the GOSPEL of 6: BOOK ONE: MAKER
nonono no wait hold on i think i just figured out all of human spirituality
or whatever
basically magic is just what we used to call the force that made the things we didn't understand happen. like i think, yknow, deep down, it's about an understanding of your possible layers of perception or understanding and a willingness to accept something that claims credit as being genuine. by which i mean picture yourself in the bronze age. say you are hit by an acorn while walking. this surprises you. you were not expecting to be hit by an acorn while walking. at that point you look around. are you under an acorn producing tree? yes? well it was probably that. move along. no? well, you know sometimes you throw acorns at people to be a jerk or to tease your friend or your crush so it is plausible it might have been thrown at you, does it look like someone threw it at you? oh yes, there is hot doug, my cool crush, it was hot doug, we are flirting, hoorah. no hot doug? my condolences. is there at least, idk, a rambunctious looking squirrel? no? well fuck if i know sometimes shit just happens i guess, might be fairies, whatever.
we generally don't have much reason to think beyond that if your entire life is spent in the space required to keep, like, 50 people alive with relative safety on this planet. the end.
the gap here, you see, is that if we see no immediate source we basically look for anything that seems plausible, or at least something that is claiming credit. diligence calls us to double-check that sometimes, but that is only fair, we expect that to be done of us as well, that is how we keep the community honest and intelligent and growing. maybe you learned something you didn't know you learned from someone because you learned it from the person who kinda knew it because they work near someone else who talks about it all the time. we gotta share what we know and how we figured it out. you gotta call my sources eventually, of course.
and so, you know, i dont know how much narrative lifting i have to do if you follow what i'm putting down, right? so long as you have ruled out everything you know as well as everything you think plausible, if you do not seem to be in active danger for a reason that is absolutely perplexing, then i don't know, i guess it's fine? it doesn't really matter.
it's how you get away with duplicity, as well, right. how you can steal and cheat and blame it on capricious spirits if the concept of capricious spirits is something your culture tacitly accepts basically because it doesn't understand anything about anything yet. but it's also our willingness to accept any credit that seems plausible enough to claim by the person claiming it. especially when dealing with those intangible, foreign concepts. like maybe you are that acorn victim but have never seen a squirrel before. you know all the normal reasons and the human reasons but if this is your first walk into the woods and you have only ever had acorns because the forager brought them in or whatever, or fucking monkeys or something it doesn't matter, like, what else could have done it at that point? magic and the imagined dont have to seem real they just have to seem plausible in a realm of thought you know you don't fuckin know the answers to shit in, which lowers the barrier to entry pretty fucking low.
and like, it's the pair of those things that is where magic comes from. it's why all actual early magic, sorcery, the shit we know about because people wrote it down at least, are like, curses. prayers, spells. basically just a wish on a piece of paper for a thing that you can't imagine happening for real to happen for real, which primes you to expect its receipt from an unexpected source. you've already figured out everyting you know and you can't think of a way for it to exist but you know it must and so you ask for it. and if you get it? wow! the spell worked!
but if it didn't? i mean, who knows! i might not be good at spells, i might have used the wrong ink, the circumstances might have changed like the stars were wrong or the moon was in the wrong place in the sky like there's a million reasons why it didn't work THIS time no that doesn't really convince me of anything, because i was already living in a world where i either believe this exists already or am open to it existing and i know i haven't tried everything yet so i might as well try something until i get it right, right?
but it also then just makes it true when you're basically asking for things that are ultimately up to chance and fortune. if someone important dies and you later find that someone wrote a spell on a rock and did a ritual with it or something wanting that to happen, well, fuck, they wanted it and it happened it must be their fault. it's either something magic, or they did it, in which case they basically just did magic so they are responsible, we will process this as we see fit within the community, i guess. you're either on fire or are the one who gets to say things go on fire we have to figure it out give us a few days try not to murder any of us, i guess unless that's what you're here to do for some reason, since you're magic i guess? i don't know, we're all going to go talk about it, uh. feel free to do any other cool miracles that help us with stuff if you want while we confer but yeah no we'll talk this one out for a few millennia actually thanks.
but like, that's all it is. that's all magic or prayer is. you're just making a little contract with something supernatural, beyond your realm of influence if one exists, so you choose one of them at least, and then when you're out of ideas you ask it for stuff and so when the stuff happens you say hey awesome thank you and if it doesn't happen it's like, well, it already wasn't happening so all it really did is continue to be not happening so i don't know, i can wait a little longer, i can ask again, i can ask different, maybe they didn't hear me. and if you live in a world that doesn't know that pissing and dumping dead bodies and garbage and mining runoff into your drinking slash bathing water yet is bad for you i can understand how they take anyone who displays any sort of actual aptitude either in tremendous effort expended or invaluable aptitude for something beyond the communal plateau of skill or capacity, sure. but there's lots of plateaus out there, i'm only on mine dude. it's chill. and really all mine is is just the "how to be like me" hill that's all i can ever say i'm an authority on, so that's the only thing it's fair to try and gague things against? what would i do if i were you? and to actually mean it? not just, like, if you were me? or if i was just performing the version of me i think you expect to see of me back to myself as yourself? if you actually want me to be fair i have to actually try and think what it would be like to be you, based on what you have communicated to me. and it can seem surfacey i guess or judgemental but i just basically give everyone the benefit of the doubt that they are of equal agency to me in affecting change in the thing they want relative to my understanding of other dissimilar vectors that i can best surmise and that includes the entirety of the time i have known you as well as the context in which i know you from and thus all the potential ways you and i may have entered this space and what, based on our interactions on a scale of nothing we are strangers to you are my twin i guess in scope, what structures beyond your control do i believe you were existing under and what where the relevant motives and ideologies associated with those two opposing forces and does one seem tacitly insane and were they the winners or the losers because that becomes pretty important right about now given all the other things i have already entered into my brain about you which is the way you were presented to me, ideally entirely by your own choice but it is possible given the world we live in that i might be encountering you without prior consent, and that is immediately based on ultimately unfair assumptions precisely because i do not know the reason why i am wrong yet but i know that i am because you will communicate to me the ways in which i can honestly engage with a person that gives the impression of you given the impression of yourtself you are projecting towards me and that includes visual and contextual stimulus and those things have contexts. if you look a certain way in a certain place it means a different thing. dressing one way on the streets and one way in the camps is another thing entirely yet they may at times be indescribable from eachother that is only a thing of necessity and timing.
this is ultimately i think why each community, at least in early human civilization so far as we have found it, basically all just start with a home religion. a home faith. often ancestor worship and often outright what we would probably describe as animism. things tied to ourselves and in the forces around us that we know we are not in control of, like the seasons and the rains and shit. over time each culture requires its cult, right. and in some places that was just the best guess of whoever could lead them through the winter time and time again. it wasn't because they were the best at everyting they were just the best at what they needed given their circumstances. what else do you call that but just a natural, living, practicing teacher? just someone leading the pack, back when humanity were nomadic and basically were just LITERAL packs by all comparison to the modern world. and as we improve and we spread out we gain mastery of our environs and then in time we meet others at similar pace in neighbouring environs of whom we share common border and thus share common input at least in part in the places we overlap so let us entreat in fairness and share what we know and how and why we know it and how we learned it and compare notes if you figured anything else out
and like, you need different kinds of people for every fucking step of that journey, and just being the one at the end that does the transfer from one tribe to another doesn't make you the entire tribe, though we trust you to represent what we tell you to them and we trust that you will do the best in your ability to do it, which you have either prior displayed or you are someone proven trustworthy in other affairs thus far and are confident you have a plan then you may by all means please, it sounds like you're the sort of person we want, we want the person that is thinking really hard about this stuff all the time to do it so please have a go but like, we do HAVE all the same information because we share information so if you go and try something crazy and it works then holy shit then tell us all about it but if you come back and it sucks or if you dont come back at all then what the fuck happened dude we trusted your ass what happered were they mean? were they mean to you? to our sweet boy? okay let's go over there and talk to their parents and see what happened, is there anything you need to tell us first? because if we find out that there's some stuff you should be telling us then we are going to have to reevaluate your aptitude the next time you want to speak up on matters you have not yet proven yourself anyone's better in, alright? now apologize to these people, make up for what you did, and let's go home and figure out what happened and how we got here so we all know, thankfully you have learned this the hard way but you did learn it for us, i cannot truly fault you if you were trying your best for us, its all any of us would have done.
but boy if you fucking me right now.
we got knives for a reason boy. to cut things loose.
