#biextroverts

I think a huge part of the underpinnings of the storyof ‘The Magnus Archives’ is change.  The Unknowing is apparently adance that doesn’t end the world, but changes it irrevocably into somethingthat better resembles the Stranger.  Something even more bizarre anduncanny than the world is currently.

It’s my theory, since hearingthis, that the world as it currently is, is held in balance.  None of theGreat Old Ones have managed to get a firm enough foothold to fully transformthe world.  But there have been moments when something like the Unknowinghave likely succeeded, but those successes were temporary.  Let meexplain.

A little bit of historicalcontext, likely tweaked in the TMA universe, regarding the Library ofAlexandria.  The Library was considered to be one of the great centers oflearning in the western world from around the 3rd century BCE until itsdestruction.   It was believed to house somewhere between 40,000 and400,000 papyrus scrolls at its height.

The exact date of itsdestruction is unknown, though some believe that Julius Caesar’s army burned itas early as 48 BCE, though it might have been as late as the 270s CE. Quite a few of the works there survived at a smaller site called the Serapeum,a large temple built during the Greek rule of Egypt.  The Serapeum itselfis thought to have been destroyed on the orders of  Pope Theophilius ofAlexandria, during his purge of all non-Christian places of worship, around 390CE.  A library to rival Alexandria’s likely did not exist again in thatarea until the House of Wisdom in Baghdad built its library in the 9th centuryCE (many historical books from before that period would have been entirely lostwere it not for the Arabic translations reconstructed there).

I want to lay this out toshow that there was no singular destruction of the library.  All the dates are contested, and all theevents surrounded its eventual burning were also questionable.  Given that the Serapeum survived as anoffshoot, and in the TMA universe, the library had an even more secretiveoffshoot in its Archive, it’s likely even harder to place the date of thatUnknowing event.  But for convenience,let’s use the later date as the destruction of the Archives.  Specifically, the library wasburned around270 CE during an attack on the city by the Roman Emperor Aurelian.  

He’s an interesting guy.  He’s one of those rose-up-the-ranks militaryemperors like Domitian that tended to do fairly well by his empire.  Aurelian’s rule was actually a period ofbarely keeping things together for the Roman Empire.  They were stretched too thin, and it was onlythrough his concerted military efforts that the whole thing didn’t collapseduring his reign.  He was actually deifiedby the Empire for his work.  

So it’s interesting that theLibrary of Alexandria was destroyed as part of an effort to maintain order, tokeep the world as the Romans knew it from unravelling.  It was done as an effort to fight change, inour world.  

Could that have been whereGertrude’s plan started to hatch?  Weknow she went to Alexandria and studied the remnants of that Archive.  She might even be responsible for the deathof that former Archivist still trapped there.

We’re viewing the destructionof the Institute as a part of the Unknowing, but whose word do we have forthat?  Elias, who defines himselfentirely as the beating heart of the Institute. Of course he believes that the preservation of the Archive and theInstitute are necessary to prevent the Unknowing.  And superficially, that makes sense.  If the Unknowing is about changing the worldto be less, well, knowing, then maintaining the Archives should be of paramountimportance.  But instead, Gertrudedecided to detonate the whole thing. Why?  That’s the question I keepasking.  If she knew that the Unknowingwas coming, and that things were rapidly declining toward the dance thatchanges the world, why would she pick that time to destroy the Archive?

Unless preventing theUnknowing is less about one side or the other winning than it is preserving thebalance.  

So we come back to the poem ‘Ozymandias’,which is a hauntingly short, lonely piece. At its most basic, it’s a poem about all things ending, all thingsdecaying, and all things ending up as equal in the vast flat desert.  We have in this a once-great statue, and aboast on a plaque demanding that the reader gaze upon the great works of thislost king.  Except the works are gone,swallowed back by the equality of the desert.

Nothing beside remains.

I think that this specificline could certainly reference the Unknowing, in the simple fact that nothinglike that lasts.  We don’t know if thedestruction of Alexandria was a successful Unknowing or not.  One might claim that the fact that theStranger is attempting to dance the Unknowing again indicates it wasn’t.  But how would we know?  What is the result of the Unknowing?  Change. But change keeps on going.  Novictory is static.  Do you think that ifthe Unknowing were to succeed, the Beholding would die?  No. These beings, whatever they are, don’t have any concept of an end.  They don’t exist that way.  So one wins, and for a while they have astronger grip over this reality.  Buteventually things turn around.  All theirgreat works fall.  The library isdestroyed.  The mask shatters.  All that’s left are remnants of thattime.  A face in an empty desert.

And on a smaller level, Ithink that line is being addressed to Elias. His hubris clearly knows no bounds. He is very much Ozymandias, this King of Kings, this beating heart of hiskingdom.  Look on his works: the libraryof the Institute is one of the premiere paranormal libraries in the world.  The other supernatural beings look at thisman—because he still is mostly a man—and they respect him.  They respect the order he keeps and the powerhe wields.  And right now, it really doesfeel like we have to look on his works and despair.  He’s the single most powerful entity directlyinvolved in the story right now.  

But change happens.  The library falls.  The Unknowing happens or it doesn’t.  This show is masterful at the surprisinganticlimax, and I wouldn’t be surprised if that was a part of theUnknowing.  If the Stranger wins … andnothing in particular happens.  Becausethe world is already uncanny.  Things tipone direction or the other, but they are always eventually leveled backout.  It seems much more immediate forthe characters, of course, as they are affected on an amplified scale by theseevents.  But to the Great Old Ones?  It’s just another move in the game, with therubble of a thousand moves before stretched out across the globe.

And this is why I really needto find out why Gertrude decided that destroying the Institute wasnecessary.  This is why I need to knowwhat she discovered when she went to Alexandria.  When she met the oldest Archivist inexistence.  This is why I need to knowwhat was in the Schwartzwald tomb that was powerful enough to restart theArchive through Jonah Magnus.  This iswhy I want to know more about what happened during the last Unknowing event,who won, and how.  Because even though it’sjust another move in a game without end, even though everything does eventuallyrevert to the desert, we care about this particular move.  And to understand how this is going to playout, Jon needs to understand what came before.

Elias is Ozymandias, revelingin his works even as they are fleeting. He’s lost track of his own scope in this game, his own importance.  I think Gertrude kept that sense that she wassmall, and that her moves had to be strategic to achieve her ends, whateverthose were.  She had a sense that allthings end, that some things might need to end. Perhaps she let go of too much. Jon isn’t Elias or Gertrude.  He’sslapped in the face at every opportunity with the notion that he’s not the mostpowerful being in the room.  He cares somuch he hates it.  He wants to protectpeople, which makes this move and this choice matter to him perhaps more thanit even did for Gertrude.  She wasplaying the game.  He’s trying to save asmany people as possible.  It’s the pieceson the board he cares about, not necessarily the result of the game.