76:1.3 This site was known to Adam as one of
the three original selections of the committee assigned to
choose possible locations for the Garden proposed by Van and
Amadon. The two rivers themselves were a good natural defense in
those days, and a short way north of the second garden the
Euphrates and Tigris came close together so that a defense wall
extending fifty-six miles could be built for the protection of
the territory to the south and between the rivers.
76:1.4 After getting settled in the new Eden,
it became necessary to adopt crude methods of living; it seemed
entirely true that the ground had been cursed. Nature was once
again taking its course. Now were the Adamites compelled to
wrest a living from unprepared soil and to cope with the
realities of life in the face of the natural hostilities and
incompatibilities of mortal existence. They found the first
garden partially prepared for them, but the second had to be
created by the labor of their own hands and in the "sweat of
their faces."
2. CAIN AND ABEL
76:2.1 Less than two years after Cain's birth,
Abel was born, the first child of Adam and Eve to be born in the
second garden. When Abel grew up to the age of twelve years, he
elected to be a herder; Cain had chosen to follow agriculture.
76:2.2 Now, in those days it was customary to
make offerings to the priesthood of the things at hand. Herders
would bring of their flocks, farmers of the fruits of the
fields; and in accordance with this custom, Cain and Abel
likewise made periodic offerings to the priests. The two boys
had many times argued about the relative merits of their
vocations, and Abel was not slow to note that preference was
shown for his animal sacrifices. In vain did Cain appeal to the
traditions of the first Eden, to the former preference for the
fruits of the fields. But this Abel would not allow, and he
taunted his older brother in his discomfiture.
76:2.3 In the days of the first Eden Adam had
indeed sought to discourage the offering of animal sacrifice so
that Cain had a justifiable precedent for his contentions. It
was, however, difficult to organize the religious life of the
second Eden. Adam was burdened with a thousand and one details
associated with the work of building, defense, and agriculture.
Being much depressed spiritually, he intrusted the organization
of worship and education to those of Nodite extraction who had
served in these capacities in the first garden; and in even so
short a time the officiating Nodite priests were reverting to
the standards and rulings of pre-Adamic times.
76:2.4 The two boys never got along well, and
this matter of sacrifices further contributed to the growing
hatred between them. Abel knew he was the son of both Adam and
Eve and never failed to impress upon Cain that Adam was not his
father. Cain was not pure violet as his father was of the Nodite
race later admixed with the blue and the red man and with the
aboriginal Andonic stock. And all of this, with Cain's natural
bellicose inheritance, caused him to nourish an ever-increasing
hatred for his younger brother.
76:2.5 The boys were respectively eighteen and
twenty years of age when the tension between them was finally
resolved, one day, when Abel's taunts so infuriated his
bellicose brother that Cain turned upon him in wrath and slew
him.
76:2.6 The observation of Abel's conduct
establishes the value of environment and education as factors in
character development. Abel had an ideal inheritance, and
heredity lies at the bottom of all character; but the influence
of an inferior environment virtually neutralized this
magnificent inheritance. Abel, especially during his younger
years, was greatly influenced by his unfavorable surroundings.
He would have become an entirely different person had he lived
to be twenty-five or thirty; his superb inheritance would then
have shown itself. While a good environment cannot contribute
much toward really overcoming the character handicaps of a base
heredity, a bad environment can very effectively spoil an
excellent inheritance, at least during the younger years of
life. Good social environment and proper education are
indispensable soil and atmosphere for getting the most out of a
good inheritance.
76:2.7 The death of Abel became known to his
parents when his dogs brought the flocks home without their
master. To Adam and Eve, Cain was fast becoming the grim
reminder of their folly, and they encouraged him in his decision
to leave the garden.
76:2.8 Cain's life in Mesopotamia had not been
exactly happy since he was in such a peculiar way symbolic of
the default. It was not that his associates were unkind to him,
but he had not been unaware of their subconscious resentment of
his presence. But Cain knew that, since he bore no tribal mark,
he would be killed by the first neighboring tribesmen who might
chance to meet him. Fear, and some remorse, led him to repent.
Cain had never been indwelt by an Adjuster, had always been
defiant of the family discipline and disdainful of his father's
religion. But he now went to Eve, his mother, and asked for
spiritual help and guidance, and when he honestly sought divine
assistance, an Adjuster indwelt him. And this Adjuster, dwelling
within and looking out, gave Cain a distinct advantage of
superiority which classed him with the greatly feared tribe of
Adam.
