#vulcan history

[noxequusart]

Cat T'Pau

[ichayalovesyou]

I was wondering if you had any headcanons or thoughts about Pre-reform/ Pre-Surak times?

My god Anon it's been over a year since I partially answered this in my drafts and I apologize, holy crap. Haven't been active in a while and am trying to catch up on soooooo many Trek things!

Pre-Surakian Reform Headcanons!

As a baseline, imagine how much things would SUCK if everyone was suddenly touch telepathic and even more empathetically interconnected with all the undisciplined emotion and political madness we've got now in the 21st century. NOT a pretty picture amiright? Oh gods...

"I'm arguing with you in my head" except real, debates on every scale from personal to grand political have a spoken layer AND a psychic layer. And regular arguments are already painful and confusing enough as it is, oof.

I bet some fights get so bad (see, canon mind rape being a thing) it's like those rodents that are so territorial they die even if they never fight if they're too close to each other? Two people staring at each other angrily for five hours until one of them just drops dead.

Psychic Warlords I believe are a thing briefly touched on in Enterprise and novel canon. Sybok's "hunting for god" V'tosh Ka'tur cult was unsettling enough, imagine that being a much MUCH bigger and more frequent problem. Entire governments using powerful Vulcan telepaths to ensure loyalty.

Just thinking about how invasive advertising is without you forcibly learning about an entire brand of hair care products because the kiosk girl at the mall tapped you on the shoulder. Ugh, makes my skin crawl to think about it.

Privacy, oh sweet mercy, again, something that's virtually non-existent now in our human Age of Information, the only totally secure place to have thoughts these days is your mind, Pre-Surakian Vulcans may not have even had that.

Mental illness is already established to not only affect the Vulcan who has it but almost everyone around them as well in-canon. Could you imagine the consequences of mental illness like Depression and Anxiety and PTSD and Alzheimer's and Bipolar being contagious like how some Humans pretend it is in real life? That would be a NIGHTMARE.

War was probably even rougher on societal psyche as well because of the k'war'ma'khon, individuals constantly feeling the immense death tolls may not have tamped war down but exacerbated the cycle of vengeance and the deep rooted prejudices that spring from it. Biiiiig yikes.

So I guess Pre-Surakian Vulcan was probably the hell that it's advertised as in canon, just on more levels than war and violence. While the primarily addressed thing is Vulcan rage in a lot of Trek shows, it's obvious Surak's teachings tamped down other emotions. Emotions like greed, ambition, jealousy, and selfishness. Which were probably the worser society destroyers than the more basic emotions like anger and sadness and joy. Which I think is telling of both how the age before Surak was like, and how many Vulcans misunderstand his teachings on certain levels post Enlightenment.

[harley-rose25]

trek thoughts: Vulcans are geneticly modified, perhaps?

Vulcans are too well evolved for their planet, like, evolutionary adaptions to the environment make sense of course, but they just seem like theyre too adapted. I mean, for example, T'pol told Cp. Archer that she didnt need sunglasses because her inner eyelids protected her eyes; humans also evolved on planet revolving a giant ball of molten rock and plasma but we didnt evolve build in sunglasses.

Vulcans also possess more strength than should be necessary. Why are they 3+ times stronger than the average human? Partially because of higher gravity, possibly partially because of cultural differences; Vulcans seem to place a higher value/need on being physically strong and healthy, likely the need to keep others from taking their mate is a strong evolutionary catalyst, but I feel like theres more.

What about their telepathic abilities? How does a species evolve something like that? Especially given that their telepathy coupled with their violent intense emotions makes for what one would think is a bad combination. It makes sense they almost blew themselves up.

[eldritchazure]

i have a surak-era oc who i’m gonna ramble about here from time to time.

he’s from t’paal because i’m Fascinated by that region for some reason. i really wish there was more info on it but alas. i’ll have to make shit up as i go. he was born in one of the enclaves but i’m thinking he was raised in a temple of akraana there.

