#queuenya

[vardasvapors]

Thou fire, Thou light, canst Thou hold us of darkness, us of the depths? Wouldst Thou collapse on Thyself, fold one thousand times light into dark, burning into all else we might ever wish? —Qeljer the Seafarer, Resurrectionists’ Lament

Ivana Skye, The Birds That Fly At Dusk

[vardasvapors]

The horns and strong bones Lilith grants to her children are herself, the strength of her resolve granted physical form, a statement: I will help you to never again break. And the bright eyes that see well in the dark are another statement: I will help you to never again be lost. [—Scirye Ena-sē, Demonhood: A Survey]

Ivana Skye, The Birds That Fly At Dusk

[vardasvapors]

The earliest known human manifestations [of souls] were made hardly a few years after the first humans reached adulthood, though which is the first is challenging to date, as many were made in close temporal proximity in entirely different continents. The angel Iblis reports that when he asked one of these first how they learned it, they simply said, ‘I wanted, I wanted, and then I knew’… —Elra Nelhim, A Brief History of the World

Ivana Skye, The Birds That Fly At Dusk

[vardasvapors]

about The Stuff with GOD and like SOUL MAGIC and things in THE STARS THAT RISE AT DAWN

-“competing access needs: the series” send tweet. but! in the form of very-early-divergent AU of the bible (genesis ch 2?) where, as soon as ‘rebellion against cosmic truths’ happens, God goes “hhhh fuq if nobody agrees with each other about what is good, how am I supposed to give everyone a good afterlife? 🤔🧐🤯👀🤗 I KNOW....I’LL ASK EVERYONE TO LIVE THEIR LIVES AS AN ARGUMENT FOR WHAT THEY WANT....oh my Me I’m genius”

-everyone: “yissssss!! no one telling us what to do!!!”

-everyone: “.......what do You mean ‘we have to figure out what we want’”

-there is only one (1) form of magic, whether you’re a human, an angel, or God. it’s “creating a manifestation of your soul in the physical world”

-it’s 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 “um it’s 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 istg” (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 qu’ran, given the book’s base mythology, God’s statements “Let There Be Light [and light Was]” and “I Am That I Am/I Will Be What I Will Be” (‘ehyeh asher ‘ehyeh) and “Be, and it is” 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 — it’s 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 “as if looking into the sky, and the sky was all stars.” 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 “a 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...”

-but God’s main role is going *chinhands*, more clerk, not judge — bearing witness to and encoding the life-arguments of everyone else in the universe, in order to spin them into afterlives

-“Your lives will argue for you” are arc words, bc God decided they can’t impose anything on anyone beyond this one commandment, not after the mistakes They’ve made, (especially with lucifer.....but that’s partly a secret) but they also can’t....know what everyone wants without everyone telling them, it’s 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 ‘inventing a universe is not responsible, let alone conservative, let alone well planned from experience’.....what little order and rules in existence are imposed on God by humans and angels)

-anyway, there’s 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

-it’s 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 God’s 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 other’s 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 — 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 ‘doing X is a heretic abomination against god’s will not meant for mortals’ is an oxymoron. god is an abomination who came into existence bc it was Them to do so. support for Abomination Rights. that’s prob a thing.)

-what do u mean ‘what does it do’ 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] ‘delicious, finally some good fucking stim’

-oh right i guess it’s ‘irreversible’ and ‘permanently disabling’ and ‘god is A Lot’ and stuff. fiiiine. it IS one of the most hardcore Arguments -- about what you want, about how a person’s nature can’t cheat itself, how things that happen can’t 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 can’t avoid being burned and still touch it. Theurgy magic can’t work that way.)

-you might notice a pattern here: “can’t have your cake and eat it too”

-you can’t manifest your soul without understanding it, you can’t interact with something as absolute as God without being burnt, God can’t 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 aren’t satisfied

-that’s why this series has a plot

[vardasvapors]

None is more themself (or Themself) than God; every aspect of Their personality, thought, being is the whole of Them, is alight with fire and infinity; is absoluteness, concentrated; is everything They are, twisting and turning and laughing and singing. How joyful They seem to me!

Zehia Denlil, Holy (source: Ivana Skye. The Stars that Rise at Dawn (Šehhinah Book 1).)

[vardasvapors]

by æjaÿ

[vardasvapors]

I drew a map for my girlfriend @ivanaskye ‘s new novel The Stars That Rise At Dawn in sketchbook autodesk that was MEANT to be very basic and mostly an excuse to use stupid puns to torment her and her linguistic training and her akkadian-based syllablic structure sensibilities, but then I got carried away with the Textures.

[vardasvapors]

In the first millennium AC, King Lot of Nefil declared that the Holy in his city cover their prices when in public, so as not to stain any unwilling eyes with the symbol of such an intimate—or, one letter of his wrote, “degenerate”—act. Some stone-etchings on official buildings in protest of this law can still be found by divers researching the ruins of the city, now many meters underwater after the unfortunate sea-level rise…

Dr. Melia Yashim, The Past is the Strangest Place of All (source: Ivana Skye. The Stars that Rise at Dawn (Šehhinah Book 1).)