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laughingpinecone · 4 years

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I am laughingpineapple on AO3

It’s a long list of character combos so the specific requests aren’t overly detailed, please draw at will from my general likes and general fandom likes in addition or as an alternative to any of those!

All requests are art or fic - for art, the stuff I like is the kind that depicts the characters doing something. I’ll always be happier with a very simple drawing of two characters walking together or sharing a cup of coffee than with an ambitious composition that looks like an Avengers poster. I also enjoy seeing them wear different clothes, getting a feel of what their fashion sense is like beyond their canon outfit(s).

Likes: worldbuilding, slice of life (especially if the event the fic focuses on is made up but canon-specific), missing moments, 5+1 and similar formats, bonding and emotional support/intimacy, physical intimacy, lingering touches, loyalty, casefic, surrealism, magical realism, established relationships, future fic, hurt/comfort or just comfort from the ample canon hurt, throwing characters into non-canon environments, banter, functional relationships between dysfunctional individuals, unexplained mysteries, bittersweet moods, journal/epistolary fic, dreams and memories and identities, canon-adjacent tropey plots, outsider POV, UST, resolved UST, exploration of secondary bits of canon, leaning on the uniqueness of the canon setting/mood, found families, characters reuniting after a long and/or harrowing time, friends-to-lovers, road trips, maps, mutual pining, cuddling, wintry moods, the feeling of flannel and other fabrics, ridiculous concepts played straight, sensory details, sickfic, places being haunted, people being haunted, the mystery of the woods, small hopes in bleak worlds, electricity, places that don’t quite add up, mismatched memories, caves and deep places, distant city lights at night, emphasis on non-human traits of non-human characters (gen-wise, but also a hearty yes xeno for applicable ships)

Cool with: any tense, any pov, any rating, plotty, not plotty, IF, nerdy canon references, unrequested characters popping up

DNW: non-canonical rape, non-canonical children, focus on children, unrequested ships (background established canon couples are okay, mentions of parents are okay), canon retellings, consent issues

Dark Souls

I’m only familiar with the first game+DLC! It’s probably relevant to mention that I think that linking the fire is kind of a dumbass move and Gwyn is an ass, but on the other hand Kaathe has his own agenda and there’s no winning move in this world, or at least no obvious one. Feel free to deviate from anyone’s canon endings, to make things happen that’ll stave off their hollowing. I am interested in any of these people meeting and possibly striking up a friendship, and also in exploring Lordran’s temporal/dimensional fuckery, where it’s possible to meet people who have been gone for ages…

Group: Solaire of Astora & Siegmeyer of Catarina: so much fanart of Sun Bro & Onion Bro being bros, so little fic. And yet, the potential! How’d they bounce off each other, what about the fact that Siegmeyer is apparently a proper Catarina knight after all while Solaire just painted his self-made insignia and left, what would Sieg think of Solaire’s quest?

Group: Alvina the Cat & Sieglinde of Catarina: dunno, kitty. I love them both and I want everyone cool to go on adventure with each other. What’s left for Alvina now that Sif is gone, Artorias’ grave desecrated? For her part, did Sieglinde, you know, (mimics Ash Lake)?

Ghost Trick

I am very interested in various characters finding about the erased timeline, but not getting their memories back, and having to live with being told about what they did but never remembering it. Exploring the ghost lore is great. All what-ifs welcome (what if they managed an acceptable happy ending but didn’t reset the timeline, what if a different party went back to the past and kept their memories, what if Alma’s ghost stuck around…) Also open to AUs here, especially for generic fantasy or sci-fi settings or the Final Fantasy ones I prompted last Yuletide.

For the non-canon sides of Jowd/Alma/Cabanela, please no infidelity? I’d be good with either setting the fic during the game timeline or some what-if thereof when the other spouse is dead or unavailable, or simply keeping them offscreen and not mentioning them (eg Alma/Cabanela beach day, Jowd/Cabanela precinct shenanigans)

For Jowd in general, I do love my big boy and enjoy milking that size difference for all it’s worth. In gen contexts too, it’s neat. him big.

Group: Jowd & Yomiel: I’d love to read about the intimate understanding that comes from their shared memories and the horrors they’ve mutually forgiven (and a penchant for morbidity they’ve gained from such horrors probably). Cat dads things welcome.

Group: Alma/Jowd/Cabanela: maybe once Alma and Jowd have figured out he’s smitten and that they do in fact reciprocate... they tease him to death, slowly and deliberately? Is it even a Jowd romance if there’s not an exhausting amount of teasing involved, I ask?

Group: Alma/Jowd & Cabanela: Cabs’ life is wild; his best friends’ home is a safe haven...

Group: Emma & Pigeon Man: Emma’s unsuspected beta reader...

Group: Alma/Cabanela: (taps mic) legs. And fashion!

Group: Cabanela/Jowd: a recent tumblr post made a convincing argument for Cabs liking to be in charge (the argument is just pointing at Cabanela, honestly). Jowd is... agreeable, by his own admission. But is it that simple?

Kentucky Route Zero

I love the ending and I’d love to see its themes and setting explored. I’m all for exploration of any of the game’s themes and for including any staples from adjacent genres - wanna go full-on American Gothic? Dip into surrealism? Take a leaf from Twin Peaks with tulpa / split narratives to explore the characters’ issues? I love AUs so that’s an option too. Or of course there’s Xanadu at the height of its glory, an infinite what-ifs generator. Were the requested characters part of it, what were their digital counterparts up to? A Xanadu narrative would be great! I’d also love to hear about any new spot along the Zero or the Echo river, or an expansion of some place that’s only mentioned by Will in HATATE or only gets a few paragraphs of text. Mostly, I just love all these characters so much and I’m going through the tagset’s options like a hyperactive cat. Any fragment of their lives will make me happy.

Group: Shannon Márquez & Conway & Conway's Dog: does Shannon get to see them after the ending? Even for a moment?

Group: Lula Chamberlain/Joseph Wheattree/Donald: so Lula went back to Mexico. Joseph is pensive. Did the events of the night shake up Donald, or what will it take?

Group: Junebug & Lula Chamberlain: artists! Outspoken... artists... with a complicated personality. Put them in the same room and...?

Group: Junebug & Johnny: where’s the strangest place they played in, and what did Johnny find there?

Group: Conway & Johnny & Junebug (Kentucky Route Zero): their story is about finding individuality, his is about succumbing and losing it. Would any of them pick up on this mid-Act IV? Or just... talking about limbs and stuff?

Group: Cate & Will & Shannon Márquez (Kentucky Route Zero): a few months later, Shannon finds herself on the Mucky Mammoth again...

Group: Carrington & Weaver Márquez & Shannon Márquez (Kentucky Route Zero): maybe the cousins were trying to bond or reminisce or whatever and Carrington dive-bombed into the conversation, but in the end it was an enriching experience... of sorts?

Group: Carrington & Lula Chamberlain (Kentucky Route Zero): I don’t usually look for college shenanigans but this may be the exception? Or Art Opinions?

Group: Carrington & Clara (Kentucky Route Zero): would she even... get a word in? Maybe with the right topic?

Group: Carrington & Cate & Will (Kentucky Route Zero): Mammoth life! ...what does theater have to say about mushrooms again?

Group: Shannon Marquez & Weaver Marquez (Kentucky Route Zero): at the end of it all, Weaver was waiting. After this end, they can stand side by side again...

Group: Emily & Ben & Bob (Kentucky Route Zero): so what does it mean, like, poetically, that they were temporally displaced and Act I is in their future from Act V? Is it possible they were not aware of it?

Mutazione

The island, the sense of community, newcomers joining the community, gardens and music... I love the mood of this little game. Got ideas for some part of the island we haven’t seen? What stories do they tell each other about Moon Dragon and the first days of the new life it brought? The plants encyclopaedia was great - do Yoké’s archives hide some other cool tome? Please, if Graubert is mentioned, I would much prefer a sympathetic portrayal - he’s got his issues but I felt that the game was much harder on him than anyone else.

Group: Yoké & Karoo: I love the friendship between Yoké and Nonno and filtering it through Karoo feels even cooler to me. When did the big spooky bird first visit, did Yoké know or perceive what was going on?

Group: Yoké & Claire: book club book club book club!

Group: Spike/Claire: they’re so cute! Dinner at Mori’s? Swimming together?

Group: Nonno & Spike: I love Nonno’s role in the community and Spike’s role in the community, and they’re the two people who landed there and decided to stay. Could they bond over this?

Group: Dennis & Nonno: Important Tree Health Business!

Group: Bopek & Jell-A: Jell-A is the absolute coolest and Bopek grew on me a lot. Their friendship is adorable! What could they do together? As a side note, Jell-A’s place has the tightest interior decor in the whole game. How’d that happen, and does Bopek get a flair for vintage shapes and volumes in his weaving?

Group: Mori & Nonno & Yoké: FRIENDS. Friends for a long time, through so much pain. An evening together while The Youths (tm) are at Spike’s bar?

Yoké: catch-all Yoké request because he’s my fave! Doing Yoké things, being a big nerd, caring for books and plants and stuff

Pyre

The burning found family feelings, the revolutionary passion, the tension between topside social constraints and the kind of freedom allowed by the Downside! Thoughts about finding oneself at the end of an age, as everything crumbles down to form something new. I love all the themes, the solemnity, the heart of this game. I adore everyone in that Blackwagon+Dalbert+Celeste, so if you want to add a Nightwing or two to any prompt, please do! I also love all the Scribes and find Erisa a compelling tragic figure. Out of the other triumvirates, I’m “love to hate them” for Manley, Brighton, Udmildhe and Deluge and would not like to see them featured in sympathetic roles. My main interest usually lies in post-canon exploration when applicable, but I’m also into various adventures during canon. Pick a location or a place outside the map and see what happens? As for the ending variables, I’d ask for a peaceful revolution and Oralech alive, but no preferences for who’s up and who’s down, pick whatever works best for any given plot bunny.

Group: Tariq & Soliam: what were Tariq and Celeste like in their earliest days? Were they made or summoned from some sort of preexisting star consciousness? They’re wildly different scenarios! I’m good with either. Does Soliam then see Tariq as a child of sorts, someone he made, or something greater than himself? Did he mean to do that, to have these two immortals around? What does Tariq learn from the First Scribe?

Group: Tariq & Dalbert Oldheart: Any excuse for Tariq to hang out with the Fates for a little while, and treasure and be treasured by dear Dalbert...

Group: Oralech & Vagabond Girl: after all is said and done, Oralech’s view of the Scribes is probably... understandably... dire. So of course I want to see him talk it out with ae!

Group: Celeste & Ignarius: look, listen, if the various triumvirates just camped out near their respective Scribe’s place during the Nightwings’ years-long absence (not the only possible explanation for how you find them all neatly lined up before the first lib rite, but an explanation nonetheless, I think. just let me have my crack), that means Iggy was Celeste’s neighbor for a long time. Neighborly hijinks please?

Group: Bertrude/Pamitha: Pam returning from her travels, again and again, and finding a home in Bertrude’s lab, finding an understanding there... Bertrude’s attitude being thorny in a way that’s just what Pam needs to allow herself to open up... also: snake kisses.

Group: Volfred Sandalwood/Oralech: waking up and remembering that the mourning that’s set deep in your roots is for someone who never died, waking up and remembering that the bitterness that consumed you had made up a betrayal that never was, finding each other through these crumbling walls...

Molten Milithe: that’s the pov for a love letter to the Downside, right? And/or which Scribe did she bond with the most? Or the least for that matter?

Volfred Sandalwood: catch-all Volf’n’anyone request. I want to see our tree interact with any friend and foe you might fancy! Arguing for his beliefs, being a history professor through and through, finding himself in a tight spot and getting unexpected help, verbally tearing Brighton a new one if they ever cross each other’s path again...

group: Volfred Sandalwood/Tariq | The Lone Minstrel: Volfred’s zodiac sign is Cancer and Cancer is ruled by the Moon, so there’s that. I love how they both hold the other in the highest esteem, especially on Tariq’s part since he’s the immortal Herald of the Scribes and Volfred is, all in all, a history teacher, but listen to him and you’d think the roles were inverted. I love my nonviolent canon but could anything happen to either of them that may require a rescue, and/or some good old-fashioned h/c? What’s something that could make Tariq of all people lose it? How’s life 100 years on?

Shenmue

This game cares for the little things. I’d love to see fanworks that try to out-slice-of-life canon...

Group: Qiu Hsu & Xianzi Bei: cormorant kung fu adventure! Do they hang out sometimes?

Group: Hazuki Ryo & Shenhua Ling: any moment, discussion, small adventure from their travels together! I love their bond! For all its waifufication of Shenhua, S3 really sold me on their friendship and a shared brand of dorkiness. Alternatively, sometimes I remember that they’d be 50ish in the present day - how and where do you picture them?

The Silver Case

I‘m all for the surrealism, big things being introduced and never picked up again, Rashomon’ing it up with six explanations for the same thing where no single one can be true, people dying and then popping up again like nbd... maybe the thing I like the most is characters transcending their humanity and looming over the dystopian world like ominous avatars. Correctness’ first ending had me swooning, that kind of mood is unparalleled. I have played TSC, FSR and 25W so far and have vague memories of K7. I’m aware of the “everything’s connected” readings but that’s not my main interest in these games. For FSR-focused requests, I see Lospass as a real island but also a metaphysical place of transformation first and foremost, where strange things happen that don’t make sense elsewhere.

Group: Toriko Kusabi & Remy Fawzil: What’s Toriko up to when she’s not chasing Chris? I think it could be fun to throw her at Remy and see the island from their point of view!

Group: Tokio Morishima & Edo Macalister: since Tokio stayed at the Flower Sun and Rain... I’m interested in peculiar happenings on Lospass that are not centered on Sumio...

Group: Tetsugorou Kusabi/Sumio Kodai: Tetsu picked one hell of a crush, huh! What’s it like in the aftermath of the games, when Sumio is Like That? How does Tetsu grapple with Parade? Is Tetsu an anchor of sorts for Correctness Sumio, who seems (at best) to be existing on a slightly different plane of existence at any given time and could disappear if you blink too hard?

Group: Tetsugorou Kusabi & Shinko Kuroyanagi: I’m joining the “let these two be foulmouthed friends” masses - who’d be more fed up with the other’s nonsense, and in which ways would they be an unstoppable team?

Group: Shinkai Tsuki & Tetsugorou Kusabi: Both of them end their stories in the shadows one way or another, and defending their protégé may have had a hand in their misfortune one way or another. What kind of understanding could they reach? What IS Tsuki up to anyway?

Group: Christina & Catherine: anthro Catherine, as per the Placebo bonus chapter Yami, was unexpectedly charming. What was Chris before reaching Lospass, and did he also have a chat with her on the plane or on the island?

#letter

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charaisgay · 6 years

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Breakdown of the Adventure Time Finale Intro

Adventure time ending has got me in a bittersweet state and I wanna contribute at least something to the commemoration of it. I’ll probably end up drawing some fan art of Shermy and Beth sooner or later because I love the short amount of stuff we get from them, but speaking of Shermy and Beth: I wanted to make an analysis/theory on everything we see in intro of “come along with me”.

Most of this is gonna be stuff that a lot of people have already theorized and put together but not all the breakdown videos get every point I wanna make spot on, so I just wanted to get everything I believe together in one neat little post.

So right off the bat we start in the Ice Kingdom as usual, and in the first second of the into we can see the ball that Patience St. Pim froze herself in during the elements mini series, so we know that she’s still (technically?) alive in this1000 years in the future version of Ooo. If it’s possible, maybe one day she might be unfreezed. I don’t remember if it was stated that that could happen or not.

And in the very next shot their appears to be pink hands gripping onto the bars of an ice cage. The most obvious answer to who is in the cage is of course Princess Bubblegum. In the episode graybles 1000+, we get a glimpse of the future Ooo and what the new Candy Kingdom looks like. It isn’t much of an kingdom but more like hotel inside of a giant futuristic gumball guardian that roams the land. In this future version of Candy Kingdom Princess Bubblegum is nowhere to be found. I believe that the knew Ice King (Gunther) has took to capturing Princesses again and PB is a reoccurring hostage of his. That’s why she wasn’t seen in the gumball guardian. This future version of the Ice King is a lot more hostile (thus why his ice/snow is more apparent and has expanded a great deal from Simon’s ice kingdom) and is competent enough to be an actual threat, and is able to keep PB for an extended period of time. So PB is still kicking around in this future version of Ooo, just not where she’s suppose to be and she doesn’t have the happiest of turn outs.

PB always being captured by the Ice King leads me to believe that this unknown person riding atop the stone duck with a telescope in the ice kingdom, is in fact Marceline. A lot of people believe that this could be a far descendant of one of the humans from the islands after they came back to Ooo, or Simon because of the shape of the backpack is similar to his: but i’m sticking with this being Marcy. My evidence towards this person being Marcy is the stone duck being present. If you remember, the stone duck’s first (or only, I can’t remember it being in any other episode?) appearance is in he episode where Marcy makes her first appearance, during the house searching song. It just seems like too much of a deliberate choice to be a coincidence. And the reason the gear looks so similar to Simon's is because after Simon died: Marcy started using his gear to travel. Or maybe it’s not his, but his influence in her life is still present so she wanted her gear to look like his. Either way, it’s Marcy. And the reason that Marcy is traveling and why she is in the Ice Kingdom is due to her searching for PB. After the Ice King started capturing PB again, Marcy was the one to start saving her after Finn died. (Kind of like history repeating itself) And it’s just a continuous never ending loop of the Ice King capturing PB, Marcy saving PB, and then the Ice King capturing her again, hiding her in a different spot every time to delay Marcy’s search. And at a certain point Marcy just decided to leave home for good and become a nomad seeing as how busy she is with always looking for PB. The two of them can’t stay in one fixed location thus allowing for Shermy and Beth to move into Marcy’s house.

