Abolished Aeon: Metaphysics 101
Dec. 14th, 2018 09:41 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
oligopsonyThis isn't advanced metaphysics - if I understood advanced metaphysics, I'd be a powerful wizard or something. This is just the basics.
The Law-Chaos axis of alignment exists, albeit in a qualified way. Things are positioned along this axis to the degree that they are contained by their name. Extremely Lawful entities, like numbers or God, are completely contained by their name - to grasp the concept of the thing is to grasp the thing in its entirety. (Not epistemically - you don't know every factor of 11,274 just by looking at it - but ontologically, everything about the number 11,274 is contained in its being 11,274.) Extremely Chaotic forms of being, like energy in a totally unrefined form, aren't even nameable or countable enough to be described as "entities."
Most things are in-between. Mass-nouns that contain energy that can become something else - soil, manure, sexual fluids, rotting corpses - lean towards being more Chaotic, until something organizes them into a more Lawful form. (Furrow the soil in nice clean rows, manure the fields and give each drop of manure a name, sing to the plants as they grow.) Rituals of naming and counting can make things more Lawful; and if you want to preserve a particular way of the ordering of the world, you'll want to engage in these naming/counting/purification rituals. As some of the examples indicate, chaotic things can be ritually unclean, but that doesn't make them Bad - they remain a necessary and important part of life, just one that's most prudently handled in certain kinds of ways.
Law and Chaos are objectively distinguishable metaphysical categories, but they are not at cosmic war with each other (although some in-world belief systems inaccurately think of them this way.) Because only a few things can be fully contained by their names - because abstractions are leaky - these Lawful entities are always shedding Chaotic residue, like bodily fluids off an animal, rain from a wind system, or comets from the motion of the stars. By the same token, cum, shit, peat, phlogiston, rain, wild storms of magical emotion, corpses, &c. always "want" to feed/become something more concrete. Many forms of apocalypse, in the sense of "big event that would be really bad from the perspective of mortals," are possible - the sun could fall from the sky, plague could engulf the nations, the usual - but these would always just represent Law and Chaos taking other, less desirable forms, rather than one triumphing over the other.
Law/Chaos doesn't care about whether you're a fascist or an anarchist, or stultified or creative, or whether you clean your room, bucko. It cares about what kind of thing you are and the extent to which you participate in/are subjected to naming/counting/purity rituals. (Okay, so some forms of room-cleaning can matter.) Basically all humans (and other intelligent animals) ping as Neutral, for the purposes of protection from chaos or whatever, unless they're one of several flavors of ascetic mystic.
If you're a living organism, then your True Name is mostly your body - or, your body is a token stating the True Name of the species that you are - which is why placing a sword in your guts and severing its structure causes you to revert to the chaotic form of corpse-flesh. (Necromantic magics that cause your body or will to persist past that are, then, artificial impositions of Law.) What the scholastics of our world saw as the problem of individuation - that you aren't just "human" but a particular human that isn't contained by that concept - is what makes you a leaky abstraction too.
Although people can hurt or help each other - and although there may be universally compelling reasons to help rather than hurt others, like "what if everyone thought that way" or "the moral valence of pain is obvious on reflection" - the traditional Good/Evil axis of alignment has no magical significance, no significance in the "physics" of the world any way it doesn't have in ours. (Although, again, certain belief systems may say otherwise. Partially this is the wish for a just universe, partially this is a response to evidence like that there are [what any reasonable person would call "evil gods"] imprisoned underground, about which more in a moment.)
(Mechanical payoff: remove alignment at least for the Good-Evil axis.)
There's no strong ontological distinction between magic/not magic, although of course different things and acts can have different degrees of power embedded in them. Things like blood, diamonds, and ritual trances are useful as spell components because they concentrate a lot of energy in them, and there's no sharp distinction between a guy swinging a sword, a guy swinging a sword while observing katas, and a guy performing katas that blow fire at his enemies. The average blacksmith knows a few effacacious runes and doesn't see these as more different from hammering and heating than hammering and heating are different from each other.
There is also no Glorantha-style mythic overworld, fundamental ontological gulf between gods and men, &c. Per below, gods and humans/taddols/mammothfolk/whatever are different, but both are, like just about everything else, finite collections/organizations of energy operating under a name.
(Mechanical payoff: adventuring classes tend to congregate around Tier 3.)
Gods are ritually defined - that is, naming rituals help carve out gods in a way analogous to how the continents are socially constructed (calling Europe "Europe" and Asia "Asia" doesn't flow at all from the continental crust, but the continental crust is there all the same) rather than how the way money is constructed (tokens are money iff we agree that it is, and maybe the token existed before but not as money.) That is, the world is naturally pulsing with emotional energy, and rituals can carve this up into relatively distinct (for a time, as long as ritually maintained) kinds of consciousness. This "relatively distinct" aspect means that gods tend to overlap and blend into each other, because the same stuff can get appropriated under multiple names. Gods also crowd each other out to an extent, but it's a relative thing and not a sharp boundaries thing.
