SEELE

SEELE takes its name from the German for soul (ゼーレ, Zēre) and operates as the hidden hand of the Neon Genesis Evangelion franchise, exerting decisive leverage across national governments and global institutions while staying unknown to the public. Everything it does serves the Human Instrumentality Project, its scheme for dissolving every separate human self into one unified existence, ending war and private struggle together.

Doctrine drives the conspiracy. Two Seeds of Life came to Earth: Adam's, from which the Angels descend, landed first, while Lilith's, wellspring of humanity, arrived afterward, and the collision left Adam sealed dormant by its Spear of Longinus. From this SEELE concludes that Earth rightfully belongs to the Angels as God's true sons, and that humanity, the accidental second arrival, bears an Original Sin simply for having come into being.

The plan unfolds in stages: wipe out the Angels, gather mankind into a single whole, and then merge that whole with Lilith and Adam alike, joining with God to reach what SEELE considers the next rung of existence. Kaworu Nagisa anchors the original blueprint; as the Seventeenth Angel carrying Adam's soul, he is meant to merge with Lilith and set off Third Impact, with thirteen Evangelions completing Instrumentality. Reality forces revisions. Units 03 and 04 are lost outright, Units 05 and 06 run late, and SEELE compensates by building the Mass Production Evangelions, machines run on Dummy Plugs derived from Kaworu. His death changes the calculus entirely: because the Dead Sea Scrolls contain nothing about those events, SEELE decides he was never the successor of life and swears off Angelic power as a road to its goal.

Its grip on NERV runs through the Human Instrumentality Committee, five SEELE men including Keel Lorenz, who fronts for the United Nations; committee members each carry an associated color and nation. Full council meetings hide the membership altogether behind towering stone monoliths, each reading only SEELE, a member number, and the words Sound Only.

Keel Lorenz, rendered Lorenz Kiel in the original German spelling, is the one member ever identified, holding the designation SEELE 01 and presumably the leadership, given how often he speaks for the collective. Fourteen unnamed men fill out the body, four of them doubling as representatives on the Instrumentality Committee, and nobody affiliated with SEELE outside this circle wields official power in it. Attendance shifts between seven and fifteen participants, with twelve the usual count, and what the members really are stays open to speculation, from Magi-like artificial intelligences to engineered beings tied to Adam and Lilith in the manner of Rei Ayanami or Kaworu Nagisa.

Kaworu served as SEELE's pilot, and its hardware included the Mass Production Evangelions, a replica of the Spear of Longinus carried as a heavy sword, and the Kaworu-based Dummy System. The organization's emblem, seven eyes split three and four across its face, likely draws on the seven-eyed Lamb of Revelation 5, while its meeting monoliths visually echo the black slabs of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey.