#especially if you picture the cosmic will of the universe just combing through all of existence

[feifiefofum]

sozin’s comet- avatar state was not just a deus ex machina

well, on the surface, it kinda was. but there’s an important line by ozai that elevates it beyond deus ex machina that nobody seems to appreciate.

‘after generations of fire lords failed to find you, now the universe delivers you to me as an act of providence.’-ozai (being a dumb bitch(still love you joker/luke skywalker))

you know how you’re not supposed to tempt fate? there are traditions from all cultures around the world that have you not ‘jinx’ your own damn self before any performance. even today, stage performers tell each other to ‘break a leg’ ie wishing/predicting a bad outcome so said outcome doesn’t happen.

and what does ozai do? he pretty much taunts the universe, aka providence, aka the cosmic will of said universe, with a offhanded remark about how facing the avatar was a favor the universe bestowed upon him.

which ties in nicely to what i hate the most about certain religiously slanted superiority complex types. and that’s the presumption that you know exactly what the big person upstairs is doing in any meaningful way. the sheer arrogance that drips from that is hubris that is just begging to be brought low in such an ironic way that it’d be painful to watch if it weren’t so justly deserved.

and what happens in his epic showdown? because of ozai’s bloodthirsty, violent beatdown on a kid barely in his teens, ozai pushes the avatar into a precisely pointed rock that reconnects said avatar to the cosmic flow of the universe, aka the avatar state.

this elevates the return of the avatar state above deus ex machina to a douglas adams bit where the narrator stares directly into the audiences’ eyes to deadpan ‘and nothing went this idiot’s way because he’s dumb’.

yeah avatar state aang beating up on ozai was a beautifully rendered, jaw droppingly choreographed fight, but people seem to miss that it’s fucking hilarious. ozai literally disrespected the fucking universe, and the universe said ‘bet’ and took ozai out by having him be the instrument to spell his own doom.

y’know how we have a saying about how a pebble couldn’t change the course a river? well, the universe said i could with change the course of this fight with this specific protrusion in a rock formation. and it did.

[butterfly-winx]

Can you tells us about aspects? What does medimagic say about them, are they developed or are u born with them? Can they change over time or with impactfil events? How do more conceptual aspects work? How much can u stretch the definition of your aspect and how do people figure out what the actual definition of their aspect is?

1. Aspects are named so because they describe the Aspect of the Universe a person is most attached to, so that the magic they express primarily comes through the aspect as an outlet.

2. What medimagic has to say about aspects is purely on the genetics basis, in that we know aspect affinity can be inherited to some extent. Powerful magic users will sire children of similar aspects. Within a realm itself, aspects usually follow some natural or cultural inclination.

But here is where it gets very nature vs nurture. Because you could adopt a Zenithian child born of the common gene pool onto say Lynphea, and the child would more likely than not adopt a nature based aspect over a conceptual one, simply because of how it has been raised, because of how close the Lynphean way of life is linked to respecting nature. As aspects and magic in general develop with the conscious mind, though genes certainly do have an inarguable impact, it is the culture and its values that surround the child in their most important developmental stage that shape the picture of their soul so to speak and determine what Aspect of the Universe they forge an especially deep connection to. 

3. Aspects are known to change following maturation or profusely impactful events in one’s life. This also covers all sorts of trauma that influence one’s ability to connect with the Flow. (I wrote about Musa’s magic disappearing briefly when her mother died while she worked through the grief). Aspects can’t change from the ground up, as they are once again tied to the conscious mind. So as a person can’t fundamentally change from the ground up, but mature and change as a response to stress and trauma, so can their aspect meld and change forms over time.

In most cases this means a shift in the specific micro-expressions of an aspect. Eg say Layla was more prone to phase manipulation and water telekinesis before, the Tritannus drama in her family changed her and now she is more attuned to intermolecular physics of water and uses morphix more for binding and healing instead of object creation.

Or it could be more drastic, like Griffin whose aspect was seismology prior to being taught aspect transcending magic by the Ancestresses and in the wake of her desertion of the witchcraft masters her aspect completely shifted to blood and bone (aka somatic medimagic, but not quite), reflecting both the work she was doing for the Ancestresses and her shift in personality. In her case this would have taken a decade to truly manifest and she was taught aspect transcending magic to begin with that made it more possible.

5. They figure it out by very long trial and error. As I said in the discovering magic in children post, you can tell what someone’s baseline aspect direction is. Magic using elders in the community then draw educated guesses based on recorded aspects of the child’s family and the surrounding community. The child then grows, undergoes formal magic training and the definition gets tightened. It is not the purpose of the aspect definition to limit the child, and there is certainly no need to stretch it, because a definition itself should be tailored to the individual and only noted down on record formally when the magic user person is certain that the description fits. 

(However it is the case that knowing a cardinal aspect direction early on in formal education can influence teachers to shoehorn their students into boxes a bit, therefore sometimes limiting the natural magic expression of a child into a pre-discovered category. In these cases, only those people who really actively use their magic notice the mismatch later in life and re-register with a better definition.)

4. Conceptual aspects are incredibly broad and though rarely ever express themselves with as strongly combative application as elemental based aspects, are thought to be the overall more powerful one of the two. Concepts are only limited by how a society, or person, defines them, so they can be argued about a lot. It is also often occurring that two people record the same concept as their aspect, but use it in completely different ways, which rarely ever happens with elemental aspects. Their definitions are extremely tight and tailored to the person. Conceptual aspects are, like a feeling you know? You can never attach a very definitive description to them as they might mean something different for everyone experiencing it.

They are also prone to change much more readily than elemental aspects. I wrote a mini rant about how I believe Techna’s aspect of technology extends over all human discovered methods of “technology”, not just electronics. Put into a society whose height of technology is different from theirs, Techna could absorb that knowledge for the duration of their stay and use it. Their spells in this case would be different, adapted to the new knowledge base. So yes, conceptual aspects can be “stretched” much more. Think of concpetuals as the humanities and elementals as the sciences.

-

Bonus: some of the Winx’s aspect categories:

Stella: Elemental - Cosmic bodies - Fairy of Shining objects related to planets

Musa: Abstract  - Man-made concepts - Sounds - Fairy of Harmonic Music (Sound as a category exists in the elemental category as well, but music itself is a man-made thing)

Layla: Elemental - Water - Movement association - Tidal forces - Fairy of the molecular bond holding tension in the water forming waves

Icy: Elemental - Water - Phase association - Solid - Witch of Ice structures

Flora: Elemental - Nature - Land association - Flora - Fairy of growth of plant matter

Roxy: Elemental - Nature - Land association - Fauna - Fairy of land-dwelling animals (To compare users under the same cardinal aspect)

Plus I put down Techna under Abstract - Man made-trades at first, but now I’m no longer sure if technology truly counts as a trade or is a concept instead.

[oculusius]

Desk Jockey

“I want that report on my desk at 6 AM tomorrow or your ass is on the street.”

I look up from my keyboard, from the sickeningly modern, blank desk to the even worse face of my branch manager. Picture what you’d expect the person saying this to look like, and you’re probably right. Tall, dark hair combed back, slicked back with just enough gel to not be disgusting. Attractive, but only conventionally, because it hides his fetid interior. The rotten, wriggling insides of the kind of guy who relishes other’s misery, especially when he’s snorting high grade blow on the weekends. Though he’d probably prefer orphan’s tears (But that’s a story for another time).

I’ll do my best, you fucking cretin.

I mumble out some garbled excuse. I won’t even tell you what I said because I forget, or rather, it was so insignificant that I never committed it to memory in the first place. “Sorry Eric,” (He’s one of the ‘hip’ bosses that makes us call him by his first name), “Won’t happen again”, Please don’t take my healthcare away I will literally suck your dick to keep it. He shakes his head and walks away. We’re the last ones in the office, one of the tallest buildings in our shitty, Midwestern town; all glass and steel like some gaudy San Francisco startup. The only lights still on are in the lobby; besides that the only other illumination is from the sickeningly crisp glow emanating from my monitor. As soon as the elevator doors close behind Eric, I grasp my hair in my hands; it’s drenched in sweat and I’m balding already, despite being in my late twenties. Flakes of dandruff are appearing on my scalp, but by the time I get home from work I’m too damn tired to remember to get that special shampoo. Stress related? Probably. Did I have time to fix it? Fuck no.

I swear to God you motherfucker I’ll name you when I eat a fucking bullet you shit fuck…

Stop. The more rational voice in my head. Finish this shit in the next—5 hours? Shit, it’s already 1 AM! I’ll smash bottles and get proper wasted when I’m finished. And when the following day is over, seeing as I’d probably be pulling an all-nighter. Fuck. I take two caffeine pills from the nondescript tin in my top drawer.

