Rejuvenation stage Gideon

The ask has reappeared! And yes, this would be such an interesting area to explore given Abigail and religion...

@faggedoutsocialite had an interesting comment when I thought I'd lost this ask:

Abigail learns some people survived (or 'survived') the bloodbath at Canaan House and proclaims "the King over the River is good" with such fervour that it genuinely triggers Harrow.

One of the most significant details she recalls from her childhood bedroom, after the bed where her little brother slept and the primrose coloured walls, is the picture of the Prince Undying.

She hides behind a pillar from a gun-wielding ghost who has just shot her husband and intends to send all of them to their second death and total spiritual destruction, and prays "Oh, God, please help me."

At least one of her degrees was taken on the Eighth, and she's effectively an ecclesiastical historian.

Her marriage is considered "traitorous to the ideals of the Necrolord Prime" by some religious authorities and the marriage and the Fifth House custom that permits it are described as "grotesque" and "revolting".

And then there's the fascinating moment in chapter 45 where Abigail reveals that:

House religion once believed there was a "River beyond" but hasn't for thousands of years, to the point that this is now considered such a heretical thing to claim that Magnus is genuinely worried about his wife expressing it in public.

That she is also aware of the stratification of the River that John described in chapter 36, that one's passage through the River apparently depends on one's moral behaviour in life and that there is a hell-like place beyond the stoma at its bottom.

That she believes their god is entirely ignorant of the space beyond the River! (and quotes Hamlet while expressing this, which has a tendency to pop up when River shenanigans are afoot...)

That the Houses are aware of the concept of divine omnipotence but that John has never claimed to so be.

That she has spent her whole life thinking that god didn't understand metaphysics and wanting to send him her notes on the subject!

That divine ignorance of metaphysics and the consequent social censure of it has directly contributed to the stagnation of their society.

She's obviously found a way to mentally balance the tension between an inhabited faith which very much does seem to imply an omnipotent and intercessory deity, and an intellectual one which seems to have a very evidence-based approach to John's own claims about himself. And unlike Palamedes, who we see in the clarity of death grimly commenting that "god takes- and takes- and takes" (and then taking a leaf from "occultist" Ianthe's book and reverse-engineering a form of ascension), we never see her articulate anything other than a neutral suggestion that god simply isn't aware of the River beyond. And I'm sure that growing up with stories from your admiral grandad might give you a slightly less deferential perspective on the guy but...she was personally invited by him to eat her husband's soul, and she, her husband, and their foster children were murdered with extreme prejudice by their faith's equivalent of an archangel, which you'd think might make one slightly less equanimous...

Which suggests that either the reckoning for the tension inherent in her beliefs is still to come, or that she's more focused on the things greater than John that she "believes more than ever now that I am dead."

That's not her only post-mortem belief statement. She also says "I firmly believe that the Kindly Emperor knows nothing of that undiscovered country", which is such an interesting sentiment, and not just for its reference to Hamlet! The idea of a divine but extremely limited entity who does not understand the spiritual complexities beyond him is a pretty specific one, and combined with her River heresies, makes me wonder to what extent Abigail is already looking at a greater reality beyond John. Especially as her appearance as a Hecate-like figure, assisting Harrow's Persephone, already places her in the context of another mystery revelation cult, the Eleusinian Mysteries.

We've already seen Dulcie's apparent transcendence of the River: in TUG, she tells Palamedes she "gambled on the truth" and that she's "really not allowed to tell" him what happened, but that it was "something awful...in the old sense of the world", and then in reply to him saying he'll find her on the shore of the River, she says "which shore?... It's a River. There are two shores. If this ends well, you'll find that out." (immediately after this, she is compared to a Biblical angel). We know that Abigail intends to cross the River. But unlike Dulcie, she has some unfinished business which may bring her more sharply up against the terrible realities of what John has done (which, incidentally, I have written a fic about, if you want Alecto's perspective on Abigail's brother responding to the truth about her death by rather turning on the Emperor...). Though I suppose it's also possible that an obviation of the crisis could come from her focus being on the bigger picture. Though I'm not sure that metaphysical clarity Abigail Pent would be any less scary than her having a crisis of faith...

(There's a whole digression to be had here about Abigail's apparent religious experience when summoning Nonius, and her "ancestral state of primaeval ghost worship"; or about the gnostic Gaia and anima mundi, and Alecto as the Sophia to John's Demiurge; and Abigail as psychopomp for crossing the waters; and whether she might play a Virgil like role to Harrow's Dante in Hell...but at this point we get into stuff like Jung, and probably also hermeticism, and I'm afraid my brain rather turns off...)

field trip cancelled

Based off hit tumblr post:

-[Eridian Adopts 2]-

Some Pash and Nona (and Alecto!) Doodles, in which Pash learns how meat loves meat. They're so silly <3

Harrow Nova AU #999 (memes under the cut)

Curious pebble (2/?)