Lilith

Lilith takes the shape of a colossal humanoid torso, roughly the size of an Evangelion, with pale, blubbery flesh and no clear sex. As seen in 2015 it lacks hips and legs entirely; the trunk ends in shapeless masses sprouting dozens of pairs of human-scaled legs. It hangs in Terminal Dogma, nailed through the palms to an enormous red cross, with the Spear of Longinus driven through its chest. After Unit-00 withdraws the Spear in Episode 22, the missing lower body grows back, still trailing clusters of small legs from the thighs.

Its most striking feature is the purple mask fixed over its face, pierced with holes for seven eyes set in two uneven columns, three right and four left, and etched with a downward-pointing triangle. Whether the mask is natural bone plate or an artificial restraint is never settled, but SEELE uses that masked face as the organization's emblem. A steady stream of LCL, which is literally Lilith's blood, runs down the cross and pools into an artificial lake on the level below; every entry plug's fluid ultimately comes from here.

Nothing resembling a will ever surfaces. Lilith hangs limp on its cross, immobile and wholly unresponsive, reacting neither to the researchers exploiting it nor to the battles shaking the city above. Whatever consciousness a Seed of Life carries stays hidden until Third Impact, when the merged being it forms with Rei finally acts with unmistakable intent.

Billions of years in the past, the First Ancestral Race scattered Seeds of Life across space. Lilith's transport, the Black Moon, slammed into Earth by pure accident in the collision known as First Impact, gouging out the Moon and destroying the Spear meant to accompany it. Earth already hosted the Seed called Adam, and two Seeds were never meant to share a planet; with Lilith's Spear gone, the sole remaining one, Adam's, activated to resolve the conflict by forcing Adam into dormancy. Lilith was left free to seed the planet with the primordial soup out of which ordinary terrestrial life evolved, a lineage culminating in humans, the Lilin, who displaced the Angels, Adam's own offspring, as Earth's dominant race.

Ages of tectonic drift carried the buried Black Moon beneath the future site of Hakone, its hollow interior forming the vast cavern later named the GeoFront. SEELE located it, raised Gehirn's headquarters, then NERV HQ and Tokyo-3, directly above, and turned the captive Angel into infrastructure: a renewable LCL well, an experimental subject, and the trigger being readied for Instrumentality, its growth deliberately halted by impaling it on Adam's recovered Spear. Every Evangelion was cloned from Adam except one. Unit-01 alone derives from Lilith, and imagery in Episode 23 suggests the unit was physically torn away from the Angel's lower half, which would account for the conspicuously absent legs.

In The End of Evangelion, Gendo forces the Adam embryo grafted into his hand into Rei III, hoping to command Lilith and reach Yui. Rei rejects him, carries Adam's body and soul into Terminal Dogma, and merges with Lilith, the clusters of legs vanishing as she enters. The resulting giant, wearing Rei's face, initiates Third Impact and Instrumentality. Shinji ultimately refuses the merged existence; Unit-01 tears out through the giant's eye and snaps the Spear of Longinus, and the vast body breaks apart and drops to Earth, apparently lifeless. The manga follows the same outline, with Lilith simply vanishing once Shinji makes his choice.