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Back in the naughties, especially in New Atheist circles, you used to see the line a lot that the reason religious people invented the afterlife was because they were scared of dying and they needed a comforting lie to sleep better at night. Incidentally, that's not true; aside from the problem that people in the past generally believed in their religion, and this whole line of reasoning (along with "religion was invented solely to control the masses") assumes a level of cynicism by religious leaders that historically is actually quite rare, we have a pretty good cognitive framework for why human beings tend to come up with a belief in spirits, ghosts, and gods, and why that tends to lead to a belief in an immaterial spirit world and (quite naturally from there) an afterlife.

Research into the cognitive aspect of spiritual beliefs has explored human intuitions about the self include its partability and permeability, which I think I've mentioned here before; our intuitions about ascribing agency to phenomena in our environment, even when no agency is immediately evident (a sort of overly-cautious tripwire for evading predators) and our overactive tendency toward pattern-matching lend themselves naturally to belief in invisible, intelligent agents shaping the world around us. When you combine that natural tendency to believe in such agents, plus intuitions about a self that can include a separate immaterial component, and the ways in which (for example) the feeling of a familiar presence can be triggered by some stray bit of sensory input or a misinterpreted environmental cue, it is very common for societies to develop a belief that the dead continue to exist in some form and continue to act in the world, possibly from some invisible spirit realm, because that is something that people are just straightforwardly experiencing on a day-to-day basis. In that sense, belief in something like a soul and something like an afterlife is more like a belief in rainbows or solar eclipses--sure, people might get the underlying phenomenological explanation for what they're seeing wrong, but they're not speculating, they're doing their best to interpret the actual experience of feeling the presence of dead loved ones and their apparent agency in the world.

That said, in the case of Christianity, we also know historically the framework that motivated the development of specifically Christian doctrines about the afterlife, which emerges from the context of Second Temple Judaism at the turn of the era. Here, the motivation was not one of comfort stemming from fear of death, it was one of morality and the problem of evil. Earlier thinking in the sort of broader Levantine cultural sphere had mostly envisioned the problem of evil as being one related to divine favor and punishment; God or the gods rewarded the righteous and punished the wicked in this life (cf., for instance, all the narratives in the Old Testament where God sends this or that conqueror to punish the people for their sins). Increasing philosophical sophistication, literature grappling with the ways in which the world could be patently unjust (like the Book of Job), and political circumstances like the conquest of Judea by the Romans and the evident lack of divine retribution against these oppressors, all led to dissatisfication in some quarters with that earlier theodicy. IIRC the influence of Greek philosophy and Greek thinking about the afterlife also played a role here.

Transposing the balancing of the moral scales to the afterlife, as some Second Temple-era thinkers did, helped construct what felt like a more intuitively correct theodicy: the wicked still got their comeuppance, even if you didn't get to personally witness it, and the righteous still got their reward. The exact nature of that comeuppance was up for grabs for a long time--there are like three different competing visions of what damnation looks like in the New Testament, and it's not until later that "eternal conscious torment" wins out as the favored position among most Christians. The righteous were always guaranteed salvation; but we know this wasn't a sop to people who were frequently scared of death because the idea that martyrdom guaranteed salvation was so compelling you had Christians begging the Roman authorities to put them to death, and even groups like the Circumcellions who attacked armed soldiers with clubs in the hopes that they could provoke martyrdom-by-cop. And you could paint these guys as fanatical outliers, but again, people in the past generally believed their religions, and we have mountains of writing, art, poetry, and music by Christians over the course of two thousand years where people are worried about a lot of things related to death (did I live a good life? will I go to heaven?) but who do not seem to be philosophically troubled by the question of whether the afterlife actually exists.

And of course the conflict between reflective and intuitive cognition is relevant here; one might reflectively believe in the afterlife, but intuitively recoil from deadly harm. I do not want to suggest that religious belief can trivially overwhelm human instinct to survive. But "the afterlife was invented as a comforting lie" is overly dismissive and flattens a complex phenomenon. It is, in its own way, a comforting lie--the lie that people in the past were all stupid, superstitious rubes, that we are infinitely smarter and more sophisticated than them, that progress will ultimately consign all such supernatural thinking to the dustbin of history. That such thinking is quite deeply rooted in our cognition and we may never be able to dispense with it entirely is very much at odds with a lot of the 2000s era all-religion-is-indoctrination children-are-born-atheist triumphalist cliches.