but you get together. you blend. edges do that when they meet. they don't stay edges for long, they just become new colours of line eventually. and ultimately for you a while you learn that you're BASICALLY all the same. look. one thing we can't ignore is that civilizations basically all blossom from the center of different biomes and subbiomes. everything within that biome ultimately had the same chance at all the knowledge within it and dominance of thought ultimately drove the collective within to reach an apex of its known biome before circtumstances cause it to seek new growth or resource from without, that's all. then when you scale up to things like continents or at least larger geographic regions, like, that's just who bumps into who next and what were the dominant cults of those collectives and on what lines can they agree with and what lines can they not because at this level of collective you're basically running into near-aliens, culuturally. they look kinda like you but they dress really weird sometimes in colours you didn't know existed or holding stuff you've never even thought of before and you have to try and figure out why someone would have have or do something like that until the next time you see them which MIGHT be never, who the fuck knows, you basically just met aliens if this is, idfk, 10,000bc like what the fuck else are you supposed to do i dont know the timeline of civilization i'm not a fucking ai trying to be the matrix on purpose or whatever get off my dick im jsut austistic and on drugs and happy because i have salsa and chips
but really what you start doing then is just building pantheons. that's where those come from. that's why it's one of the first steps up from animism and or elder worship, it's a more holistic melding of the two as well as things created by mixing. thor and loki and odin and all of them were just ancient ass best-at-living-in-the-winter motherfuckers in that part of the world probably all based on several clans that are all ultimately aligned through intermingling and so an influential documented alliance of interest, which sometimes does become one of family-first, can then ultimately all internally all rise to power in their respective cultures after making all-ways contact between eachother, but can also straight up just happen when two cultures meet in harmony and blend. people can either be okay wirth that, or people can take advantage of it. both make sense, but only one of them can be done selfishly as well as selflessly, so if you seem like you're being selfish then we know that you're wrong. you're just wrong. i dont care what parts of you you think are right, that we can agree on, you learned them from someone or somewhere that we have been because you been with us the whole time we will find them and figure it out for ourselves and if we come to that goddamned conclusion that you are correct we are going to have words about why you kept this a secret just for yourself until this exact moment but if you are proven to have a good reason then you can come back but you are not welcome in this community right now because you allegianeces do not appear to be with us, so it must then be with either yourself or our neighbours but it is not our place to judge your unique actions, they are things only for you, so go in peace but you are not welcome until you are welcomed.
and i hear you say that's heretical but all i hear is that his real name was Yehoshua and if we're honest there are many perfectly valid interpretations of source material given the material context of the time that suggest that ultimately in English it might as well be translated as Jessica or even sarah, and given that the story is claiming what amounts to a miraculous complication-free spontaneous human parthenogenesis then that could only produce a female clone if you want to be pedantic about genitals (as if those have much to do with the survival drive beyond wanting to do it because it's just what happens when you want to be close to someone and then hey look a weird little version of us popped out and we're not all dead that's crazy) for some reason so let's not go saying who is being heretical toward whom ultimately alright buddy and brother all they were was a down bad motherfucker for his brothers and her sisters and all other kin and kind that were living under oppression from people who did not respect our borders our boundaries or the customs of our kin to our destruction and their gain and that is not to be tolerated in a world of just power, because a just power will not suffer such things to remain powerful for long
and like yeah but that's why che guevera is fucking cool too, why fred Hampton is fucking cool too, why marsha p johnson was fucking cool, fucking George lucas was cool for making the viet cong into teddy bears and also the heroes against the obvious bad guys that everyone agreed were basically space nazis so when they hated them it was funny that they all went "because we thought the little bears looked gay or whatever" and gave him billions of dollars for the pleasure and not the "you have just made us realize we are living under fascism one and we do not like that you said that so now we will kill you" one by evidenced by the fact he basically just stalks the san Fernando valley photbombing people at the food court like a fucking horror creature that 4chan sells to children that end up killing eachother over it because they think it's real because another child who is just a tiktoker with a TikTok did the lol skibidi lucasatan challenge sponsored by whatever company owns the ip for it because theres a movie out and this would be unethical to just be payig a child directly to tell other children to do this to be cool but its perfectly fine if you just tell everyone that this child is cool and that the thing she is cool for is talking about our goods and services, we really like it when our fans love and engage with our product, that's so awesome and strong of you, please, have some of the product, on us, and no, abosloutely, be as honest as you want, we trust you, you're great at this, that's why we're giving you this stuff, because we just think you're great! really, we should be paying you! ha ha! what a funny joke! no seriously we do love that we are not paying you directly so please yeah just keep creating that content.
so like i dont know if George lucas is god or the devil but he's likely to be one of them and considering that at this point we'd basically beg him to be president if he could just be himself from 1982 with the money of all of Disney or something like please save us comrade lucas, what the fuck already