76:2.9 And so Cain departed for the land of
Nod, east of the second Eden. He became a great leader among one
group of his father's people and did, to a certain degree,
fulfill the predictions of Serapatatia, for he did promote peace
between this division of the Nodites and the Adamites throughout
his lifetime. Cain married Remona, his distant cousin, and their
first son, Enoch, became the head of the Elamite Nodites. And
for hundreds of years the Elamites and the Adamites continued to
be at peace.
3. LIFE IN MESOPOTAMIA
76:3.1 As time passed in the second garden,
the consequences of default became increasingly apparent. Adam
and Eve greatly missed their former home of beauty and
tranquillity as well as their children who had been deported to
Edentia. It was indeed pathetic to observe this magnificent
couple reduced to the status of the common flesh of the realm;
but they bore their diminished estate with grace and fortitude.
76:3.2 Adam wisely spent most of the time
training his children and their associates in civil
administration, educational methods, and religious devotions.
Had it not been for this foresight, pandemonium would have
broken loose upon his death. As it was, the death of Adam made
little difference in the conduct of the affairs of his people.
But long before Adam and Eve passed away, they recognized that
their children and followers had gradually learned to forget the
days of their glory in Eden. And it was better for the majority
of their followers that they did forget the grandeur of Eden;
they were not so likely to experience undue dissatisfaction with
their less fortunate environment.
76:3.3 The civil rulers of the Adamites were
derived hereditarily from the sons of the first garden. Adam's
first son, Adamson (Adam ben Adam), founded a secondary center
of the violet race to the north of the second Eden. Adam's
second son, Eveson, became a masterly leader and administrator;
he was the great helper of his father. Eveson lived not quite so
long as Adam, and his eldest son, Jansad, became the successor
of Adam as the head of the Adamite tribes.
76:3.4 The religious rulers, or priesthood,
originated with Seth, the eldest surviving son of Adam and Eve
born in the second garden. He was born one hundred and
twenty-nine years after Adam's arrival on Urantia. Seth became
absorbed in the work of improving the spiritual status of his
father's people, becoming the head of the new priesthood of the
second garden. His son, Enos, founded the new order of worship,
and his grandson, Kenan, instituted the foreign missionary
service to the surrounding tribes, near and far.
76:3.5 The Sethite priesthood was a threefold
undertaking, embracing religion, health, and education. The
priests of this order were trained to officiate at religious
ceremonies, to serve as physicians and sanitary inspectors, and
to act as teachers in the schools of the garden.
76:3.6 Adam's caravan had carried the seeds
and bulbs of hundreds of plants and cereals of the first garden
with them to the land between the rivers; they also had brought
along extensive herds and some of all the domesticated animals.
Because of this they possessed great advantages over the
surrounding tribes. They enjoyed many of the benefits of the
previous culture of the original Garden.
76:3.7 Up to the time of leaving the first
garden, Adam and his family had always subsisted on fruits,
cereals, and nuts. On the way to Mesopotamia they had, for the
first time, partaken of herbs and vegetables. The eating of meat
was early introduced into the second garden, but Adam and Eve
never partook of flesh as a part of their regular diet. Neither
did Adamson nor Eveson nor the other children of the first
generation of the first garden become flesh eaters.
76:3.8 The Adamites greatly excelled the
surrounding peoples in cultural achievement and intellectual
development. They produced the third alphabet and otherwise laid
the foundations for much that was the forerunner of modern art,
science, and literature. Here in the lands between the Tigris
and Euphrates they maintained the arts of writing, metalworking,
pottery making, and weaving and produced a type of architecture
that was not excelled in thousands of years.
76:3.9 The home life of the violet peoples
was, for their day and age, ideal. Children were subjected to
courses of training in agriculture, craftsmanship, and animal
husbandry or else were educated to perform the threefold duty of
a Sethite: to be priest, physician, and teacher.
76:3.10 And when thinking of the Sethite
priesthood, do not confuse those high-minded and noble teachers
of health and religion, those true educators, with the debased
and commercial priesthoods of the later tribes and surrounding
nations. Their religious concepts of Deity and the universe were
advanced and more or less accurate, their health provisions
were, for their time, excellent, and their methods of education
have never since been surpassed.
4. THE VIOLET RACE
76:4.1 Adam and Eve were the founders of the
violet race of men, the ninth human race to appear on Urantia.
Adam and his offspring had blue eyes, and the violet peoples
were characterized by fair complexions and light hair color --
yellow, red, and brown.
76:4.2 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.
76:4.3 Adam and Eve, like their brethren on
Jerusem, were energized by dual nutrition, subsisting on both
food and light, supplemented by certain superphysical energies
unrevealed on Urantia. Their Urantia offspring did not inherit
the parental endowment of energy intake and light circulation.