(people don’t know what the goddess akraana presided over, only that she was the wife(?) of the war god khosarr, so i’m gonna make things up. i’m thinking she was some kind of goddess of magic, prophecy, and art because it’s convenient and also cool. also since one of the enclaves where her disciples lived is now an artists’ enclave so it works. her worshippers were kinda like a mystery cult, similar to the cult of despoina, hence why people don’t know what her deal was today. sorry for the info dump, i find this kind of thing REALLY interesting so i think about it A Lot.)

so this guy was a disciple of akraana and raised in one of her temples. the reason why he was sent there as a child was because he had these “visions” of the past and the future. the actual reason for the “visions” was that his mind was frequently temporally displaced. not permanently or constantly like spock’s was in disco, but it kind of came and went? like he’d be going about his day and then all of a sudden BAM there’s gonna be a horrible famine here At Some Point in the Near Future. or BAM someone was murdered horrifically at this spot A Very Long Time Ago. or someone was born at this spot and a lot of people were full of joy about it A Very Long Time Ago. he couldn’t tell when exactly things happened/would happen, only vague impressions. this is why he was dropped off at the temple by his parents. they didn’t know how to deal with the visions and figured the temple people might. is this logical or at all responsible parenting? definitely not. but i’m thinking the visions put great mental strain on him and by extension his parents through the familial bonds so maybe sending him to live with the people who specialized in that kind of thing would be able to take care of him better. whether or not that’s true remains to be seen.

i have no idea how the temporal displacement happened, or why it isn’t like how spock’s was. at this point it’s plot convenience. idk maybe it’s some weirdo space entity?? idk idk. anywho he mistook the weirdo space entity for akraana (or maybe it was akraana. who knows. ANYWAY.)

so yeah he gets these visions. maybe they slowly drive him a little mad? i don’t know!! i’ll figure it out, or maybe i won’t. but yeah he gets visions and then writes them down in a bunch of notebooks over his life. he doesn’t know what most modern things are so they’re written through a kind of fantastical/mythological lens. he predicts different wars with aliens but he doesn’t know they’re aliens so he calls them like, demons or spirits or whatever. even technology that could be found at that time he probably didn’t know about, because i’m imagining that the temple/area he was raised in was one of the ones that was generally against technology. so if he were to predict the radiation from the nuclear weapons being used at the time, people wouldn’t know what he meant until it was happening.

eventually the notebooks are found and now they’re in a museum somewhere displaying the history of the region. most historians dismiss his prophecies as the ramblings of a madman but those who look closely enough do admit it is somewhat eerie how they seem to mirror a lot of big historical events.

for example, a ship full of vengeful demons wearing the faces of vulcans emerging from a portal, who will consume t’khasi from the inside out.

anywho. at the moment his name is tova. this is subject to change. his story is pretty barebones at the moment and is little more than a concept that i’ve written out here in a very long winded post. i’ll probably flesh it out some more, add some much needed Drama and probably a healthy serving of Angst, as you do.

[sokorra]

The Rewatch 234: Gambit

Series: Star Trek: TNGEpisode: 7.04 Gambit Part 1 (October 11, 1993) and 7.05 Gambit Part 2 (October 18, 1993)Rating: 4/5Redshirt Status: 0/7/64 Notable Guest Stars: Richard Lynch (Arctus Baran) – Lynch was a very productive actor.  Although I don’t recognize many titles on his filmography he made several a year so there are a lot of them.  It seemed he liked playing Villains in horror movies…

[spirk-trek]

"The ahn woon!"

S2E1: Amok Time ⋆.˚ ✧ · ˚⊹ ·

[lionofchaeronea]

Vulcan, Pompeo Batoni (1708-1787)

[spongynova]

can you do stonn in 01 rattlesnake if you're still doin the color pallet thing?

What? Are you asking me to draw the OG HIMBO?! Please the way I screamed at my screen in front of this ask from @kaklord. Thank you this was a delight to work on!

So here is more of my sequel to Amok time: T'Pring and Stonn training to kick Spock's ass!

[bumblingbabooshka]

T’Pring Evaluates the Mirror, the Reflection.

[whencyclopedia]

Vulcan

Vulcan or Volcanus was the Roman god of fire and forge, the equivalent of Hephaestus from Greek mythology. The son of Jupiter and Juno, he was the special patron of blacksmiths and artisans. As the god of the forge and the devastating fire of both the environment and nature (volcanoes), Vulcan was probably among the most dreaded of all the gods.

Continue reading...