("Gods" here can mean anything from a local river naiad to Ye Olde God of the Forge. I mentioned "God" above, but It's a philosophical postulate that you can ignore for 99% of purposes, although yes people have tried naming rituals on the God of the Philosophers and yes this has had strange effects.)
Naming gods means you can communicate with them more easily, rather than dealing with all the Chaotic jumble of emotional and natural forces that would exist prior to their being bundled by a True Name, which is why cultures do it. Bundling different forces and ideas together also can be useful based on how they interact. For instance, naming rituals that bind together the idea of the winds, prosperity, and the honor of a particular city-state can be really good for trade, for instance.
Or there's what the ancient otyugh civilization did countless epochs ago, binding together all sorts of hostile divine-natural forces with the idea of being imprisoned underground. In these impossibly deep prison-temples, inscriptions on ancient stellae and underground river-fed prayer wheels try to keep these monster-gods imprisoned within their names. But there's always leakage. (To keep up my promise of "no designated villains," I see these as peripheral, likely not always malevolent due to abstraction leakage and how ancient otyugh concepts of what a hostile force is differ from "modern" people's, and so on - but you can use this an an excuse for including all the classic Weird Dungeon Horror Shit you want.)
As the stellae and prayer wheels indicate, it's ritual that matters, not belief. The stellae and prayer wheels don't believe a damn thing. You don't have to convince yourself of anything, just convince the (divine-natural forces to be bound together under a name) that they are bound together under that name.
Gods can participate in naming (&c.) rituals just as much as humans or prayer wheels can. Popular religion and serious intellectuals both believe the current arrangement of the world probably came about through ritual observances by divine forces themselves.
Time also has a name, or is rather subjected to many kinds of naming, and (it is hypothesized) some of these is actually a lot more stable than other things because they're ritually reinforced by the actions of various stars, planets, and so on. For instance, in addition to the 365-day solar cycle, there's a 157-day cycle (connected with an invisible planet?) that knowing the intricacies of is extremely helpful for in many kinds of "magical" technique - astrology, of course, but also what words efficaciously Mean on certain days, and so on. Like everything else, these named entities leak and have hiccups, which means that some time is unordered - that is, sometimes extra time appears at the beginnings/ends of cycles that isn't part of the cycle itself. This is why times like midnight, the solstices and equinoxes, the new moon, and the beginning and end of the 157-day cycle (especially when these occur in conjunction with each other) can be especially dangerous - and, for the same reason, ideal for certain effacacious rituals. The extra time that shows up is usually just a few seconds, if that, and can be local or global. If you want to travel through time... you can't do so safely, you can't do so reliably, but you can (in principle) do so from one of these "extra" moments to another.
The Law-Chaos axis of alignment exists, albeit in a qualified way. Things are positioned along this axis to the degree that they are contained by their name. Extremely Lawful entities, like numbers or God, are completely contained by their name - to grasp the concept of the thing is to grasp the thing in its entirety. (Not epistemically - you don't know every factor of 11,274 just by looking at it - but ontologically, everything about the number 11,274 is contained in its being 11,274.) Extremely Chaotic forms of being, like energy in a totally unrefined form, aren't even nameable or countable enough to be described as "entities."
Most things are in-between. Mass-nouns that contain energy that can become something else - soil, manure, sexual fluids, rotting corpses - lean towards being more Chaotic, until something organizes them into a more Lawful form. (Furrow the soil in nice clean rows, manure the fields and give each drop of manure a name, sing to the plants as they grow.) Rituals of naming and counting can make things more Lawful; and if you want to preserve a particular way of the ordering of the world, you'll want to engage in these naming/counting/purification rituals. As some of the examples indicate, chaotic things can be ritually unclean, but that doesn't make them Bad - they remain a necessary and important part of life, just one that's most prudently handled in certain kinds of ways.
Law and Chaos are objectively distinguishable metaphysical categories, but they are not at cosmic war with each other (although some in-world belief systems inaccurately think of them this way.) Because only a few things can be fully contained by their names - because abstractions are leaky - these Lawful entities are always shedding Chaotic residue, like bodily fluids off an animal, rain from a wind system, or comets from the motion of the stars. By the same token, cum, shit, peat, phlogiston, rain, wild storms of magical emotion, corpses, &c. always "want" to feed/become something more concrete. Many forms of apocalypse, in the sense of "big event that would be really bad from the perspective of mortals," are possible - the sun could fall from the sky, plague could engulf the nations, the usual - but these would always just represent Law and Chaos taking other, less desirable forms, rather than one triumphing over the other.
Law/Chaos doesn't care about whether you're a fascist or an anarchist, or stultified or creative, or whether you clean your room, bucko. It cares about what kind of thing you are and the extent to which you participate in/are subjected to naming/counting/purity rituals. (Okay, so some forms of room-cleaning can matter.) Basically all humans (and other intelligent animals) ping as Neutral, for the purposes of protection from chaos or whatever, unless they're one of several flavors of ascetic mystic.
