[THEORY] Lilith's Gambit: Why the "7" Seeds of Life could prove that the First Impact was NOT an accident. (NGE + EoE)

TL;DR: Lilith didn't crash on Earth by mistake. Being the sole Seed of Knowledge (Free Will), she caused the First Impact on purpose to put Adam to sleep and use humanity as a "legal bypass" to achieve godhood. However, after living as a human (Rei) and seeing individual love (Yui/Shinji), she repented in EoE and gave the future to humanity.

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Hey everyone! I've been turning over the official lore of the First Ancestral Race (FAR) in my head for a while now, and there is a detail that never quite sat right with me.

According to what I know of the canon, we know from official information that the FAR sent 7 Seeds of Life into the cosmos in spherical ships ("Moons"), each equipped with a Spear of Longinus as a control mechanism, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the seed itself. These seeds contained one of two attributes: the Fruit of Life (the S² engine, immortality, and physical power, like Adam and the Angels) or the Fruit of Knowledge (reason, science, and free will, like Lilith and humanity).

The detail that made me question this in the first place is the confirmed number: if the FAR designed a binary system based on 2 fruits (Life vs. Knowledge), why send an odd number like 7?

If they were evenly distributed, we would have an even number (4 and 4, or 3 and 3).

A total of 7 implies that either completely unknown types of fruits exist (maybe a "non-Euclidean geometry" fruit, we could spend all day making up theoretical seeds), or, what makes the most sense: the distribution is asymmetric.

Here is where my hypothesis comes in: What if there isn't an even split? What if the FAR sent 6 Seeds of Life and 1 Seed of Knowledge? What if Lilith is a unique anomaly in the entire universe?

Official lore tells us that the original plan was for Adam to colonize Earth. But due to an error that is never elaborated on, Lilith's Black Moon ended up crashing into the very same planet (the First Impact). To top it off, Lilith's Spear of Longinus (who is the invader, the one that would make the most sense to deactivate given that Adam was already there by his own right) "broke or was lost" during the crash, forcing Adam's Spear to deactivate him instead to prevent 2 seeds from coexisting, leaving Lilith free to seed the Earth with Knowledge-based life (humanity).

Here is where things get weird: How is it possible for the FAR to generate divine technology, with so few seeds and chances (7), and on top of that, have 2 of them fail? Would they really make such an absurd miscalculation as crashing two seeds into the same planet? And that the spear that happens to break is the invader's? It's deeply suspicious.

If we connect the dots, the narrative changes:

The Fruit of Knowledge isn't just "intelligence"; it's the ability to reason, doubt, decide, and rebel. For its part, the mythology that gives Lilith her name in our world describes her as the first woman, the one who refused to submit and chose to leave of her own free will.

Through this lens, the fruit of knowledge is also the Fruit of Free Will (we could get symbolic here, like how having 7 seeds represents the 7 days of biblical creation, with Lilith being the Sabbath, the different day, when God rested, the perfect moment to do something God doesn't want you to do). She wasn't a blind tool executing a program like Adam.

Lilith didn't fall onto Earth by mistake. She tracked Adam, purposefully undid or destroyed her own Spear, and deliberately caused the First Impact to usurp the planet. She knew Adam's Spear would react by deactivating him by FAR design, leaving the Seed of Life in an eternal slumber and allowing the Seed of Knowledge to dominate the world.

The number of seeds (7) could suggest that the Fruit of Knowledge was an exception, perhaps an isolated experiment, an anomaly, or a scarce trait within the FAR's plan. Lilith, being the only entity endowed with true agency and choice, didn't follow the cosmic script assigned to her.

So, the Evangelion universe is not the result of a tragic space accident, but of the first great rebellion against its creators: a conscious Seed that manipulated the rules of the game so that humanity, and not the Angels, would inherit the Earth.

If we extrapolate this logic, everything seen in The End of Evangelion could actually be a plan by Lilith to transcend herself.

There are several concepts that occurred to me as I chewed on this theory. On one hand, separating Lilith's original agency from the empathy she develops as Rei.

In that sense, Lilith doesn't start with human empathy. At first, she operates with a cold, autonomous, and purely executive logic. It's possible that through the Dead Sea Scrolls (or her own nature as the "fruit of knowledge", the FAR could have loaded the data into her), she possessed self-awareness and knowledge of how both seeds (life and knowledge) function. But she was also aware of the limitations. Given that the FAR deliberately coded an entire system NOT to allow the union between seeds, it's very possible Lilith came up with this whole plan as a bypass to that programming. For some reason (maybe the spear itself, maybe a programmed instinct), Lilith couldn't simply go to a planet with a white moon and take the fruit; she needed an intermediary.

Apparently, the offspring of the seeds don't have the same locks as the seeds themselves (Eva-01, a clone of Lilith, was able to eat Zeruel, an offspring of Adam, without any problem, absorbing both fruits with no lock triggering), so everything might have originated as a plan by Lilith to bypass these restrictions.