[android-and-ale]

Historian's Perspective on Vulcan Time Zones

This was supposed to be a quick response to something on a Discord. As you can see it turned into 750 words on the history of Earth time measurement, time zones, and my opinion of how and why Vulcans would use time zones. If you're into Vulcan vs Human cultural minutia, enjoy diving down this rabbit hole with me!

Vulcans, with their canon innate sense of time, would in fact still have time zones - but they wouldn’t use them the way we do today.

Here on Earth, time zones were a secondary effect of trains. Before trains, people had a lot of different means of telling time, but they mostly revolved around dawn and dusk. You can still see that today in Jewish and Muslim timekeeping. We’re in the month of Ramadan right now. Fasting is from LOCAL dawn to local dusk, not the time of those events in Mecca. Shabbat starts at local dusk on Friday night. The whole idea of tying human time to precise minutes would be nonsensical for pretty much everyone living before the industrial revolution.

Hours also used to be variable in length, based around good old dawn and dusk. So for the Romans the “first hour” was literally the first hour after dawn. They divided the daylight into 12 hours (because Sumerian math is persistent AF). During summer, one “hour” was about 75 modern minutes long, while during winter, one hour was 45 minutes long. An hour was a division of daylight, not a collection of minutes.

Up until the industrial revolution this was fine. If you needed precise timing for a chemical reaction there were surprisingly accurate measuring devices, but those weren’t applied to everyday life. 

Christian church bells and Muslim Adhan calls to prayer followed the dawn to dusk modified hour system to let people know what time it was. In Christian literature, you find a ton of references to different churches hourly bells tolling for a solid 3-5 minutes back to back. 

It was part of the rhythm of the day. Many church clocks didn’t even have minute hands, because yo didn’t need them. In daily life, you honestly didn’t need to know anything more precise than “half” or maybe “quarter” past a specific hour.

Time zones as we know them were literally invented by train companies. It was the only way to ensure the trains ran on time. You can find tons of contemporary writing about how “two of the clock” could mean damn near anything. If you’re trying to get meat butchered this morning in Chicago to New York city on quickly melting slabs of ice so it’ll arrive in time to be taken to shops and sold before it spoils, you really need your trains to run on a dependable schedule. 

So I say:

1) Vulcans would have time zones because they are the most logical means of scheduling long distance transportation and distribution. 

2) Local time has little to do with time zones. Vulcans in canon have an innate sense of time in a way we humans do not, so really, the point of time zones is just ensuring transportation and distribution networks are efficient.

3) Nimoy infused a lot of Judaism into the lore of Vulcans. As such I think their innate time sense would also be tied to a dawn-to-dusk schedule. (The modern idea of starting a new “day” in the middle of a late night sleep cycle is very weird and totally ahistorical.)  Therefore Local time is still linked to dawn and dusk. It’s also useful to know what time dawn and dusk are for people halfway around the world. That way you can efficiently schedule meetings with them at mutually convenient times. Once more, we come back to time zones. 

If you want a real world example of how No Time Zones fucks you up, look at China. There is officially One Time Zone in all of China, even though geographically it would be cut into 9 if you followed the same lines everyone else uses. That means a normal meeting at 10 am for someone in Bejing is at what we would consider 1 am at the furthest point west. But 1 am is legally “10 am” for them. If you don’t have to deal with Bejing on the regular, then the clock numbers have zero correlation with the way people in those places actually live their lives. 

I suspect what a lot of people really object to is daylight savings time. 

Vulcans who use local dawn and dusk to define their days would find this equally nonsensical. 

Now if you want to get weird with it, you could make all VSA starships use ShiKhar Central Time, regardless of where the crew is from. 

[tragediambulante]

Vénus demandant à Vulcain des armes pour Énée, François Boucher, 1732

[fine-arts-gallery]

Vulcan in his Forge (1750) by Pompeo Batoni.

[lindahall]

Johann von Charpentier – Scientist of the Day

Johann Friedrich Wilhelm von Charpentier, a German geologist and mining engineer, died July 27, 1805, at the age of 67; he was born in Dresden in 1738.

read more...

[spirk-trek]

Arlene Martel as T'Pring, S2E1 of Star Trek, 1967

[fancyshooting]

ocelot's full biography from the mgs4 database: