Edit: some things changed from the time I made it, I don't follow some of the things from here anymore, but it is a fine read, so don't let is stop you otherwise. I am, however, working on a new version of this.
Allrighty, time to introduce you to my weird gnosis. This will be a long post. I mean it, it's really long one.
Prompted by @runasulienadanika, I present to you my (lazily made in eight minutes) Fear Wheel! Yaaaaay!
So. I will go through them all, at first, as the ones, that are near, and then the opposites. This will contain a lot of speculations and UPG.
Also, I want to say before everything, that I did not make this chart. I took it from one of theories (link, please read it yourself!), that explained all left plot holes after podcast was finished, and I will heavily rely on that work. And, while I do rely on that work, I don't support everything from it. And, if you stumbled upon this in the wild, hi! I am a pop-culture polytheist and I worship Fears! UPG, in this case, means Unverified Personal Gnosis, which is my own experience with Fears, that didn't have any direct confirmation within the podcast. Now we can start.
Similarities, or the ones, that are close to each other.
Starting with the Eye and Web and in clockwork direction. Both the Eye and the Web are passive and share a common motive: a desire for knowledge. Both manipulate this knowledge, but for their own ends. The Archivists themselves embody both of these Fears. The Web in the podcast can very subtly manipulate and control people; Joh, despite belonging to the Eye, can do the same in the third and fourth seasons, especially in the fourth.
Web and Corruption. Their similarity is evident in their creations, for I'm sure most people who fear insects also fear spiders, and vice versa. Corruption also corrupts, an act of manipulation in itself. Jane said spiders have their own song.
Corruption and Extinction. We know the least about Extinction, but the known information is enough to include it here. Garbage appears in some Extinction episodes and is clearly part of its aspect, and garbage is disgusting, which is an aspect of Corruption. Adelard Dekker said he watched for outbreaks of epidemics, as they could be manifestations of Extinction.
Extinction and Desolation. Nuclear weapons bring pain and fire. Corpses in some Extinction episodes were described as burnt and ash-covered.
(Bonus) Corruption and Desolation. They've always felt similar to me. Sometimes I associate things with each other simply because, and these two Fears felt like similar colours: a gradient with a hint of orange. Both Fears impart a certain love and desire to their avatars. Corruption suggests being consumed by what they love; Desolation is about the love of inflicting and receiving pain. Both take something from our lives, and both cause pain. Asag, one of Desolation's "names," is the deity of both fire and disease. Additionally, I believe John Amherst, the avatar of Corruption, is also the avatar of Desolation, as fire is present in all of his scenes, which is associated with it.
Desolation and Hunt. Vampires are the product of the Hunt, Desolation, and Corruption. They burn easily due to Desolation. Corruption, for they most closely resemble mosquitoes, which are part of the Corruption aspect. The house of the very first vampire Trevor meets is dusty and untidy, and she offers him rotten fruit. Therefore, the Hunt ranks alongside Desolation and Corruption.
Hunt and Slaughter. They've been similar to me from the very beginning. It's very easy to switch from Hunt to Slaughter. Even in real life, both of these Fears coexist in people. Those who are afraid are afraid that those who come after them will hurt them. And those who enjoy inflicting pain will deliberately seek out those to hurt. Hunters often sing while hunting, which is the motif of Slaughter. The episode about the murder club belongs to both Fears.
Slaughter and End. What if it's not war that brings so much fear? Many war episodes mention soldiers believing there's only one path, and that's to fight to the death. Living dead soldiers are also often seen. The merging of bodies that shot Melanie, the dead people who must fight each other in the episode about Grifter’s Bone, and others. Slaughter is about gratuitous cruelty and pain, which can also be seen when those trapped in the Catalog of the Trapped Dead describe their condition.
End and Lonely. I've had a series of unexpected deaths in my family, and I can say for sure that these two Fears influence each other. Death leaves you very lonely and isolated from others. During grief, we isolate ourselves to cope with the loss of our loved ones, and this is precisely what feeds Lonely. The Lucas family only meet at funerals.
Lonely and Stranger. Nothing is more isolating than being alone in a group. If everyone is a stranger to you, you'll be alone. Lost in the Crowd, an episode about a girl who was almost trapped by Lonely, is exactly that.
Stranger and Flesh. They are as similar to me as Desolation and Corruption; their gradient has a tint of red. Stranger is about objects coming to life, Flesh is about treating the living as an object, as meat. Both have a skin motif. The anatomy students belong to both of them.
Flesh and Spiral. These two Fears both struck a particular chord with me. Both of these Fears are present in many mental disorders, such as eating disorders, gender and body dysphoria, and others. Treating oneself as a mere piece of meat isn't entirely sensible. Objects that bleed on their own or cause other objects to bleed, such as Boneturner's Tale, can be attributed to Spiral and Flesh. In the episode about the slaughter house, the statement giver got lost in a labyrinth, which in itself is an aspect of Spiral. Jared Hopworth especially preys on people with mental health issues. Plus, he uses a book about Flesh and Spiral. When Mike Crew tried to use Boneturner's Tale, he only got more fractals, which wouldn't have happened if it had been a book about Flesh alone.
Spiral and Buried. The Spiral is also about the fear of being lost, which is most easily achieved in cave labyrinths, as best seen in the episode about the Lost Johns’ Cave. Almost all labyrinths are about the Spiral and the Buried. Even buildings, at their core, are an intersection of the two. It only takes a couple of things gone wrong, mostly a door, to get trapped in the room you're in.
Buried and Dark. The connection is obvious — caves are dark, like most of the ocean. Most places where you're trapped are dark. And the Buried itself often includes the Dark, whether it wants to or not, as in the episode where the rain fell so hard that the statement giver had to drown himself to escape, the light bulbs contained water, and thunder rumbled without lightning.
Dark and Vast. Though we associate Vast with the boundless blue sky, the vast majority of it is the impenetrable blackness of space. Likewise, the oceans are mostly dark. This is felt in my gnosis, for, as an avatar of the Vast, darkness was always somewhere nearby, and I even worshipped it under another name.
Vast and Eye. There's no point in being afraid of heights if you don't know there's land somewhere down there, no point in being afraid of endless space if you don't know there's an edge just a little bit further. Mike himself spoke of this, saying they have a lot in common, that "...After all, what, what good’s the height, the terrifying draw of gravity, unless you, unless you really know the scale of what you’re facing?". Jude told Joh that the one she knows is closer to Joh than to her, which makes sense, for the Vast is closer to the Eye than to the Desolation.
And back to the Eye and Web.
And here I will touch the topic of "something".
Eye and Lonely. If you're being watched, you're not alone. In true solitude, you won't sense anyone or anything, including gazes and presences. I don't consider Dark and the Eye to be opposites, for although the Eye is associated with, well, eyes, its essence is knowledge. In the darkness, you may not see something, but you can know about something or someone through other senses, such as hearing, or if someone can see in the dark. Darkness can hide something from the eye, but there are other ways to know it, which, unlike complete isolation, where no one knows anything about you, allows the Eye to see despite the Dark.
Web and Stranger. The Stranger brings objects to life, giving life to dolls, mannequins, and taxidermy. The Web, conversely, transforms living things into objects: toys for its game, pawns, and tools. The Web's artefact, a table, bound the Stranger's being, Not-Them, and it could do nothing until the table was broken. After Joh breaks the table, he comments that spiders and webs are separate from the that being, that they bound it, that they are opposites. The Anglerfish was particularly interested in smokers, choosing only them as prey; any addiction, including smoking, is under the Web.
Corruption and Flesh. Rot destroys flesh. And in the podcast, Flesh is very clean; there aren't really any episodes where Flesh itself is even remotely dirty. Bleeding due to the connection with the Spiral, anatomy students cleaning up after themselves, and in the same episode about the slaughter house, it was clean to deal with Corruption. The man above was an avatar of Flesh, fighting Corruption.
And so we come to the Extinction and "something." To understand my logic, we first need to understand how the Fears emerged.
They always appear in pairs, so they can counteract each other. In the last episode, it was said that it all began with two Fears: "A fear of blood and pounding feet, a fear of that sudden burst of pain and then nothing" and "The fear of their own end, of the things that lived in the darkness, became a fear of the darkness itself". They didn't have the names we gave them back then, but they were there, and I want to emphasize this: the names we use for them now don't fit them at that time. All Fears were once these two.
Over time, the Fears were divided as reasons arose to fear their individual parts, and they have divided into the current number. The first Fear, "A fear of blood and pounding feet, a fear of that sudden burst of pain and then nothing", appears to be a mixture of what we know today as the End, the Hunt, and the Slaughter, while the Fear, "The fear of their own end, of the things that lived in the darkness, became a fear of the darkness itself", is Dark. For simplicity and understanding, I will call the first Fear the End and the second the Dark, so you can understand the chronology from my head. Again, they had different names back then, if they had any at all.
In the beginning were the End and Dark, the most ancient of Fears. Then from the End sprang first Slaughter, then the Hunt, and from Dark first sprung Vast, then Buried. Thus, Slaughter opposes Dark, the Hunt opposes Buried, and Vast opposes the End, all of which will be after this section. At some point, the Spiral and Desolation sprang from Buried and the Hunt, Lonely sprang from the End, thus from the Darkness/Vast the Eye, for it was said that "...because they knew the dark held flashing talons and shining eyes...", confirming that the Eye and Dark are not opposites, and finally, from the Spiral and Desolation, the Web and the Stranger. Before Extinction, the youngest Fears were Flesh and Corruption.