The logic Lilith would follow is: "Since I (Lilith) cannot ascend by taking the fruit of life directly, I need my offspring (humanity) to do it for me. It makes no sense for me to take root on just any random planet; I need to be close to the seed of life. So I plant myself on a planet with a seed of life and disable my own spear. Since the FAR foresees 2 seeds ending up on a single planet (hence why the mechanism exists), there won't be a problem: the seed of life gets deactivated and my offspring will inhabit the planet as intended by the FAR in this 2-seed scenario. Once my offspring (humanity) develop, their free will, which comes from me, will push them to seek more power; they will search for my soul, my body, and merge them with the offspring of the seed of life."

But how can we be sure Lilith knew her offspring, after millions of years, would eventually execute this union? And what if humans went extinct before completing the mission? The answer lies in the Dead Sea Scrolls.

In the series, the scrolls are described as prophecies. But what if they're instructions? That's where we switch free will for determinism. Lilith didn't leave things to chance:

First, Lilith is a seed of life; the idea of her offspring "going extinct" doesn't make much sense if we consider the FAR's redundancy. It's possible that the technology is strong enough to assume that life will simply keep working (we see that Lilith constantly secretes LCL, the primordial soup, even while dormant without her soul when she's in Rei). Yes, there can be extinctions, but it's an iteration; eventually "that race" will arrive that will activate the plan (given that they are descendants of Lilith and the fruit of knowledge, they will inherit that civilizational constant, mere curiosity would be enough for them to reach her). In that sense, for a seed of life, millions of years probably don't matter to her; it's part of her divine nature.

Second, we can rely on humanity inheriting the drive to seek more power from Lilith, but also on Lilith encoding it through the scrolls. The scrolls are clearly FAR technology (given they are in every seed); it's possible Lilith acquired the data (how everything worked and how to design her plan) directly from them, but it's also possible Lilith herself modified them for humans. She left the modified scrolls "with prophecies of the future" because she knew that eventually someone with power would read them and follow them to the letter out of pure messianism (SEELE). This also explains why this plan was carried out originally. Why bother doing all this? Why didn't SEELE simply leave humanity alone? They were so convinced that the path to ascension was that one because Lilith herself manipulated them into believing salvation came from Instrumentality, when in reality they were used by Lilith so they would develop the technology for her ascension.

However, something went wrong during her plan: Lilith repented.

Lilith knew her offspring's tendencies because they are inherited (she is like that), but she didn't count on the intra-human connection of a multitude of souls being valuable, and as a singularity, she was ontologically incapable of knowing what the experience "of the other" was like, not even with Adam given that he didn't have consciousness like hers.

Being a unique entity, Lilith's entire initial model of "what my offspring will do" was based on the introspection of a single mind. Lilith could never have predicted the phenomenon of connection between multiple minds until it happened.

This also explains why the AT Field and its dissolution are the core of the series: the AT Field represents precisely the phenomenon that Lilith did not include in her original equation as something relevant to her plan.

Lilith left the Dead Sea Scrolls as a manipulation tool to guide humans (SEELE) toward Instrumentality. Her original plan was to gather all of humanity back into her womb to transcend as a complete deity (Fruit of Knowledge + Fruit of Life).

Why then does she retract in The End of Evangelion, leaving the decision to stop Instrumentality to Shinji? The answer is Rei and Yui.

Let's review the cases of each instance of Rei in terms of her personality:

Rei I: Sadistic, incapable of showing empathy, inconsistent with human values (cruel). She is the purest form of Lilith in human language.
Rei II: Fragmented. The Rei with a body is passive and personality-less (but slowly develops one through contact with Shinji); the Rei in Eva-00 is chaotic and violent, clearly filled with hatred toward those who tore her into halves (Gendo, Ritsuko).
Rei III: Agency. Once whole again, she inherits the memories and personality of Rei II, human love and experience, and during Instrumentality she also encounters Adam (Kaworu), who by that point had also come to love Shinji and humanity. She is the one who ultimately rejects Gendo's plan and gives the final choice to Shinji.

Quantum Rei: An entity closer to Lilith as a deity. At the end of The End of Evangelion, Rei does not return to a human body; she remains in that state (which later appears at the beginning).

Yui also fits into this plan. Most likely, Yui didn't know about Lilith's cosmic plan. By merging with Eva-01 (under the pretext of being an eternal monument to human existence), it is the first great demonstration of an individual human maternal act. Yui remains bound to the Eva to protect her specific son (Shinji). It is an "anti-Instrumentality" on an individual scale. As Lilith's essence intertwines with Eva-01 and the Reis during Instrumentality, Yui's purely human and loving choice "teaches" Lilith that the bond between separate beings holds a higher value than absolute merging. Yui (along with Rei II) ends up being, without knowing it, the spark that proves plural life is worth preserving.

In that sense, Lilith doesn't "turn good" overnight. What happens is she receives empirical data that contradicts her original simulation model: she discovers that her offspring value individuality, plural bonds, and the friction of existing separate, something she as a unique entity had never experienced or understood.

Viewed this way, it ends up turning the story of Evangelion from "humans ruining everything out of hubris while aliens crash by mistake" into a cosmic-scale tragedy about the first entity with free will in the universe, who tried to deceive her creators, but ended up being moved by the love and pain of her own children.

Put another way, Lilith does end up being a mother in the most poetic sense of the word, a mother who sacrifices her own plan (godhood) for the sake of her children's lives, who choose to live in freedom.

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What do you think? Does this sound crazy to you, or do you think it fits well with the lore?