If you're a living organism, then your True Name is mostly your body - or, your body is a token stating the True Name of the species that you are - which is why placing a sword in your guts and severing its structure causes you to revert to the chaotic form of corpse-flesh. (Necromantic magics that cause your body or will to persist past that are, then, artificial impositions of Law.) What the scholastics of our world saw as the problem of individuation - that you aren't just "human" but a particular human that isn't contained by that concept - is what makes you a leaky abstraction too.
Although people can hurt or help each other - and although there may be universally compelling reasons to help rather than hurt others, like "what if everyone thought that way" or "the moral valence of pain is obvious on reflection" - the traditional Good/Evil axis of alignment has no magical significance, no significance in the "physics" of the world any way it doesn't have in ours. (Although, again, certain belief systems may say otherwise. Partially this is the wish for a just universe, partially this is a response to evidence like that there are [what any reasonable person would call "evil gods"] imprisoned underground, about which more in a moment.)
(Mechanical payoff: remove alignment at least for the Good-Evil axis.)
There's no strong ontological distinction between magic/not magic, although of course different things and acts can have different degrees of power embedded in them. Things like blood, diamonds, and ritual trances are useful as spell components because they concentrate a lot of energy in them, and there's no sharp distinction between a guy swinging a sword, a guy swinging a sword while observing katas, and a guy performing katas that blow fire at his enemies. The average blacksmith knows a few effacacious runes and doesn't see these as more different from hammering and heating than hammering and heating are different from each other.
There is also no Glorantha-style mythic overworld, fundamental ontological gulf between gods and men, &c. Per below, gods and humans/taddols/mammothfolk/whatever are different, but both are, like just about everything else, finite collections/organizations of energy operating under a name.
(Mechanical payoff: adventuring classes tend to congregate around Tier 3.)
Gods are ritually defined - that is, naming rituals help carve out gods in a way analogous to how the continents are socially constructed (calling Europe "Europe" and Asia "Asia" doesn't flow at all from the continental crust, but the continental crust is there all the same) rather than how the way money is constructed (tokens are money iff we agree that it is, and maybe the token existed before but not as money.) That is, the world is naturally pulsing with emotional energy, and rituals can carve this up into relatively distinct (for a time, as long as ritually maintained) kinds of consciousness. This "relatively distinct" aspect means that gods tend to overlap and blend into each other, because the same stuff can get appropriated under multiple names. Gods also crowd each other out to an extent, but it's a relative thing and not a sharp boundaries thing.
("Gods" here can mean anything from a local river naiad to Ye Olde God of the Forge. I mentioned "God" above, but It's a philosophical postulate that you can ignore for 99% of purposes, although yes people have tried naming rituals on the God of the Philosophers and yes this has had strange effects.)
Naming gods means you can communicate with them more easily, rather than dealing with all the Chaotic jumble of emotional and natural forces that would exist prior to their being bundled by a True Name, which is why cultures do it. Bundling different forces and ideas together also can be useful based on how they interact. For instance, naming rituals that bind together the idea of the winds, prosperity, and the honor of a particular city-state can be really good for trade, for instance.
Or there's what the ancient otyugh civilization did countless epochs ago, binding together all sorts of hostile divine-natural forces with the idea of being imprisoned underground. In these impossibly deep prison-temples, inscriptions on ancient stellae and underground river-fed prayer wheels try to keep these monster-gods imprisoned within their names. But there's always leakage. (To keep up my promise of "no designated villains," I see these as peripheral, likely not always malevolent due to abstraction leakage and how ancient otyugh concepts of what a hostile force is differ from "modern" people's, and so on - but you can use this an an excuse for including all the classic Weird Dungeon Horror Shit you want.)
As the stellae and prayer wheels indicate, it's ritual that matters, not belief. The stellae and prayer wheels don't believe a damn thing. You don't have to convince yourself of anything, just convince the (divine-natural forces to be bound together under a name) that they are bound together under that name.
Gods can participate in naming (&c.) rituals just as much as humans or prayer wheels can. Popular religion and serious intellectuals both believe the current arrangement of the world probably came about through ritual observances by divine forces themselves.
Time also has a name, or is rather subjected to many kinds of naming, and (it is hypothesized) some of these is actually a lot more stable than other things because they're ritually reinforced by the actions of various stars, planets, and so on. For instance, in addition to the 365-day solar cycle, there's a 157-day cycle (connected with an invisible planet?) that knowing the intricacies of is extremely helpful for in many kinds of "magical" technique - astrology, of course, but also what words efficaciously Mean on certain days, and so on. Like everything else, these named entities leak and have hiccups, which means that some time is unordered - that is, sometimes extra time appears at the beginnings/ends of cycles that isn't part of the cycle itself. This is why times like midnight, the solstices and equinoxes, the new moon, and the beginning and end of the 157-day cycle (especially when these occur in conjunction with each other) can be especially dangerous - and, for the same reason, ideal for certain effacacious rituals. The extra time that shows up is usually just a few seconds, if that, and can be local or global. If you want to travel through time... you can't do so safely, you can't do so reliably, but you can (in principle) do so from one of these "extra" moments to another.