Corruption and Desolation used to be one and the same. I described their similarity above, and Desolation was the first. Asag encompassed both fire and disease. Diego of the Cult of the Lightless Flame worshipped Asag, and Arthur, from the same cult, has thoughts on the matter. The gist of his thoughts is that Diego read some ancient tome in which they, Desolation and Corruption, were mentioned together. The point here is the "ancient," which confirms that Asag, Desolation, was also Corruption.
After the Industrial Revolution, along with the Fear of animals, the Flesh separated from the Spiral, and Corruption from Desolation.
What I am getting at. We know Extinction exists. It's positioned right between Corruption and Desolation, and I think it emerged from Desolation, along with its motivations for a future without us, and it emerged from under the wing of the ancient End, not the Dark. And that leaves us with "something." If Extinction exists, then there's an opposite, something that emerged from the Spiral. I don't know what that something is, because it's never been mentioned in the podcast itself. I've often seen something called The Dull online, the fear of being othered, and the source I'm citing calls it The Simulation, the fear that the world isn't real. I'll leave that to your imagination, because it hasn't yet manifested itself in my practice, but I admit it exists and is the opposite of Extinction.
Let's return to the wheel. Desolation and the Spiral. I have reason to believe that trees can be considered symbols of the Spiral. The Spiral is not only about madness, but also about a feeling of being lost, as I wrote above. It's easiest to get lost in the forest. As evidence, when Mike Crew opened the gates of the Lichtenberg Figure, he saw a forest full of impossible trees. The tree on the Hilltop road was bleeding, which is an aspect of the Spiral: if you see a bleeding tree, you'll think you're losing your mind. Trees grow according to the law of fractals, and as a lover of both trees and fractals, I can say that looking at each one for too long loses the passage of time. Trees can easily be burned, which is Desolation. Plus, in the podcast, Desolation doesn't like the Spiral. When Ivo arrives at the Hilltop, a Desolation creature attacks him because he's marked by the Spiral, he fears he has schizophrenia. From a gnosis perspective, the Spiral is about the mind and the intellectual, while Desolation is about the material. The Spiral very rarely affects material things per se, but it almost always affects the mind and distorts it. Desolation, on the other hand, is about material things and rarely pursues the mind, causing physical pain or the pain of loss.
Hunt and Buried. Hunt, by its very nature, is a chase from a predator, and in a confined space, there's no real room to run. In the Coffin, the Hunt released Daisy because it couldn't reach her due to the opposing force. I don't consider Buried and Vast to be opposites. They are close on the wheel and also have many similarities. Vast is about our insignificance; it includes open, endless spaces as an aspect, but they're not the main thing. In the Coffin, there's no up or down, only cramped space, earth, and a lack of air. You're insignificant in the Coffin, unimportant — that's the essence of Vast. The dimension itself in the Coffin is vast, endless. Vast and Buried together share an entire ocean, often with Dark. Weather itself is a very vast thing, with thunderstorms, storms, lightning, rain, and the like, and yet Buried often uses weather. Like in the episode described above, where it rained so much that the statement giver had to drown himself, and also that episode with the mudstorm in the States. I count both of those episodes, plus the one with the ocean, under the Vast and the Buried.
Slaughter and Dark are opposites due to history, something I described in the Extinction section. When the divisions began, Slaughter and Darks began to oppose each other. In the episode about a father's love, the father kills a dark monster to protect his daughter, using a ritual that involves killing many people. As he does this, he hums a melody, and the music is the Slaughter motif.
And finally, the End and the Vast. The Vast is about infinity, eternity, the End, well, about end. The Vast grants its avatars, if not immortality, then certainly a long life, as Simon is an example, which contradicts the end. Georgie tells John during her statement "The promise of a cold and lonely eternity in the grave would have been a mercy; at least it would be eternal. But everything ends, even the universe, even time. (…) …the monumental realization of the scale we existed on. Not the meaningless vastness of the universe, but the… the smallness of it.” sounds very much like the opposite of the Vast. There's some room to speculate that the Vast grants some form of immortality to those it marks: when Gertrude dropped Jan Kilbride’s body into the hole to prevent the Buried ritual, it was said, "But Gertrude also realized that the body need not be alive. Or in one piece. She thought it was a mercy. It wasn’t", suggesting he was still alive, despite everything. Simon and the guy who was eaten by the sky both say time felt wrong. The guy said his watch had stopped, Simon said he could have been falling for a million years or a second. The Vast isn't just about infinity; it's about the fear of not dying, which is the opposite of the End, which completes everything, which is the fear of dying.
And, finally, I believe that there is some entity that is The Fear, that includes all Fears, but I have not met it yet, so I cannot say for sure, I have no experience yet, but I have reasons to believe in it.
Please give me your thoughts! I would love to read them!