This is of course the Gunther version of Ice king who we got a glimpse of in the graybles 1000t episode. In concept art, he was called the ice thing. And he looks noticeably different from what he looked like in the finale, the main difference being that he no longer has a body. My theory is that he just evolved to become like this over time, but I also like to believe that after his wife, Turtle Princess died (because she’s mortal) he went mad and become a much more prominent monster and threat to the land of Ooo, and he ventures across the land and interacts with everything a lot more than the Ice King we knew did. Maybe he was the main reason and the cause of the land of Ooo being in the decrepit state it’s in.

As the Ice King flies off we get a distant look as what’s believed to be the Pup kingdom. Probably one of the last standing kingdoms. Theirs truck transport road that seems to be taking supplies in, so while the land of Ooo does look pretty barren: their seems to be enough peeps around for jobs like this to still exist.

And as we zoom into the kingdom we get a glance at what Pups look like. Pups are the obvious descendants of Jake and Rainicorn. Jake and Rainicorn did essentially create a new race of beings, and with how fast Rainicorns grow, it would make sense that they would be able to develop into a new civilization and culture in the span of 1000 years.

And it seems like the Pup race has been doing well for themselves seeing as they have a means of space travel. My theory is that some time while the Pup civilization was being created, some of it’s members split off and decided to venture in space. So half of the Pup Kingdom is on earth while the other half is in space. This rocket ship is just a way for them to communicate and send supplies to each other.

And again, referring back to graybles 1000t episode: we can see some of these space Pups having a wedding. When I first watched this episode a while back I didn’t even put together that these guys were Pups. But the evidence is obvious. They had the eyes and signature jowls of Jake, and they all speak Korean like Rainicorn. So yeah, the Pups are doing good.

Going back to the intro, we can even see some of these space Pups floating on a platform in the sky with another Pup trying to attack Ice King. Which is more evidence towards my theory that Ice King is a wanted criminal and a top priority in this state. But wait, that’s not just any Pup firing at Ice King. It’s Gibbon! Charlie’s son.

He’s still alive after all these years. With being so old, his fur turned white and he grew a super long mustache/beard. But you can still tell it’s him. As for how he is still alive after all this time: it’s because he has one of ice crown’s jewels in his eye, thus granting him some kind of immortality. We saw one of the ice crown’s jewels fall out and be used as a wedding ring in the finale, as for how Gibbon got a hold of this jewel: we will never know. But he got it somehow. Either way it’s cool that he’s still around. With being so old, maybe he’s some kind of respected high up authority in the Pup kingdom.

Now for the part in the intro that everyone has been pointing out the most, the Finn and Jake giant stone statues. It’s obvious that these two stone colossus are suppose to be Finn and Jake. The most apparent theory is that Finn and Jake were regarded as such great heroes that they became historical figures and these statues where built of them as monuments. That or maybe it was their grave stones, such brave heroes do deserve a send off as great as they where.

And it seems as if the flame guy (who I will be getting to in a second) has decided to take refugee inside of Jake’s statue. Although, some people don’t believe that this monument is actually Jake but instead Jermaine because of this:

Theirs a slab of stone next to the flame guy that looks like it use to say Finn and Jermaine as opposed to Jake before it got broken. Now theirs two answers I've come up with for this. One: maybe there where three monuments: Finn, Jake, and Jermaine’s, but Jake or Jermaine’s monument got destroyed somehow and only one remains. The one we see could be Jake or Jermaine’s. Or two: later in his life Jermaine become an adventure like Finn, Jake, and their parents, and claimed a great title as a hero reviled only to Finn. And while Jake was still greatly remembered and respected, Jermaine just began to outshine him in the public eye. Jake was kinda lazy and was never really the adventurer type anyways, he just kinda followed behind Finn. Jermaine must’ve created his own identity and did something as great as Finn’s accomplishments. Personally I like to believe a mix between the two options happened. All three of them did have monuments but one got destroyed, and Jermaine did become a great hero thus why he also has a statue in remembrance.

Also, behind the flame guy you can see a shovel and some covered dirt which makes me further believe that those statues where grave stones, and this patch of dirt is one of the brother’s grave. As for the Flame guy, it’s pretty easy to connect that he is a reincarnation of the flame elemental. And the slime guy that he’s firing at is most likely a reincarnation of the slime elemental. Maybe the two elements are at some kind of war. Sadly, this means that FB and less sadly Slime Princess, are not alive anymore like PB, and died some time in the 1000 years after the finale.

And in this shot you can see what’s most likely a descendant of the two headed duck that use to be outside of Finn and Jake’s tree house, and a space Pup spying on Marceline’s old house that now belongs to Shermy and Beth. Maybe he’s just trying to make sure Beth is safe, it make sense: she is a princess after all, and an important leader figure, they wouldn’t want anything to happen to her. This is their way of giving her freedom to do her own thing while also protecting her.

And finally we get to see Shermy and Beth residing in Marceline’s house. It’s interesting that the Pups let their Princess stay away from home, but it’s nice to see them being so non lenient on her. Another interesting bit is that you can see Bubblegum’s greatest uncle cup: which probably means before PB started getting captured again, she lived with or visited Marceline a lot at some point. Maybe it happened after the fall of the old Candy Kingdom.

In the next shot we can see remnants of the old candy kingdom, and what looks like a resident from Lumpy space. So Lumpy Space is still around. But unfortunately, Neddy most likely isn’t, seeing that the giant tree in the candy kingdom has lost it’s foliage and is probably dead, thus not giving Neddy any sustenance to survive off of. Maybe the lack of Neddy’s juice after the tree and himself died is what caused the Candy citizens to relocate, and on they’re search to find a energy to sustain candy life. And PB built the great gumball guardian to protect the Candy people from the threat of the Ice King (or what ever has brought devastation to the land of Ooo) while they travel. On the upside it looks like the Candy Kingdom did survive fairly a long time after the finale, maybe it became abandoned only few hundred years before Shermy and Beth’s time. I say this because of how much the Candy Kingdom has expanded and developed into a more metropolis like city before it’s fall, that would take a lot of time. Maybe the humans from the islands started living in the Candy Kingdom when they came to Ooo and helped the Princess expand.

Oppose to a traveling Finn sitting on top of a stretched out Jake, we see Shermy and Beth traveling on top of grown Sweet Pea. So he’s still alive and seems to be as friendly as he was as a kid. Or at least friendly enough to give Shermy and Beth a ride. In the finale you can see him walking the land with a giant sword, maybe he’s become the exact opposite of the Lich: an immortal being who will forever protect the citizens of Ooo. He seems like the gentle giant type but won’t hesitate to put a stop to evil doers and exhibit his inner strength.

And with that intro ends with Shermy: a reincarnation of the Hero comet, like Finn and Shoko, and Beth: a far far down the line descendant of Jake, and princess of the Pup civilization, fishing just outside of the cave where their house resides. I would love it if these two had some kind of short ten episode mini spin off series or a comic line, I liked their personalities and it would be great to explore them and the future land of Ooo more.

God I love how this show can cram so much information into just 24 seconds.

EDIT: Recently Steve Wolfhard updated us with some more information about this 1000t years Ooo and it turns out that I was pretty much right about my theory that PB was the person in the ice cage. He stated the PB is present in the intro, and I sure as heck didn’t see her anywhere else. The theory that Marcy is the one riding the Stone Duck is still up for grabs though, but i’m pretty sure it’s true. He also stated that the fire and slime guy are indeed reincarnations of the flame and slime elementals,he said the crew wanted to put them in as a way to tell the audience that PB is the only elemental we knew that’s still around now (except Patient St Pim but I don’t think she really counts).

He also gave us some interesting Pup lore on how every Pup is born with a power, but as of late Pups are having their powers taken away at birth. Seemingly the old version of Gibbon is the one taking their powers away. Turns out I was completely off about the Pups giving Beth space to be her own person by letting her stay away from home, in all actuality she’s an exiled Princess who was usurped by Gibbon and that’s why she isn’t at home anymore. She’s basically on the run. So I was right about Gibbon being an high up authority but I didn’t expect him to be evil in a way.

But it’s interesting and it makes some sense: apparently Gibbons powers we’re stolen and it does seem like the crown’s jewel affectd him in a way similar to how the ice crown makes it’s user go insane.

My theory is that after his power was stolen he fell into a depressed state and searched for a way to get it back or something that would give him special abilities again until he found the Ice crown’s jewel. The combination of the ice crowns affect it has on people and his depression was enough to drive him over the edge. So he decided that if he couldn’t have his powers no Pup could, and started stealing their powers (presumably he uses the magic staff he has to do it)

Must’ve took him along time to work his way up the ranks since he didn’t actually become the Pup king until Beth’s time. I say this because Beth does know of her heritage and that she’s suppose to be the rightful leader of the Pup kingdom, so her parents must’ve been in power at some point in her life or else how would she know that? My guess is that Gibbon took over around the time Beth was a little kid (i’m just assuming that in the finale Beth is a teenager around the ages of 14-17) but Beth escaped before Gibbon was able to take her power. We see her parents nowhere and it looks like it’s just her and Shermy, so they most likely didn’t make it out.

Or maybe Gibbon isn’t that vile and he allowed Beth’s parents to continue ruling but appointed himself as their over see-er, he let them stay in charge of the kingdom but they had to have their powers removed. Beth, not wanting to give up her powers: was exiled or ran away. Thus why she still has her powers. It seems as if the Pups do know of her current location (because of the space spy pup) but aren’t really seeking to take her out. Gibbon doesn’t see her as a threat and just lets her do her own thing while keeping tabs on her.

God it’s all so interesting, I wanna know so much about Beth. She seems like such a cool character.

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fragmenthearted · 5 years

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@lucianprincess cont from (x):

If there is one thing Aurora expected to have in the near or distant future, it was the visit of her ancestor to come and lecture her about the fact that she had come a little too close to Ardyn. She wasn’t really happy to have this discussion, but she was going to make the effort to listen to his arguments. With a tired sigh, she crossed her arms and looked at him in a stoic way.

“All right. I’m listening to you.”

She listened carefully to him while remaining as silent as possible, letting him explain each of the points he wanted to address. Why would she cut him off? It was easier for her to start thinking about what she would say to him later. When he finished, Aurora raised a hand, looked at it and let her thumb slide over her nails, coming and going as if this repetitive gesture would help her focus her thoughts.

“Indeed. I am not your sister but your many-great-granddaughter and he is not your best friend but your brother. Although I can fully understand this uncomfortable feeling you are talking about, if my brother were to tell me that he was in love with my best friend and that his feelings were mutual, I would be happy for them and wish them all the happiness in the world.”

While continuing to play with her fingers, she raised her pale blue eyes towards Somnus with an inscrutable face.

“About your brother. Ardyn.” The princess deliberately used his name as if to show that she was not going to name him ‘Adagium’, ‘Accursed’ or any other name. “I know exactly who he is. I know what he is capable of doing and what he plans to do because he has never hidden his intentions from me. Destroy our line to the last one of us.” She paused for a short while, stopping playing with her fingers to clench a fist, her thumbnail sinking slightly into her index finger skin to keep her calm and her voice became grave and scathing. “But if he put this goal in his mind, it was because of ALL of you. You. The Oracle. The Gods. You only fuelled his anger and hatred. When he was just a good and selfless man who only wants to help his neighbor and save his people from Starscourge.”

Aurora closed her eyes, lowering her head in a new tired sigh, letting her raised arm fall back on her other arm. She felt that even if she tried to express her point of view it would be useless.

“Then, yes. I know that I am playing a dangerous game and that I am aware of the risks I am taking. But I will not abandon my wish to bring him back to the Light, nor will I abandon the idea of preventing all this from ending in a bloodbath, even if it means going against the Prophecy and the divine plans by finding an alternative to all this.” Her voice, although slightly tinged with anger, was blatant with sincerity. "He has feverishly accepted my outstretched hand and the confidence he has in me is not high for now. And just because I have some feelings for him doesn’t mean I’m blind and stupid. I know very well that he could betray me at some point…“ The young woman frowned and clenched her jaw slightly before raising her pale blue eyes to her ancestor.

“But I have no intention of letting him down, otherwise I wouldn’t be any better than you."

"Good? Selfless?" Somnus let out a short snort of laughter.

"Did he tell you that? Did you get that impression from the histories I declared? I'm sorry, but my brother - may the Six let his soul find rest - was a naive fool who played with lives the same way he does now, and would have had me stay my hand while, for every person he 'healed', three more elsewhere succumbed to the Starscourge.

“And yet, I was the one vilified, and he was hailed as a savior, just as he always was and always expected he would be. But I wished to avoid the taint of Adagium's actions staining my brother's memory..."

The blue eyes that met the princess’s would have matched hers - were it not for the cold in them.

“Aurora, I have watched over this country and this city for as many years as Adagium has been lost to this world. Even as part of the Old Wall, my vessels have fallen before him and the horrors he brings forth. I do not speak from idle speculation or mere jealousy, but from experience.

“Adagium is a daemon who wears my brother's face and keeps his and many others' souls from their proper rest. He has consumed countless hundreds of my soldiers and people, and many, many more in the Empire, I cannot be but certain… I fear he could consume you as well, not simply betray you.”

The dark haired man turned half away and stared into the distance, his arms still folded, but his fingertips were now ever so slightly tapping on his arm, as if in thought. He looked older, as if the conversation was reminding him of a later time in his life, and curled around his head was not only a ghostly version of the crown all Lucian monarchs wore, but vestiges of the Mystic's horns.

"Whatever you might think of me, I do not regret my decisions - after all, are you not here to rebuke me for them? But I do regret the methods by which I carried them out. I did not intend things to turn out this way… And, Aurora?"

With that, he looked back at her. "Out of all that you said, there is one more thing I wish to correct - and if there is any of this that you carry back to him, this he should know. I believe Aera - our Oracle - remained loyal to him to the end; as yours was to your brother. Let him find solace in that at least - if he is able."

#(queue)#lucianprincess #muse : the somnial progenitor #//ahah sorry he seems to like talking in whole paragraphs #//you don't even want to see how much I cut >.<

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anhed-nia · 6 years

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PROFONDO ROSSO/THE APPLE

For some disgusting reason that may never be explained, I recently watched THE APPLE back to back with DEEP RED, and the experience produced a powerful moral outrage that I didn’t even know I had in me. Readers may be aware of the latter-day cult classic THE APPLE, a US-West German nightmare vision from 1980 that was exhumed in recent years by masochistic thrill-seekers and subsequently elevated to appropriate infamy. In fact, nonsensically, THE APPLE may have enjoyed wider visibility in our time than PROFONDO ROSSO, a virtuoso directorial effort from giallo master Dario Argento arriving the year before the more popular SUSPIRIA (not a giallo, by the way). PROFONDO ROSSO was exported under the ironic american title DEEP RED: THE HATCHET MURDERS--ironic because the film was hacked nearly to death, with the fatal amputation of more than twenty minutes of character development, leaving behind a movie that was too confusing and too revolting for foreign audiences then unfamiliar with the italian thriller genre. Happily, the film has enjoyed loving restoration and increased circulation since its 1975 debut, giving one a feeling of justice served. It is hard to feel that same sort of cultural pride in the endurance of THE APPLE, which is similarly impossible to look away from, though for quite opposite reasons.

So the thing is, Dario Argento is an artist who, in spite of his notable misanthropy, has given something to the world. He works in what I would call the most complex artistic medium in human history, and for more than a decade, he consistently lives up to its many intricate challenges. Here you have a guy who wakes up one day and says, "You know, I have something to say. I see the world in a certain way, and I need to tell everyone about it. I'm going to shoot a movie that's really going to make people feel something." And he does. He makes PROFONDO ROSSO, a perfect film. He really cares about it. Every single thing is just so. He takes these absurd miniature tableaus, and photographs them in a way that transforms them into another universe. He makes you feel like you're seeing the color red for the first time. He positions flashy modernity against grave antiquity, and seductive trash against high art, creating juxtapositions that communicate vividly about the dazzling contradictions in the very soul of Rome. This dichotomy is mirrored in his main character, a nervy but vulnerable pianist who has to hide his full artistic sophistication, lest he lose his job playing in seedy dives. This being a giallo, he witnesses a mysterious murder, the key to which is buried in his own memories--he himself becomes the only substantial evidence of the crime, and he is forced to live out his life in an escalating nightmare until he gathers enough context to make meaning out of what he knows. PROFONDO ROSSO is indeed profound and savage, offering reflexive commentary on its own existence as a primal and salacious piece of entertainment that is executed with almost impossible elegance and wisdom. Dario Argento is an artist who recognized the full multifaceted power of cinema, and then with great deliberation, fashioned this gift to the world.

Meanwhile, this same world also contains a guy like Menahem Golan. Golan may be forgivable as the crass commercialist behind the Cannon Group, who shat out a number of dusty-looking vehicles for goons like Chuck Norris and Sylvester Stallone. However, nothing forgives THE APPLE. Nothing even explains it. It appears to be marketed to no one at all, being that no human being who has ever walked the earth could derive pleasure from it. While it may be hard to imagine possessing Argento's talent, it's easy to imagine him contemplating the vast potential of cinema, identifying its prismatic means of expression, and approaching it with both the humility and the courage to make of it something flawless. He does due diligence. He is responsible. He may injure his audience with his brutality, but he’ll never hurt their eyes. It is in no way so easy to even begin to estimate what Menahem Golan was thinking when he dreamed up this grueling fundamentalist christian sci-fi fantasy in which a pair of dopey Adam and Eve-like folk singers tries to save the distant future of 1994 from a literal disco inferno. This dystopian fable, apparently shot in the mass transit hubs of West Berlin, describes a world that has been taken over by a tyrannical music production company-cum-government, Boogalow International Music. The defining characteristic of its rule is enforced disco dancing. The viewer will never find out what is gained by all this disco dancing, or what else this company/government does; there is almost no apparent violence, physical or institutional, and there seem to be no consequences for the disco-averse other than that they are occasionally fined for failing to wear their "BIM marks" (a sort of "mark of the beast" that's obviously just a dead stock skate sticker). BIM's worst crime is trying to turn cherubic hippie chick Bibi into a disco diva, while keeping her apart from her beloved folksy musical partner Alphie. The action culminates with the lovebirds running away to live with a bunch of dirty hippies who leave unattended fires burning all over the public park where they live, and who are presently rescued by a godlike intergalactic being (or just god, but he flies around in outer space, I have no fucking idea) in a white tuxedo, who ferries them all off to another planet in his flying Rolls Royce.

