The Midway Creatures

77:2.1While this is the nar­ra­tive of the ori­gin, na­ture, and func­tion of the mid­way crea­tures of Uran­tia, the kin­ship be­tween the two or­ders—pri­mary and sec­ondary—makes it nec­es­sary to in­ter­rupt the story of the pri­mary mid­way­ers at this point in or­der to fol­low out the line of de­scent from the rebel mem­bers of the cor­po­real staff of Prince Cali­gas­tia from the days of the plan­e­tary re­bel­lion to the times of Adam. It was this line of in­her­i­tance which, in the early days of the sec­ond gar­den, fur­nished one half of the an­ces­try for the sec­ondary or­der of mid­way crea­tures.

77:2.2The phys­i­cal mem­bers of the Prince’s staff had been con­sti­tuted sex crea­tures for the pur­pose of par­tic­i­pat­ing in the plan of pro­cre­at­ing off­spring em­body­ing the com­bined qual­i­ties of their spe­cial or­der united with those of the se­lected stock of the An­don tribes, and all of this was in an­tic­i­pa­tion of the sub­se­quent ap­pear­ance of Adam. The Life Car­ri­ers had planned a new type of mor­tal em­brac­ing the union of the con­joint off­spring of the Prince’s staff with the first-gen­er­a­tion off­spring of Adam and Eve. They had thus pro­jected a plan en­vi­sion­ing a new or­der of plan­e­tary crea­tures whom they hoped would be­come the teacher-rulers of hu­man so­ci­ety. Such be­ings were de­signed for so­cial sov­er­eignty, not civil sov­er­eignty. But since this project al­most com­pletely mis­car­ried, we shall never know what an aris­toc­racy of be­nign lead­er­ship and match­less cul­ture Uran­tia was thus de­prived of. For when the cor­po­real staff later re­pro­duced, it was sub­se­quent to the re­bel­lion and af­ter they had been de­prived of their con­nec­tion with the life cur­rents of the sys­tem.

77:2.3The postre­bel­lion era on Uran­tia wit­nessed many un­usual hap­pen­ings. A great civ­i­liza­tion—the cul­ture of Dala­ma­tia—was go­ing to pieces. “The Nephilim (Nod­ites) were on earth in those days, and when these sons of the gods went in to the daugh­ters of men and they bore to them, their chil­dren were the ‘mighty men of old,’ the ‘men of renown.’” While hardly “sons of the gods,” the staff and their early de­scen­dants were so re­garded by the evo­lu­tion­ary mor­tals of those dis­tant days; even their stature came to be mag­ni­fied by tra­di­tion. This, then, is the ori­gin of the well-nigh uni­ver­sal folk tale of the gods who came down to earth and there with the daugh­ters of men be­got an an­cient race of heroes. And all this leg­end be­came fur­ther con­fused with the race mix­tures of the later ap­pear­ing Adamites in the sec­ond gar­den.

77:2.4Since the one hun­dred cor­po­real mem­bers of the Prince’s staff car­ried germ plasm of the An­donic hu­man strains, it would nat­u­rally be ex­pected that, if they en­gaged in sex­ual re­pro­duc­tion, their progeny would al­to­gether re­sem­ble the off­spring of other An­don­ite par­ents. But when the sixty rebels of the staff, the fol­low­ers of Nod, ac­tu­ally en­gaged in sex­ual re­pro­duc­tion, their chil­dren proved to be far su­pe­rior in al­most ev­ery way to both the An­don­ite and the San­gik peo­ples. This un­ex­pected ex­cel­lence char­ac­ter­ized not only phys­i­cal and in­tel­lec­tual qual­i­ties but also spir­i­tual ca­pac­i­ties.

