#celyet

[ivanaskye]

If say they took a uquiz, which sailor senshi would each Šehhinah character be? (i was thinking about some of the stuff I've seen about how Šehhinah is very in dialogue to shoujo anime in some ways and became curious)

the issue with this is that the sailor senshi aren't that archetypal! you'd be better off asking their shoujo hair colors lol.

shoujo hair colors: i think eliya is blond just like in canon;

tamar's a white haired anime boy, but a girl, and girl versions of this archetype don't have white hair. black is possible, close to canon

yenatru would probably just get to have green for his-theme-color reasons

celyet's actually a decent canditate for a white haired anime girl (totally different archetype from white haired anime boy), but black + hime haircut is plausible

ēshva possibly could end up as an electric blue

yairēn's a classic brown

teśena may fit ~purple?

kjorel..... uh. maybe just going with black is okay.

uhhh i don't want to leave you with nothing for your actual question but uhhhhh

edit: WAIT on second thought anime hair au lucifer would change to the opposite of the hair vibes not just the gender. that would be really funny.

[lepertamar]

Kjorel hears the next word without hearing. Of course he knows. Or maybe he’s always known. He wonders as if from the air itself how much he can know without knowing, how much he can think without thinking. A sharp smell in the air and maybe that’s what his ears are ringing with. He wants to be empty of this. He wants to be free. Please, please.

this is so SO good. the knowing not different from the sort of Deep Understanding And Knowing that tesena (or celyet, jibril, etc) had, just the reaction of the knower is different, like johnny truant vs navidson.

[vardasvapors]

sometimes you discover a suicidal naked lady taking a mudbath in your soul at 2am and you have to go ‘wow this is a thing that sure is happening ’

[artbyvampiraptor]

Celyet from The Birds That Fly At Dusk. As a neurodivergent person, I had SO many feelings about this character???? Like we’re not so much alike in personality, but I related so well to her anxiety and struggles to communicate and deep fear of being misunderstood. Ugh this series makes me feel seen. ANYWAy Sehhinah is Good.

[vardasvapors]

I can’t actually ‘draw things’ that are ‘visible’ or ‘decipherable’ but maybe someday I’ll commission a real artist to do them properly. I sketched a few tarot card concepts as characters from @ivanaskye ‘s Šehhinah series lol! mostly the ones that most ludicrously on-the-nose:

0. The Fool [God] (the Major Arcana is the path the Fool takes through the great mysteries of life and the main human archetypes. Represents beginnings, looking forward to the future, inexperience, not knowing what to expect, improvisation. the fool believes in the world’s power to teach him wisdom.)

I. The Magician [Lilith] (symbolizes divine immanence and the divine motive in mankind, tapping into one’s own power and/or another person’s to bring about transformation. the magician can bridge the gap between heaven and earth)

II. The High Priestess [Jibril] (invites the living to the esoteric mysteries, symbolizes spiritual insight, hidden talents, wisdom, tenacity, intuition, the future yet to be revealed)

VI. The Lovers [Tamar] (a temptation of the heart, a crossroads between relationships, a commitment or desire with serious ramifications, requiring the sacrifice of an aspect of one’s current life. Represents an irreversible choice.)

XVII. The Star [Celyet] (Opportunities aligning, renewed inspiration, hope for the future, attunement to the universe, freedom and serenity, gratitude for one’s circumstances)

XVIII. The Moon [Ēshva] (hiding, illusion, and deception, a state of fear and confusion, a time when something is not as it appears to be. A misunderstanding, or a truth one cannot admit to oneself.)

XII. The Hanged Man [Lucifer] (represents ultimate surrender, breaking old patterns and letting go, being suspended in time. the hanged man chooses by his own accord a plight that superficially resembles punishment of a traitor.)