They had a single circulation, the human type of blood
sustenance. They were designedly mortal though long-lived,
albeit longevity gravitated toward the human norm with each
succeeding generation.
76:4.4 Adam and Eve and their first generation
of children did not use the flesh of animals for food. They
subsisted wholly upon "the fruits of the trees." After the first
generation all of the descendants of Adam began to partake of
dairy products, but many of them continued to follow a nonflesh
diet. Many of the southern tribes with whom they later united
were also nonflesh eaters. Later on, most of these vegetarian
tribes migrated to the east and survived as now admixed in the
peoples of India.
76:4.5 Both the physical and spiritual visions
of Adam and Eve were far superior to those of the present-day
peoples. Their special senses were much more acute, and they
were able to see the midwayers and the angelic hosts, the
Melchizedeks, and the fallen Prince Caligastia, who several
times came to confer with his noble successor. They retained the
ability to see these celestial beings for over one hundred years
after the default. These special senses were not so acutely
present in their children and tended to diminish with each
succeeding generation.
76:4.6 The Adamic children were usually
Adjuster indwelt since they all possessed undoubted survival
capacity. These superior offspring were not so subject to fear
as the children of evolution. So much of fear persists in the
present-day races of Urantia because your ancestors received so
little of Adam's life plasm, owing to the early miscarriage of
the plans for racial physical uplift.
76:4.7 The body cells of the Material Sons and
their progeny are far more resistant to disease than are those
of the evolutionary beings indigenous to the planet. The body
cells of the native races are akin to the living
disease-producing microscopic and ultramicroscopic organisms of
the realm. These facts explain why the Urantia peoples must do
so much by way of scientific effort to withstand so many
physical disorders. You would be far more disease resistant if
your races carried more of the Adamic life.
76:4.8 After becoming established in the
second garden on the Euphrates, Adam elected to leave behind as
much of his life plasm as possible to benefit the world after
his death. Accordingly, 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. Their
children all grew up to maturity except 112, so that the world,
in this way, was benefited by the addition of 1,570 superior men
and women. Though these candidate mothers were selected from all
the surrounding tribes and represented most of the races on
earth, the majority were chosen from the highest strains of the
Nodites, and they constituted the early beginnings of the mighty
Andite race. These children were born and reared in the tribal
surroundings of their respective mothers.
5. DEATH OF ADAM AND EVE
76:5.1 Not long after the establishment of the
second Eden, Adam and Eve were duly informed that their
repentance was acceptable, and that, while they were doomed to
suffer the fate of the mortals of their world, they should
certainly become eligible for admission to the ranks of the
sleeping survivors of Urantia. They fully believed this gospel
of resurrection and rehabilitation which the Melchizedeks so
touchingly proclaimed to them. Their transgression had been an
error of judgment and not the sin of conscious and deliberate
rebellion.
76:5.2 Adam and Eve did not, as citizens of
Jerusem, have Thought Adjusters, nor were they Adjuster indwelt
when they functioned on Urantia in the first garden. But shortly
after their reduction to mortal status they became conscious of
a new presence within them and awakened to the realization that
human status coupled with sincere repentance had made it
possible for Adjusters to indwell them. It was this knowledge of
being Adjuster indwelt that greatly heartened Adam and Eve
throughout the remainder of their lives; they knew that they had
failed as Material Sons of Satania, but they also knew that the
Paradise career was still open to them as ascending sons of the
universe.
76:5.3 Adam knew about the dispensational
resurrection which occurred simultaneously with his arrival on
the planet and he believed that he and his companion would
probably be repersonalized in connection with the advent of the
next order of sonship. He did not know that Michael, the
sovereign of this universe, was so soon to appear on Urantia; he
expected that the next Son to arrive would be of the Avonal
order. Even so, it was always a comfort to Adam and Eve, as well
as something difficult for them to understand, to ponder the
only personal message they ever received from Michael. This
message, among other expressions of friendship and comfort,
said: "I have given consideration to the circumstances of your
default, I have remembered the desire of your hearts ever to be
loyal to my Father's will, and you will be called from the
embrace of mortal slumber when I come to Urantia if the
subordinate Sons of my realm do not send for you before that
time."
76:5.4 And this was a great mystery to Adam
and Eve. They could comprehend the veiled promise of a possible
special resurrection in this message, and such a possibility
greatly cheered them, but they could not grasp the meaning of
the intimation that they might rest until the time of a
resurrection associated with Michael's personal appearance on
Urantia. And so the Edenic pair always proclaimed that a Son of
God would sometime come, and they communicated to their loved
ones the belief, at least the longing hope, that the world of
their blunders and sorrows might possibly be the realm whereon
the ruler of this universe would elect to function as the
Paradise bestowal Son. It seemed too good to be true, but Adam
did entertain the thought that strife-torn Urantia might, after
all, turn out to be the most fortunate world in the system of
Satania, the envied planet of all Nebadon.