Alright. I need to get the excel sheet from that old email inbox the intern left when he quit (not that I blame him). To do that, I need to go through my inbox and find that time I CC’ed him about scheduling that conference call. But to get into my inbox, I need to reset my password because company policy is to change passwords every 3 weeks, and it can’t be a past password…

Alright. One step at a time.

 It’s two hours later. I found the file, finally. I feel like I crossed the fucking Rubicon with no limbs to get here. Now, to get the shit I need from it and send it to Eric. I hope he chokes on it. While bleeding. From every orifice, and then some. I open the file, and I’ve never been so goddamn happy to see the sickening green of excel. Document recovery—what’s that? Fuck it, I’ll deal with it later. I ctrl f the account name. Beads of sweat are dripping off my forehead. Outside, it’s still the vaguely pinkish black of night in any big city. I might actually get some sleep tonight…

WHY IS THERE A FUCKING HYPERLINK HERE?

Oh boy, this better not cost me my job. I get sent to a greyish webpage, the kind of soulless portal that screams ‘high finance’. A nondescript login page for “Kleene-Rosser Accounts Management LLC”. I roll my eyes. Management occasionally threw us these shitty platforms because their friends from way back developed them, and they wanted to help them out. Because God forbid we use Citibank.

There’s no login, but there’s a support number on the bottom of the page. Maybe if I call, they can help me? It’s worth a shot. I mean, I had nothing but time, and if it actually worked and saved my job, I would fly all the way to India or some shit to kiss that phone technician on the lips. Alright. God, when I was an undergrad did I ever imagine this would be my waking life (or lack thereof?) I should’ve joined the military. Better to be blown up overseas then mentally scarred over here.

4-887-612-393: 24/7 Live Support

I call from my office phone, in the hopes that it’ll lend credence to the claim that I fucking need this login. The phone rings for what seems like half an hour, but I can tell from the clock on the wall that it hasn’t been a single, godforsaken minute. Maybe I’d died and gone to purgatory? Seemed believable enough—although, I wasn’t sure what I’d done in a past life to deserve this. Maybe I was a Mongol slavedriver, and…

“Hello, this is ZenDesk, my name is Robert. How may I help you today?” My crisis of existential spiraling instantly, mercifully, shatters. I put on a cheery voice.

“Hi, I work at [company name]. I really need to find something for my boss, and in this accounts payable excel file, it says that I’m supposed to login to a ‘Kleene-Rosser Accounts Management?’ I have all my company info if you need it, I was just never told we used this firm before.”

A beat passes. I hope he heard the desperation in my voice, because if I had a guardian angel, it’d be on the other end of that phone line. Why did I tell him I never heard of this place? He doesn’t care! He isn’t paid to care!

“Of course, sir. Just a moment please. What’s your name sir?”

That thin veneer of politeness again.

“Uh, Keith Sanders. I also have my company email, if you can send the password there…”

“OK sir, what’s the address?”

I spell it out for him. My fingers are digging into the faux-leather of the chair. I’m starting to sweat. If this doesn’t work, I’m fucking hosed…

I tell him the address, and soon I have the URL to reset the Kleene-Rosser password. Surprisingly, my company email works for the username. Lucky guess I suppose? I thank him, truly from the bottom of my heart, and wait for the page to load.

According to the web page, the site was some kind of file storage service. Besides a few nondescript tabs on the top leading to “Home”, “Support”, etc. there’s nothing but a grey background set behind a very basic file directory.

[company_name]/Accounts/Accounts_Payable/2019/May/.

There it is! So deceptively close. 05.19.19.xcl

When I try to open it, I hear the most awful of noises: the Windows 10 error sound, impossibly loud. File corrupted. WHAT THE FUCK? HOW DO YOU CORRUPT A FUCKING EXCEL FILE? SHOVE IT UP YOUR ASS SIDEWAYS?

I dig my fingertips into my temples. I can feel the faint outline of an engorged vein on the side of my head. I imagine it, an angry, vibrant purple, the shooting representation of my immense, earth-shattering frustration.

