#vulcans

El-Keshtanik means "freeborn," emphasis on the "born." Kesh- is the root of a lot of vagina-related words connected to sexuality and birth. So its placement here is not about freedmen/freedwomen in Vulcan's old trafficking industry (more on that later). Freedom in this etymology is a thing you are born into. That's important. Remember that.

Til- is more obscure, but options are tilau (pierce/perforate), tilaya (perforation), and tilek (spear). There's a theme going here. A kind reading of this etymology is that it relates to Surak's teaching of, "The spear in my enemy's side is the spear in my own," and here is where we need to turn to beta cann, which I think is fair, because el-keshtanik is a fanon word and it's canon now, so beta canon is extremely valid.

Surak's family business was trafficking people. In the Trek novels' histories of Vulcan, that is the profession he was born into. He worked a boring clerical position treating people with desirable mind-talents as product which he sorted from an office computer. Their primary clients? The military. In the TTRPGs his father is a general, slightly different, but if you try to make the two backgrounds work together definitely implies things about where the clan gets their "product."

Vulcan concepts of nobility don't seem to neatly map onto Earth ones. Surak's clan is considered to be a noble clan. They were wealthy and respected even before the Awakening. Whether they became wealthy through selling people, military honors, or both, doesn't really matter. T'pau, Sarek, and Spock are descended from Surak's clan. They benefit from this history. T'pau is their Head-of-House. In some novels, notably the Saavik ones, she is also head of the V'shar, Vulcan intelligence.

Vulcan professions tend to run in families. And they have arranged, in what is almost certainly a political move, for him to marry T'pring, who joins the El-Keshtanktil. So to sum up: we have a freeborn family who built their wealth on trafficking people, with deep ties to an intelligence agency, arranging a political marriage between one of their scions and a space!cop whose organization is called Spear of the Freeborn.

It's just very weird. The implications are numerous. I'm gonna skip over the obvious hints of eugenics and keeping law enforcement in the family and go back to the El-Keshtanktil's etymology and antiquity.

What was the original purpose of the El-Keshtanktil?

Do they predate the Awakening? If so, was their spear punitive? Were they slavecatchers like Earth's police started out as? Was it protective? Was their role to defend freeborn Vulcans from being enslaved for crimes? Either way, the implication is enforcement of caste.

Do they post-date the Awakening? Is their spear the one from Surak's metaphor? In that case, why the emphasis on freeborn Vulcans? A kind reading of this is that "freeborn" is also a metaphor (as in "I am a Vulcan, bred to peace") but I'm not sure that fits the Age of Surak. It still implies, if it's metaphor, that logic and freedom are intertwined.

Which brings me to Year Five. I know that the comics are in a weird spot for canon, but SNW introduced the El-Keshtanktil, and it used a comic book backstory for Uhura, so I feel like we can use the comic books.

In Year Five, we see that the Age of Awakening was not pristine. Surak and his followers, at some point, lost their way, and began separating kids from parents for reeducation camps. Which is why early Romulans decided to nuke them. Once again: this is a guy who grew up to inherit a family business of trafficking people, apparently using those skills to spread logic by any means necessary. This ends thanks to a time-traveling Spock. So is this the context for the El-Keshtanktil?

The hole keeps going and I hate every part of it even as I kind of love the motifs all these implications add up to. I feel like I appreciate Spock more, because Surak as a flawed person and Tu-Surak as a faith with a flawed history that even Surak had to find the center of once again makes both Spock's life and the Vulcan plot on ENT really work.

Why is the Kir'shara such a big deal? How could Vulcans misinterpret Surak's teaching so badly that they become militant? Why is it significant that the bearer of Surak's katra is the key to recovering it? Easy answer: it contains Surak's very last teachings, the ones the wrote between the Romulans arming the bombs to destroy his reeducation program and dying of radiation as a result of that specific attack. Year five strongly implies this with Surak's appearance and costuming. It also suggests that Surak, whatever his personal feelings, had lost control over his followers. It's entirely possible that Vulcans were never corrupted from an original, they just never got these final teachings.

Why did it take so long to come to light? Don't know, but could the "Spear of the Freeborn" have anything to do with it? Their stated job, on-screen, is to capture those who have strayed from logic and return them to it. What does that sound like? Maybe, just maybe, enforcing a vision of Tu-Surak which kept Vulcan's social structures intact? Which was easier for people to accept than Surak's actual radicalism?

T'pau being in charge of Vulcan intelligence just kind of makes sense if the V'shar started within the Syrranites, as a result of her being the one who recovered the Kir'shara. She could be in charge for founding it. And maybe, just maybe, there's an old cultural wound being reconciled and healed by Spock's arrangement to T'pring?

And like... this is Spock, who grasps the heart of Surak more than most of his species. Who said "Logic is the beginning of wisdom, not its end." Who facilitated Reunification with the Romulan people, whose presence on Romulus was as disruptive to their society--built on the same framework as pre-Awakening Vulcan--as Surak was to his own contemporary Vulcans. Whose empathy was his strongest quality. The exact empathy Surak's spear metaphor was supposed to be about.