Bodacious Betentacled Being

What exactly was Christ? Was he just a guy? Was he a demigod like how the Greeks had? Was he literally God, or just an aspect of God? Did he even have a body? If he didn’t have a body what did it mean for him to suffer? Maybe he was some kind of energy ghost who didn’t have a real body? Was he a magician? Can we learn to do all that stuff? Can women be priests? The next 300 years of Christianity would hash out these questions in a no-holds-barred free-for-all theology deathmatch. The grand prize? The right to determine what exactly Christianity means. 

Bishops everywhere would write letter after letter, arguing that their interpretation of Christ is the real, true, inarguable Christianity, and everyone who disagrees with them is a false teacher with dangerous and worthless opinions that are so obviously wrong they require an entire book to debunk how wrong they are. 

You're touching on one of the major issues with the term "mysticism" here. How do we know that any two given mystics are talking about the same thing?

Academically speaking, mysticism means one of two things. One: People who had personal contact with wholly transcendent Other. And Two: People writing about those first people. This arises from a common pattern you see in history.

A mystic comes out of a cave and says "I just spoke to god in a way that overwhelmed me beyond what language can capture, join my cave sect." And then his followers dedicate their lives to spending their time in caves trying to talk to God and writing about the experience, even if they never figured out how to do it themselves. Historians still call those followers "mystics" or their theology "mystical" even if they never had the same experience as the original cave guy.

Then, one of the cave followers meets a monk from a foreign land. They get to discussing theology. These foreign monks are the followers of a man who lived on a mountain and spoke to god in a way that overwhelmed what language can capture, and the cave mystic says by cavegod I think your mountain mystic and my cave mystic might have spoken to the same god! Or maybe two aspects of the same god! To which the mountain mystic says "well our mountain god had seven heads and a a flaming scimitar but I see the similarities" to which the cave mystic replies "obviously gods are not limited to a single shape."

Obviously there is no empirical way to prove that cave monk and mountain monk were talking about the same god. But that kinda doesn't matter. If you're discussing an ultimate transcendent thing beyond language itself, the language used to describe it kinda doesn't matter past a certain point.

You literally have to collect rare stones from remote locations, put them into specific formations to work. All of this gets written down in symbols which don't make sense to the uninformed. It gets powered by energy which can not be seen in most cases.

The 4th Headless Haunting: Wail Fall

Some souls sink.

Human bodies rarely make it into the depths without being dragged there by a ship or submarine. But some are Seen by the deep. They belong there. So they sink.

One day the dark will finally finish digesting her. It will turn her grief made flesh into a million heartbeats. It will convince her that she's allowed to leave.

Until then she'll roam the crushing blackness, a favored paramour of the sea's teeth, leading those who also have souls made of whale bone down

to

the

I’m so excited to show you my 5 of cups that I made for Star Crossed a Queer Tarot. There are so many incredible artists and just a few days left!