Ramble about the Eighth below, only tangentially relevant:
The thing, I think, about the Eighth House, and what makes them compelling for me personally, is that they are in some ways the only house that cares about what is right and wrong.
Don't get me wrong here, many of the other Houses have members who do so - Palamedes comes to mind, that darling boy - but as an institution, the very aim of the Eighth House is (at least nominally, and very much paralleling the Christian Church, historically) to safeguard humanity and society (for such values as they consider human and society, at any rate) by acting as staunch moral shepherds and guardians. They perceive (accurately!) a world in which many donāt give a toss about whatās right, and care only for their own advancement or pleasure, and do their very best to have the discipline to step in and say:Ā āNo! Enough! This is wrong!ā, as Silas does on several occasions throughout the first book.
The problem, of course, and once again, if I can be pardoned for saying so, paralleling reality and especially the Christian Church, is that Silas is, uh, wrong.
Because obviously, we can all see that what Silas does to Colum is horrible. We can see that what Silasā entire HouseĀ has done to Colum, from birth, from beforeĀ his birth, is horrendously wrong, and yet Silas wouldnāt even pause to consider that. It wouldnāt occur to him. Like any group of moral guardians, the Eighth House clings so tightly to an ossified (heh) deontological set of ethics that they never stop to ask themselves if they might be wrong, if things should not, perhaps, be different.
(The real pain in the ass, then, is that sometimes... they shouldnāt. Sometimes you need a person to step in and say that power isnāt goodness, nor cleverness truth. And youād rather have that person be a Palamedes than a Silas, but sometimes Silas is all you have.)
The Ninth, then, is... an inversion of that House, in many ways. Because where the Eighth is about the spiritual health of Society as a whole, the Ninth eschews society entirely. The Eighth House revolves around a total subservience of the self to what they see as the greater good, and similarly, a member of the Locked Tomb congregation is alsoĀ supposed to experience a total annihilation of the self, but do so while striving for a complete eschewal of society. The personal life of the ideal Eighth is the same as that of the ideal Ninth, because it is null - the difference is that the Ninth cannot exist withinĀ society, and the Eighth has no purpose without.Ā
And no, I have no fucking clue what the black vestals they used to send out to serve in, like, the Cohort and stuff did. Made other people feel better about the fact that Someone was doing the spooky shit so they didnāt have to, probably? That has seemed to be the role of mystics throughout a lot of history.
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