The First purpose of religion and mythology is to help humans cope with and accept their place in the universe. The Second purpose is to present a consistent image of the cosmos. The Third Purpose is to validate and support a specific moral code. The Fourth purpose is to carry individuals and cultures and communities through various stages crises of life. To help people grasp the unfolding of life with integrity.
Liber Essentialium
There are many core concepts that you will no doubt find strange and confusing, possibly even alien and threatening when you first read them. We have made an attempt to include those concepts and terms here, so that when you encounter them elsewhere on the page you will understand them.
The Crescent Sun
The modern calendar is is a solar calendar, linked to the orbit of the Earth around the sun. But older calendars linked the year to both the moon and the sun. These calendars could be calculated by any members of a culture. The word month is a reference to the moon, and the length of a month is designed to match the lunar cycle. The modern calendar is an abstract thing, divorced from all natural cycles but one. The Crescent Sun is a calendar that takes in to account the cycles of the sun, the moon, and the seasons. The Crescent Sun accounts for changes in human activity. It is designed for people, not spreadsheets.
The Verse
We live in a narrative universe. Most of us paddle around in the shallows of this narrative universe. But what if one were to weaponize that narrative universe? What if one were to build a mind palace of epic proportions and hook in a whole holographic fractal designed to transmit culture to a new generation? What if were to encode survival and freedom into a story and slip it through the bars of the cell?
The Bestiary
The human mind is designed to think about and to understand people. As a result, we remember concepts better when they are anthropomorphized. We remember the Grim Reaper. We remember Santa Claus. We remember gods and demons and the ideas for which they stand. So let’s weaponize this. Let’s build a menagerie of purpose built beings: demons and gods, eldritch monsters and fair folk, heroes and villains. Let’s build stories we can put to good use.
The Legendarium
And so we tell stories, to give ourselves significance and context and meaning. We tell stories to anchor ourselves in space and time, rather than drift in a vast cosmic ocean. We tell stories to create a light in a vast lightless void.
Taken from the Ars Holistica
And so we each live in a fantasy world composed of the stories that we have accepted. I call this: The Shadowlands. You live in the shadowlands, you own personal matrix. Only it isn’t a prison, like in the movie- it’s a space suit to keep you alive. Because our minds can’t handle the unvarnished reality of the world of flesh and bone- what I call the Bonelands.
We live in the Shadowlands, but we die in the bonelands.
Now you may be thinking, after the imaginary mongoose, and the talk about everything being fictional and about lying hard enough that you convince the universe, and now this stuff about the Shadowlands, that I am arguing that magic is nothing more than stories we tell ourselves and each other. And you’d be right.
And from there you might make the leap ti think that I am therefore arguing that magic isn’t real. And in that you would be wrong.
To adapt Gk Chesterton’s famous quote, the question is not if fairy tales are true. The question is, if fairy tales are useful.
The human experience is expressed in stories. We are the stories that we tell. So we should be very careful what stories we tell. What stories and whose stories we tell. We have spent ten thousand years tricked into telling stories in which we are slaves to self made kings. It’s time for new stories. You must tell your own stories. But these will do in the interim, stories to help you find your own stories. Stories of freedom and rebellion. Stop singing the songs of your masters. Stop singing the songs of your killers. Sing your own freedom.
“I don’t care if the fairy tale is true. I care if the fairy tale is useful.”
-from the Ars Holistica
Recommended Reading
- Moonwalking with Einstein, by Joshua Forer
- Genesis and the Rise of Civilization, by J. Snodgrass
- Bolo’bolo, by P M
Professor Harbinger's School for Villains 