That is how THE APPLE resolves itself. It's almost a feat in and of itself that, in spite of being based so transparently on the story of the Garden of Eden and certain parts of the Book of Revelations, THE APPLE manages to have no clear message whatsoever. There's a tenuous thing about how it's good for people to love each other, but it's impossible to imagine what BIM's point is, why they care whether or not people love each other, why they oppress people, how they oppress people, and what happens if you defy them, other than that you get a ticket and someone chases you out of the civic space that you're vandalizing. Besides that, the movie is simply bad in every single way. The music is the worst you'll ever hear, vacillating between being purely idiotic, and being militantly offensive, as in the case of a reggae number comparing the rule of BIM to the American slavery period. The costumes are beyond ugly, leaving every single character looking like they've been scribbled on and thrown in the garbage by an angry child. At a certain point, THE APPLE seems to be meticulously checking off a list of things that no person would ever wish to see in a movie, from filthy gangs of sack-clad children shrilly repeating nonsense lines, to warty old jewish stereotypes being sexually molested while they spoon-feed unctuous folk singers a greasy-looking stew

The film is so hideous in every dimension that you wouldn't even take a picture of it if it were happening in front of you. It's bad enough that the people who collaborated on this movie actually did any of what you see on the screen even one single time, without someone actually deciding to record the whole thing and distribute it to the world at large. What I'm essentially trying to say is, on the same planet in the same timeline, you can somehow have a person like Dario Argento, considerately and patiently crafting an incomparable work of art that speaks to the artist's economic and historical context--and you can also have someone like Menahem Golan, who can't even figure out how to make meaning out of the fucking Bible, who has the fucking nerve to shoehorn a bunch of degenerates into grimy leotards and make them twirl batons in a world covered in shitty stickers, and he calls that a fucking movie. He charges money for people to see it. It is literally maddening to even try to imagine what would motivate all this wasted motion, the product of which is so aesthetically and emotionally destructive that it is actually evil. It can be evil, to make a bad movie. This is the one and only lesson of THE APPLE.

PS I've seen THE APPLE like a hundred times so I guess I actually love it in some perverted way, I mean I'm not above it. Just, something had to be said.

#blogtober #deep red #the hatchet murders #profondo rosso #dario argento #the apple #men ahem golan #menahem golan #musical #sci-fi #fantasy #religion #giallo #horror #thriller

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genesisarclite · 7 years

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The Mirror’s Soul, pt. 1

A while back, I’d mentioned wanting to write about Typhon-Morgan. I’ve had this idea ever since I finished the game for the first time back in late August, and over time, it evolved, grew, and nagged me until I finally sat down and wrote it out. While I do have more planned, I’d like to see what people think of this part first before I write up and post the rest of it.

Fair warning, I listened to music like this while writing. Combining that music with the first part with Alex reminiscing about Morgan about made me cry. I can only hope that came across well enough in the text. Also, the title comes from the saying “the eyes are the mirror of the soul”, the author of which seems to be unknown. The project’s name comes from “through a mirror, darkly”, title of an episode of DS9, which in turn is a play on the saying “through a glass darkly”.

Enjoy.

We’re gonna shake things up. Like old times.

It had been nearly two weeks to the day since Alex had spoken those words to a facsimile of his brother, an inky humanoid shape forming a near-perfect copy of a person, allowing him to touch it and not shying away. It had even gotten the color of Morgan’s eyes right, though those eyes rarely blinked. The movements of the hybrid were slow, deliberate, sometimes stiff, but move it did, like a person. Like the brother he’d lost.

Nine years. Eight months. Seventeen days.

Talos I is a wreck floating in space, punctured and long since having leaked its oxygen, its pieces orbiting the Moon for eternity, the last and silent testament to mankind’s foolishness. Its beautiful gold panels had been pitted by time, its rings spinning into pieces and smashing into the Moon, creating geysers of glittering dust. A monument to man’s greatest achievements, left a husk and a tomb.

He didn’t know how many bodies were still left up there, but there had to be dozens. Their bones were left spinning in space. It was a graveyard now, the coral long since faded.

Somewhere up there were the frozen bones of his brother. He hadn’t been there when Morgan succumbed to his injuries, on the floor of the reactor core, struggling to make his way in to arm it. He could still remember listening to his labored breathing, the desperate gasps, the sound of blood hissing across his teeth with every breath, and the soft rustle of the uniform over the floor grating as he dragged himself down the steps.

Pleading with Alex to destroy the station. Begging him to do it, whether Morgan made it back or not. Telling him that the instant those keys locked in, he was to flip the switch that would send the reactor thermonuclear. The Apex, mother of all Typhon, had to die so that others, countless others, could live – species they couldn’t see, worlds they would never know in their lifetimes. Morgan had developed a soul, a perspective, a conscience, and saw beyond himself, beyond TranStar, into the chilly depths of space and eternity.

He saw something beautiful, wondrous, impossible to understand and too incredible to grasp, and in his awe, in his understanding, he begged Alex to help him destroy the monsters.

Alex didn’t want him to, of course. The thought of losing his brother, the only family he really loved, to a sacrifice, no matter how noble, had shattered every ounce of resolve he carried within. No matter how much Morgan changed, he was still his brother, his little brother who still needed protecting sometimes.

Morgan should have been here, on Earth, celebrating a triumph.

But in the reactor core, the Apex had reached through, tendrils of shadow devouring everything in its path. Morgan had fought, but run out of ammo, run out of stamina, and collapsed at the bottom of the steps, mere feet from the key slots and unable to move any further. Of course, there had been no mercy there, as Alex had listened to his little brother take his final, pained breaths, become delirious in death, and felt, in some way, his very soul leave the world, abandoning its broken shell.

It had destroyed him. Completely. Nothing else mattered – not the research, not their parents, nothing. Only Morgan mattered in the end, and now his little brother had gone to his grave in the eternal silence of the cosmos.

Nine years. Eight months. Seventeen days.

The creature that had studied him so curiously from the chair in the bunker was not Morgan, no matter how much it looked like him. It couldn’t speak, and its eyes brimmed with alien thoughts. It was thinking and feeling for the first time in its life, the blindfold of the Looking Glass pulled away at last, and it had nothing but the experiences of modified memories to function with. It didn’t know how to process human thoughts and feelings, and the collision of alien instinct with human sapience was unseen, but, he knew, intense.

Morgan had first postulated the idea of simulating human experiences in an attempt to turn a Typhon into a sapient being, an idea he had shot down without much thought over a decade ago.

Morgan should be here. This thing was not Morgan.

The creature had spent the next two weeks in a section of bunker cordoned off by extra-strength glass, too large to be a cage and full of nooks, crannies, and halls to wander down. It didn’t shift out of Morgan’s form, idly walking around in the red uniform and constantly examining its surroundings. Alex rarely left it alone, and sometimes, when he spoke to it, the creature stopped and listened to him. The way it stared at him was unsettling, to say the least, but it was with Morgan’s eyes, and that was what really scared him.

But he had to be sure. They had already gone through several iterations of this experiment, and this one was the only one that stayed in Morgan’s form and willingly – as far as he could tell, anyway – accepted its human “heritage”, and not gone mad and tried to eat everyone in sight.

They couldn’t risk losing now.

There weren’t many people left on Earth anymore, only scattered pockets, trying to survive. He wasn’t sure if there were enough left to repopulate, either, even with the possibility of other space stations still holding living crew. This bunker was one of less than a dozen around the world, all built down into bedrock and with a thousand contingencies, containing somewhere between twenty and thirty people – he didn’t keep count, he never had, too busy trying to save the world and all – and all of them were tired. There was enough food left to keep them all alive for a while longer, but sooner or later, they would succumb to hopelessness.

This was his last, longest shot. This – a captured Typhon injected with mirror neurons and fed with memories and feelings and thoughts – was the last hope for humanity’s future.

If this creature failed to bridge the gap, or if it fell back on instinct and had to be destroyed – if it didn’t kill him first – then the extinction of mankind would soon follow, just like any other civilizations. A star in a galaxy of billions would go silent, maybe to await another future cycle, maybe to die alone in the distant future, long after any sentient being was alive anymore to witness the age of slow star deaths.

He tried not to think about it, but it weighed on him, heavy as a millstone, and ate at his mind.

After all, this was his fault.

The creature, nameless but bearing Morgan’s form, stood still now, staring at him with its head tilted a little. Familiar brown eyes searched his face. The hybrid rarely changed expression, but its eyes did. Typhon couldn’t speak, and he doubted this one would ever be able to. Its eyes spoke instead, sometimes in a primal sort of way, sometimes in a more childlike way, usually not in a way he understood.

Alex sometimes just… stood there, staring at this terrifying triumph of reckless determination and science. This was no folly, not like TranStar and the neuromods and the evils perpetrated in Psychotronics for all those years. If this succeeded, there was still hope, but he wasn’t ready to remove the barriers between himself and… and it just yet, even if it had willingly taken his hand in understanding before.

Apparent understand, at least.

The hybrid stood motionless, still looking at him, not breathing or blinking, form completely solid, seeming content to stare for as long as he allowed it.

If this one failed, it was all over. Everything would die, and mankind would be little more than an epitaph for some future spacefaring civilization to stumble across, if such a thing ever came to pass.

Nine years. Eight months. Seventeen days.

Looking at Morgan’s visage threatened to break him all over again, even after nearly a decade to heal. It was like a part of him had been torn away and crushed, never to be reborn. He just wanted his brother back, childish though it was, just wanted to joke with him and laugh with him and argue with him one more time, sit quietly next to him under the stars as they toasted their victory, free from their parents at last.

Those desires, those wishes, those dreams, were ashes now. The part of him that had died with Morgan still hurt, an ache in his heart that he suspected would never heal.

And now he could apologize only to empty air, knowing full well that Morgan would never hear it.

How many mistakes he had made in those fateful days.

The hybrid looked away from him, still unblinking, to something behind him. The snap-hiss of a door opening and closing came to him; he turned enough to see who had entered. One of the scientists, a woman taller than him, her face weathered by worry and long, sleepless nights, her hair cropped short in an uneven cut, moved up next to him and stopped at his side. She wore a TranStar uniform like everyone else, bearing marks of having been patched and adjusted numerous times over the years. It fit a little loose.

For a long time, he and the woman stood in silence and studied the creature, who studied them back.

“Any changes? Anything new?”

Alex looked at her, then back at the hybrid, feeling suddenly tired, and shook his head. “Nothing. It hasn’t tried to communicate or do anything different. Every day, it just… wanders back and forth, back and forth. I don’t know what it’s thinking, if it thinks at all.”

The scientist was Sonia Wilken, only thirty years old, but she looked older and tired. Her adult life had been spent in the shadow of the Typhon’s slow harvest of their world, much like most of the others in this bunker – any who had not died and had their neural patterns mapped onto Operator AI cores. Long hours spent going over experiments, calibrations, and calculations left little time for sleep, showing in the darkness under both of her eyes. Her hair had been cropped short, to her chin, out of necessity more than anything, and though it hadn’t yet begun to gray, its red color had lost most of its luster in the time he’d known her.

Alex had found her quite by accident, if by proxy. In the ghost town of San Francisco, where the buildings were still pristine, a team of his Blackbox Operators, led by the ghost of Sarah Elazar, had found her hiding in an apartment with two other survivors and several burning corpses. One of the survivors had been killed by a sudden blast of plasma, scorching the other down one side, but Sonia had been shielded from it by an empty bus.

To make sure she and the Operators got back safe, the survivor had stayed behind, going into a parking garage and stalling with pistols and lures, never to be seen again.

That had been nearly eight years ago.

She approached the glass and leaned close. Alex tensed, not knowing exactly why, as he watched the hybrid look back at her, then mimic her movement, bringing its face closer to hers. Still unblinking, it studied her, eyes darting back and forth across her features. “Alex, you can’t keep it caged forever, you know that.”

“And you know how important this is, Sonia.”

“You want it to act human and think like us. You want to be able to live up to your name and save humanity. Well…” She looked at him. “…you can start by not keeping it caged up like this.”

He frowned. “Sonia, look, I see your point, I really do. You’ve been hammering on it for two weeks now. Try to remember that I’m trying to keep what few people we have safe in here. We don’t know what it’ll do when exposed to other people, or how it’ll react to different stimuli.”

Sonia’s eyes were a very dark blue, like the ocean, or how he remembered it before the coral began to spin its way across even the seas themselves, and right now, they looked at him with an intensity he could match, easily, but didn’t know if he really wanted to.

“Has anyone ever gone in there and tried being near it?” She looked back at the hybrid.

“Not yet. People aren’t expendable enough for that.”

“Coming from you, that says a lot.”

The words stung. “I suppose.”

“I’ll go in.” At his incredulous look, and as he opened his mouth to protest, she raised a hand. She didn’t have enough energy to do anything more than that, only giving him a wry smile. “Before you say anything, think about it. I’m just a jury-rigged scientist, no doctorate or anything, and I’m replaceable. If you–”

“No, you’re female, and very good at what you do.”

“You’re so practical, you know that?” She shook her head a little. “We can talk about the necessary balance of male and female needed to save the species when we’re actually at that point. Right now, if I die, it means the experiment’s a failure, and you can start over, while I don’t have to see a real bleak future.”

“The answer is no, Sonia. If anyone should be going in there, it’s me.”

She sighed. “Then do it, Alex. Sooner or later, we have to find out if it’ll kill us.” Her uniform rustled as she turned to face the hybrid directly. It was still looking at her, expression unreadable. “Too bad you can’t speak. Then I could just ask if you’ll kill us.”

Its eyebrows cinched together, and it shook its head slightly.

Alex stared at the creature, wondering why he was surprised to see such a gesture. After hours in the sim and having chosen the most morally righteous path through the scenario, it had spent a great deal of time with humans, and now, in the real world, two weeks observing them. This meant it understood words and their context, at least enough to know that this little gesture meant “no” – or, at least, he hoped so.

“Sonia,” he said, “if I don’t come back out, you know what to do. Just talk to the Operators. They’ll help you.”

She looked at him with a furrowed brow. “I’m… not part of–”

“You know what to do, Sonia.” He placed a hand on her shoulder. She didn’t, of course, at least not completely, having never been on the Dark Mirror Project directly, only having heard the things he said about it. She worked in the hardware section of their makeshift science division as a tech, finding better ways to detect and repel Typhon. Many of her designs, QC’d and constructed by a small team of other techs, had made it into the bunker’s defenses, and as a result, infiltration rates had dropped significantly since she’d been brought on board.

But despite her intelligence, by herself, she could never hope to replicate the Dark Mirror Project, so he had left just enough information that anyone could pick up the pieces.

He always had a contingency plan. Always.

Sonia said nothing as he walked over to the mantrap they had constructed for the cage and let himself in. The door behind him sealed before the one leading into the cage opened, allowing him to step through and be face-to-face with the creature for the first time in so many days.

“Well,” he said, “here we are again. Are you planning to kill me, then?”

The creature looked at him, still frowning, and shook its head without taking its eyes off him. When he took a step forward, its expression changed, resembling childlike curiosity, and it didn’t move away.

“You’ve been watching,” he said. “You can see us.”

It nodded slowly, still unblinking.

“I can’t put into words just how important you are.” He took another step closer, and for a moment, he could imagine it was his brother, somehow brought back to life. Morgan would never hear anything he had to say ever again – his desperate apologies, the long nights staring into space while mumbling about the past – and he could never tell him how right his brother had been, about everything. “If you’re just human enough, you can infect your whole species with our… essence, so to speak, and Earth might be saved.”

The hybrid shifted its weight, still gazing at him, but it seemed to listen, if it not understand.

“I just don’t know if humanity can be saved.” He looked at the floor and ran a hand over his face. “But even if it can’t, stopping your species means maybe saving a million others we’ve never seen. Morgan talked about that in the last hours before he died. Somehow, he knew other species had been consumed elsewhere in the galaxy, and there were more that could be saved by stopping you here.”

The hybrid tilted its head the other way, frown deepening, brown eyes keen.

“He saw beyond himself, deep into the cosmos. He wasn’t like that when the trials started, you see. He kind of… grew a conscious or something, and by the time he decided to follow the January Protocol and destroy the station, he didn’t care if he lived or died anymore. All that mattered was saving others, and he gave his life to do it, even if it ended up being in vain.” Realizing his voice had begun to shake, he stopped and swallowed. Knowing what Morgan had chosen to do in the end shamed him, only because he hadn’t been able to picture sacrificing his life own for the sake of others. So caught up in “uplifting humanity”. So convinced he was in a league of gods. What it had cost in the end was rivers of innocent blood. “I’d like to bring you out to see the others, but there aren’t many of us here. If you kill us, there’s no more hope for anyone. I want to trust you. Can I?”

The creature studied him for a long time in silence, and with serious eyes, it nodded gravely. It then stepped toward him and extended a hand.

Alex looked at it. The hand looked just like Morgan’s and bore no glove.

He took it.

Through his own gloves, the appendage felt solid and gave off warmth, though a little too much for a human, but the twitching of the fingers felt real enough. When he looked at the creature’s face again, it nodded as its lips formed a faint smile – as genuine as any human’s. It had been observing.

Alex opened the mantrap and led the creature in. It didn’t let go of his hand, but it didn’t hold on very tight, either. Maybe it thought the gesture was just… polite?

Sonia hugged her arms close as he and the hybrid approached, looking wary, but she kept her eyes on the hybrid’s all the same, eventually relaxing her arms when it came within a few feet of her and stopped, finally letting go of his hand. It tilted its head first one way, then the other, still as unblinking as ever. She took a step forward, then another, and another, each slow and carefully placed, until she stood in front of it and held out a hand. She stood a little taller than the hybrid, eyes looking down slightly at him, and said nothing.

It looked at her hand, then reached out for hers. She wore no gloves – this would be the first time it would touch any person “skin to skin”. He wondered how it would react.

Their hands met. She entwined her fingers with its and met it eyes directly. Its other hand came up, covering her, as its head tilted the other way again, then back upright. She didn’t speak, and the hybrid made no sound, still as stone, staring at her as if she were the most fascinating thing it had ever seen.

