# Eden

Explore the Mormon Transhumanist perspective on Eden—where ancient narratives of paradise meet visionary ideas about humanity’s past, present, and future.

Eden is the garden where scripture places the first man and woman in the presence of God, and Restoration teaching reads it as the first sanctuary and a pattern for the paradise the earth is to become. Mormon transhumanists therefore treat the garden as a commission to make the world's wilderness like Eden, on the terms the first garden set.

Eden is the land in which "the Lord God planted a garden eastward" and placed the man he had formed (Genesis 2:8). The Hebrew *'eden* sounds like a common noun meaning "delight" or "luxury," though some scholars trace the name to an older word for an open plain. The word for garden, *gan*, comes from a root meaning to fence or protect, so the garden is an enclosed and guarded place. A common reading treats Eden as a lost golden age, a park of ease that humanity forfeited and can only mourn. The Hebrew prophets and Restoration scripture remember it in other terms, as a holy place where people worked in God's presence and as a pattern the faithful are to build again.

## The Garden as Sanctuary

Interpreters of Genesis have come to read the garden as the first temple and Adam as its first priest.

It has long been recognized that Eden shares features with Israel's sanctuaries. God walks in the garden, the verb later used for his presence moving among Israel's camp. The garden is entered from the east, as the tabernacle and the temple were, and after the expulsion God "placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life" (Genesis 3:24), much as cherubim were woven into the veil before the holy of holies. Ezekiel calls Eden "the garden of God" and sets it on "the holy mountain of God" (Ezekiel 28:13-14).

Less often noticed is the language of Adam's charge. The Lord put him in the garden "to dress it, and to keep it" (Moses 3:15). The two Hebrew verbs, *'abad*, "to work" or "to serve," and *shamar*, "to keep" or "to guard," appear together elsewhere in the Pentateuch only for the Levites who served in the tabernacle and guarded it. Read with that echo, tending the garden was a form of worship, and Adam's work in the soil was priestly service.

## Eden in Restoration Teaching

Latter-day Saints place Eden within this world's history and make its story the opening scene of temple worship.

Early Church leaders reported that Joseph Smith located the garden in Jackson County, Missouri, the region a revelation of 1831 had named the center place of Zion. A revelation of 1838 calls a valley to the north Adam-ondi-Ahman, "the place where Adam shall come to visit his people" (D&C 116:1). The first garden and the promised city of Zion thus share one landscape, joining the beginning of the human story to its end. Latter-day Saint temples also present the garden narrative as the first stage of a journey back to God. Going further, the temple runs Eden's pattern in reverse. Adam and Eve went out eastward past the cherubim, and temple worship leads its participants inward, through a veil, toward the presence they left. In this reading the way back to the tree of life runs through covenant and labor.

## A Wilderness Like Eden

The prophets foresee Eden returning as something cultivated and built, and Mormon transhumanists count human work as part of that return.

Isaiah promises that the Lord "will make her wilderness like Eden, and her desert like the garden of the Lord; joy and gladness shall be found therein" (Isaiah 51:3). The Bible opens in a garden and closes in a city, and in the city's street grows "the tree of life, which bare twelve manner of fruits, and yielded her fruit every month: and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations" (Revelation 22:2). It is significant that the restored Eden has streets, that its tree yields a harvest every month, and that its leaves heal whole peoples. Mormon transhumanists read the renewal of this world as a prophetic vision that knowledge and technology are meant to help fulfill. They see early forms of it in irrigated deserts, restored wetlands, crops bred to survive drought, and medicine that reaches the poor. Each extends Adam's commission to serve and guard living things.

## Paradise Engineering and the Walled Garden

The hope of building paradise carries two risks, an Eden without growth and an Eden for a few.

Some transhumanists propose paradise engineering, the use of genetics, drugs, and neuroscience to abolish suffering in all sentient life. Restoration doctrine shares the hope that people will have joy, yet the garden it remembers held more than ease. It held a commission, a choice between two trees, and a God who came to speak with its inhabitants, and Restoration scripture teaches that to remain there would have meant a life without children or growth. The second risk lies in the word itself. A *gan* is a fenced place, and technologies of abundance can produce gated suburbs, climate-controlled enclaves, and patented seed that keep their delights within a wall. Isaiah's promise concerns the wilderness and the desert, the places outside the fence. The test for any technology that promises paradise is whether it helps make the wilderness like Eden for all who live there, a place served and guarded in the presence of God, or encloses a garden of delight for a few.