76:5.5 Adam lived for 530 years; he died of
what might be termed old age. His physical mechanism simply wore
out; the process of disintegration gradually gained on the
process of repair, and the inevitable end came. Eve had died
nineteen years previously of a weakened heart. They were both
buried in the center of the temple of divine service which had
been built in accordance with their plans soon after the wall of
the colony had been completed. And this was the origin of the
practice of burying noted and pious men and women under the
floors of the places of worship.
76:5.6 The supermaterial government of
Urantia, under the direction of the Melchizedeks, continued, but
direct physical contact with the evolutionary races had been
severed. From the distant days of the arrival of the corporeal
staff of the Planetary Prince, down through the times of Van and
Amadon to the arrival of Adam and Eve, physical representatives
of the universe government had been stationed on the planet. But
with the Adamic default this regime, extending over a period of
more than four hundred and fifty thousand years, came to an end.
In the spiritual spheres, angelic helpers continued to struggle
in conjunction with the Thought Adjusters, both working
heroically for the salvage of the individual; but no
comprehensive plan for far-reaching world welfare was
promulgated to the mortals of earth until the arrival of Machiventa Melchizedek, in the times of Abraham,
who, with the
power, patience, and authority of a Son of God, did lay the
foundations for the further uplift and spiritual rehabilitation
of unfortunate Urantia.
76:5.7 Misfortune has not, however, been the
sole lot of Urantia; this planet has also been the most
fortunate in the local universe of Nebadon. Urantians should
count it all gain if the blunders of their ancestors and the
mistakes of their early world rulers so plunged the planet into
such a hopeless state of confusion, all the more confounded by
evil and sin, that this very background of darkness should so
appeal to Michael of Nebadon that he selected this world as the
arena wherein to reveal the loving personality of the Father in
heaven. It is not that Urantia needed a Creator Son to set its
tangled affairs in order; it is rather that the evil and sin on
Urantia afforded the Creator Son a more striking background
against which to reveal the matchless love, mercy, and patience
of the Paradise Father.
6. SURVIVAL OF ADAM AND EVE
76:6.1 Adam and Eve went to their mortal rest
with strong faith in the promises made to them by the
Melchizedeks that they would sometime awake from the sleep of
death to resume life on the mansion worlds, worlds all so
familiar to them in the days preceding their mission in the
material flesh of the violet race on Urantia.
76:6.2 They did not long rest in the oblivion
of the unconscious sleep of the mortals of the realm. On the
third day after Adam's death, the second following his reverent
burial, the orders of Lanaforge, sustained by the acting Most
High of Edentia and concurred in by the Union of Days on
Salvington, acting for Michael, were placed in Gabriel's hands,
directing the special roll call of the distinguished survivors
of the Adamic default on Urantia. And in accordance with this
mandate of special resurrection, number twenty-six of the
Urantia series, Adam and Eve were repersonalized and reassembled
in the resurrection halls of the mansion worlds of Satania
together with 1,316 of their associates in the experience of the
first garden. Many other loyal souls had already been translated
at the time of Adam's arrival, which was attended by a
dispensational adjudication of both the sleeping survivors and
of the living qualified ascenders.
76:6.3 Adam and Eve quickly passed through the
worlds of progressive ascension until they attained citizenship
on Jerusem, once again to be residents of the planet of their
origin but this time as members of a different order of universe
personalities. They left Jerusem as permanent citizens -- Sons
of God; they returned as ascendant citizens -- sons of man. They
were immediately attached to the Urantia service on the system
capital, later being assigned membership among the four and
twenty counselors who constitute the present advisory-control
body of Urantia.
76:6.4 And thus ends the story of the
Planetary Adam and Eve of Urantia, a story of trial, tragedy,
and triumph, at least personal triumph for your well-meaning but
deluded Material Son and Daughter and undoubtedly, in the end, a
story of ultimate triumph for their world and its
rebellion-tossed and evil-harassed inhabitants. When all is
summed up, Adam and Eve made a mighty contribution to the speedy
civilization and accelerated biologic progress of the human
race. They left a great culture on earth, but it was not
possible for such an advanced civilization to survive in the
face of the early dilution and the eventual submergence of the
Adamic inheritance. It is the people who make a civilization;
civilization does not make the people.
76:6.5
Presented by Solonia, the seraphic "voice in the Garden."
