about The Stuff with GOD and like SOUL MAGIC and things in THE STARS THAT RISE AT DAWN
-âcompeting access needs: the seriesâ send tweet. but! in the form of very-early-divergent AU of the bible (genesis ch 2?) where, as soon as ârebellion against cosmic truthsâ happens, God goes âhhhh fuq if nobody agrees with each other about what is good, how am I supposed to give everyone a good afterlife? đ¤đ§đ¤Żđđ¤ I KNOW....IâLL ASK EVERYONE TO LIVE THEIR LIVES AS AN ARGUMENT FOR WHAT THEY WANT....oh my Me Iâm geniusâ
-everyone: âyissssss!! no one telling us what to do!!!â
-everyone: â.......what do You mean âwe have to figure out what we wantââ
-there is only one (1) form of magic, whether youâre a human, an angel, or God. itâs âcreating a manifestation of your soul in the physical worldâ
-itâs called Theurgy, and anyone can do it...technically. you need no instruction or resources, but the ONLY way to do it is by understanding your soul, which is super hard. like uh....Sauron and the One Ring. except usually much less useful and evil because âum itâs my soul?? you saying my soul should be useful??? fuck you. i will sue you if you move my soul which is a giant sand dune out of the harbor istgâ (this happens)
-Your soul is what makes you identifiable to yourself, so theurgy is sort of the venn diagram intersection between being/creating/becoming....making smth come into existence from nothing but your soul
-Eg, what makes God, God, is that Their Them IS the definition of fusing existence as a person/becoming God/creation of the universe into one undifferentiated nounverbadjective
-if you wanted to put it in terms of quotes from the tanakh and quâran, given the bookâs base mythology, Godâs statements âLet There Be Light [and light Was]â and âI Am That I Am/I Will Be What I Will Beâ (âehyeh asher âehyeh) and âBe, and it isâ would be the exact same thing if translated into theurgy
-This is why God is and cannot be other than infinite wheels within wheels of burning light upon light â itâs like the verb+noun of being light/becoming alight/burning into light. the Big Bang in perpetuity. axis, rays, and rim
-one character describes Them as âas if looking into the sky, and the sky was all stars.â like how in astrophysics, if the universe WAS infinitely old and vast, the night sky would be a sheet of pure starlight. but also in the same breath describes Them as âa brightness less like the sun and more like certainty. an i am i am i am echoing and rippling....it feels like singing in her eyes. it feels like voices and voices...â
-but Godâs main role is going *chinhands*, more clerk, not judge â bearing witness to and encoding the life-arguments of everyone else in the universe, in order to spin them into afterlives
-âYour lives will argue for youâ are arc words, bc God decided they canât impose anything on anyone beyond this one commandment, not after the mistakes Theyâve made, (especially with lucifer.....but thatâs partly a secret) but they also canât....know what everyone wants without everyone telling them, itâs ontologically impossible.
-after all, bc God is a specific, immutable, individual, person, the only reason they were able to get the rest of the universe to exist as something Other than themself, when nothing except themself existed at first, was by getting souls who were other than Themself (angels) to exist and giving them Their soul as fuel to use as power to do-be anything the angels want, and doing the same with humans but without the fuel and instead with procreation and non-soul bodies and stuff, and allow the rest of the universe to accumulate from there.
-(the inverse of the Prometheus myth! bc another premise is âinventing a universe is not responsible, let alone conservative, let alone well planned from experienceâ.....what little order and rules in existence are imposed on God by humans and angels)
-anyway, thereâs a catch-22 to theurgy -- nothing you manifest from your soul, (as opposed what you make from pre-existing matter, including yk your sex cells) can be Other than yourself. anyone who touches your manifestation will be subjected to your soul
-itâs also irreversible, nothing theurgically made can be destroyed, or rearranged unless designed to. it happened and cannot unhappen, bc your soul happened and cannot unhappen. it lasts past the end of the world, into the afterlife after the resurrection. like plastic. i mean uh.
-i guessss my meta interpretation is that because Existence-From-Nothing IS Godâs nature, They were able to defeat this ontological paradox and create souls other than Their own soul, and all these souls (angels and humans) continued to manifest themselves, and rearrange each otherâs manifestations (i.e. all existing matter). but anyway, this absoluteness of extremity has never been achieved by anyone else................yet
-but this also means God is also not omnipotent -- They are limited by Themself.
-e.g.: if you want, you can summon God and make a deal with Them: They will let you directly touch/see/hear/name Their soul, the source of the universe â as long as, in exchange, you offer Them a body part of yours as a price. because, as mentioned before, to touch God IS to be burned, God cannot be not-God
-(the inverse of a Faustian bargain! uh. bc âdoing X is a heretic abomination against godâs will not meant for mortalsâ is an oxymoron. god is an abomination who came into existence bc it was Them to do so. support for Abomination Rights. thatâs prob a thing.)
-what do u mean âwhat does it doâ you get to have part of your frail biological human body permanently caught in a experience of divine revelation and be in a 24/7 bdsm relationship w the Absolute Definition of Beauty and Creativity
-[gordon ramsay voice] âdelicious, finally some good fucking stimâ
-oh right i guess itâs âirreversibleâ and âpermanently disablingâ and âgod is A Lotâ and stuff. fiiiine. it IS one of the most hardcore Arguments -- about what you want, about how a personâs nature canât cheat itself, how things that happen canât simultaneously not-happen. if you want to feel a soul, that soul Exists. (and if that soul is fiery and intense as the big bang and to mutilate part of your body and make it impossible to ever feel anything else with that body part again, you canât avoid being burned and still touch it. Theurgy magic canât work that way.)
-you might notice a pattern here: âcanât have your cake and eat it tooâ
-you canât manifest your soul without understanding it, you canât interact with something as absolute as God without being burnt, God canât make you what you deserve in the afterlife without you telling Them what you want.
-but you CAN, otoh, invent totally new ways for existing, if you arenât satisfied
-thatâs why this series has a plot