Alex didn’t want to break the careful silence. It felt delicate, like sugar glass, and he wasn’t sure how the creature would react to being suddenly interrupted. It seemed so deliberate in everything it did, absorbing its surroundings and lingering when most people would have long moved on. Sonia was the only other person it had seen outside the sim and himself, so maybe it was just… interested in a new face.

Eventually, he said, in his softest voice, “You’re the first face it’s seen besides me since leaving the sim. It might think you’re really interesting as a result. What do you think?”

Sonia’s thin lips twitched into a half-smile. “I think your brother was a looker,” she murmured. The smile faded. “I think it’s worth the risk, Alex. Unless it’s planning to massacre everyone at once at a later time, it doesn’t seem like it’ll hurt anyone. You should bring it out to meet the others.”

“If you say so.” He moved closer, drawing its eyes to him. “Hey, are you ready to see the others? Ready to see what you were made for, and why you’re here?”

It released her hands and turned to face him, nodding. Alex felt a shiver run down his spine as he thought of all the people he could be putting in danger, but he pushed those thoughts aside. Time for mankind was running out fast. Soon, the entire world would be covered in coral, and they would be the latest victims. If it all ended here, then it would be fitting, yet this could also be the beginning of an era of hope.

“I don’t know how you’re going to do it, but… I just… I know, this can’t be the end. It can’t be. Come with me, and let’s… shake things up, in ways we never have before.”

“This isn’t about TranStar, or technology, or making maximum profits, not anymore,” Sonia said. She touched the creature’s arm, making Alex tense, but it only looked at her, not otherwise bothered. “This is about life. This is about saving everyone, and about hope. No pressure, of course.”

It nodded at her, then looked back at Alex and nodded at him, too.

“We’re running out of time,” he said gently. “This all depends on you now.” He took a deep breath. “Let’s go.” He turned and faced the only exit, a door set unobtrusively into the wall, and keyed in the code to unlock it. The locks very quietly came under, and the door slid open with a soft hiss. Beyond the threshold stretched a long, narrow hall, at the other end of which was another bulkhead door, and beyond that, the central atrium, where the crew went to relax as much as they could with the world’s ashes scattered around them.

It was the most central and well-fortified location in the entire bunker. The living quarters and kitchen led off from that atrium, detached from everything else.

If anything went wrong now, there would be very little that could be done to stop it.

Alex led the way down the hall, the creature at his heels and Sonia bringing up the rear, and opened the bulkhead door. It hissed open, the atrium’s sterile light falling across them, and together, they stepped inside.

#prey #prey 2017 #alex yu #morgan yu #my writing #typhon morgan #prey spoilers #right in the feels

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mostlysignssomeportents · 7 years

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William Gibson interviewed: Archangel, the Jackpot, and the instantly commodifiable dreamtime of industrial societies

William Gibson's 2014 novel The Peripheral was the first futuristic book he published in the 21st century, and it showed us a distant future in which some event, "The Jackpot," had killed nearly everyone on Earth, leaving behind a class of ruthless oligarchs and their bootlickers; in the 2018 sequel, Agency, we're promised a closer look at the events of The Jackpot. Between then and now is Archangel, a time-traveling, alt-history, dieselpunk story of power-mad leaders and nuclear armageddon that will be in stores on October 3.

It's been nearly 20 years since I first interviewed Gibson and in the intervening decades we've become both friends and colleagues. He was kind enough to submit to an email interview again, in advance of Archangel's publication.

Cory Doctorow: This feels like an intermediate step between today and Agency, which is, in turn, an intermediate step on the way to The Peripheral. I know that when you first wrote The Peripheral, you didn't really know what The Jackpot was... Is this you taking successive runs at either side of The Jackpot, trying to get up to the edge of it so you can get a better look at it?

William Gibson: It feels like that to me now, but the whole thing’s been completely unintentional.

Mike and I (Michael St. John Smith, the actor, who’s also a screenwriter) started bouncing things around after I’d finished The Peripheral, which I assumed would be a one-off, but I found myself still in the grip of the “stub” alternative timeline thing, so Archangel wound up with a similar mechanism (rules of time travel invented, as far as I know, by Sterling and Shiner). Meanwhile, Agency was conceived as a book set in 2016 San Francisco/Silicon Valley, but treating contemporary reality there as if it were a near future (which of course it feels like to me, because I’m old). But I’m also slow, so Trump got elected before I’d finished, and suddenly I had about half of an ms that felt like it was set in a stub, a world that never happened. Extremely weird feeling! So I had this one extra thing to be pissed off with, about Trump! But then I wondered what would happen if I considered it as exactly that, a stub, but to do so I felt I needed to hook it up with the further future of The Peripheral, the London of the klept. Meanwhile, Archangel had been coming out from IDW, and when I went down to meet them at ComicCon, in 2016, the possibility of a Trump win naturally came up. So, through to November 8th, part me was looking at that, and the other part was No Fucking Way, and, well, you know.

For the record, in the graphic novel's script, pre-election, the Pilot winds up where he winds up in the comic, but it’s a nice WTF moment.

CD: You've written screenplays and novels but not, AFAIK, comics. You're on record as thinking that the comics previously adapted from your work were visually disappointing. You are one of the most visual writers I know, a font of extremely specific and striking visual details -- tell me what it was like to be able to collaborate with drawing-type people who could make visual things happen? How did it compare to screenwriting, how close did it come to your mind's eye, did this scratch some long-felt itch to conjure those visuals up and make them tangible?

WG: Well, previous attempts were well-intentioned, I don’t doubt, but comics have gotten a lot more sophisticated in the meantime.

Maybe because I'm a very visual writer, I don’t actually have any specific urge to see someone else render the things I’ve already seen, myself, in mind’s eye.

That said, the process with IDW was extremely gratifying. The talent and experience of a lot of professionals, all bent toward making this thing right. And budget not an issue, just a question of what could be drawn and fit in available space. You want an atomic explosion, you’ve got it!

CD: You once told me that Neuromancer was optimistic because it only featured a couple of limited nuclear exchanges instead of the holocaust we'd all be expecting. The futures you've written this decade all feature much more grave catastrophes, with much higher death-tolls. Is your optimism (such as it was) waning?

WG: I think I was relatively optimistic then, and remain so, but less so. I’ve never felt that my optimism, such as it was, was particularly logical. Often it felt deliberately quixotic to me.

But I’ve also observed a tendency, over my years as an sf reader, for sf writers of a certain age to give the After Us The Deluge speech, so I promised myself I’d try to be watchful of the onset of that, try to fend it off as best I could. I suspect that when people notice how much of the world they grew up has already ended, it’s quite natural to feel that the world is ending. Because the world one knew quite demonstrably is. But it always has been ending, that way. You can read the ancient Greeks, say, doing it at great length. When younger, though, this sounds like something one can simply choose to avoid, just as old people, to the young, appear to have made some sort of inexplicably terrible decision to become old.

There aren’t many catastrophes in my work, in our traditional cultural sense. There’s the California quake that forms the backstory of the Bridge trilogy, and the somewhat deliberately goofy Singularity that closes it. Otherwise, the catastrophic landscapes are simply human civilization, ongoing. The Peripheral introduced something new, for me, with the idea that our cultural model of catastrophe is still largely one of a uni-causal event of relatively short duration. We are ourselves of relatively short duration as individuals, and thus do we look at the world. Is our widespread use of fossil fuels a single extended catastrophe? Did it become one at some relatively late point? Is our species itself catastrophic (see Sterling’s “Swarm”)? Would it seem so to tigers, could they consider such things, and know that we’re on the brink of bringing about their extinction? I don’t see why it wouldn’t.

It seems to me in retrospect that Ballard’s work had a certain arc, in its employment of catastrophe. Early on, he’d unleash catastrophes of the sort our culture recognizes as such, though with wonderfully poetic results. As he continued, however, the catastrophe became humanity. Not a world made desert, or drowned, but a world made Cannes writ large, and terrible through being the very opposite of deserted.

CD: One place where this catastrophic business wraps around to touch your visual sense is in the cyberpunk aesthetic: for decades, you've been frontrunning the mainstreaming of bohemian subcultures. Archangel features gorgeous, eyeball-kicky sequences in an illegal nightclub in war-torn Berlin, with lots of well-dressed weirdos (there's also a Bowie-esque protagonist in the cast of characters). Today, it's hard to imagine a genuinely underground culture that isn't also something you can buy at the mall, with a few exceptions (e.g. extreme racist alt-right Pepe trolls who have to order their t-shirts off the internet or get them in a flea market). Can you imagine an uncommodifiable futuristic bohemian subculture that today's post-cyberpunks could deploy to make really edgy teens and young people? (Scott Westerfeld suggested that tomorrow's punks might opt for acne in a post-zit world)

WG: I accepted Sterling’s description of bohemias as “the Dreamtime of industrial societies” immediately, but I also took it (and still do) to imply that that might not be true for post-industrial societies. Bohemias were the product, if Sterling was right, of societies in which information was relatively unevenly distributed, specific information being what you needed in order to auto-other yourself into subculture. Roots of “hip”: to know, to be "with it”. A more universal, post-geographical availability of information seriously messes with that, because you don’t need to physically go to Montmartre or the Haight to get with it.

Mr. Baby’s club in Archangel is envisioned as a scaled-up version of what you get when Berlin’s Weimar bohemia becomes a platform for the postwar black market, so imagine it as primarily extra-legal, but staffed in part by pre-war counterculturists.

It’s interesting to consider the Pepe trolls as a subculture, because if they aren’t, why aren’t they? Yesterday a friend showed me a passage from Joshua Green’s book about Steve Bannon, Devil’s Bargain, describing René Guénon as an influence. So I checked out Guénon’s Wiki for the first time. Highly recommend it. Trippy, as we used to say! Guénon was, among other things, a convert to Islam (albeit a raging esotericist along with it, so not just any Islam) and otherwise deep into Egypt. So in the way of things internet I wound up diving his correspondence with Julius Evola, who kept him up to date on what Aleister Crowley was up to, and explained why this Jung character was even more dangerous than Freud. Both these guys, Guénon and Evola, were obviously total hipsters (in the original sense of the term). Subculturalists, unmistakably. With-it dudes. Whatever “it" was.

But then I never felt I truly understood many aspects of what I’d experienced in the countercultural ‘60s until I got a prof at UBC whose central interest was the mass psychology of fascism. Guénon and Evola and, hell, Bannon, come with big deja-vu, that way. Guénon also influenced Andre Breton (doesn’t surprise me). So the Pepe trolls, however distantly, have this weird lineage, which feels countercultural to me. (Is Bannon hip to the Dark Enlightenment?)

Subcultural “cool”, it seems to me, is inherently commodifiable. Subcultures may have pre-dated cool, but I wouldn’t bet on it. There was a countercultural boutique in Greenwich Village in the 1890s, called The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, the first I know of. Sold the outfit a girl needed to self-other into Village-ness (but she still needed cigarettes, too).

CD: Last question: When I first interviewed you, 20 years ago (!!), we talked about why Japan was a wellspring of cool futurity and China was (in the cyberpunk pantheon, at least), an also-ran. Now, Chinese authors are winning Hugo awards and China is projecting more heavy zaibatsu-style force into more territories (including orbit) than Japan ever dreamed of. In The Peripheral, China is a mysterious, closed technocracy that may or may not be the source of interdimensional semi-time-semi-travel. Now that you've written two more books that circle The Peripheral's future, are you homing in any more on what role China plays in this future you're playing in?

WG: In The Peripheral, I thought of China as a much more sophisticated and advanced species of klept. So that “the” klept, as Netherton thinks of it, comes out of the jackpot controlling everything still habitable that isn’t China. Which has become some sort of super-advanced sphere of its own, with little need of dealing with outsiders. Which gave me this other, unknowable realm, a sci-fi Faerie, where impossible magic can conveniently happen without my having to invent an explanation for it. But that’s not any literal prediction for China. That’s me using China as a plot device.

What I wanted from Japan, when I started writing sf, was that it was Japan. It was wonderful for me that it was Japan during the Bubble, because that slotted perfectly into my being sick of sf futures basically being America. But that was really just another excuse for me to write about Japan. The thing that makes me nuts about Japan, as near as I’ve ever been able to express it, is the way in which all of all their culture, their stuff, seems to be fractal. You can break it down into smaller and smaller bits, and each one is still Japanese. For whatever reason, I’ve never gotten that from China. For me, Japan’s gotten steadily more interesting as that Next Big World Player thing has receded. I don’t want to hang with whoever has the most money and spaceships. I want to hang with whoever has the best shadows, the most exquisitely weird and poetic history of being whacked with alien technology, becoming the first industrialized Asian nation, trying to take over their side of the world, getting nuked for their trouble, and inventing the Walkman. I think it’s probably something like you and Disneyland: I’m just so there.

https://boingboing.net/2017/09/22/the-jackpot.html

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nolimitsongrace · 4 years

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Pastor Nicole Crank - Girls Night In w/ Holly Wagner, Debbie & Savannah ...

Remembering Your First LoveApril 24, 2020

Remember therefore from whence thou art fallen, and repent, and do the first works; or else I will come unto thee quickly, and will remove thy candlestick out of his place, except thou repent.

— Revelation 2:5

As we walk with the Lord, there is always a danger that as each of us grows older in our spiritual walk and become more structured, polished, refined, and doctrinally developed, we will slowly start to forfeit the zeal and spiritual fire we once possessed. What we once held as precious has a tendency to seem routine over time, and as we become accustomed to God’s precious Spirit in our lives, too often we unintentionally begin to simply “traffic” in the things of God.

I don’t know a single mature Christian who hasn’t had to fight this temptation, as the reality of the lost condition he or she was delivered from gradually becomes a distant memory. It’s a subtle backsliding that occurs in the very act of serving God.

*[If you started reading this from your email, begin reading here.]

A good example of this is found in the story of the church of Ephesus, a renowned church in the Roman province of Asia (modern-day western Turkey) that was founded by Paul in the First Century AD. These early believers had come to Christ in a blaze of glory and, from the onset of their congregation, experienced profound demonstrations of God’s power. They witnessed people delivered from idol worship, liberated from evil spirits, and many healed in a myriad of truly miraculous ways. Zealous for Christ, they had burned all their occult books and magical incantations — which were worth a small fortune — thus demonstrating a deep and sincere repentance in their willingness to completely sever their new lives from their pagan past.

In its early years, the church of Ephesus burned like a spiritual inferno. The Ephesian believers’ vibrancy and excitement inspired the same passion in other churches and spiritual leaders throughout the Roman Empire. But as the years passed, the zeal the Ephesian church had once possessed for the things of God slowly ebbed away. Knowledge increased, but the believers’ fiery passion for Jesus seemed to diminish. Undoubtedly, as the church grew, so did its members’ schedules, routines, habits, customs, and traditions. The subtle backsliding that often occurs when Christians become involved in serving God seems to be precisely what happened to this great church. The Ephesian believers were so busy serving Jesus that they lost their intimacy with Him. It is also likely that they experienced a loss of joy in their service, since joy is impossible to maintain without a vital connection to the Savior.

Revelation 2:4 tells us that the Ephesian believers had lost their “first love.” In other words, they had lost the simplicity and passion once associated with their early love for Jesus Christ. This tells us how far they had unintentionally drifted from the fire and zeal that once characterized them. For this reason, Jesus urges them to stop everything they are doing to “remember” the simple but precious relationship they had with Christ before they became so spiritually sophisticated. He says, “Remember therefore from whence thou art fallen, and repent, and do the first works; or else I will come unto thee quickly, and will remove thy candlestick out of his place, except thou repent” (Revelation 2:5)

The word “remember” comes from the Greek root mneia. In ancient literature, this word denoted a written record used to memorialize a person’s actions, a sepulcher, statue, monument, or tombstone. It is very significant that the word mneia can be translated a sepulcher. This suggests that the Ephesian believers’ early experiences with Christ had become buried by 30 years of activity. Jesus urged them to dig through all the clutter of their schedules, routines, and activities so they could “remember” their vibrant beginning. Like dirt on a grave, the busyness of ministry had buried what was once precious to them. By using the word “remember” — the Greek word mneia — Jesus implored them to unearth those early times when their faith was tender and new — to dig deep in order to recall and recover their powerful past. Once they remembered, they would be able to see how far they’ve drifted from the vibrancy that once marked their beginnings.

However, the word “remember” (mneia) also refers to a statue or a monument. This tells us that some memories should stand tall in our lives forever and never be forgotten. The purpose of a statue or monument is to put living people in remembrance of a significant historical event or person. That statue or monument is intended to memorialize a historical event or a deceased hero that future generations should never forget.

Statues, monuments, and tombstones are made of metal or stone; therefore, they endure many years without human effort. But memories must be deliberately maintained and cultivated if they are to remain vital in our hearts and minds. And if significant memories are not deliberately passed onto future generations, they become lost under the overgrowth of life, just like a neglected grave with no tombstone. It doesn’t take too long before the location of such a grave to be completely lost. People will walk across it and not even know that the remains of a precious person lay buried beneath their feet.

In the same way, important memories are easily forgotten. Adults forget their childhood; nations forget their heritage; and Christians forget their early beginnings with Jesus. In Revelation 2:5, we discover that churches can forget their past. Years of activity and Christian service can so consume a congregation’s energy and strength that they begin to forget the great work of grace God performed in their hearts. Weariness, busy schedules, and new programs to implement year after year all have the ability to wear down a body of believers — turning all their activity for God’s Kingdom into spiritual drudgery, slowly reducing what was once fresh and exciting into a monotonous, religious routine. Soon the early memories of coming to Christ are buried under an overgrowth of activity and spiritual weeds. Once-thankful people begin to forget how wonderful God’s grace was when it first touched their hearts.

The word translated “remember” is in the present active imperative, which means Jesus wanted the Ephesian believers to be continually mindful of their past. What God had done in their midst was a wonderful memory that needed to be memorialized among them for all generations. And if they took an honest look at themselves and compared their present to their past, they would see what Jesus knew about them — that they were fallen compared to the zeal and the spiritual passion that had once burned in their hearts.

