Because no concept of paradise could accommodate knowledge that our loved ones suffer eternal torment, Lila decides that the unsaved must get a free pass from the saved who love them, a kind of plus-one invitation to heaven.
At some point, the tradition incorporated the idea of a garden setting, perhaps following the Islamic concept of Paradise, an association certainly made when the tradition was mature, although the difficulty of reconstructing gardens from archaeology makes the early stages of this process hard to trace.
Even our language reflects the importance of cultivation and domestication: through concepts of paradise, civilisation, culture (the word "lady" has roots in the kneading of bread).
Cultures and faiths since time immemorial believe so, though their concepts of paradise are as diverse as life itself.
In the sixth century B.C., when Iranian Emperor Cyrus liberated the Jews from their Babylonian captivity, the Iranian concepts of paradise (a Persian word), hell, and purgatory were imported into Judaism and, eventually, Christianity and Islam.
The otherworld is viewed as two-storied and consists of first, a graveyard hades, or underground village of the dead in a holy forest near the village; and second, a distant hades, far in the north behind the burning stream (with an admixture of paradise concepts).
The fifth clade (E), consists of Paradisaea birds-of-paradise, Wilson's bird-of-paradise (Diphyllodes respublica), magnificent bird-of-paradise (Diphyllodes magnificus), and king bird-of-paradise (Cicinnurus regius).
Thus, Macgregor's bird-of-paradise (Macgregoria pulchra) is a giant honeyeater [ 13], while the cnemophiline birds-of-paradise form a distinct lineage well separated from the true birds-of-paradise clade [ 13- 15].
The third clade (C) consists of the twelve-wired bird-of-paradise (Seleucidis melanoleuca), Drepanornis sicklebills, the standardwing bird-of-paradise (Semioptera wallacii), riflebirds (Ptiloris), and the superb bird-of-paradise (Lophorina superba).
Within this clade the genera Diphyllodes and Cicinnurus are sister lineages, while the blue bird-of-paradise (Paradisaea rudolphi) is sister to other Paradisaea birds-of-paradise.
This model was proposed to explain the apparent rapid radiation of the birds-of-paradise.
