#and point them in the right direction | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

serpentface · 2 months ago

Note

Do you have any information on the root scholars that you can share? They’ve always been a cool cult/organization to me

Ok it’s a facet of the Eterhimhamdli religion, which is The most widespread single belief system east of the inner seaway (which isn't saying much in terms of scale but it's still pretty significant) and also one I've barely introduced so I'll go over it a bit here.

Eterhimhamdli has spread past its initial sphere of old (~500 years BP) southern Lowlands Yuroma kingdoms, has many folk practices, and has schismed a few times, so there's a good deal of cultural variation. But its basic tenants/tendencies are:

-Creator deities are wholly rejected, the universe is an interplay between non-personified dualistic forces of Body(evil)/Mind(good). In one schism, the interplay of these two forces is the Dream, in others dreaming is an aspect of Mind.

-Deities in general are not wholly at odds with Eterhimhamdli, but their importance is de-emphasized and worship is usually discouraged in favor of making them objects of contemplation and/or tutelary figures.

-The Mind of the universe exists as a collective soul from which human souls emanate

-every person has two souls: an egoistic soul that animates the body and an ethereal soul that animates the mind. The latter is conceptualized as a single drop from a greater sea of the collective soul.

-belief that true wisdom is derived through access to this collective soul.

-belief that the trappings of the the ego-soul and the body's demands inhibits access to said collective soul.

-belief in the concept of enlightened beings who gain full experiential knowledge of the collective soul while remaining in a body, thus becoming capable of directly communicating aspects of their wisdom to the masses.

the biggest schism in this religion is over whether enlightenment just means experiencing full knowledge of the collective before you die, or whether it means transcending the limits of the body entirely and functionally becoming an immortal, godlike being.

deities of older/other religions absorbed by Eterhimhamdli are often reframed as enlightened mortals.

-most sects believe that only sophont life (or sometimes Only humans) have a etherial-soul along with the ego-soul, while animals exclusively have the ego-soul. Plants and inanimate objects Usually aren't ascribed souls outsides of heavily syncretic folk practices.

-belief in a fundamental good-evil cosmic dualism, though in a fairly complex way (evil is a necessity for life that is to be tempered and grappled with, rather than outright vanquished from the world entirely). The notion of 'evil' here is most associated with bodily desires (this includes all bodily needs like hunger and thirst, necessary to support life but viewed dangerous in excess, and being the root of conflict and pain).

the evil nature of bodily desire is not About sex, but does translate to non-procreative sex being frowned upon to varying extents.

-belief that life is a state of internal warfare between the evil ego-soul and the good ethereal-soul, with the former being more powerful and influential. To lead a good life is to bring the ego-soul into equilibrium with the ethereal soul. To live a wise and venerable life is to fully tip the balance in the latter's favor (this is not an expectation for lay followers, as it is considered profoundly difficult and requires separation from worldly life).

-lay followers practice forms of temperance to bring these forces into equilibrium, priests practice forms of asceticism to subdue the ego-soul and gain experiential wisdom in the process.

-The way you balance your life has consequences for the afterlife. An evil life causes an eternal death (this is usually posited as an underworld), a life in equilibrium causes one to be reborn into a new human body (a neutral fate), and a good life results in full return to the collective soul (this is a state of complete peace and contentedness and access to infinite wisdom).

-A selection of hallucinogenic plants are central to the monastic/priestly aspects of the religion, being seen as the key method through which the body can be transcended and the ego-soul can be quieted in order to tap into the collective. Lay followers do not participate in this facet on a regular basis.

-Priests also participate in self-flagellation, as the struggle with physical pain is a key microcosm of the broader internal war with the ego-soul, and can be a source of wisdom and contemplation. They are extensively tattooed for partly related purposes. Laymen are not expected to flagellate as a practice but rather to apply teachings to/learn from struggles with everyday pain.

-Very complicated relations with violence as a concept. Some strains of Eterhimhamdli philosophy see violence as an exclusive result of evil to be avoided whenever possible (usually more completely by priesthoods than the wider societies they live in), others see it as a neutral tool in of itself that Can be a force for good when used wisely. (Large scale 'wise usages of violence for the sake of good', shockingly, tend to favor the in-group's position in preexisting ethnic/religious/territorial conflicts).

-Most sects are proselytizing and see conversion as a necessity to create a better world, and have broadly unfavorable views of other religious practices.

This does not extend to seeing all societies that practice Eterhimhamdli or even The Same Schism Of Eterhimhamdli in a positive light (the birthplace of this religion is currently about 60 semi independent city-states organized into leagues that are frequently at war with each other)

-Highly favors education, literacy, rhetoric, debate, and the acquisition of material knowledge along with deeper spiritual wisdom. Knowledge and wisdom are venerable traits and societies should be led by the learned, or at least by people under their guidance.

---

The Scholarly Order of the Root is one order of Lowlands Eterhimhamdli monastics, functioning as a closed cult/mystery religion. They’re based out of Suurota (one of the biggest Yuroma city-states and dominant member of its league). They're at the top of the league's hierarchy of monastics, very wealthy, and have some involvement in governance (being an advisory body to the magistrate).

The Scholars primarily interact with the general public by hosting many of the league's institutions of scholarship and philosophy, and some of the biggest libraries in this part of the world. Their institutions are used by laymen Suurota citizens and members of government for study, and they host monks and priests (uninitiated to the inner cult) in their halls.

Actual membership to the Scholars cult is limited, they neither expect nor want associates to participate in their rituals. Rather, they position themselves as teachers- revealing small aspects of their secret knowledge to laymen and the lesser monastics as a form of guidance, while keeping dangerous knowledge for only the trusted inner circle.

Their baseline belief system aligns with the general schema of Lowlands Eterhimhamdli (one of three major schisms of this belief system), but their closed cult practices revolve around fairly unique interpretations, understood to be the ultimate underlying truths of this worldview.

The Scholars focus on an extention the Mind-Body model of the universe where their synthesis is the Dream (this itself is not unique to this cult, but the depths of their focus is). Under this model, the world is the dream of the collective consciousness, and achieving enlightenment or even temporary lucidity can allow the dream to be shaped to one's will.

One of their most secretive practices is god-building, in which they utilize altered mental states to shape the fabric of the dream into entities they can use as personal teachers of secret knowledge (also as a type of magic in general, they use it to 'build' guardians and curses and the like).

The process involves using mild doses of Ur-Root brew (mostly derived from roots of the clonal Ur-Wood colony, whose bark has notable concentrations of dimethyltryptamine and also hosts milder fungal hallucinogens) while maintaining an object and concept as a focal point of concentration. The altered state provided by the Root allows the user some access to the wisdom of the collective soul, and they will experience secret knowledge and revelations about this object, how it can best be used (this will be supplemented by material knowledge about the subject). This process is repeated until the user experiences a sense of Presence in the object, which must be interacted with, given a name and a face. Through more repetition, the object is believed to be shaped into a sort of thoughtform god which has come into material existence via manipulation of the dream.

This is considered to take immense time and effort to come to completion, god-building projects can last for years and be the combined effort of multiple Scholars. In the end, you have shaped an entity to your will that can operate independently of you.

The Ur-Wood itself is the center of Scholar cult practice, as it is both the purveyor of their most important hallucinogen and believed to have been the first god ever shaped by this form of lucid dreaming (it's a pilgrimage site for Eterhimhamdli where thousands of followers have undergone Ur-Root trips over the past four centuries, using the woods as an object of contemplation). To them the Ur-Tree is the ultimate teacher of their cult, an extremely powerful built-god that has been involved in almost every journey to enlightenment and contains all these journeys within its substance.

They believe that communing with the tree via Ur-Root can grant access to all enlightened mortals- full trips (with a DMT breakthrough type experience) will often involve sensations of encountering entities, which they interpret to be these historical figures. Within their religious framework, they're kind of speedrunning enlightenment. Under most conventional frameworks, the teachings of wise and/or enlightened people are conveyed in writing or speech as things to Contemplate on one's own journey- you might be able to understand them Conceptually but true understanding is Experiential, a process that can take a lifetime. In their framework, they're both receiving these teachings directly AND embodying states in which they can experientially comprehend them.

That summarizes most of their secret practices, and the rest of their practice is pretty standard for devout Lowlands Eterhimhamdlist priests. They live a partly ascetic lifestyle, they bear extensive tattoos as a contemplation of pain and marker of their journeys, they flagellate, they use tutelary hallucinogens, they refine their non-experiential body of knowledge through debate and rhetoric, they work to accumulate both worldly and spiritual knowledge, they work as scribes, etc.

#When I say 'cult' I'm using the 'specific form of veneration within a broader religion' definition. These people are very well known #and established in the religious framework of the Suurota league and not like a weird fringe thing.#The practice of upper priesthoods retaining secret knowledge is pretty standard for this religious sphere. The general public knows #they are Hiding Knowledge and this isn't an issue.#A lot of their secret practices would be questioned or viewed as potentially heretical by other Eterhimhamdlists though #Particularly their speedrunning brute-force approach to acquiring wisdom and perception that they are directly communicating #with enlightened mortals. A lot of the philosophy of this religion focuses on the journey to arrive to these truths across the span #of a lifetime. Most historical figures though to have achieved enlightenment did so on their deathbeds after a lifetime of work #and communicated the most important parts of their knowledge with the little time they had left. That's kind of the point.#Also it would have to be rewritten from the fucking ground up but the story that Whitecalf was originally a prequel to involved #the Scholarly Order of the Root attempting to godbuild a person into a weapon against a 30+ years down the line beefed up #Imperial Wardin in an expansionist period and at war with the Suurotan league #The original story still had all the magic stuff so they actually kind of did turn a kid into a magic weapon of mass destruction #These places aren't right next to each other btw and they've had pretty minimal direct interaction until recent history due to #having a Massive Fucking Mountain Range between them #(and also a good deal of space between themselves and said mountain range)#The Yuroma-Wardi population does originally descend from the general area of Eterhimhamdli's birth but the group that #Established this population arrived after a couple generations of moving place to place (some settling) in exodus after being driven #from their homelands in an ethnic/religious conflict with one of the earliest Eterhimhamdli states #Yuroma-Wardi is also a kind of placeholder name that I need to change. They derive from speakers of the Yuroma language family #but would not consider themselves related to the contemporary ethnic groups that are called Yuroma

48 notes · View notes

houkagokappa · 6 months ago

Text

Bless Mokumokuren for outright stating that the genre tags for Hikaru ga Shinda Natsu have never changed, i.e. the official site never dropped the "BL" tag from the series as it got more popular to reach a wider audience. It's been a persistent rumor in the fandom, and one I'm afraid will start circulating again once the anime starts airing.

If you mainly follow English language sources, please remember that whatever tags different anime and manga sites, databases, aggregators etc., either add or leave out don't always reflect the author's intent and the official sources, and should NOT be used to argue for what genre or demographic a certain work belongs to. It can just be random people claiming whatever they want based on their own interpretations and I've seen plenty of errors and real time changes to them based on new chapter developments, that might help catch the attention of some people, but don't suddenly change the genre of the work itself.

Not having BL as a genre tag also doesn't mean that a work can't include any boys loving. The queer themes have always been present in HGSN, and if you're up to date with the manga, they've been outright stated. Having queer characters or a queer story line doesn't automatically mean that a work is BL or yuri, and not including those tags doesn't mean that it's just "baiting". This gets brought up so much I think Mokumokuren's gotten tired of it, because the other day they clearly spelled it out for everyone, assuring that the story is queer, although it's not tagged as BL or focused on romance.

Here's what they shared on their Bluesky account:

The genre tag and advertising direction on the official website have never changed since the beginning of serialization. From the beginning, it has been consistently promoted as a "coming-of-age horror" within the official reach. (It's also true that the official reach is very limited…) Whatever the genre tag is, and even if this story isn't a romance, as the author, I guarantee that it is a queer story. There seems to be a persistent false rumor going around that "the author suddenly removed the BL tag from the official website by the 3rd volume," but the truth is that there was never an official BL tag from the beginning. (This is not to deny any queerness.)

And further back:

My opinion that the genre of The Summer Hikaru Died is something that the readers are free to think about on their own remains unchanged, but I view it as a story that sympathizes with those who have been left out of stories about love and sex, so I describe it as "coming-of-age horror." I think the key is the fear of not being “normal” and not having a place to belong, which is common for all kinds of people regardless of their attributes. I think it's fine for queer stories that aren't romances to exist. That's why I've been careful not to position it as a love story from the start.

Let's stop obsessing over tags and allow queer stories to exist and thrive, even when they lack a clear romantic plot or subplot and are more subdued.

#my nonsense #hikaru ga shinda natsu #the summer hikaru died #i've been following mokumokuren for years and they've been getting more and more direct about this #i have to imagine they've gotten tired of international fans pestering them about this to really spell it out #usually using some english too #they also pointed out how genre definitions can differ in different countries so expectations differ too #it must be so frustrating to be writing a queer story about not fitting in and constantly have ppl saying you're not doing it right ;____;#also i don't know how much of a problem this is anymore (apparently still to some degree?) or how necessary this post is anymore #but i want it to exist for new fans esp those who find it thought the anime since i know the baiting discourse will start up again #and old ones who lack media literacy or maybe don't follow and translate mokumokuren's tweets and bluesky stuff #speaking of should i get a bluesky account???#(also the translations are janky bc i used translators and can't spend any extra energy on them pls forgive me)

50 notes · View notes

sideswipesjetpack · 3 months ago

Text

YALL PLEASE IF YOU HAVE A BUNCH A TF REFERNCES DUMP ‘EM IN MY ASK 😭😭 Pinterest isn’t pinteresting

#transformers #maccadam #tf REFERNCES #cybertron #tf #maccadams #A COMIC PANEL EVEN I can store in the ‘redraw’ folder..#CHARACTER?? idk anyone you want to see me draw i guess 😭😭#OR OR POINT ME IN THE RIGHT DIRECTION OF FINDING THEM

21 notes · View notes

wonder-worker · 11 months ago

Text

"Administratively, too, [...] queens were considered the legal lords of their landholdings. [...] Grants noted that the queen's officials had administrative autonomy without being subject to the king or anyone else, and evidence of the same assumption can be gleaned from court rolls that were recorded with headings indicating the lord of the manor whose court proceedings were being enrolled. As an example, some court rolls for the manor of Haveringatte-Bower specified that it was the court of [Margaret of Anjou] that was in session, while later rolls recorded Elizabeth Woodville as the lord of the manor court."

— Michele Seah, "My Lady Queen, the Lord of the Manor': The Economic Roles of Late Medieval Queens", Parergon, Volume 37, Number 2, 2020.

#queenship tag #margaret of anjou #elizabeth woodville #I really appreciated how Seah acknowledged the uneven surviving evidence for her subjects and how that affects her analysis.#It was very brief but it was more than what most historians do so it was very refreshing :)#my post #english history #this is for @ anon who asked if its true that Margaret mostly hosted her own courts while EW mostly stayed with her husband #I'm not sure which (if any) historian has said something like this* but I highly doubt it's true !#We don't really have solid itineraries in place for either queen to make any kind of firm conclusions of the sort #(ie: about their residences or anything else) though I'm sure it would have varied depending on the situation #But either way it's explicitly clear that both Margaret and Elizabeth held their own courts in their own lands on multiple occasions #And we also have evidence of both of them residing with their husbands in regular circumstances #*tbh this is too long to get into right now but this assumption does fit into the few 'revisionist' interpretations of both Margaret and EW #(which imo is just as degrading as her traditional interpretation for the latter) so I wouldn't be surprised if some #historians may have framed their situations in such a way and relied entirely on their own assumptions to do so #Either way as far as I know there is no evidence of any such contrast existing - at least not on a consistent basis.#and the evidence we do have contradicts the assumption #Hope this helps! I figured a proper excerpt from this article would clarify the point better than any direct answer from me <3 #queue

57 notes · View notes

sammygender · 1 year ago

Text

something about john winchester mischaracterisation just needles me inexplicably. i can deal with it if a fic is good otherwise but cmon. you have to Get Him. he loves the boys and he ruins their lives like come on….. if you don’t get that he loves them then how r u even getting dean’s character considering that dean is The Same in this manner. love can be bad love doesn’t change abuse it just complicates it etc etc.

unrelatedly but also relatedly, i don’t think he’d be actually homophobic because i don’t think he has time to care. i do however think dean would be absolutely convinced he is incredibly homophobic for unknown reasons. john probably makes like an offhanded comment about something being gay once and 15 year old dean (very attracted to men. genuinely no idea whatsoever. still feels intense rush of panic at the word) decides it must mean john desperately and intensely HATES gay people and proceeds to become world’s best baby homophobe for like a year before he starts to think Maybe Sammy’s gay (sam likes to read books) and cools down on the homophobia. also his heart was never really in it. but he still thinks john is homophobic and has also decided sam’s probably gay (sam is more attracted to women than dean is) so he worries about this a lot.

then one day john says extremely casually about sam Sometimes I wonder if he’s not a little queer, you know, and dean’s heart stops and he’s like What no of course not what and john’s like If it means he doesn’t get into as much trouble with girls as you seem to, I honestly don’t mind and dean’s just like. What. but by this point it’s far too late and all fragments of homosexuality have been far buried beneath the surface by his subconscious. Also it’s important that john WOULD be kind of annoyed by dean being gay. he already thinks sam is weird and has decided to love him anyway (although i’m not sure sam got the memo about being loved anyway so the effort was useless) so it’s ok if sam is gay (privilege of being the family freak!) but dean is meant to be mini him. #picking up girls. see that journal entry. he’d get over it though.

#I’m sorry but it is INFINITELY more compelling that john winchester is crazy protective and controlling and loves them to the point he #sacrifices his life for them #seeing those glimpses of 70s era john winchester. insanely fascinating.#Anyway this post really changed direction😭sorry guys #gay dean winchester #bi dean winchester #john winchester #oliver talks #spn #spn meta #it’s very important to me that both dean and john genuinely think for a bit that sam is gay. and then sam grows up and is a lesbian so #essentially they were right (im joking) (im not)

97 notes · View notes