The word “fallen” means a downfall from a high and lofty position. The Greek tense doesn’t describe the process of falling, but rather one who has already completely fallen and who is now living in an already completely fallen state. For the past 30 years, the church at Ephesus had hosted the world’s greatest Christian leaders, experienced the power of God, and become more advanced in spiritual knowledge than any other church of that time. The Christian world looked at this congregation as the ideal church. However, we must never forget that what can be carefully hidden from human eyes can never be concealed from Jesus’ eyes. Hebrews 4:13 tells us that “…all things are naked and opened unto the eyes of him with whom we have to do.” Christ is often not impressed with the things that impress us. He often sees a different picture than others see. Others may have been impressed with the heritage of the Ephesian church and its roster of famous personalities who passed through its doors — but in Jesus’ eyes, it was “fallen.”

If this illustrious church with its list of remarkable accomplishments could be called “fallen,” it is clear that any church — regardless of its notable beginning or enduring fame — can also be “fallen.” This means one’s past is not a guarantee for the future. If an individual or a church is not completely devoted to doing whatever is necessary to retain spiritual passion, it is likely that over the course of the years, that passion will slowly dissipate, as was the case with the church in Ephesus.

Just as Christ spoke to the congregation at Ephesus, I believe He is compelling us to return to Him and rekindle the fire that once burned so brightly in our hearts. We need to unearth the precious memories of what our walk with Jesus was like at the beginning — and honestly see if we have retained that same passion, or if we’ve let it slip over the passing of time due to schedules, routines, or other reasons. Jesus is calling us. He cries out to everyone who has an ear to hear what He is saying.

Is it possible that Jesus is speaking to you today, asking you to reevaluate the condition of your own spiritual passion?

MY PRAYER FOR TODAY

Father, as I evaluate my own heart, I realize that I have allowed distractions and the cares of life to dull my passion for You. Somewhere along the way, I became more focused on working for You than walking with You. I repent and turn away from the prayerlessness and hardness of heart that led me to this state. Renew a steadfast spirit within me. Restore to me the joy of Your salvation; lift me up from the place where I’ve fallen; and uphold me by Your generous Spirit. Teach me afresh to reverence You and to truly love You by being a doer of Your Word and not merely a hearer only.

I pray this in Jesus’ name!

MY CONFESSION FOR TODAY

I confess that I give to the Lord the glory due His name. I am His and my heart is wholly devoted and undivided in its affections. I choose the better part of being with Him above all else — that I may know Christ and become increasingly transformed into His likeness.

I declare this by faith in Jesus’ name!

QUESTIONS FOR YOU TO CONSIDER

Can you think of a time when your spiritual passion burned more brightly than it is burning today? How were you different than you are today? Why not write two columns on a piece of paper, with the left column listing words and phrases that described what you were like earlier, and the right column to express words and phrases of what you are like in comparison today?

Do you recall a time when you were like a spiritual burning inferno? How would you describe your spiritual fire today? High, medium, low, gone, consistent?

Remembering the passion that once burned brightly inside you may take some time. Why don’t you schedule a quiet time when you can let your mind drift back to those early days and let your heart relish those precious memories that first set your heart on fire?

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topmixtrends · 7 years

Link

IN “Passage to India,” the quintessentially American poet Walt Whitman celebrated the networks of commerce that were linking the world together at the end of the 19th century:

The earth to be spann’d, connected by net-work, The people to become brothers and sisters, The races, neighbors, to marry and be given in marriage, The oceans to be cross’d, the distant brought near, The lands to be welded together.

Aided by the invention of the steamship and the expansion of telegraphs and railways, the world economy entered a phase of globalization, celebrated here by Whitman in tones that prefigure the enthusiasm of today’s apostles of the information age. Maya Jasanoff quotes the poem at the beginning of her new book The Dawn Watch to illustrate the roots of globalization.

The races did not, however, live in the harmony envisioned by Whitman. During a period of relative peace within Europe and North America, the imperial powers extended their control of the rest of the world, and entered an age of empire that lasted until their competing desires for conquest exploded in World War I.

One novelist was in a unique position to chronicle 19th-century globalization and analyze the contradictions of imperialism. Born in what is today Ukraine, to Polish nationalists dedicated to the memory of a country that had been partitioned among three empires, Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski was welcomed into the world by a song from his patriot father:

Baby son, tell yourself, You are without land, without love, Without country, without people, While Poland — your Mother is in her grave.

More literally orphaned at the age of 11, and inspired by the novels of James Fenimore Cooper, Konrad Korzeniowski set out to sea before his 17th birthday. After personal disasters and (probably) a suicide attempt in Marseilles, he arrived in London when he was 20. There he joined the British Merchant Marine and sailed all over the world in service of British commerce.

Sixteen years later, as Joseph Conrad, he retired from the sea and began writing several of the greatest novels of modern English literature. In her brilliant book, Jasanoff explains how four of the best of these novels offer insights into globalization and imperialism that remain relevant today.

Jasanoff is an insightful and imaginative historian. Her earlier books told compelling stories of the lives of both powerful and obscure inhabitants of the British Empire in the 18th and 19th centuries, and won her many accolades (including the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize at Yale, where I teach). A genius of the archives, she brought together, in her award-winning Liberty’s Exiles, the stories of the losers of the American Revolution — the loyalists who left the newly founded United States and wound up in Canada, Jamaica, Sierra Leone, and throughout the empire. Likewise, her first book, Edge of Empire, introduces a rich cast of characters (British and French collectors of antiquities in India and Egypt), an empathetic understanding of how diverse communities interacted in the face of large historical forces, and a novelist’s skill at complex storytelling.

In The Dawn Watch, Jasanoff tells the life story of a novelist. The book comes in the form of a biography of Joseph Conrad, but in fact through Conrad she tells the story of a whole phase in world history. Conrad’s insights into his time have been recognized by earlier generations, notably by Hannah Arendt, who drew on his novels for her analysis of imperialism and racism in The Origins of Totalitarianism.

Recent generations of students and scholars may have been put off reading Conrad by his deliberate use of racist language and some of his stereotypical assumptions, which were famously exposed by Chinua Achebe. In reply to Achebe, Jasanoff quotes a young Barack Obama, who said of Heart of Darkness, “the book teaches me things […] [a]bout white people, I mean. See, the book’s not really about Africa. Or black people. It’s about the man who wrote it. The European. The American. A particular way of looking at the world.” And many postcolonial novelists, notably V. S. Naipaul, have admired Conrad for his mostly unsentimental analysis of race relations and his boundless curiosity about life at the edges of empire.

Boundless curiosity is also an attribute of Maya Jasanoff. In her earlier books, she pursued obscure characters through even more obscure archives. In The Dawn Watch, she travels in the footsteps of a famous writer. Other biographers have followed Conrad’s trail, notably Norman Sherry, who in the mid-20th century was able to interview many immediate relatives of people who had known the novelist. Sherry uncovered some of the “originals” of Conrad’s fictional characters. Nearly a century after his death, such pathways have closed, but Jasanoff found ways of reliving Conrad’s experiences, notably by traveling on a container ship from Hong Kong to Southampton, England, along routes followed by Conrad during his lifetime, and traveling by boat along the Congo River, the setting of Heart of Darkness, Conrad’s most famous and notorious work.

Jasanoff’s travels have given her an empathy and an understanding for Conrad, and also for the victims of imperialism, that breathe on every page of this magnificent book. She sees his plots in relation to the basic drama of his life, but sees that drama as itself reflective of broader historical events:

Conrad’s fiction usually turns on the rare moments when a person gets to make a critical choice. These are the moments when you can cheat fate — or seal it. You can stay on board a sinking ship or jump into a lifeboat. You can hurt someone with the truth or comfort them with a lie. You can protect a treasure or steal it. You can blow something up or turn the plotters in.

You could spend your whole life in the place where you were raised or you could leave and never come back.

Although written later, Conrad’s The Secret Agent tells the story of a terrorist plot in London in the 1880s, the decade when Conrad became a naturalized British subject. Jasanoff shows how the novel, a sort of rewriting of Dickens, reveals much about Conrad’s own life as a young man in London. She also suggests the relevance of Conrad’s analysis of 19th-century terrorism for our own day.

Conrad’s most technically adventurous novel, Lord Jim, tells the story of a young British sailor who does not live up to the code of the sea and who winds up traveling further and further east in an effort to escape from Western civilization. The story is related in a series of interviews and flashbacks that would later inspire Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane. Having spent so much time on shipboard, Jasanoff recognizes the storytelling technique (which goes all the way back to The Odyssey): this is “a narrative composed in sailor’s time.”

Citizen Kane was not the only major American film that retold a Conrad story in a different medium and setting. In the 1970s, when Francis Ford Coppola made Apocalypse Now, a film about the fate of US imperialism in Southeast Asia, he drew on Conrad’s African novel, Heart of Darkness, for his plot. Jasanoff shows that Conrad became a writer in Africa, where he worked on his first novel about Southeast Asia, Almayer’s Folly.

Conrad had spent most of his time as a sailor in Southeast Asia, and he later chronicled the intersection of a vast array of cultures in books like Almayer’s Folly and Lord Jim. Jasanoff retells the story of Conrad’s travels in the region, but she offers a new interpretation, pointing out that the ship he served on as first mate was active in the (illegal) slave trade, and tracing the presence of slavery in his portrayal of Malay society.

This interchange between the two regions forms part of the history of empire and suggests how racism and globalization intertwined. Jasanoff investigates the moral ambiguities of Heart of Darkness with great sensitivity and awareness both of Conrad’s biases and of the horrors he witnessed. She shows how Conrad exposed the horrors of the supposed Belgian civilizing mission in the Congo, but also analyzes his reluctance to get involved in political crusades, which she attributes to his reaction against the suffering caused by his parents’ idealism.

Perhaps Conrad’s greatest novel, and his most demanding, is about a region he never saw at first hand. Nostromo describes a revolution in a fictional Latin American country, Costaguana. By reconstructing Conrad’s process of writing the novel, and drawing on contemporary press accounts of the 1903 revolution in Panama, Jasanoff shows how Conrad evolved his critique of US power in Latin America; she sees him as a clear-sighted observer of the future of the Western hemisphere, despite the fact that he had only seen the Latin American coast briefly from onboard ship. Costaguana was therefore fictional, invented, in a way that the settings of his earlier novels were not, but Conrad was a sufficiently perspicacious reader of the newspapers and of human nature to offer a telling interpretation of current events, as well as a rich invented world of great depth and sympathy.

Most novelists tell us about an event and then describe its consequences. Conrad often reversed this chronology: in his best novels, he describes impressions and experiences and then spends pages analyzing their causes. The result is a kind of epistemological disorientation in which the reader continually gathers clues almost as in a mystery novel. Unlike in most mystery novels, however, the answer to Conrad’s riddles is not a simple “whodunnit.” Often, as in Lord Jim, he describes experiences precisely to show that the mystery is insoluble. As Jasanoff puts it in speaking of Conrad’s English alter ego, the narrator of both Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim, “Marlow was constantly seeing things but only later managing to figure out what they meant.”

In what is probably the best book ever written on Conrad, Conrad in the Nineteenth Century, the critic Ian Watt influentially described this method as “delayed decoding.” Maya Jasanoff has taken Conrad’s technique as her own. Frequently she tells us a wonderful story out of Conrad’s life, lovingly reconstructed from his memoirs and letters, only to explain a few pages later: “Yet almost none of what Conrad said lines up with other records.” A critic and historian with the virtuosity of a latter-day Sherlock Holmes, Jasanoff then goes on to retell the story based on her own findings. Through it all, she shows how Conrad’s story is part of a broader history — the history of globalization and empire — world history. This is the best book on Conrad since Watt’s. Maya Jasanoff has given us a Conrad for the 21st century.

Pericles Lewis, professor of Comparative Literature and vice president for Global Strategy at Yale University, is the author or editor of several books on literary modernism and 20th-century editor for the Norton Anthology of World Literature.

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Genesis of the Written Word -- Temple and Cosmos Beyond this Ignorant Present -- HUGH NIBLEY 1992

Genesis of the Written Word

The most interesting thing about this article is that, within a month after it was printed, a cover story appeared in the prestigious journal Science recounting the strange achievement of an Apache Indian by the name of Silas John, who not only claimed to have had a whole writing system revealed to him in a dream for holy purposes, but actually produced the system, which turns out to be a highly efficient one; an instant alphabet, not out of nothing, but out of a dream.1 If it could happen in 1904 to a semi-literate Apache, could it not have happened earlier?

Only such evidence could break the vicious circular argument which has long prevented serious investigation into the origins of writing. Many writers in scientific journals have recently deplored the way in which scientific conclusions reached long ago and held as unimpeachable truths turn students away from avenues of research which might well prove most fruitful. The evolutionary rule-of-thumb — convenient, satisfying, universal — is cited as the prime offender. Here is a test of how it works: Ask your students to write a paper on “A Day in the Life of a Primitive Man.” None of them has ever seen a primitive man or ever will, but does that stop them? Before the question is on the board they are off and running and can go on writing at top speed indefinitely. They all know exactly how it should have been; evolution emancipated them from the drudgery of research. And in all of science there never was a more open-and-shut case than the origin of writing: intuitively we know it must have begun with pictures, and traditionally we know it can have developed in only one way — very slowly and gradually from simple to more complex forms, and all that. Some may elaborate on the theme with tree-alphabets, ogams, runes and (as we have) arrow-markings, but if there ever was a hypothesis which enjoyed complete and unquestioning obedience, the origin of writing has been it. Yet the discerning Kipling, taking a hard common-sense look at the official solution, found it simply absurd. It is the same hypothesis that we now dare to question, grateful for the support of the noble Silas John.

We have all grown up in a world nurtured on the comfortable Victorian doctrine of uniformitarianism, the idea that what happens in this world is all just more of the same: what lies ahead is pretty much what lies behind, for the same forces that are at work on the earth today were at work in the same manner, with the same intensity and the same effects at all times past and will go on operating inexorably and irresistibly in just the same way forever hereafter. There is no real cause for alarm in a world where everything is under control beneath the watchful eye of science, as evolution takes its undeviating forward course, steady, reliable, imperceptibly slow and gentle, and gratifyingly predictable. According to an eminent British scholar of the 1920s,

The skies as far as the utmost star are clear of any malignant Intelligences, and even the untoward accidents of life are due to causes comfortably impersonal. . . . The possibility that the Unknown contains Powers deliberately hostile to him is one the ordinary modern man can hardly entertain even in imagination.2

In such a world one needed no longer to run to God for comfort. The matter-of-fact, no-nonsense approach of science had since the days of the Miletian school and the ancient atomists banished all childish fears and consigned the horrendous and spectacular aspects of the human past and future to the realm of myth and fantasy.

Quite recently, however, scientists have noted with a shock that in looking forward not to the distant but to the immediate future what they discern is not just more of the same but something totally different, something for which they confess themselves entirely unprepared, since it is all entirely unexpected.3 The idea that what lies ahead is by no means the simple and predictable projection of our knowledge of the present has, as John Lear points out, reconditioned our minds for another look at the past as well as the future. Since the past is wholly a construction of our own imaginations, we have always found there just what we expected to find, that is, more of the same. But now “future shock” has prepared us for “past shock,” and we find ourselves almost forced to accept a view of the past that is utterly alien to anything in the experience of modern man.4

Antiquity of Writing

Joseph Smith as a prophet also looked both ahead and behind and came up with a picture of both worlds that violently shocked and offended his Victorian contemporaries. He presented his peculiar picture of the past in the most daring possible way, in the form of a number of books which he claimed to be of ancient origin, their contents given to him “by the Spirit.” But his image of the future and the past was not conveyed in mystical utterances in the manner of Swedenborg, Jakob Boehme, or the “Urantia Volume,” whose assertions may be tested only by waiting for history to catch up with them. His story was rather to be found in the pages of ancient books that purportedly existed and either still survived in the world or had left unmistakable marks behind them.

In the first lesson of the current Melchizedek Priesthood manual President Joseph Fielding Smith brings this formidable contribution to our attention:

The Latter-day Saints are doubly blessed with the word of the Lord which has come to light through the restoration of the gospel. We have been given the records of the Nephites and the Jaredites. . . . The Lord restored much that had been originally revealed to Adam and Enoch and Abraham, . . . and it is to their condemnation when members of the Church do not take advantage of their opportunities to read, study, and learn what the records contain.5

Few people realize that in Joseph Smith’s day no really ancient manuscripts were known. Egyptian and Babylonian could not be read; the Greek and Latin classics were the oldest literature available, preserved almost entirely in bad medieval copies no older than the Byzantine and Carolingian periods. The oldest text of the Hebrew Bible was the Ben Asher Codex from the ninth century A.D. Today we have whole libraries of documents more than 4,000 years old — not just their contents, but the actual writings themselves going back to the very beginnings of civilization. It is just as easy to dig back 6,000 years as it is to remove the dust of 5,000 years; and when we do so, what do we find in the way of written documents? Let us consider three main points: (1) what can be inferred from Joseph Smith’s statements as to the nature of the oldest human records, (2) what the ancients themselves have to say about those records, and (3) what the actual condition of the records indicates.

First, if Joseph Smith is right, the written records should be as old as the human race itself, for, he tells us, “a book of remembrance was kept . . . in . . . the language of Adam” (Moses 6:7).6 Now what do the ancients themselves have to say on the subject? Surprisingly, a great deal, of which we can give only a few quotations here.

According to them, the king had access to that divine book which was consulted at the time of the creation of the world: “I am a scribe of the god’s book,” says one of the earliest pharaohs, “who says what is and brings about what is not.”7 A later but still ancient (Thirteenth Dynasty) pharaoh recalls, “My heart yearned to behold the most ancient books of Atum. Open them before me for diligent searching, that I may know god as he really is!”8 Over the lintel of the ancient library of the great temple at Edfu was a relief showing four kneeling figures giving praise to the heavenly book descending to earth; hieroglyphs above their heads show them to represent Sia and Hw, or the Divine Intelligence and the Divine Utterance (the Word) by which the world was created (fig. 59).9 In Egypt every step of the founding of a new temple had to follow the prescriptions given in the heavenly book, since such a founding represented and dramatized the creation of the earth itself.