[lepertamar]

TRAGICALLY, the endgame/climax/Big Twist of The Birds That Fly At Dusk was SO COOL that it wiped most of the stuff i thought was really lame and boring (interspersed unevenly with other cool stuff) about the first 2/3rds of the book from my mind, i have been checkmated :V i’ll probably flip back through it to remind me of my complaints

[lepertamar]

so it's common knowledge that 'God' is not actually one of sehhinah!G-d's names, but the significance of this is lost on people, to the point where jibril has to point to this and spell it out carefully, the fact that it's a categorical noun, when telling celyet about the possibility of other gods. only some people know Their true names, for example holies (ones who have spoken the names, but also eliya wryly wonders if tamar knows some of g-d's names after mentally cursing her 'in all the names of god') which makes me wonder....it would be reasonable i think to speculate that because holies know 'God' isn't one of G-d's names, they might write it as 'G-d' to express the fact that they're talking about Them personally, by name, even though they can't actually write it down (becuz the names are impossible to write or becuz writing it would burn whatever it's written it on or however it works) :3 even though it apparently hasn't really crossed anyone's mind that this might also mean there's more of them sjdfsdoifdgsdwfe.

anyway i wonder also if people have like Unnamable Theurgy Identity stuff where their names or neopronouns are [their specific manifestation] in such a way where it's required to have unusual emoji-like notation in order to refer to them in speech/writing/sign (i guess is in a bit of an odd phase culturally since sehhinah is pre-computers and pre-unicode, but is not pre-typewriting or pre-printing-press given the way books are presented)

[lepertamar]

i would guess....the cause of the great distress to celyet.....so i related extremely to this distress because i had/(still somewhat have) a similar distress about misinterpretation, i guess i was thinking about the like process over time of understanding theurgy. like the theurgist usually has to progress from not-understanding-themself to understanding-themself-more to articulating that understanding in the form of a manifestation. and usually these theurgists will know that if someone else encounters the theurgist’s manifestation, the person will have to go through some sort of process to understand it too and sort of accept ‘understanding your manifestation wrongly’ as temporally part of the experience of ‘understanding your manifestation’.

but celyet has a deep distress about the idea of anyone interpreting her manifestation wrongly even as part of the process of understanding it, i think partially because for her, there wasn’t really a process......her self-understanding-as-river is basically just one single combined step. and the book describes it all better yet it all really comes down to........:

..........at the moment of self-understanding (or more like, AS her self-understanding), celyet it seems could have invented the concept of a river if rivers didn’t already exist.

and she thinks she is normal! at least she thinks that her soul is normal. but she is not normal.....she does not think/feel about Self the way most more-normal people think/feel about Self.

the fact she is cut off from even knowing she is different, let alone why she is different, until late in the book is due to a gap in her world’s capacity to hypothesize the idea of her, though the society isn’t suppressing or hiding anything, which ironically (though of course not at all surprising to me!) makes this capacity even more out of reach? taboos (including taboos that claim x does not exist) only spring up if x is a tangible and threatening presence that very much exists! taboos against infidelity would not exist if no one had thought of cheating yet, taboos against disrespecting elders wouldn’t exist it no one ever disrespected elders, etc. (in monotheistic religions, taboos on other gods would not exist if no one had considered that any other gods could exist.) so there’s no taboos here, people haven’t espoused a celyet theory of self to keep secret even if they wanted to. (and would they even want to? honestly maybe not necessarily....except what of the premise of the covenant?)

but that gap probably has also blotted out the framework for articulating many other concepts too.....

[lepertamar]

so in thinking about biblical texts i was thinking ‘who else in the tanakh would be a theurgist or a holy or etc in a sehhinah universe version of them’ (thought about cain & abel as theurgists but that’s for a different post) and realized suddenly! lot’s wife as a holy....

the LORD rained upon Sodom and Gomorrah sulfurous fire from the LORD out of heaven.

He annihilated those cities and the entire Plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities and the vegetation of the ground.

Lot’s wife looked back, and she thereupon turned into a pillar of salt.

I then had this conversation LMAO:

lurkfriend

i had a tiny bit here about chemical salts and it was already a big stretch because we're dealing with hebrew and im fairly certain this was prior to even alchemy? but my idea was, a lot of chemical salts are made up of two elements which are highly reactive by themselves (e.g. sodium chloride -- sodium literally explodes with water, chlorine is... chlorine) but the salt is extremely unreactive, and the idea of lot's wife reacting with the angel and being burnt up/"used up" and completely changed into a different form which can't really react anymore but is delicious is forever altered into something completely different?

coal 

ooooooooooooohhhhhh yeah!!!!!! 

aaaaaaa fuck i love ‘used up’

coal

in a way this feels like her theurgy......lot’s wife’s soul as something with reactive-ness, kind of like......a pillar of proof that a soul can be something-that-is-used-up.......like how a manifestation does not decay but it can be decay or a-decaying-thing 

(can promise a person whose soul is a tree that their tree manifestation will never decay, one can promise someone whose soul is rot that they will always be-decaying.......[mushroom post voice: decay is an extant form of life]. that fanfic line ‘is that a threat or a promise?’ someone can promise lucifer ‘don’t worry, your soul is yourself and g-d cannot blight it’, and this would be a horrible despairing threat of ‘this is useless, your soul is vaccuum-sealed and utterly inert and impermeable and g-d can never ever react with it’ to a holy.) 

though most holies wouldn’t affected by such threats anymore becuz they have proved it to themselves, while lucifer definitely perceives holies as potentially an existential threat to lucifer’s own soul if holies’ self-knowledge is true, lol). but i could imagine sehhinah-lot’s-wife as !!!!!!! maybe even the wife of sehhinah-lot? (aka the king of nefil?) 

who has been threatened with how holies’ souls are irreversibly chemically “used-up” and she is like ‘is that a threat, or a promise?’

lurkfriend

OOOH YEAH

"your soul is yourself and god will blight it"

theres a !! idea there that... the difference between theurgy and holy is sometimes a sort of murky boundary esp. wrt the affects it has on the person-experiencing-it, but i love the idea that... sehhinah-lot's-wife becoming holy and in the process of becoming holy, feeling herself so-intensely, that this is who she is, that she was made for this moment, for this moment of god burning her, that she manifests salt...

coal

!!!!yesssss 

if g-d can involuntarily manifest due to their true name being called, it makes sense that sometimes humans might as well, and ‘moment of seeing g-d’ is truly a moment of intense self-feeling....

lurkfriend

celyet manifested by accident because of intense self-feeling! im surprised canon hasnt mentioned holies as accidentally manifesting during-the-act in light of this

coal

ahhhhhhhhh yes!!!!!!!!

that could also be an additional layer of like.......mystery. like there’s already tamar’s ‘i don’t know all of myself, but i know i’m someone who has seen g-d’ and then for some people it could be also ‘and i know i am [manifestation] becuz i manifested it, but why and how am i that?’

lurkfriend

ooo yeah!!! lot's wife trying ot figure out why she's salt... that's a particularly humorous one 

its also, hm, because depends on whether souls can change at all? if they can-- then for some holies theres a certain question if the manifestation is of a soul that doesnt express itself in quite that way anymore

"my soul was salt but now im burned and im not sure who i am but i have seen god, and i was salt"

[vardasvapors]

What are your top 5 favorite scenes from the Šehhinah series?

1. The prologue of the first book, when Tamar becomes a holy, is my favorite scene in any piece of fiction ever

2. The Celyet-Jibril god convo in the 2nd book

3. Possibly (Probably ?) a scene in the hugely-rewritten 3rd book that’s a major spoiler and also hasn’t been properly written out yet so uh hard to say

4. That fucking Dysfunction Junction teen-movie-childhood-friends subversion bummer letdown scene of Eliya and Tamar bickering on the motorcycle about the ethics of eloping with the big bang to get into magic bdsm

5. Jibril and Ēshva arguing about souls in the (rewritten) 2nd book, ‘yeah no’ retorts Ēshva, to an angel, after hearing a first-hand account about the motivations involved in making the universe

[ivanaskye]

i need to know: which of your characters is most like you, and also, can they be ranked by how hot theu are. (these aren’t related…i just thought of them).

celyet, followed by teśena (coming up in the third book). ...actually, celyet's how I worked out that I was autistic--one of those situations where I wrote someone a lot like me and everyone was like, Ivana, this character is an Autism. (this was back in 2016 with the first version of the book.)

AS FOR HOTNESS.

oh no I think everyone is too "in their early 20s" (or younger!) and Going Through It (various values of it) to be quite. hot. probably the character who fits the concept of hotness best is. god.

actually eshva might be somewhat hot by the end of the book?

yenatru is. very very pretty. but alas that is a different metric.

......jibril? but they definitely don't care about anything even remotely hotness-adjacent. (unlike god, who doesn't care about romance but sure does uh! something pretty hot on the regular!) similar could be said of eliya actually.

...I'm not sure why tamar is not striking me as all that hot? she Could be but

alas celyet does not arise from the hottest of my personal vibes

[lepertamar]

this book is maybe even more uneven than the last (at least in just these first few chapters.) like.......celyet is 🥺🥺🥺🥺 heartsplitting-beautiful a character, the dense and altogether atmospheric effect of being in her mind!!!!! like in the chapter of her being on her horse, and then ohhhhhhhhhh even more the chapter of her in the coffee shop........!!!!!!!!!!! the soft heavy intensity of her needwant-terror of being Known, of being twisted, the panging pain of it...!

but right between those two is the most pointlessly annoying and superficial chapter from her pov possible?? i don’t get it

[ivanaskye]

IVANA SKYE BIBLOGRAPHY MASTERPOST!!

Finally, some information about all my books and series in one place...

Šehhinah:

Šehhinah is a fantasy-with-angels trilogy in a world with near-modern tech, but a different history (and set of continents!) than ours.  It’s about understanding yourself, finding friends, and being a dork.

There are angels running around, and Fallen too.  The magic system, Theurgy, is based on literally manifesting one’s soul into the world, because no one in this series has any chill.  Especially not God, who makes willing people into Their Holy by manifesting Their soul near enough to them to burn their bodies and give them superpowers.  Or Lilith, who lowkey kidnaps abandoned or abused children and manifests her soul near their bodies to make them into demons.

Each of the books takes place primarily in a different city with a different cast, although some of the characters do cross over (especially in the third book.)  For this reason, the second book can probably be read standalone if that’s what you’re down for.

The first book, The Stars that Rise at Dawn, takes place in Ēnnuh, a desert city which is maybe the second-oldest city in the world (but this is debated).  There’s solar panels and motorcycles everywhere, and bookstores host philosophy debates with clickbait-style advertising.

It follows Elīya, a philosophy major who Doesn’t Know When To Stop, and her childhood friend Yenatru, who is Too Gay To Function.  Elīya’s on a quest to get back together with her other childhood friend, Tamar; Yenatru’s just on a quest to have friends, or maybe even a boyfriend.  Thankfully for Yenatru, he runs into Lucifer in the library one day, and strikes up a weirdly good conversation with her.

Yes.  That Lucifer.  He’s surprised about that too.

Anyway, Lucifer’s also pretty much just a dork who wants to have friends, so they’re a good match.  But Elīya might have other plans for them… like trying to rope them into this whole finding-Tamar thing.

“Most people think of you as somewhat dignified,” Yenatru points out. “Someone with pride. Impressive.”

Lucifer clutches a hand to her chest. “Ow, don’t go implying I don’t have pride. I like being prideful! ’S fun.”

“You are attempting and failing to banter with some really shy boy you met in a university library,” Yenatru says, deadpan.

“I did say I was pathetic,” Lucifer says with a smile. “Do you believe me now?”

Yenatru thinks about that for a moment, then nods. “Yes. Yes, I believe you.”

Lucifer’s smile turns harder, almost determined. “Good.”

[GET IT HERE FOR 99cents]

The second book, The Birds that Fly at Dusk, takes place in Ākal-ne, a city at the edge of the steppe near some mountains.  It’s large and spread-out, people mostly roller skate to get everywhere, and each field of study has its own college, which is also a lodge where its students say.  A collodge, if you will.  (Sorry not sorry.)

It follows Celyet, a semiverbal autistic demon originally from near the city who ran off to the city to evade bad social dynamics, which, #relatable.  She manages to run into Sän, another demon who’s been spending their time lately working as a barista and also falling over a lot.  Celyet’s trying to avoid people and doesn’t want to make friends, but there might be some kind of connection between them…

…And then Jibril, the pun-loving angel who never shuts up, walks into that very coffee shop, because they (a terrible coffee fiend) are actually its owner.  That’s why it’s called JiBrew.

And that’s when Celyet accidentally performs Theurgy right in the middle of the coffee shop.

“Hmm, okay,” the angel continues on, “it’s kind of starting to look already like you’re not going to say anything, sigh”—and Celyet, looking down at the bar, finds herself blinking at the fact that the angel Jibril just said the word ‘sigh’ aloud, dramatically, instead of actually sighing—“I mean, I’m kinda used to it, since I’m so overwhelming and frankly gorgeous and all, this kind of thing absolutely happens.  Although I do quite like hearing from other people!  God, that’s always fun.  Oh, yes, that too—I’ll curse by God, when I feel like it.  Of course, I’m an angel, but why not.  I’ll curse by God and fire and flames, the whole thing, it’s a better curse than anything else really, and that disaster probably deserves to be used as a curse anyway.  Still can’t believe They didn’t notice how flaming sad Lucifer was for so long!  A couple of times I even tried to be like, hey God, my man, I mean not really man because You have no idea what a gender is, but my man all the same, have You noticed, there are some flaws in how You’ve set things up.  And They were just kind of like … well, the way They are, They basically only responded by just being fire, you know how it is.  And it’s fun to feel that kind of fire and light everywhere in your body, at least for me …”

Speaking of God, Celyet thinks, God she wonders if Jibril’s ever going to shut up.

[GET IT HERE FOR 4.99]

The third book, The Lives that Argue for Us, is set for a May 4th release date, and is available for preorder.  It introduces the partially-floating tropical city of Askannan, where a subculture of people—the Seafarers—dedicate their lives to traveling around the world and showing people cool art because, again, no one in this series has any chill.

Kjorel is one such Seafarer, and is about to leave for his first voyage after secondary school… which unfortunately means not seeing his datemate, Teśena, for about eight months.  They’re in an open relationship, but have never been put to the test quite like this before.

So while Teśena’s dealing with the loneliness of being almost entirely nonverbal and without aer datemate by befriending God, Kjorel finds himself in Ēnnuh… where he meets a certain adorable boy who hates shorts.

Teśena’s not quite sure how this works, how to think to someone who’s this here with aer, but ae tries, ae imagines almost an opening up of the memory of it all—and somehow this act, this unfurling, itself gently glows.

A thousand wings shift again, eyes made of fire open and close, wheels made of fire turn and turn.  And the fire of God’s wings moves as if closer to aer, almost as if laughing, understanding, something like a mirror wrapped in one of the wheels reflecting.

Teśena has made terrible, impulsive decisions, ae understands.

And God seems to respect that in the way God respects Themself.

[PREORDER HERE]

Evocation:

Evocation is an NA fantasy series with short, novella-length books set in a fantasy world which thinks it knows what’s up.  There’s a very established and easily accessible system of name magic, and easy communication with the low-power Gods known as Vitalities… what more could a society want?

And then a completely different type of magic shows up overnight.

The series follows Nena, a former circus performer who’s already won the world’s equivalent of the Olympics… meaning that now, at eighteen, she has no more life goals left.  Oops.  So she’s getting TF out of dodge, which is to say, out of her hometown, to do… something.  She isn’t really sure what.  It might involve befriending fellow traveler Maráh.  Or it might end up accidentally setting a bunch of things around her on fire with her thoughts…

Meanwhile, Cijaya’s recovering from emotional abuse over in a different city, and is pretty sure that graduating secondary school is the right time to get as far away as possible.  But even waiting two months for that is a challenge, especially when your only friend is the snarky Vitality of a nearby lake.

The second book, currently up for preorder and about to be released on April 3rd, continues these characters’ stories in addition to introducing the fourth major character of the cast: Pelekri, who’s also discovered the new system of magic, and is using it to … be a vigilante solar panel installer.  That’s what anyone would do with magic, right?  Right…?

“You’re not excited,” Maràh said.  “Not really.  Not openly.  No matter what you present on the surface.”

“About this?” I asked, almost smiling, however inappropriate that expression was.  “About Mangtena?”

“About anything,” Maràh said, almost smiling too, perhaps as if they’d caught me in something, as if they’d won, or just as if in the back of their mind they were thinking about really good chocolate.

Well, of course, I could travel.  I could even imagine being excited about that, as I once was.  I hadn’t yet visited every city on Sifir, and perhaps I could.  I could go to every last one, see it all, see everything—

—and, I asked myself, how long would that really take?  A few years?  Sifir wasn’t big; everyone knew that.  But though certain Vitalities had long hinted at a much larger landmass somewhere across the ocean, a continent they called it, the oceans were simply too wide to cross, though many had tried.

My breath caught in my throat and the reason for that catching burned in me: boredom.

[GET THE FIRST BOOK FOR FREE HERE!]

[PREORDER THE SECOND BOOK HERE]

The Size of the World:

The Size of the World is a standalone novella, my first published release, and also the only one of my books available in paperback (which is very pretty.)It’s hyper-poetic in both style and setting, and involves Theia—a character who is much more autistic than I had a clue about at the time when I wrote her—crossing the Seven Seas to find the Darkness past the Seventh Sea.  And, uh, falling completely in love with this girl she meets in the Second Land.

“Theia,” she says, grinning. “That is a good name. It tastes like ivy in my mouth.”

“Who are you?” I ask.

“I am Tellus,” she says, “if you wish.”

“If I wish?”

“Tell me,” she whispers, “have you ever met someone with only one name?”

“Yes,” I say. There is nothing in common between my Kingdom and hers.

“In this Land,” she proclaims, “you never will.”

[GET IT FOR 2.99 HERE!]

[lepertamar]

lurkfriend

absolutely losing my mind at your celyet post because it's actually clarified a very big thing for me wrt theurgy ive been a bit "hm" about why theurgy isnt more common in sehhinah? its obviously not rare, but i had a feeling it's treated as a sort of... something most people don't choose to do? and i've been operating off the logic that it's just a personal thing, like you gotta be some sort of person to want to make a manifestation i never considered that there's an actual process people have to go through to articulate who they are :>

coal

yeah! i mean see eliya......i assume she probably has the most 'normal' process

lurkfriend

admittedly up until now ive been reading eliya as... "the only reason she struggles is because of her personal flaws (difficulty paying attention, just not being very aware of her Self?), but the moment she gets over that it's all fine" but in light of this i think it's more fair to say that what i call eliya's "unawareness of her Self" is just... the normal amount of Self awareness people have?

coal

i think it is true! most people have very little self awareness as far as i can tell

i am Very highly self aware compared to most people, idk if that's because i'm crazy or just another outraging wrinkle in the fact people consider me incapable of self awareness whenever they hear i'm crazy lol

if anything i'd say eliya is a tiny bit more self-aware than average. enough that tamar's choice to become a holy actually haunts her.

but not enough for her to have any inkling of 'this was a huge deal, it's a big thing and implies something Huge and Deep about the interiority of this person i thought i knew' until later  

i think most people are capable of self-awareness but most people don't actually.......do any of it until jolted into it

tamar didn't until she saw a holy!

but i think lots of struggles, or forms of marginalization, especially ones related to mental stuff or gender stuff, can provide this jolt irl (but not in sehhinah cuz sehhinah is very accommodating but frictionless utopia)

lurkfriend

you learn something new every day... i have genuinely been assuming everyone is as self-aware as i am (just, as you say, not really using it), but i assumed it was like. just how people are? 

 ooft yeah i feel :/ & honestly that makes sense? our self awareness has been getting a really good deal of exercise by our crazy in particular. 

i guess thats another problem wrt sehhinah's utopia setting -- it's a bit harder to find experiences that challenge your most fundamental beliefs in such a way that you're kind of forced to become more self aware

coal

yeah!!! like i've been thinking its utopia is kind of the opposite of star trek's. like: sehhinah doesn't do sometimes dumb or disastrous struggles and debates over bigotries and bad ideas and oppressions that usually do get to a solution. stable it also doesn't have a high numbered human cost measured in death and misery the way star trek does. i think very few people die or have their lives ruined due to oppressions and wars and evil! and generational trauma is so minimal! but they also are fairly....stagnant. so few challenges to push them into anything. 

also of course i think..........there are people who are naturally self-aware.....but aren't truthful to themself so they pass up this opportunity. and there are people who are jolted into self-awareness.....but aren't truthful to themself so they pass up this opportunity. 

and i guess that is yet another reason why tamar struck me so hard -- she wasn't naturally more self-aware than average, but when jolted into it, she was sincere to herself. she would not lie to herself.

lurkfriend

yeah... of course there can be little troubles too (yairen!!) but it feels like... because a lot already has some sort of solution, there's less possibility for innovation. 

tamar is very Big because there is no "solution" to her - your friend isn't who you thought she was, you're horrified because of, idfk, your internal prejudices? ergo you're forced to confront yourself and change and stuff. it's not something very surface level and easy, such as a lack of communication that can be solved by someone mediating a discussion. it's something that requires a bit more uprooting 

and yeah!! the amount of people who twist themselves into a pretzel irl because they don't want to accept something about themselves...

coal

yess.....she is such an open ended problem

ur mention about prejudices.....it seems like some of the issue IS actually that eliya didn’t think of becoming a holy as horrifying....because she didn’t think of it as being a big deal at all. so she had no idea why tamar ran away over it. ‘come on, i obviously wouldn’t hate u for this totally ok thing, it’s just kind of interesting so u should have shared it with us cuz u promised.’ 

the society going from ‘it’s degenerate and offensive!’ to ‘it’s perfectly normal and just whatever’ which is much less harmful but....actually a bit less truthful?

lurkfriend

o damn i read it the completely other way, like "i obviously wouldnt hate you because you're my friend, even though this is absolutely weird [derogatory]", but i like your reading too because the "flattening" of everything into "ok" tracks very well 

minor tangent; i do also like the parallel wrt the "flattening" to how in irl, dominant systems tend to kind of "incorporate" stuff thats disrupting into them to make them not disruptive? e.g. whats happening with nonbinary (trying to become a 3rd gender or man/woman-lite, to get rid of the destabilising force that nonbinary/genderqueer/gnc could be), arguably whats happened with marxism/socialism/other "radical" leftist positions, etc etc. 

it takes away any of the threat/power, and usually comes along with a bettering of circumstances overall because the dominant position has to shift a little to incorporate the "threat", but it also detooths the threat and doesn't address the systemic problems (so then a new paradigm needs to be invented that tries to address those problems, and the cycle starts anew?)

coal

yeah there is enough ambiguity....but LOL right what a comparison. sehhinah’s system genuinely doesn’t have nearly the amount or badness of problems that irl has but it does contribute to people’s like, confusion/alienation based misery, eliya/yenatru/celyet

hmmm sehhinah as like a desert ecosystem, where things are very sparse and stable but occasionally there is a Huge Flood and Everything Flowers Wildly

lurkfriend

celyet as the river that brings water to the desert lands but yeah!! people having to reconsider their entire metaphysics in a way.... delicious

i would guess....the cause of the great distress to celyet.....so i related extremely to this distress because i had/(still somewhat have) a similar distress about misinterpretation, i guess i was thinking about the like process over time of understanding theurgy. like the theurgist usually has to progress from not-understanding-themself to understanding-themself-more to articulating that understanding in the form of a manifestation. and usually these theurgists will know that if someone else encounters the theurgist’s manifestation, the person will have to go through some sort of process to understand it too and sort of accept ‘understanding your manifestation wrongly’ as temporally part of the experience of ‘understanding your manifestation’.

but celyet has a deep distress about the idea of anyone interpreting her manifestation wrongly even as part of the process of understanding it, i think partially because for her, there wasn’t really a process......her self-understanding-as-river is basically just one single combined step. and the book describes it all better yet it all really comes down to........:

..........at the moment of self-understanding (or more like, AS her self-understanding), celyet it seems could have invented the concept of a river if rivers didn’t already exist.

and she thinks she is normal! at least she thinks that her soul is normal. but she is not normal.....she does not think/feel about Self the way most more-normal people think/feel about Self.

the fact she is cut off from even knowing she is different, let alone why she is different, until late in the book is due to a gap in her world’s societal capacity to hypothesize the idea of her, while also not actually suppressing or hiding anything, which ironically (though of course not at all surprising to me!) makes this capacity even more out of reach? taboos (including taboos that claim x does not exist) only spring up if x is a tangible and threatening presence that very much exists! taboos against infidelity would not exist if no one had thought of cheating yet, taboos against disrespecting elders wouldn’t exist it no one ever disrespected elders, etc. (in monotheistic religions, taboos on other gods would not exist if no one had considered that any other gods could exist.) so there’s no taboos here, people haven’t espoused a celyet theory of self to keep secret even if they wanted to. (and would they even want to? honestly maybe not necessarily....except what of the premise of the covenant?)

but that gap probably has also blotted out the framework for articulating many other concepts too.....