It was as if every cog in the infernal machine that was my work place was designed specifically to drive me fucking bananas. Like my life was some cosmic joke to see how much I would endure before going postal, or at least smashing my monitor. Jump out an office window, strapped with speakers blaring “FUCK THIS PLACE” over and over again, even when they’re scraping me off the pavement with a comically large spatula. Every little thing piled atop one another to form the worst shit tsunami eternally suspended above my head. Every wriggling, squealing fucking cell in my brain…

Alright, let’s think of solutions. Eric wanted the file, and if it was corrupted, I’d just tell him the truth: that it’s how I found it. Man, why did I drive myself up the wall earlier? So stupid… I log into my email. Actually, I don’t. As soon as I hit enter in the URL bar, I get that fucking google “no internet” error dinosaur. At this point, I try to keep rolling with the punches. Alright, network diagnostics, here we go. After what feels like centuries, after windows resets the router, etc. I finally get an answer. Sort of. An error code. I had two hours left before I was unemployed. I take another caffeine pill and keep going, determined to see this shit through to the end.

Hidden on the fifth page of the search results is my answer. It’s on an obscure, early 2000s web forum that had a grand total of 2 users online, probably bots. A post from a literal decade ago has my same issue, and one of the commenters mentions he had the same thing. Apparently, it’s a hardware issue with the router. Despite being woefully underqualified to deal with IT issues, I have no other choice. No fucking way Eric will believe that the internet cut out 2 hours before my deadline. I find the tech support number, and pray that the information is up to date and that they won’t have to send a technician out to fix it.

As the phone rings, I ponder my situation. I was unlucky enough to find what I needed right as the Wi-Fi died, and it was probably one of those issues that fixes itself in an hour anyway. There it is again; I can almost see the shadowy gears of the universe working against me, trying to crush my psyche beneath their teeth into bits of mental scrap. When I finally get a response, I’m caught off guard. This guy seems American. His voice is a bit hoarse, and I picture him as the fat comic book guy from the Simpsons, gut and all.

“----- tech support. How can I help you?”

I don’t like the way his voice trails off every word, leaving a breathy wisp behind like the tail of a comet. It makes me want to shudder.

“Yeah, uh—“

My mind blanks for a minute. I’ve been derailed, and it takes an agonizing few seconds for me to decide what I want to say.

“I was trying to email my boss, and—“again with the unnecessary details “I got this error code, and I saw online that it was an issue with the router.”

“Uh huh.” He sounds skeptical. And disapproving. I imagine he’s wrinkled that gob of cartilage clinging to his face he calls a nose. “What’s the model number?” He finally asks.

I read off the name, and he laughs. He fucking laughs. Is my suffering amusing him? Arousing him?

I have a clearer image of this guy now. Pervading my mind, filling the gaps in my brain, covering my synaptic gaps with fucking cement. He’s grossly overweight, in some dark room somewhere. He smells like BO and he is sweaty milky beads off his forehead that are landing into his keyboard and congealing. The scent is odious, like a corpse coated in mayonnaise and left in a tomb for five millennia, except it’s still wet.

“Sir?” That subtle tone of annoyance again. “Do you understand me, sir?”

“Uh, yeah, sorry. Would you mind repeating that? I was just—talking to someone.” Idiot he can tell you weren’t.

I write down his instructions, but first he pontificates about some issue with a chip in the router or some shit. Apparently I have to call the manufacturer? And they can help me dust it off or some such?

He’s fleshy and sickeningly soft, like a malformed, hairless puppy. That shirt’s been pasted to his damp stomach longer than you’ve been on Earth. It’s just a crude impersonation of the kind of people that run this industry. And you’re just his plaything, to be antagonized and fucked with until…

As soon as my attention is re-centered, I say “Alright thanks bye” without even knowing what he was rambling about before. He laughs. No, cackles. I can practically smell the stale coffee and tobacco on his breath. I slam the receiver down. It was starting to stick to my face with sweat and I really wanted to switch to my cell anyway. Peeling it away was orgasmic.

I examine the napkin I had scribbled on. I’d written it down in a haze, and it almost felt like I was reading someone else’s handwriting. Was that a 5, or a 6, or what? Doesn’t matter. I plug in the numbers, to some obscure fucking company I know nothing about. There’s like 12 digits, not like any number I’ve ever dialed. Unbeknownst to me, I was about to make the worst fucking mistake of my life, worse than taking on that debt to go to college or that time I puked on grandma’s casket at the funeral. Light years away, I imagine, some metaphysical blade was eagerly, sexually, preparing to scoop out my insides and flay them across time and space, flicking its imaginary tongue back and forth in anticipation.

I had expected that infuriating error code, but instead, I feel it. All of it. The other side is cold, and every hair on my body stands right on edge.

“Hello?”

The phone’s definitely connected.

“Hello?!”

This time it seems to echo. I’d opened a door, a beaming ray of light into a place that hasn’t been graced by it in eons.

“Is this Infolink appliances?” I gulp suddenly. My throat is impossibly dry. Everything that made me me, my identity, my memories, my interests… were spilling out into space, into an impossible void far blacker than even the darkest of nights. Please. Like my brain was a plastic bag full of air, but now it’s been punctured. It’s getting sucked out like a breached spaceship, and my body is curling around the now torturous void. I am a husk.

I drop the phone on the ground, and the screen cracks. But I’m far beyond caring about that screen now. The spiritual, inky black is billowing out of the phone like an endless wave going out in every direction. And there’s something else. A raucous laughter, and sneering, they’re laughing so hard somewhere backstage that their mouths, or whatever they call those fucking gullets, are overflowing with sickening white foam with streaks of yellow bile. Dark silhouettes that have been eagerly waiting this whole time for this horrible climax. I’d played my part. Everything else was out of my hands now.

[acehotel]

A Trip to the Sun Ra archives on the occasion of his 104th birthday, as recounted by Eric Isaacson of Mississippi Records

Eric Isaacson, owner of Portland’s singular Mississippi Records, and Libby Werbel, curator of Portland Museum of Modern Art, traveled to Chicago last month to check out the Sun Ra archives, housed at the University of Chicago’s Regenstein Library. Libby is currently curating a show at Portland Art Museum dedicated to Sun Ra, opening later this year. Here, Eric reports on their pilgrimage to Chicago for the week of what would have been Sun Ra’s 104th birthday, plus the genesis of his love for Saturn’s favorite son. 

Before I get into a narrative about me and Libby's trip to Chicago, please indulge me as I write a digressive personal anecdote about the kismet that first led me to Sun Ra.

In the early 1990s, I was traveling through the USA in a van seeing the country for the very first time. In Phoenix, Arizona, I stumbled into a really bad record store, filled with over priced Beatles, Eagles and Rolling Stones collectables. The man behind the counter obviously considered himself a great music scholar and psychedelic warrior of the 60s.  On the floor, beneath a record rack, I found a box filled with strange homemade looking records. The covers were all hand painted and had titles like The Other Side Of The Sun, Disco 3000, Cosmic Tones For Mental Therapy, My Brother the Wind and so on. I had never even heard of the artist they were all attributed to — Sun Ra. 

Intrigued by the covers, I asked the record store clerk how much they cost and he said, "Aw, those records all sound like a bunch of noise... and they don't even have real covers, just those hand painted junky lookin' ones. You can have them for $2 each."  Something about the vibe of the record store clerk was so awful and the records seemed to be emanating the exact opposite vibe — so they called to me. The clerk’s contempt for them really did help their cause in my eyes. I was broke, but I bought the whole box.

This began my life long love of Sun Ra.

I used to be the manager of a record store in Oakland called Saturn Records (named after Sun Ra's record label), and now I run a record store and label in Portland, Oregon called Mississippi Records. Our retail shop always has at least 50 different Sun Ra titles in stock. Obsessive? You betcha. Libby Werbel runs an art gallery out of the basement of the record store called "The Portland Museum Of Modern Art." When she first started scheming on what she wanted to show at her gallery, a Sun Ra related show was at the top of the list. Through her world class work at PMOMA, she was recently invited to be visiting artistic director at the actual Portland Art Museum, curating 18 months worth of programing in their contemporary art wing under the theme of "building our own monuments." Who deserves monuments more than Sun Ra, the hardest working man in show business?

This led us to Chicago. The Sun Ra archive is held within the marvelous brutalist architectural library at the University of Chicago, within 150 boxes of varying size. Alton Abrahams, who ran Sun Ra's label Saturn with him and managed the band, donated all the materials to the University’s special Jazz Archive for safe keeping. We requested to spend 3 days combing through the archive, selecting the ephemera and artifacts we’d borrow for a full-on Sun Ra retrospective show at the Portland Art Museum. It was a great joy. The University doesn’t allow public documentation of the treasures in their archive (Editor’s note: the images herein were all swiped from the web), but trust me, it’s a mindblower, especially all the amazing posters of Chicago shows — Sun Ra with Alice Coltrane, Albert Ayler, the MC5 and on and on.

Sun Ra claimed that in 1938, a bright light appeared around him, and, as he says, "My whole body changed into something else. I could see through myself. And I went up... I wasn't in human form... I landed on a planet that I identified as Saturn... they teleported me and I was down on a stage with them. They wanted to talk with me. They had one little antenna on each ear. A little antenna over each eye. They talked to me. They told me to stop attending college because there was going to be great trouble in schools... the world was going into complete chaos... I would speak through music, and the world would listen. That's what they told me."

By the time he arrived in Chicago in 1945, Sun Ra was deeply immersed in the study of music, and the city was the perfect incubator for his unique vision. Despite Sun Ra's personal attempts to obscure his own origins and journey — he loved to be cloaked in mystery and intrigue — the story of Sun Ra since his landing in Chicago has been covered widely and well. His was a nuanced vision, and the picture posthumously constructed by the cold light of archivists and historians would not have been to interesting to him.

Like the man said:

"If death is the absence of life/then death's death is life"

After the cut: some stray observations we had in Chicago during the downtime between our long dredges through the fantastic 150 boxes of Sun Ra's historic artifacts. 

+ We arrived in Chicago off a red eye flight, bleary eyed and near psychedelic from the lack of sleep. Our dear friend Gordon, who happens to work at the Stumptown Coffee situated in the lobby of the Ace Hotel, picked us up at 6 AM and quickly corrected our condition with some cold brew.

+ Truth be told, I am first and foremost a food tourist and the legends of Chicago's 78 neighborhoods of ethnic food offerings was beyond exciting. Gordon was kind enough to lay down a beautiful list of must visit restaurants, some of them within walking distance of Ace. Two blocks away was a tiny Japanese restaurant called Ramen Takeya, which we had to visit twice due to a near religious experience we had while eating a salmon chirashi bowl with crunchy onion bits. We also ate incredible Naples-style pizza, which they cut with scissors to whatever size your heart desires, so you can get away with trying six pies in one sitting. A trip to Chinatown landed us at a perfect no nonsense dim sum place, and then there was the Greek deli that served a spinach pie as big as two fists of fury.

+ We managed to do some non-food related things too — like take a great stroll to the Garden of the Phoenix, a small island park across from the Museum of Science and Industry, replete with its own charming Japanese garden on the water an a surprise sculpture by none other than Yoko Ono. 

+ We went and drank martinis at Al Capone’s old haunt called the Green Mill Cocktail lounge and at in the dark smoke crusted dive in what we were told was his favorite booth. 

+ On our last day we made our pilgrimage to the MCA to catch the Howardena Pindell retrospective which managed to move Libby to tears. Her dedication and political conviction was exactly what both of us needed to see. 

+ Since we had some more time to kill before our evening flight out, we made our way to the Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art and upon arrival felt like we hit pay dirt! This place was amazing! Libby waxed poetic about the long history of Chicago and the surrounding areas radical community of self-taught artists and we got to see some of our favorites displayed unassumingly in all their glory. They had everyone: Lee Godie, Eugene Von Bruenchenhein, Simon Sparrow, Mose Tolliver and Jimmy Lee Sudduth (to name a few) and a full-on recreation of Henry Darger’s apartment, which immediately creeped us both out. It was a perfect treat to the end of our trip, and solidified our belief that Chicago is a city filled to the brim with things to discover. We can’t wait to come back.

[starsailorstories]

The Major Goddesses of the Sweet Chariot Universe

Well, at least the Andromedan corner of the universe.

The most common family of religions among Astraea species is known as Cosmonism/the Cosmonist faiths. They’re inspired by ancient observations of the universe, its governing forces, and what happens to actual suns/stars--which the starlike astraeas understandably conflate with themselves--over their life cycles. 

In prehistoric times before interplanetary space travel became common each world had her own religion, often centered around nature as it was perceived in that particular solar system. But as more astraeas returned to the vacuum--genetically, their ancestral home--they began to both blend their traditions and deify broader forces that affected the galaxy on the whole.

At some point a VERY long time ago, some rando–they call her the unknown scholar, but her anonymity just kind of drives home that she didn’t have any specific credentials for doing this (although really, what kind of prophet does)–gathered up sacred poetic texts from the 16 Holy Worlds where planet-based society was supposedly created, translated them into the common proto-space-latin, and in the translation sorted all the local deities mentioned into the service of the three governing forces. So Altamai’s mother goddess of daybreak, for instance, became an incarnation/guise of Orellistia because she controlled heavenly bodies, and the storm goddess honored on the inner rings of the gas planet Shali became a guise of Levinoxia because she represented a chaotic/entropic force.

The collection of poems is the text they all refer to as the Holy Poets (so called bc they come from the Holy Worlds, not necessarily because they themselves constituted religious figures, although they do for some people), which forms a core for a lot of their view of morality and the world, though it also has just…stories, not all of which have an obvious religious lesson, many of which are probably allegories, a lot of which are love stories. Like every sacred text anywhere, there are about ten billion million different interpretations of it. I’ll discuss several of them in later posts, but most have the reverence of three overarching cosmic forces, their metaphorical implications for daily life, and their correspondent deities at their center.

This post will be LONG, but it has art! 

Cunaderia is the goddess of the Origin (the big bang), birth and beginnings, time, and fate, born from the nova of the Dead Goddess (who is implied to be a form of Levinoxia and/or Orellistia, although it may not always have been such) at the moment of the big bang. She is always depicted as a young child, usually seated on a cushion in a shallow basin floating in vast blankness outside time and space and reading a scroll that bears the Story of Time. The echoes of her long recitation can be heard in the cosmic microwave background.

Although she is not the designer of most things within the universe, she is the creator of the universe itself, and holds the singularity from which the next big bang will issue on the tip of her finger. Her recitation of the Story sustains the continued expansion of the universe and therefore the procession of history. Because of all this she is considered the most awe-inspiring and ineffable figure in the whole Cosmonist pantheon, and it’s considered improper to speak her name aloud in an unconsecrated space. Most refer to her with euphemistic nicknames like “The Child” and “The Little One.” People will sometimes say “the Little One stammered” to describe a moment so charged time seemed to stand still.

Unlike Orellistia and Levinoxia, Cunaderia is generally remembered and worshipped on a regular schedule rather than receiving prayers and offerings on an as-needed basis. The perception, for  the most part, is that everything she controls is already decided, and she can’t be swayed by loyalty or hospitality. It is considered right to thank her for unexpected twists of good fortune, though, and there’s an adorable tradition of leaving handmade dolls and toys at her shrines and temples as tokens of gratitude for good luck, since she’s dogmatically considered to be like five years old.

(The five years old thing figures into a lot of irreverent humor, by the way. Every time you have a day where you’re like “this might as well happen,” they say, remember that the whole pageant of history is just a story made up by a kindergartner at the end of the day.)

Her guardianship over fate gives Cunaderia charge over who will rule each of the Holy Systems, and she’s usually depicted holding or surrounded by seven stars, representing the lives of future queens to one day be incarnated at her discretion. The same seven stars have been a symbol of the peace between the systems for many hundreds of turns, but at the time of the story, all seven mark the diadem of the Empress and the seal of the Hyperian dynasty.

For this image of her I tried to get as close to her “official” Destigravitationist representation as I could. The shell she’s sitting on forms the shape of the Sun Lily, which is a traditional motif in depictions of the goddesses because of its associations with sanctity and power, although not coincidentally it’s also the symbol of the Aula. Her clothing is a style of dress--inspired by the armor worn by an ancient, now-extinct order of warrior priestesses from the Altamaian arctic circle--worn for occasions of Altamaian, and therefore Basilean, national pride. She also wears the round hair comb associated with schoolgirls in the Atya-Jenya system (where the Basillan homeworlds and the Rings are) in general, though hers is made of royal white-gold rather than the usual cloth and cardboard.

In addition to the familiar and the patriotic motifs Cunaderia’s icons usually incorporate a number of symbols of time and fate. Behind her is a star-dial, a device held/placed at the horizon to show the time and date based on the positions of specific reference stars which are close and bright enough to be distinct from the light of the dome. Around her hand is a fortune-teller’s coin (I need to make a post about Andromedan divination soon!). The colors she wears are also significant: for Astraeas, blue is the color of youth, the ephemeral, and innocence, while red is the color of wisdom as well as of death and therefore destiny. Her light is also blue--because blue stars tend to burn brighter and not live as long, a blue light is a symbol of a kind of tragic eternal innocence--a spirit too pure for the material world.