And what does the actual state of the documents attest? If writing evolved gradually and slowly as everything is supposed to have done, there should be a vast accumulation of transitional scribblings as countless crude and stumbling attempts at writing would leave their marks on stone, bone, clay, and wood over countless millennia of groping trial and error. Only there are no such accumulations of primitive writing anywhere. Primitive writing is as illusive as that primitive language, the existence of which has never been attested. And indeed the very nature of writing precludes anything in the way of a slow, gradual, step-by-step evolution: one either catches on to how it is done or one does not, and once one knows, the whole mystery lies revealed. All the evidence shows that that is the way it actually was. “Suddenly . . . graves in the predynastic cemeteries” display “the art of writing . . . with a fairly long period of development behind it,” writes Engelbach. “In fact it was writing well past the stage of picture writing.”10 Both the long period of development and a primal picture writing must here be assumed, since there is no evidence for them. If writing did evolve in Egypt, the process took only “a few decades,” after which the art remained unchanged “for thousands of years,” according to Capar. 11Alan Gardiner notes the same strange and paradoxical state of affairs: hieroglyphic “was a thing of rapid growth,” but “once established remained immutable for fully 3,000 years.”12 So also A. Scharff assures us that with the First Dynasty “writing was introduced and perfected (ausgebildet) with astounding speed and detail.”13“There is no evidence of a gradual development of script in Egypt,” writes Elise Baumgartel,14 and yet there is no evidence of that script anywhere else. There is something wrong with this evolutionary process by which one and the same people develop a system of writing almost overnight, and then refuse to budge an inch on the way of progress forever after. Stuart Piggott finds that immediately after “ambiguous stammerings . . . on the slate palettes . . . a rapid cursive form of writing with pen and ink” is in evidence.15 Stranger still, on the most famous of those predynastic slate palettes with their ambiguous stammerings that suggest only the dawn of writing we see clearly depicted a king (Narmer) following behind an attendant (tt) who is carrying the classic two inkpots of the Egyptian scribe (fig. 60). The tombs of the First Dynasty “show that they had a well-developed written language, a knowledge of the preparation of papyrus.”16 Inscriptions found on tags and labels of First-Dynasty jars, often regarded because of their crudeness and brevity as primitive attempts at writing, are crude and brief because they were meant to be identification tags and nothing more — not literary compositions; actually, as Sethe points out, “they are written in a sophisticated cursive writing.”17 For though “hieroglyphics appear all at once in the world as an Egyptian invention cir. 3000 B.C.,” hieratic, the cursive writing of the same symbols, was also in use just as early.18

Complexity of Nascent Languages

All of which is most retrograde to tenaciously held theories of the evolution of writing in Egypt. But how about the rest of the world? Wherever we look the earliest systems of writing are somehow connected with the Egyptian and appear suddenly in the same paradoxical way. Though there is “a prehistoric connection with Babylonian cuneiform” and Egyptian, according to Sethe,19 and though J. Friedrich has demonstrated the connection by an impressive catalogue of striking parallels,20 the gap between the two systems is still too wide to allow any thought of deriving the one from the other.21 “The writing which appeared without antecedents at the beginning of the First Dynasty (in Egypt) was by no means primitive,” writes Frankfort. “It has, in fact, a complex structure of . . . precisely the same state of complexity which had been reached in Mesopotamia. . . . To deny . . . that Egyptian and Mesopotamian systems of writing are related amounts to maintaining that Egypt invented independently a complex and very consistent system at the very moment of being influenced in its art and architecture by Mesopotamia where a precisely similar system had just been developed.”22 Not only are these two systems related, but they show remarkable affinities to the earliest Chinese writing,23 as well as the Hittite, proto-Indian,24 and proto-Elamitic scripts.25 P. Mordell insists that the Hebrew alphabet is related to an Egyptian linear writing system, a real alphabet, which “evolved at a date when hieroglyphic writing was unknown, then persisted with a strange vitality, and was never absorbed or ousted.”26 This was that mysterious prehistoric “Mediterranean” alphabet which is said to be older than hieroglyphic,27 and which suddenly spread all over the Near East at the end of the second millennium B.C.28

“Evolved”? Many scholars have pointed out that the alphabet is the miracle of miracles, the greatest of all inventions, by which even the television and jet-planes pale in comparison, and, as such, a thing absolutely unique in time and place; they also agree that it was of Egyptian or West-Semitic origin.29 It is also argued that by the very nature of the thing it can only have been the work of a single inventor.30 “The gulf between the idea and the written word,” writes H. Schmitt, “could only have been bridged once, by a miracle of invention.”31

Dearth of Evolutionary Clues

Given the evolutionary hypothesis, any healthy normal growing boy can describe in convincing detail how long ago “the naive child of nature” everywhere drew crude pictures to convey his simple thoughts,32 and how out of this the process moved “everywhere inexorably . . . towards the final stage, the alphabetic writing.”33 To save our eager high-school student from undue embarrassment, we have just quoted two eminent scholars. But if it really happened that way, then we would find traces of evolving writing “everywhere”; veritable middens of scratched rock and bones and shells would attest the universal groping toward the inexorable final stage over tens of thousands of years, while the clumsy transitional forms should outnumber proper writing by at least a million to one. However, the vast accumulations of attempts at writing simply do not exist; there is no evidence whatever of a worldwide groping towards the goal. Having made his lucid and logical statement, the author of our last quotation observes with perplexity that “it is surprising that the ultimate stage in evolution . . . was only achieved in a very few spots on the globe.”34That is, we do not find a multiplicity of writing systems throughout the world; in fact when we come right down to it there seems to have been only one! We find “only a very few systems of writing,” says David, “. . . and even these are so much alike and so closely related in time and space that their independence appears at least problematical.”35 The vast world-wide corpus of embryonic scribblings that should attest the long ages of slow transition from picture writing to true writing simply is not there, and the innumerable systems of writing which must have resulted from the basic psychological need of men everywhere to express themselves can be counted on the fingers, and most probably on the thumbs, of one hand.

Pictures Not Origin of Writing

People have always drawn pictures, but was that the origin of writing? Was there ever a real picture writing? E. Doblhofer defines “pictorial writing,” which he says is “incredibly ancient,” as “a series of images [which] can possibly be ‘read’ accurately by any spectator.”36 Kurt Sethe would agree: a “pure” picture writing is one which “could be read in any language at sight.”37 And right here the issue is settled: if there ever was a true picture writing it has not yet been discovered. Where on earth is a single inscription to which any and all beholders, scholars or laymen alike, regardless of their own language and culture, would give the identical interpretation? When Sethe sought for a true picture writing to illustrate the process by which hieroglyphic emerged, the only examples he could find in all the world were North American Indian petroglyphs, which no one can “read” or interpret to this day.38 “True picturewriting,” wrote Alan Gardiner, “makes excessive demand upon the skill and ingenuity of the writer, and its results are far from unambiguous.”39 It takes special skill, that is, to execute “true picturewriting” and special skill to read it: which is to say that it is not the simple and uninhibited drawing and viewing of pictures at all. Doblhofer himself confirms this when he assures us that “the most primitive pictorial writings . . . translate . . . abstract ideas with the aid of symbolical signs,” for symbolical signs are not plain pictures but conventional devices which must be learned; that is, even “the most primitive” picture writing is not just picture writing as he defines it.40 In the very earliest Egyptian writing it is impossible to interpret the pictures as such, and there is no evidence of pictograms in Egypt at any time, according to Sethe.41 Also, we must not forget that along with the most “primitive” Egyptian writing in prehistoric times we find a genuine alphabetic writing flourishing most paradoxically.42 Long wrestling with the problem of deriving the alphabet from a syllabic writing, that is, from a system in which the names of things depicted supplied certain sound combinations, has led to the general conclusion that syllabic writing was “a blind alley which could not lead to alphabetic writing.”43

Like the earliest Egyptian documents, the Babylonian tablets bearing “the oldest written signs thus far known” are highly stylized and cannot be read.44 Granted they are picture writing, no two scholars “read” them the same. Mesopotamia offers to date the only chance of presenting the evolutionary sequence of the development of writing by a stratigraphic pattern. Only, alas, it doesn’t work. Though it is assumed, of course, that “the earliest examples of writing in Mesopotamia are pictographs. . . . Very few of these were actually excavated scientifically, so that, from the chronological point of view, there is little help to be obtained from stratigraphic connections,” according to Burton-Brown, who should also have pointed out that the inscriptions which have been scientifically excavated have a way of refuting the expected patterns, since some of the most primitive writing is found in late strata and vice versa.45

The paradox that anything as advanced and sophisticated as writing should come into the world full-blown and all at once is invincibly repugnant to the evolutionary way of thinking. Of recent years the anthropologists have taken a strong stand on the “tool” theory of civilization. The idea is that primitive hominids quite thoughtlessly and accidentally blundered on the use of this or that piece of wood, bone, or rock as a tool, and that “it was the success of the simplest tools that started the whole trend of human evolution and led to the civilizations of today.”46 It is the primitive tool, falling fortuitously into its hands, which draws mankind irresistibly forward to new levels of attainment, for “when men make a tool, they commit themselves, man depends upon his tools for his very humanity.”47 In a word, “social evolution is a consequence of technologic evolution.”48

Some of the scientific speculators, however, take the opposite position, that man “has always had reservoirs of response far more than his devices (tools) asked of him,” and that in “his attempts to transcend his biological limitations” his mind always runs ahead of his tools, not behind them.49 When men need a tool they invent it, not the other way around.50 Men themselves decide what tools they will have, so that one evolutionist notes with perplexity that “one of the most puzzling aspects of the culture” of the “Cavemen” is “their heavy dependence on tools whose use is now a complete mystery.”51 Carleton S. Coon observed that “for the simple reason that human beings are not equipped by nature to live without tools,” we must suppose that they always had all the tools they needed for survival even in Pliocene.52Petrie, in a significant and neglected study, pointed out that instead of eagerly adopting a superior tool as soon as it was made known to them, human beings have shown “a resistance of almost 100 percent” to any new tool coming from the outside.53 Though all the neighbors of the Egyptians knew about their superior axe forms for thousands of years, the only other ancient people to adopt them were of all things the South Americans.54 Petrie knows of seventeen Egyptian tools and weapons, some of unsurpassed efficiency, which are over the centuries never found outside of Egypt, and, he observes, “the converse is equally true.”55

Writing: A Gift from Heaven

Then whatever induced one people to adopt writing from another? The interesting thing here is that though the idea quickly caught on, each people in adopting it insisted on making it its own exclusive possession and devised from the first a native style that set it off from all the others. Both the popularity and the variety of ancient writing is to be explained by its religious nature. E. von Mülinen has noted that new scripts invariably appear as the vehicles of new religions,56 while Jürgen Smolian points out that all of man’s greatest inventions or discoveries seem to have the primary purpose of putting him into communication with the other world.57 If Joseph Smith was right, books and writing are a gift to man from heaven, “for it was given unto as many as called upon God to write by the spirit of inspiration” (Moses 6:7). The art of writing was a special dispensation, an inestimable boon, enabling the righteous to retain the memory of divine visitations and communications ever fresh before them, and assisting them in coordinating their earthly activities with the heavenly order: “The immediate will of heaven is contained in the Scriptures,” said the Prophet Joseph.58

The earliest records of the race have much to say “about the miracle of writing, which the Ancients regarded as a gift from heaven.”59 The Egyptians believed that writing was a sacred trust given to the king as “high-priest and scribe” to keep him and his people ever in touch with the mind and will of heaven.60 Thus the Book of the Foundation of Temples was thought to have been sent down from heaven to the immortal genius Imhotep, the Vizier of King Djoser of the Third Dynasty and the greatest builder of all time (cf. fig. 51A, p. 390), after which the book “was taken away to heaven at the time the gods left the earth,” but was sent down again by Imhotep at a later time, when he “caused it to fall from heaven at the place north of Memphis” (cf. fig. 55, p. 413).61 In Babylonia

the King is the Sent One. He has ascended to heaven to receive . . . the tablets of destiny and to get his commission. Then he is sent out, i.e., he descends again. . . . And so the knowledge is communicated to the king, it is of a mysterious character, bearing upon the great mysteries of heaven and earth, the hidden things, and is a revelation of the hidden knowledge by the gods (the god). Can we style it “primordial revelation”?62

The idea of a primordial revelation is that a complete knowledge of the world from its beginning to its end is already written down and has been vouchsafed to certain chosen spirits from time to time, a doctrine familiar to Latter-day Saints.63 The heavenly origin of writing is constantly referred to anciently in the doctrine that writing and the symbols of writing are derived from the starry heavens (fig. 61). The Tablets of Destiny which contain all knowledge and impart all authority “are the divination of the world, the stars and constellations form the writing.”64 As Clement of Alexandria observed, both in Egypt and Chaldaea, “Writing and a knowledge of the heavens necessarily go together.”65 How this is can be seen if one considers where all of the oldest writings of the race are found.

If we turn from ancient doctrine to concrete discovery we are soon made aware that the oldest writings are always found in temples. “It is in these temples that we find the first signs of writing. . . . The script appears from the first as a system of conventional signs . . . such as might have been introduced all at once. We are confronted with a true invention, not with an adaption of pictorial art.”66 For Egypt, Steindorff maintained that “the birthplace of this ‘hieroglyphic system’ of writing was the sacerdotal school of Heliopolis.”67 In Babylonia, according to Hrozný, it was in the Uruk period, 3200 B.C., that “there originated . . . from the records of business transaction in the temple enclosure, the picture writing which in later times developed into cuneiform writing.”68 Though these symbols cannot be read (i.e., they were not picture writings, but “a collection of abstract tokens eked out with pictograms”),69 it is apparent that they “were for the most part lists of commodities supplied to or delivered by officials and others concerned with the administration of the Temple.”70

Here we have a combination of business and religion which has given rise to the discussion of the rivalry of Kultschrift (cultic or religious writing) and Gebrauchschrift (practical business writing). Actually no rivalry exists between them: the consensus is that the oldest written symbols are property marks, such as arrow markings and cattle brands (fig. 62), and in order to be respected as such they have to be sacrosanct, holy symbols duly registered in the temple.71 If the oldest writing is used for business, it is always temple business, and the writing is also used for other — far more important — purposes. Examining the claims of the two, Helmut Arntz concluded that the holy or cultic writing has clear priority.72 One can, like old Commodore Vanderbilt, carry on business in a state of total illiteracy, and indeed men of affairs have always viewed men of letters with suspicion: “Writing is an art despised by the Roman businessman,” wrote Cornelius Nepos, “who have all their writing done for them by hirelings.”73 But one cannot carry on the holy business of the temple without the divine gift of writing.74 “Hieroglyphic is correctly named,” Sethe observed, being devised “only for the walls of temples. . . . It is a survival from prehistoric times.”75 It is no accident that temple architecture and writing appear suddenly together.76 The templum is, as we have shown elsewhere, an observatory, where one takes one’s bearings on the universe.77 There the heavens are carefully observed, and to be of value those observations must be recorded. Alphabet, calendar, and temple naturally go together, all devised for handling messages from the stars and planets.78 “We may think of the stars as letters inscribed on the heavens,” said Plotinus, and we may think of the heavens as a great book which men copy and project on tangible materials at the holy places.79 Recent studies by Gerald Hawkins, Peter Tompkins, Giorgio de Santillana, and others have given vivid reality to the heretofore vaguely surmised existence of ritual complexes of great antiquity where men observed the heavens and acquired an astonishing amount of knowledge about them, which, in order to use, they faithfully committed to their books.

From first to last, ancient writing remains in the hands not of businessmen but of priests; it is a holy and a secret thing, imparted only to the elect and zealously withheld from all others. “He who divulges it,” we read of a typical holy book, “dies a sudden death and an immediate cutting-off. Thou shalt keep very far away from it. It is to be read only by a scribe in the workshop, whose name has been duly registered in the House of Life.”80 “Only the prophets may read and understand the holy books” is the rule.81 Each system of writing itself is an effective seal on the holy books, a cryptogram, “a secret formula which the profane do not know.”82 The key to power and priesthood lies “in the midst of the Sea of Coptos, in a box of iron, the box of iron being (in) a box (of bronze, the box of bronze) in a box of kete-wood in a box of ivory and ebony, the box of ivory and ebony in a (box of silver, and the box) of silver in a box of gold, wherein is the book.”83 The idea of the holy book that is taken away from the earth and restored from time to time, or is handed down secretly from father to son for generations, or hidden up in the earth, preserved by ingenious methods of storage with precious imperishable materials, to be brought forth in a later and more righteous generation (i.e., Moses 1:41), is becoming increasingly familiar with the discovery and publication of ever more ancient apocryphal works, Jewish, Christian, and others.84 But nowhere does the idea find clearer or completer expression than in the pages of the Book of Mormon and the Pearl of Great Price.