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— Clementine Von Radics, from In A Dream You Saw A Way To Survive; "The Fear" (via lunamonchtuna)

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Joy Sullivan, from "Late Bloomer", Instructions for Traveling West

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So I'm re-listening to Gideon the Ninth, and noticed for the first time that while Canaan House is VERY tall, even counting the hatch rooms there's tons of floors they can't access.

And it's on earth.

And the sum total of necromantic transgression etc etc.

What if Canaan House IS the Tower?

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The point about the permeability of the soul is at least in part that we cannot separate love and consumption. You almost always can’t say ‘this is because of the soul juices mingling’ vs ‘this is one of the horrors of love’ and that’s the point.

Is Naberius haunting Ianthe because they grew up together, because they were trained to be two halves of the same whole, because she knew him inside out and there’s a love in that, however violent? Or is it because she’s been using him like a battery and a hand-puppet and a computer program and now he’s threaded up through her. She can’t know! She doesn’t want to know, she refuses to look.

Did Gideon v1 become more militaristic after Pyrhha’s death through osmosis? Or was it because he loved her and trusted her and his first thought in a crisis was What Would Pyrrha Do. Did he love Wake because their programming got jumbled or was it because he met a awful redhead and thought oh, my best friend would have been so stupid for you, she would have been such a wreck…

Did John make the earth angry or did the earth fill John with anger or was it both? Did the love come first or the fury? Does Mercy love her god because Cristabel did or does she do it for the sake of Cristabel? The lyctors all view themselves as living memorials to the dead, of course they’d voice the dead’s thoughts, act out their habits and carry on their infuriating quirks. How else do you remember? You can’t peel apart the analogy and make it all magic or all mundane because soul-permeability coexists with the everyday manacles of affection.

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Everyone talks about Hades, Poseidon, & Zeus

Everyone knows Hestia, Demeter, & Hera

Everyone loves Apollo, Hermes, & Dionysus

Everyone appreciates Athena, Artemis, & Persephone

...but let's talk about the untapped potential of

Eris, Ares, & Enyo

(Destruction trio made up of Discord, War, & Bloodlust and hated by almost everyone except each other)

Eileithyia, Hebe, & Pasithea

(Hera's non-problematic children trio. Childbirth, Youth, & Relaxation don't look like they should compliment each other but they somehow do)

Theia, Rhea, & Phoebe

("my brother-husband is locked in Tartarus" trio)

Eos, Helios, & Selene

(semi-acknowledged by people who actually bother to learn about mythology)

Morpheus, Phobetor, & Phantasos

(The dreamer triplets)

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I do not really cosplay, this is a secondary valentine's gift for my gf who is pretty popular for cosplaying Harrow and I literally have hundreds of these photos

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— Trista Mateer, from Honeybee (via lunamonchtuna)

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I've seen lots of Locked Tomb valentines, but none with my favourite expression of affection in the series:

“A ghost that old—the feeding—”

“It would be unprecedented,” said Pent. She was talking a little bit too much, too fast. “I mean, there’s the issue of whether the Lyctor in question is even dead. That’s the first thing to consider. As a speaker to the dead, I really am at my best when people are not alive … If they are in the River, whatever the depth, I can only hope that a handful of minor relics and the new blood of my beating heart will tempt them to the surface. Nobody has ever tempted a Lyctor before. I am not even certain where they go. Do Lyctors enter the River? Do Lyctors pass as we pass? I don’t know where they wait. I don’t know how to direct them. But I would so love to try.”

Harrowhark waited, her thumbs pressed together within her sleeves.

From the half a step behind her, Ortus said: “Your indefatigability in the face of ancient death becomes you.”

“Stop flirting with my wife,” said Magnus.

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Morning Doodle: “Koja bowed and made his compliments to Lula’s shiny feathers, the purity of her song, the pleasing way she kept her nest, and on and on, until finally the nightingale stopped him with a shrill chirp. “Next time you may stop at ‘please.’ If you will only cease your talking” (Leigh Bardugo’s short story “The Too-Clever Fox,” which can be found in “The Language of Thorns”)

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Completely random, but I finally got back the pics from the film I gave for revealing in October, and I am rly happy. Here's some random pics from Κισσαβος and Βελίκα.

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"Nobody gave a voice to these Greek Mythology female characters."

Euripides after writing Andromache, Andromeda, Antigone, Danaë, Electra, Hecuba, Helen, Iphigenia in Aulis, Iphigenia in Tauris, Medea, Merope, Wise Melanippe, Captive Melanippe, Peliades, The Phoenician Women, The Trojan Women etc.

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Leona and Diana Severance (the TV show) AU :))