77:2.5These mu­tant traits ap­pear­ing in the first Nod­ite gen­er­a­tion re­sulted from cer­tain changes which had been wrought in the con­fig­u­ra­tion and in the chem­i­cal con­stituents of the in­her­i­tance fac­tors of the An­donic germ plasm. These changes were caused by the pres­ence in the bod­ies of the staff mem­bers of the pow­er­ful life-main­te­nance cir­cuits of the Sa­ta­nia sys­tem. These life cir­cuits caused the chro­mo­somes of the spe­cial­ized Uran­tia pat­tern to re­or­ga­nize more af­ter the pat­terns of the stan­dard­ized Sa­ta­nia spe­cial­iza­tion of the or­dained Neb­a­don life man­i­fes­ta­tion. The tech­nique of this germ plasm meta­mor­pho­sis by the ac­tion of the sys­tem life cur­rents is not un­like those pro­ce­dures whereby Uran­tia sci­en­tists mod­ify the germ plasm of plants and an­i­mals by the use of X rays.

77:2.6Thus did the Nod­ite peo­ples arise out of cer­tain pe­cu­liar and un­ex­pected mod­i­fi­ca­tions oc­cur­ring 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.

77:2.7It will be re­called that the one hun­dred An­don­ite germ plasm con­trib­u­tors were in turn made pos­ses­sors of the or­ganic com­ple­ment of the tree of life so that the Sa­ta­nia life cur­rents like­wise in­vested their bod­ies. The forty-four mod­i­fied An­don­ites who fol­lowed the staff into re­bel­lion also mated among them­selves and made a great con­tri­bu­tion to the bet­ter strains of the Nod­ite peo­ple.

77:2.8These two groups, em­brac­ing 104 in­di­vid­u­als who car­ried the mod­i­fied An­don­ite germ plasm, con­sti­tute the an­ces­try of the Nod­ites, the eighth race to ap­pear on Uran­tia. And this new fea­ture of hu­man life on Uran­tia rep­re­sents an­other phase of the out­work­ing of the orig­i­nal plan of uti­liz­ing this planet as a life-mod­i­fi­ca­tion world, ex­cept that this was one of the un­fore­seen de­vel­op­ments.

77:2.9The pure-line Nod­ites were a mag­nif­i­cent race, but they grad­u­ally min­gled with the evo­lu­tion­ary peo­ples of earth, and be­fore long great de­te­ri­o­ra­tion had oc­curred. Ten thou­sand years af­ter the re­bel­lion they had lost ground to the point where their av­er­age length of life was lit­tle more than that of the evo­lu­tion­ary races.

77:2.10When ar­chae­ol­o­gists dig up the clay-tablet rec­ords of the later-day Sume­rian de­scen­dants of the Nod­ites, they dis­cover lists of Sume­rian kings run­ning back for sev­eral thou­sand years; and as these rec­ords go fur­ther back, the reigns of the in­di­vid­ual kings lengthen from around twenty-five or thirty years up to one hun­dred and fifty years and more. This length­en­ing of the reigns of these older kings sig­ni­fies that some of the early Nod­ite rulers (im­me­di­ate de­scen­dants of the Prince’s staff) did live longer than their later-day suc­ces­sors and also in­di­cates an ef­fort to stretch the dy­nas­ties back to Dala­ma­tia.

77:2.11The rec­ords of such long-lived in­di­vid­u­als are also due to the con­fu­sion of months and years as time pe­ri­ods. This may also be ob­served in the Bib­li­cal ge­neal­ogy of Abra­ham and in the early rec­ords of the Chi­nese. The con­fu­sion of the twenty-eight-day month, or sea­son, with the later in­tro­duced year of more than three hun­dred and fifty days is re­spon­si­ble for the tra­di­tions of such long hu­man lives. There are rec­ords of a man who lived over nine hun­dred “years.” This pe­riod rep­re­sents not quite sev­enty years, and such lives were re­garded for ages as very long, “three­score years and ten” as such a life span was later des­ig­nated.

77:2.12The reck­on­ing of time by the twenty-eight-day month per­sisted long af­ter the days of Adam. But when the Egyp­tians un­der­took to re­form the cal­en­dar, about seven thou­sand years ago, they did it with great ac­cu­racy, in­tro­duc­ing the year of 365 days.