What is perhaps the oldest religious book known, the so-called Shabako Stone, instead of the primitive mumbo jumbo one might expect, contains a story strangely familiar to Latter-day Saints (cf. fig. 43, pp. 180-81). It is the text of a ritual drama enacted in the temple to celebrate the founding of the First Dynasty of Egypt, and it depicts the council in heaven, the creation of the world, the fall of man, and the means by which he may achieve resurrection and be reinstated in his primal glory. The book, on a scroll, was hidden up in the wall of that same temple of Ptah of Memphis, founded by Menes, the first Pharaoh, and was discovered by a later king, Shabako, who followed the same text in the rites establishing his own (Twenty-fifth) Dynasty.85

Another king reports that “when His Majesty settled the lands . . . he mounted the throne of Horus. . . . He spoke to his noble ones, the Smrw of his immediate presence, the faithful writers-down of the divine words, who were in charge of all the secrets.”86 Writing, here shared only with his intimates, is par excellence “the King’s Secret,” which gives him all advantage over his fellows and the ability to rule them. The technique of writing is the foundation of empire, for only the written document can overcome the limitations of space and carry a ruler’s word and authority out of sight and beyond the hills, and even defeat the inroads of time on human memory by preserving the words of command and judgement for unlimited numbers of years.87 The king describes himself as the mediator and scribe of the god in heaven in the administration of his empire: “I sit before him, I open his boxes, I break open his edicts, I seal his dispatches, I send out messengers.”88 In Mesopotamia also “the supreme sovereignty of the universe connected with the tablets of destiny is thus identical with the casting of the oracles of lots,” the possession of which could give even a robber “possession of the rulership of the world.”89 The Pharaoh was authorized to rule only when “the master of the house of the divine books” had inscribed his royal names” on the true records deposited in the heavenly archives” (fig. 63).90 The archives were known in Egypt as the House of Life (cf. fig. 1, p. 12), housing the writings upon which the life of all things ultimately depended.91 It was a powerhouse humming with vital electricity, transmitting cosmic forces from heaven to earth, a place of deadly peril to any mortal not holding the necessary priestly credentials.92 Wherever the heavenly book is mentioned, the heavenly scribe appears as king, priest, and mediator, in early Jewish and Christian as well as older traditions.93 Pharaoh is preeminently “He who knows, being in possession of the divine book.”94 Like the Egyptian Thoth, the Babylonian Nabu, the prophet and scribe writes all things down in the “unalterable tablets” of destiny which determine all that happens upon the earth.95 In the earthly as in the heavenly court, everything was written down, not only to follow the divine example but to coordinate earthly with celestial proceedings. In Persia, for example,

the entire administration, as was customary from the earliest times in the Orient, was carried on by written documents, as it was in the courts of Egypt, Babylonia, and Assyria. . . . Everything is carefully written down; even in battle the King’s secretary is beside him taking notes; every royal remark is written down and then gathered into “Daybooks” or “Memoranda books,” such as have been found in the archives of Suza, Babylonia, Ecbatana, etc.96

The Myth of Irra, one of the oldest stories in existence, shows “that Mesopotamian theologians were not ignorant of the concept of a ‘sacred book,’ that is, of a divinely inspired, even dictated text, which contains the only correct and valid account of the ‘story’ of deity.”97 In Egypt it is “the King who is over the spirits, who unites hearts — so says He who is in charge of wisdom, being great, and who bears the god’s book, even Sia [‘the personification of intelligence and understanding’ — Faulkner] who is at the right hand of Re.”98 The relief, mentioned above (cf. fig. 59, p. 455), from the temple library of Dendera shows us the scribe’s palette, the Egyptian symbol of writing and all that it implies, descending from heaven; it is supported by two figures who strike the pose signifying “eternity” and who face each other, denoting “from eternity to eternity,” while four other figures are in the attitude of adoration; hieroglyphic symbols above the head of each show them to represent the ear that hears, the eye that sees, the mind or intelligence (Sia) which conceives, and the word of power (Hw) which consummates the creation of all things.99

The books were consulted on every occasion: “Copy thy fathers who have gone before thee. . . . Behold, their words are recorded in writing. Open and read and copy.”100 When King Djoser away back in the Third Dynasty asked his all-wise minister Imhotep to explain a seven-years’ famine, the latter “begged permission ‘that I may enter into the Mansion of Life, and may open the books and may seek guidance from them.’ “101 Interestingly enough, the most important of all writings were genealogical records, and Gardiner concluded not only that the House of Life was, properly speaking, nothing more or less than the genealogical archives, but that the Great Pyramid itself was built to contain the royal genealogical records.102 The astonishing mass and charge of ancient book making may be attributed to the basic doctrine that everything must be written down: “The Babylonian conception of Canonicity, . . . that the sum of revealed knowledge was given once for all by the antediluvian sages,” necessarily posits the existence of the Primordial Book that contains everything that was, is, and is to come, and presents “a remarkable parallel to the Rabbinic view that God’s revelation in its entirety is contained in the Torah,” according to W. G. K. Lambert.103

Knowledge: A Gift from Heaven

This is consistent with the marvelous function of writing as the great synthesizer. To write is to synthesize. The basic idea of writing is that symbols represent sounds and that smaller units make up larger units—not compounds or composites, but true units. Thus a letter by itself is without significance; there must be a reference to something which goes beyond it—other letters making a word or a name. A single letter, heraldic mark, tally, crest, or wasm has no meaning without reference to the official heraldic list of such and the names they represent. The word in turn is also meaningless without reference to other words; even a one-word sentence such as “Alas!” takes its meaning from other unspoken words. The meaning of every sentence also depends on its larger context; even a short aphorism must be understood in its cultural context. For the ancients, any self-contained message was a book. They were not disturbed by the extreme brevity of many “books,” because they regarded every book also as part of a larger context—for the Egyptians the “Hermetic” books. Every proper Arabic book, regardless of its subject, still opens with a paragraph praising God for his creation and the place in it which this particular writing occupies. Ancient records come to us not in single books but in whole libraries. These are not mere collections but organic entities, as the archaic Egyptian sign of the Book-lady Seshat attests: her seven-pointed star goes with her seven books, representing every department of human knowledge, being let down from the opened heavens (cf. fig. 46B, p. 229).104

The House of Life where the books were copied and studied had from the earliest times the aspect of a university, a super graduate-school;105 “there it was that all questions relating to . . . learned matters were settled.”106 The place was always part of the temple, and the books contain the earliest poetry, for poiema means “creation” and the business of the Muses at the temple was to sing the Creation song with the Morning stars;107 naturally the hymn was sung to music, and some scholars would derive the first writing from musical notation.108 It was performed in a sacred circle or chorus, so that poetry, music, and the dance go out to the world from the temple, called by the Greeks the museon, or shrine of the Muses (cf. fig. 6, p. 24). The creation hymn was part of the great dramatic presentation that took place yearly at the temple, dealing with the fall and redemption of man, represented by various forms of combat, making the place the scene of the ritual athletic contests sanctified throughout the world. The victor in the contest was the father of the race, the priestking himself, whose triumphant procession, coronation, and marriage took place on the occasion, making this the seat and source of government (the king was always crowned in the temple rather than the palace).109 Since the entire race was expected to be present for the event, a busy exchange of goods from various distant regions took place, the booths of pilgrims serving as the market booths for great fairs, while the necessity of converting various and bizarre forms of wealth into acceptable offerings for the temple led to an active banking and exchange in the temple courts; the earliest “money,” from the shrine of Juno Moneta at Rome, is temple money (cf. fig. 7, p. 24). Since the place began as an observatory, and all things were tied to the calendar and the stars, mathematics flourished and astronomy was a Muse. History was another Muse, for the rites were meant for the dead as well as the living, and memorials to former great ones (believed to be in attendance) encouraged the production of a marvelous art of portraiture, of sculpture and painting, which would have flourished anyway as architectural adornments, since the design and measurements (the middot) of the temple structure itself as a sort of scale model of the universe and cosmic computer were all-important; the architecture of the hierocentric structure was of primary concern. And since from that central point all the earth was measured and all the lands distributed, geometry was essential: “In the Beginning the One God promised Horus that he should inherit the land of Egypt, which was written in the Books by order of the Lord of All. . . . At the Division of the Lands it was decreed in writing.”110

The writings produced and copied in the House of Life were also discussed there, giving rise to philosophy, but concerned largely with cosmology and natural science. In short, there is no aspect of our civilization that does not have its rise in the temple, thanks to the power of the written word. In the all-embracing relationships of the Divine Book everything is relevant. Nothing is really dead or forgotten; every detail belongs in the picture, which would be incomplete without it. Lacking such a synthesizing principle, our present-day knowledge becomes ever more fragmented, and our universities and libraries crumble and disintegrate as they expand. Where the temple that gave it birth is missing, civilization itself becomes a hollow shell.

A Necessary Addition

In the short compass of a single lecture one always raises more questions than can be answered or discussed. The true origin of writing must remain, as Siegfried Schott observes, a subject of the purest speculation for a long time to come, and possibly forever.111 The fact that all the scholars are merely guessing should not deter us from the fascinating game, for as Karl Popper puts it, it is only by guessing and discussing that any science makes any progress.

Some years ago there was a consensus among students that Egypt was the ultimate home of the alphabet. The decisive study was that of Kurt Sethe, who tried to follow a strictly evolutionary line, with writing evolving inevitably from everyday human needs throughout the world as if by natural law,112 “gradually and imperceptibly,” culminating in a full-blown alphabet in Egypt.113 In the beginning, he avers, humans everywhere communicated by pictures, and to prove this he cites cases in which the white man astounded the Indians by communicating in writing without pictures; he then furnishes as a classical example of Indian picture writing the headstone of a famous chief on which three short vertical strokes represent three seriously wounded warriors while sixteen short horizontal strokes denote sixteen war-parties.114 And this is picture writing? Well might the white man have been astounded that the Indians could thus communicate without letters. None, in fact, of the more than a dozen reproductions of Indian picture writing supplied by Sethe can be read as pictures, and Sethe himself concludes that all these examples are nothing but “mnemotechnical aids” to help the writer fix things in his own mind rather than convey them to others; most of the sketches are so reduced and stylized as to be entirely symbolic, with no attempt at realism, reduced cues that mean nothing to those who have not already experienced what they depict (fig. 64; cf. fig. 58, pp. 422-23).115

This, however, is not true picture writing, according to Sethe, that being a foolproof system in which “every single element of the thought process has its own picture.”116 But if Sethe’s examples of primitive picture writing (of which he could find none in Egypt) were inadequate and even irrelevant, his examples of true picture writing leave even more to be desired—there are none. All his evidence he must find embedded in later hieroglyphic writing.117 In true picture writing, he says, every concept has its picture, so that the writing can be read by anybody anywhere in the world.118 As an example he gives the sign of the cross, which accompanying a name signifies a dead person, forgetting that it only does so as a purely abstract and highly conventionalized symbol, and not as a picture.119 But since “man thinks in words,” according to Sethe, everywhere the true picture writing was “automatically” and “very early converted to phonetic writing.”120 But if men were thinking in words all the time they were drawing pictures, how long would it take them to associate the two? Why does there have to be a gap at all? The evolutionary rule requires it: true writing, being purely phonetic, must necessarily be the last step in the long evolutionary process.121 Again the evidence is missing: all known picture writings in the Old World, according to Sethe, had already become phonetic scripts before their earliest appearance, so that we can only infer the existence of the previous primitive—and true picture writing—systems from indications discovered in the known systems.122 The only clear evidence that Sethe can find for the evolutionary process is the existence of independent systems of writing, all of which, according to him, must have emerged in the same way from primitive picture writing; he lists ten such systems, of which only three had been deciphered in his time.123 Since then the list has been extended, and in the process the independence of the various systems from each other has been brought under serious questioning. Since alphabetic writing is the ultimate perfection in the chain of evolution, it is disturbing that Sethe must conclude that the less efficient, clumsier, and more primitive syllabic writing was evolved from the more perfect alphabetic writing, and not the other way around.124

Sethe’s thesis is that the Egyptians, beginning with a true picture writing containing “originally a countless multitude of symbols”125 (which strangely enough have never turned up anywhere), through a series of inevitable and “purely mechanical” steps, “quite unconsciously and without intention” produced an alphabet of twenty-four letters, all consonants,126 from which all the alphabets of the world were eventually derived.127 The crucial step was the adoption of these characters to their own language by the Hebrews in Sinai—possibly by Moses himself.128 For Sethe, the “missing link” was supplied by Petrie’s discovery of the Siniatic script in 1905.129 From first to last “the entire developmental process of writing from pictures to letters can be viewed in the framework of natural science” (fig. 65).130

To Sethe’s famous study (based on a series of lectures, 1916-1934), Schott added an appendage in 1964. He notes that certain conclusions of Sethe are necessarily premature: the Sinai script has not yet been read with certainty.131 And he cites the later study of Hans Bauer, who, while agreeing that “the Egyptian origin of alphabetic writing is by no means in doubt” and that “anything as rare and marvelous . . . can hardly have originated twice,”132 sees the all-important transition to the standard Semitic alphabet taking place not in Sinai but in Canaan to the north.133 The split between the northern and southern schools still maintains simply because of a lack of evidence.134 Schott wonders if it is necessary to go through all that rigamarole about the various stages of picture writing, for which no rigorous test is possible.135 If we are dealing with a “rare and marvelous” invention, where must we draw the line as to the inventor’s inspiration—can he not have invented the whole thing? The trouble with the evolutionary concept in Egyptian writing, Schott observes, is that the process unfortunately runs backwards.136 The only way to account for the total lack of evidence for all the necessary long transitional phases, according to Schott, is the assumption that everything in those days was written on perishable material, a proposition which he finds untenable.137

And this is where we come in—without apologies, since everything is pretty much up in the air, and there is much to be said that has not been said. Since it is admittedly poverty of evidence that leaves us all in a box canyon, one would think that the scholars, if only in desperation, would venture to consider all of the evidence and not only that which comes under the heading of natural science. With all other ways blocked, it might be a good idea to try some of the neglected passages and ask some of the unasked questions. Here are a few:

1. How are we to account for yawning gaps in the evolutionary record, the complete absence of those transitional documents which should, according to the theory, be exceedingly numerous?

2. What about the sudden emergence first of hieroglyphic writing and then of the Semitic alphabet, each in its perfectly developed form? Why in the case of admitted human inventions, the work of obvious genius, must we still assume long periods of gradual, accidental, unconscious development if no evidence for such development exists outside of the theory itself?

3. The oldest writing appears side by side with the oldest legends about writing. Wouldn’t normal curiosity suggest a hearing of those legends? Greek tradition attributing the origin of the alphabet to Phoenicians has been thoroughly vindicated; no scholar denies that. Then why not examine other legends seriously, at least until something better turns up?

4. Why is it that the ancients are unanimous in attributing the origins of writing, including the alphabet, to a heavenly source?

5. Why are the earliest written documents always found in temples? Why do they always deal with religious matters?

6. Whence the unfailing identification of reading and writing with divination, that is, with interpreting the will of heaven?

7. “There is in the very nature of writing something marvelous and mysterious, which at all times has exercised a powerful attraction on thoughful minds,” writes Sethe.138 Why, then, does he insist that the first true writing, the process of an unconscious, mindless, “automatic” process “can contain only very trivial matters”?139Could anything so “Wunderbares und Geheimnisvolles” (wonderful and mysterious)140 have been invented in a humdrum way for purely humdrum purposes?

8. The supernatural power of the written symbol is as old as the marking of arrows. How can one comprehend the nature of the earliest writing without considering the miraculous or magical powers it exercised over man and beast?141

9. The first writing appears full-blown with the founding of the First Dynasty of Egypt, and in a form far too well-knit and consistent to have evolved, according to Schott.142 What is the significance of writing as “the King’s secret,” the indispensable implement to government and authority?

10. Why is writing always a mystery, a guild secret, a kingly and priestly monopoly? “The really marvelous things that writing does, the astounding feats of thought-stimulation, thought-preservation, and thought-transmission . . . are of no interest to practical people: business records, private letters, school exercises, and the like are periodically consigned to the incinerator by clerks and merchants to whom eternal preservation and limitless transmission mean nothing.”143 Why must the latter be given the credit for inventing writing?

Let these ten questions suffice to justify our own speculations. Schott rejects Sethe’s main thesis, that the Egyptians had a true alphabet, on the grounds that they mingled their alphabetic signs with syllabic and picture writing (the ideograms or determinatives that come at the end of words; cf. fig. 44, p. 218). But whereas the scribes make constant use of the twenty-four letters or single-consonant symbols and could not write without them, they often omit the other signs and seem to be playing with them. Schott maintains that only the Phoenician genius suddenly realized the possibility of doing without the syllabic and pictographic elements entirely; yet for ages the Egyptian scribes freely dispensed with them, now in one word and now in another—they knew it could be done. Pictures? Hieratic is as old as hieroglyphic, yet it contains no recognizable pictures, and demotic is anything but picture writing. Why retain pictures in such systems, since no one can recognize them? To an Egyptian who spoke the language, the alphabetic signs would be enough, just as the same signs, without vowels, are quite adequate for the reading of Semitic lanugages. Granted that some of the other signs are necessary, why is the whole massive and awkward machinery of both picture writing and syllabic writing retained to clutter up an economical and efficient alphabet? I would like to suggest that those who employed the “holy engravings” (for that is what hieroglyphic means) had not only their own people in mind but were thinking of others as well. One need only think of countless early funeral-steles, consciously addressed to distant generations yet unborn. Without ideograms any learned Egyptian scribe could still read a text, but we today could never understand Egyptian without those pictures. Can it be that they are put in there for our benefit or the benefit of others like us? Likewise the eking out of the alphabetic signs with syllabic forms suggests a patient repetition and emphasis for the benefit of stumbling children. If Egyptian writing, because of its compound nature, is absolutely unique, perhaps its intention was also unique—to communicate more widely than the other languages. There is a good deal of evidence to support this theory, but we cannot go into it here. For many years learned men guessed at the meaning of hieroglyphics, and when some of them, like Horapollo, Kircher, or Seiffert, made some happy strikes, it was the pictographs that enabled them to do so and which could have put them on the right track had they properly pursued them. In the 1880s Egyptologists of a number of lands, under the leadership of Professor Samuel Birch of Oxford, collected and interpreted all the available hypocephali of that time, and came up with a surprising unity of views, based on the symbolism alone. Today, as many experts are pointing out, it is doubtful whether anyone really understands any Egyptian religious text; there is still a long way to go, though much progress has been made. But the point is that the evidence is all there before our eyes and that the Egyptians have perhaps consciously supplied us with an overload of material, a safety factor to make sure that in the end the message would get across.

