Ancient to Them

Introductory Noise

I want to start writing again but the idea(s) I have in my head have nothing to do with what I have previously written. Thus and therefore, I started a new space to think in for a while.

This blog will have little blurbs of fiction and setting as I think about them so they have a place to live that is not only inside my head. I have ideas for a no-longer-all-that-insane science fiction world and the wars to come between corporations and their memetic existence. But I want to start at the beginning to get to the corporations and memes. And before I start writing something “for realz,” I will churn through ideas.

The format of these posts will be:

• A little introductory meandering.
• The “meat”.
• Some notes about interesting things I’m reading or playing right now.

And that’s it. Nothing too difficult. Nothing too convoluted. Just me and the inside of my head.

I am @multiplexer on bluesky. I’ve dropped off of everything else.

Ancient to Them

Spirit-life — God-life — evolved alongside corporeal life. As the algae dreamed algae dreams in ancient, green seas, algae spirits dreamed along with them. As life exploded, so did the spirit world before thought: expanding and exploding to cover the globe. The ancient world was the time of the spirits of Stromatolites: unimaginably ancient, unremittingly cruel, and locked into the cycles of birth, feed, reproduction, and death. They have no concept of time or place. They simply are, and they embody the world at its most primal.

These are the ancient spirits that embodied needs and urges. As life evolved, the spirits evolved. They became the spirits of unending hunger. The spirits of hunting, prey, and being eaten in turn. The spirits of base violence and death and the spirits of rebirth and growth in the warm places.

These spirits had no more form or thought than the creatures whose urges and needs they inhabited. Slow eons ground on, and the spirits never changed. Great Dyings came and went, and the spirits still inhabited the urges of the land, sea, and (later, so much later, beyond recognition) the sky. Towers of plankton? Great migrations of trilobites? Dinosaurs fighting their wars of dominance on the land? The spirits did not care. They simply were.

Even when the meteorite hit the world of dinosaurs and the world smelled terrific for a few hours before turning to stink and decay, the spirits still inhabited the world and represented the urges and needs of the living.

Rise of Thinking Things and Their Spirits

Nothing changed for the ancient spirits across time until one new being stood up in an ocean of grass and stared back at them. For the first time since bacteria divided and creatures swam in blood-warm seas, a new two-legged creature gave the experiences around them name and bound the spirits into form.

These new spirit forms were those that cannot be explained or controlled: thunder and lightning, the coming of spring and the dying off of the fall, the growth of reeds at the banks of rivers, the animals that provide food and the cool places that slow the rot of their decaying carcasses, and the transformation of ground plant seed into fermentation and bread.

Imminence

As thinking things named their world, they embodied their life experiences with the spiritual and the imminent. Thinking things yanked a small selection of spirits, the great miasma of life, and trapped them into form through belief and naming.

Never has a spirit taken a form in the great millennia of time. These ancient spirits of form are the numinous spirits. These numinous possess the essence of the place, the landmark, or the thing.

The numinous spirits are terrifying and awe-inspiring. Much like the ancient spirits they were before, they were forcefully pulled from the miasma by belief, and they had no hopes or dreams. They do not think any more than a primordial spirit of hunger thinks. They could not be bargained with. They could not be reasoned with. Their actions are their actions. These spirits simply are.

These spirits are imminent — near, close, about to arrive at any moment.

When the spirits arrive, thundering and spitting fire, the thinking things only hope to leave with minimal death and destruction.

The transformation from numinous spirit to small godhood runs through metaphor. The numinous experience of the growing grain becomes the metaphorical experience of the embodiment of the grain. The numinous experience of the mountain becomes through metaphor the embodiment of all high places.

A spirit becomes a god when its nearness, its imminence, its core, enduring metaphor of its numinous experience is bound within an enduring concept. Then, it transforms from an awe-inspiring experience happening now, becomes the god that exists through all time.

The growing grain becomes the Harvest.

The coming fall becomes Death.

The coming spring becomes Rebirth.

The cool, dark places become the Home, the Hearth, and the Entryway.

Why do we care?

It will become important to remember the definition of numinous and imminence as Gods grow and take on new forms that humans think up.

• Numinous are experiences outside of human experience.
• Imminence are experiences that are dangerously near.

Early small gods were spirits bound into the metaphor of experiences outside of human experience that are in the here and now and embody forces that cannot be controlled.

Fun stuff.

Media Update

• We’re watching Silo Season 2 which continues to be excellent. Although, I worry what will happen when the showrunners run out of content from the books ala Game of Thrones. Wool is a highly recommended read if you’re looking for some fun science fiction.
• We’re working our way through A Crown of Candy on DropoutTV. Easily the best of the series with the Intrepid Heroes, and a stark reminder that when the GM says death is on the line, death is actually on the line.
• I’m finishing up the Divide series by JS Dewes. I loved the first two books (The Last Watch and the Exiled Fleet) but the 3rd book lost some of the magic. Still recommended because some of the set piece scenes are fantastic.
• We’re playing Shadow of the Demon Lord, of which I have extremely mixed feelings. We’re finally strong enough that we can do super fun things but it’s taken 7 levels to get there.