As for the Semitic alphabet and our own, derived from the Egyptian and often called the greatest of all inventions, the most wonderful thing about it is that it seems to have been devised for the express purpose of recording the scriptures—our scriptures. The objection today to Sethe’s suggestion that Moses himself may well have been the inventor is that the alphabet is older than Moses and seems to have been at home at an earlier time up north—in Canaan. Sethe does not apologize for citing a Jewish writer, Eupolemos, in support of the claims put in for Moses,144 and so it seems only fair to point out that by far the overwhelming authority of Jewish tradition favors not Moses but Abraham as the inventor of the alphabet, though some say he inherited it from Enoch. Of recent years a number of new alphabets have turned up in the Near East, dating to 2000-1500 B.C. and all “clearly the inventions of individuals.”145 Well, why not? Once one knows it can be done, one is free to invent one’s own alphabet; the Deseret Alphabet is an impressive demonstration of that (fig. 66). But it would seem that “the Canaanitic alphabet, which has conquered the world,” is the oldest of all, and as such is “a witness to the ancient origin of the Torah.”146 Some think it may be as old as or even older than hieroglyphic itself.147

By the most cautious estimate of the situation, it is safe to say that the scriptures are not to be taken lightly. When scholars who pride themselves on their freedom from any religious commitment are found seriously considering the genesis of the written word not only in holy writings but specifically in our own scriptures, it behooves us to pay attention. Whoever reads the Standard Works today has before him the words of God to men from the beginning, in witness of which the very letters on the page are but slightly conventionalized forms of the original symbols in which the message was conveyed. Merely as a cultural phenomenon the possibility is awe-inspiring, but that it should all go back to Israel and Egypt is too much to hope for. As members of the human race we are bound to approach the scriptures with new feelings of reverence and respect. They are the nearest approach and the best clue thus far discovered to the genesis of the written word.

Notes

This was first delivered as the Commissioner’s Lecture in 1972 and was published by BYU Press in 1973. It was later reprinted (without the complete footnotes) in

New Era

3 (September 1973): 38-50, and in

Nibley on the Timely and the Timeless

(Provo, Brigham Young University Religious Studies Center, 1978), 101-27, with the preface included above.

1. This note appeared at the end of the New Era version, p. 50: Since these reflections first appeared in the Commissioner’s Lecture Series, an important study on the subject has emerged in a feature article by K. H. Basso and Ned Anderson, “A Western Apache Writing System: The Symbols of Silas John,” Science 180, no. 4090 (8 June 1973): 1013-22. The authors begin by deploring the strange indifference and neglect shown by scientists in the past toward the study of “so-called ‘primitive’ writing systems,” as a result of which the present-day world is almost completely in the dark on the subject. “Under these circumstances,” they write, “it is with considerable enthusiasm” that they call attention to an authentic Western Apache writing system that is still in use. The system is ingenious, original, and highly efficient, and is entirely the invention of one man, Silas John Edwards, who produced it in 1904, insisting that the whole thing was given to him in a “dream from God, . . . at one time in one dream,” for the sole purpose of recording certain ritual prayers and ordinances that have since been faithfully perpetuated among his people. Since the value of the writing was the power to preserve the divine instructions unaltered through time, the knowledge of the system has been “restricted to a small band of elite ritual specialists” (1015). Of course, Silas John knew about alphabetic writing, yet his system is a “totally unique cultural form . . . among the significant intellectual achievements of an American Indian during the 20th century” (1013).

The thing to notice here is that Silas John was a plain, simple, but deeply religious Indian, while the system of writing he produced suddenly in 1904 was not only highly sophisticated but has proven perfectly functional. No long ages of evolution were necessary to its emergence; the thing was given, he always maintained, in a single vision, for the express purpose of instructing men in the will of heaven and keeping them faithfully observant of it; it has never been used for anything else. Here in a leading scientific journal is a scientific description of how a system of writing actually came into being among a “primitive” people, and it confirms our own suspicions at every point.

2. Edwyn Bevan, Hellenism and Christianity (London: Allen and Unwin, 1921), 81.

3. John Lear, “The Star-Fixed Ages of Man,” Saturday Review 10 (January 1970): 99, speaking in particular of population and pollution problems.

4. “What is happening now is . . . an abandonment of Renaissance-inspired approaches. . . . The new approach is quite different in spirit and in method. It begins with a clear acknowledgment of the impossibility of reconstructing the original order of things human,” William D. Stahlman, “Global Myths Record Their Passage,” in ibid., 101.

5. Joseph Fielding Smith, Selections from Answers to Gospel Questions (Salt Lake City: Deseret News, 1972), 4.

6. Early Jewish apocrypha emphasize the close association between Adam and the art of writing, a theme which cannot be handled in the scope of this paper. He is called “the four-lettered Adam” in the Sibylline Oracles 3:24, referring to the well-known Jewish doctrine that all things were created out of letters in the first place, the theme of the Sefer Yetzira.

7. Raymond O. Faulkner, The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts (Oxford: Clarendon, 1969), no. 510:1146.

8. That this Atum is to be identified with Adam has been suggested by leading Egyptologists: Eugene Lefebure, “Le cham et l’adam égyptiens,” Biblical Archaeological Society Proceedings 9 (1893): 174-81; Alexandre Moret, Histoire de l’Orient, 2 vols. (Paris: Presses universitaires, 1945), 1:209.

9. Jean Capart, “L’exaltation du Livre,” Chronique d’Egypte 22 (1946): 25.

10. R. Englebach, “An Essay on the Advent of the Dynastic Race in Egypt and Its Consequences,” ASAE 42 (1942): 197-98.

11. Jean Capart, “Thème religieux ou fantaisie,” Egyptian Religion 1 (1933): 117.

12. Alan H. Gardiner, “The Nature and Development of the Egyptian Hieroglyphic Writing,” JEA 2 (1915): 62.

13. Alexander Scharff and Anton Moortgat, Aegypten und Vorderasien im Altertum (Munich: Bruckmann, 1950), 22.

14. Elise Baumgartel, Prehistoric Egypt (London: Oxford University Press, 1947), 48.

15. Stuart Piggott, The Dawn of Civilization (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1961), 127.

16. Walter B. Emery, “The Tombs of the First Pharoahs,” Scientific American 197 (July 1957): 112.

17. Kurt Sethe, Vom Bilde zum Buchstaben: Die Entstehungsgeschichte der Schrift, vol. 12 of Untersuchungen zur Geschichte und Altertumskunde Aegyptens (Hildesheim: Olms, 1964), 27-28.

18. Scharff and Moortgat, Aegypten und Vorderasien im Altertum, 46.

19. Sethe, Vom Bilde zum Buchstaben, 20.

20. Johannes Friedrich, “Schriftsysteme und Schrifterfindungen im alten Orient und bei modernen Naturvölkern,” Archiv Orientalni 19 (1951): 251-52.

21. Henri Frankfort, The Birth of Civilization in the Near East (London: Williams and Norgate, 1954), 110.

22. Ibid., 106-7.

23. Antal Dávid, “Remarques sur l’origine de l’écriture sumérienne,” Archiv Orientalni 18/2 (1950): 51-54.

24. Bedrich Hrozný, Ancient History of Western Asia, India, and Crete (New York: Philosophical Library, 1953), 116-17.

25. J. Jordan, “Ausgrabungen in Warka,” Archiv für Orientforschung 6 (1930-31): 318.

26. Phineas Mordell, “The Origin of Letters and Numerals According to Sefer Yesirah,” JQR 2 (1911-12): 575.

27. Émile Massoulard, Préhistoire et Protohistoire d’Égypte (Paris: Institut d’Ethnologie, 1950), 323-24.

28. Naphtali H. Tur-Sinai, “The Origin of the Alphabet,” JQR 41 (1950-51): 296.

29. Sethe, Vom Bilde zum Buchstaben, 20; Friedrich, “Schriftsysteme und Schrifterfindungen,” 259; Hrozný, Ancient History of Western Asia, 166-72, looks for the place of origin in northern Syria, northwestern Mesopotamia, or eastern Asia Minor.

30. Sethe, Vom Bilde zum Buchstaben, 45-47.

31. A. Schmitt, cited in Helmut Arntz, “Zur Geschichte der Schrift,” Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gessellschaft 97 (1947): 82-83.

32. Sethe, Vom Bilde zum Buchstaben, 10.

33. Ernst Doblhofer, Voices in Stone, tr. Mervyn Savill (New York: Viking, 1961), 33.

34. Ibid.

35. Dávid, “Remarques sur l’origine,” 49.

36. Doblhofer, Voices in Stone, 22.

37. Sethe, Vom Bilde zum Buchstaben, 24-25.

38. Ibid., 9.

39. Gardiner, “Egyptian Hieroglyphic Writing,” 64.

40. Doblhofer, Voices in Stone, 28 (emphasis added).

41. Sethe, Vom Bilde zum Buchstaben, 28.

42. Ibid., 18.

43. William F. Edgerton, “On the Theory of Writing,” JNES 11 (1953): 287-90.

44. Heinrich J. Lanzen, “New Discoveries at Warka in Southern Iraq,” Archaeology 17 (1964): 125.

45. T. Burton-Brown, Studies in Third Millennium History (London: Luzac, 1946), 66-67.

46. Sherwood L. Washburn, “Tools and Human Evolution,” Scientific American 203 (September 1960): 63.

47. James K. Feibleman, “Philosophy of Tools,” Social Forces 45 (1967): 331-37. See also Kenneth P. Oakley, “Dating the Emergence of Man,” Advancement of Science 18 (1948): 422. Lewis Mumford, “Man the Finder,” Technology and Culture 6 (1965): 375-81.

48. Leslie A. White, “Energy and the Evolution of Culture,” American Anthropologist 45 (1943): 338, 347.

49. “Cybernation and Man,” Man on Earth 1/4 (1965): 6.

50. Amélia Hertz, “L’histoire de l’outil en fer d’après les documents égyptiens hittites, et assyro-babyloniens,” L’Anthropologie 35 (1925): 75-95.

51. Jean Hiernaux, “How Man Will Evolve,” Science Digest 58 (August 1965): 93.

52. Carleton S. Coon, The Story of Man (New York: Knopf, 1962), 64. The Leakeys would concur with his verdict.

53. William F. Petrie, “History in Tools,” Smithsonian Institution Annual Report (1918): 568.

54. Ibid., 568-69.

55. Ibid., 570.

56. E. von Mülinen, “Sprachen und Schriften des vorderen Orients im Verhältnis zu den Religionen und Kulturkreisen,” Zeitschrift des Deutschen-Palästina-Vereins 47 (1924): 88, 90.

57. Jürgen Smolian, “Vehicula Religiosa: Wagen in Mythos, Ritus, Kultus und Mysterium,” Numen 10 (1963): 203, citing as examples fire, wheels, wagons, architecture, and ships.

58. Joseph Fielding Smith, ed., Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1947), 54 (emphasis added).

59. Naphtali H. Tur-Sinai, “Sitir Samê, die Himmelsschrift,” Archiv Orientalni 17 (1949): 433.

60. Hermes Trismegistus, 1, cited in Theodor Hopfner, Fontes Historiae Religionis Aegyptiacae (Bonn: Marcus and Weber, 1922-24), 393.

61. Henri Brugsch, “Bau und Maasse des Tempels von Edfu,” Zeitschrift für ägyptische Sprache und Altertumskunde 10 (1872): 3-4.

62. Geo Widengren, The Ascension of the Apostle and the Heavenly Book (Uppsala: Boktryckeri, 1950), 21.

63. Smith, Selections from Answers to Gospel Questions, 5; Moses 7:67.

64. Alfred Jeremias, Das alte Testament im Lichte des alten Orients (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1916), 51.

65. Clement of Alexandria, Stromata V, 4, in PG 9:44.

66. Frankfort, Birth of Civilization, 55-56.

67. George Steindorff, Egypt (New York: Augustin, 1943), 24.

68. Hrozný, Ancient History of Western Asia, India, and Crete, 36-37.

69. Frankfort, Birth of Civilization, 56, n. 1.

70. Piggott, Dawn of Civilization, 90.

71. See Hugh W. Nibley, “The Arrow, the Hunter, and the State,” WPQ 2/3 (1949): 329-39; reprinted in CWHN 10:2-15; Hugh W. Nibley, “Controlling the Past: Part V,” IE 58 (May 1955): 307-8; reprinted in CWHN 4:245-47.

72. Arntz, “Zur Geschichte der Schrift,” 76.

73. Cornelius Nepos, On the Great Generals of Foreign Nations XVIII, Eumenes I, 5.

74. Nibley, “Controlling the Past: Part V,” 307-8; reprinted in CWHN 4:245-53.

75. Sethe, Vom Bilde zum Buchstaben, 20-21.

76. Siegfried Schott, Mythe und Mythenbildung im alten Aegypten, vol. 15 of Untersuchungen zur Geschichte und Altertumskunde Aegyptens (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1945), 10-11.

77. See Hugh W. Nibley, “Tenting, Toll, and Taxing,” WPQ 19 (December 1966): 603-7; reprinted in CWHN 10:41-43; see also Hugh W. Nibley, “The Hierocentric State,” WPQ 4/2 (1951): 235-38; reprinted in CWHN 10:110-14.

78. Scharff and Moortgat, Aegypten und Vorderasien im Altertum, 3; there is a striking passage in Syncellus, cited in Hopfner, Fontes Historiae Religionis Aegyptiacae, 74.

79. Plotinus, Enneads II, 3, On Whether the Stars Are Causes 7.

80. Papyrus Salt 825A, in Alan H. Gardiner, “The House of Life,” JEA 24 (1938): 167.

81. Heliodorus, Aethiopica (Ethiopians) II, 28, 2.

82. Étienne Drioton, L’écriture énigmatique du livre du jour et de la nuit (Cairo: l’Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale, 1942), 86.

83. Francis L. Griffith, Stories of the High Priests of Memphis (Oxford: Clarendon, 1900), 21-22.

84. Leo Koep, Das himmlische Buch in Antike und Christentum (Bonn: Hanstein, 1952); Widengren, Ascension of the Apostle and the Heavenly Book.

85. Kurt H. Sethe, Dramatische Texte zu altaegyptischen Mysterienspielen, 2 vols. (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1928), 1:5, 8.

86. Max Pieper, Die grosse Inschrift des Königs Neferhotep (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1929), 6-11.

87. Moret, Histoire de l’Orient, 1:96-107.

88. Pyramid Text (PT) 309:490-91.

89. Widengren, Ascension of the Apostle and the Heavenly Book, 11, 10.

90. Alexandre Moret, Du caractère religieux de la royauté pharaonique (Paris: Leroux, 1902), 102.

91. Winfried Barta, “Bemerkungen zur Darstellung der Jahreszeiten im Grabe des Mrr-wj-k3.j,” Zeitschrift für ägyptische Sprache und Altertumskunde 97 (1971): 7.

92. Gardiner, “The House of Life,” 76.

93. Heinrich Zimmern, Die Keilinschriften und das Alte Testament (Berlin: Reuther & Richard, 1903), 405.

94. PT 250:267.

95. Bruno Meissner, Babylonien und Assyrien, 2 vols. (Heidelberg: Winter, 1927), 2:124-25.

96. Eduard Meyer, Geschichte des Altertums, 4 vols. (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1910-58), 1:42-44.

97. A. Leo Oppenheim, “Mesopotamian Mythology III,” Orientalia 19 (1950): 155.

98. PT 250:267.

99. Capart, “L’exaltation du Livre,” 25-27.

100. Alan H. Gardiner, “New Literary Works from Ancient Egypt,” JEA 1 (1914): 25.

101. Gardiner, “The House of Life,” 166.

102. Alan H. Gardiner, “The Secret Chambers of the Sanctuary of Thoth,” JEA 11 (1925): 4.

103. W. K. G. Lambert, “Ancestors, Authors, and Canonicity,” Journal of Cuneiform Studies 11 (1957): 9.

104. Heinrich Schäfer, “Mousa bei Horapollo II, 29 und die Göttin Ss3-t,” Zeitschrift für ägyptische Sprache und Altertumskunde 42 (1905): 72-75.

105. Siegried Schott, in “Nachwort,” to Sethe, Vom Bilde zum Buchstaben, 81.

106. Gardiner, “The House of Life,” 159; cf. 174-79.

107. Walter Otto, Die Musen und der göttliche Ursprung des Singens und Sagens (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1961).

108. Fritz M. Heichelheim, “The Earliest Musical Notations of Mankind and the Invention of Our Alphabet,” Epigraphica rivista italiana di epigrafia 12 (1950): 111-15.

109. We have treated the overall theme in “Hierocentric State,” 226-53; in CWHN 10:99-147.

110. Siegfried Schott, Das Buch vom Sieg über Seth (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1929), 16.

111. Schott, in “Nachwort,” to Sethe, Vom Bilde zum Buchstaben, 83.

112. Sethe, Vom Bilde zum Buchstaben, 2-3; the only motivating force was immediate practical need, 41, 66.

113. Ibid., 32, speaking of Egyptian linear writing; ibid., 39, speaking of the Egyptian alphabet.

114. Ibid., 4-5; fig. 2.

115. Ibid., 6, 11, 14-17.

116. Ibid., 17.

117. Ibid., 18-19.

118. Ibid., 24-25.

119. Ibid., 25-26.

120. Ibid., 26.

121. Ibid., 27.

122. Ibid., 28.

123. Ibid., 20.

124. Ibid., 29.

125. Ibid., 34.

126. Ibid., 38.

127. Ibid., 45-63.

128. Ibid., 55-56.

129. Ibid., 57-59.

130. Ibid., 66.

131. Ibid., 73.

132. Bauer, Alte Orient, 12-13; citing Schott, in “Nachwort,” to Sethe, Vom Bilde zum Buchstaben, 75.

133. Sethe, Vom Bilde zum Buchstaben, 74.

134. Ibid., 75.

135. Ibid., 76.

136. Ibid., 80.

137. Ibid., 81.

138. Ibid., 1.

139. Ibid., 73.

140. Ibid., 1.

141. See Nibley, “The Arrow, the Hunter, and the State,” 328-44; in CWHN 10:1-32.

142. Schott, in Sethe, Vom Bilde zum Buchstaben, 81.

143. Nibley, “Controlling the Past: Part V,” 307-8; reprinted in CWHN 4:245-47.

144. Sethe, Vom Bilde zum Buchstaben, 55.

145. Alfred Jirku, “Der Kult des Mondgottes im alter Palästina-Syrien,”

Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft 100 (1950): 520.

146. Tur-Sinai, “The Origin of the Alphabet,” 296.

147. Mordell, “Letters and Numerals According to Sefer Yesirah,” 575.

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