Orellistia is the goddess of Gravity, the force which orders the stars. It follows from that that she is also the goddess of all matter, which gravity forms into stars, planets, and galaxies; as well as of light (a consequence of this pull), order, inspiration and creative activities of all kinds from construction to motherhood, prosperity, love (attraction and loyalty, at least among stars, are both functions of gravitation), marriage, family and the home. “Home” can mean everything from “household” to “home planet” of course, so she also has superintendence over all national/state/planetary protector deities. Until fairly recently the ruling classes have stopped short of actually claiming she protects the empire on the whole, but that’s a line the Hyperian dynasty have been more than willing to cross.

Gravity is an incredibly important concept in astraea cultures, to the point where it’s usually capitalized and spoken of as not only a natural law, but a moral and devotional one as well. The most extreme view of it holds that every single physical thing in the universe--people included--is organized into a perfect hierarchy by a series of literal or metaphorical orbits. The galaxy turns around the dome, within which Sol Atya, Sol Jenya, Sol Minerva, and Sol Suraya move around the gravitational center of their system (once believed to be, and still honored symbolically as, the dwelling place of Orellistia herself); the four suns are attended by their planets, who are attended by their moons and satellites, who are attended by their queens and ruling councils, who are attended by the royal family, who are attended by the nobility, and so on down the chain all the way to lux laborers and the dishonored poor.

Of course, while Orellistia is often seen in the mainstream as maintaining the status quo, her depiction in the holy poems is a little less convenient. Most often, she’s portrayed as a stereotypical artist, trying things out and gradually molding the universe towards perfection with a careful balance of gentle nurturing and sometimes ruthless erasure. Love and war are equal products of her instigation, and both are simply mediums through which she executes her grand vision. In her more ancient portrayals she shares many traits with some of the solar demigoddesses (who, most historians agree, were once worshipped as goddesses themselves despite being much more flawed and down-to-earth than the current Big Three)--she’s warm and personal and rather human, prone to frustration and jealousy and even insecurity. The many syncretic devotional paths centered around her--particularly in the antedome and farther afield--definitely have more in common with this version.

Titles used for Orellistia include variants on Mother of Gravity, (Nebula) Genetris, Creatrix Regina, Flower of the Cosmos, Mother of a Thousand Suns, Core of the People, Map-Drawer (particularly when she is taken up as a war deity), and Galaxy-Weaver (especially popular with the massive antedome textile industry). Often people will pray or sing to her and leave gifts at her shrines before undertaking an endeavor--either to ensure inspiration or success, whichever one they’re more concerned about. She’s usually pictured wearing gold, salmon and pink--the colors most associated with stellar nurseries on the galactic scale, sunrise on the planetary scale, and the mini-nebula in the womb of every Mother on the family scale; colors associated with nurturing, creation and new life--if not actually dressed in and made of nebular clouds. It’s also common to portray the central dome of Andromeda (or at least all the important bits) either symbolically or literally in her hair as if they formed there and are now in her orbit (this picture went for symbolically). Other depictions give her distaffs and embroidery hoops, architects’ tools, paint brushes, and other implements of Creation (it honestly usually depends on where you plan to hang the picture).

Her light is usually portrayed as bright white, sometimes with a blue tint. White lights are associated with the full energy of young parenthood and the prime of life.

Levinoxia is the goddess of the Vacuum and Orellistia’s wife, although the Basilean religious establishment has done everything in their power to downplay that. She is the goddess of uncharted, dark space and of antimatter, and as such the goddess of darkness, night, the unknown/exploration/the pursuit of knowledge, the pursuit of truth, truth itself, entropy, magic, change, and travel in general, as well as being the protectress of the dead (although Orellistia is said to choose who will live and die).

She travels the cosmos, broadening the borders of its beings’ understanding, maintaining a long-distance relationship until the wife’s art block gets bad enough that she needs her to come home and keep an eye on things while she does an epic studio cleanup and then takes a nap, which ultimately results in the heat death of the universe and, once they’ve spent the night together and Levinoxia has showed her wife all the new ideas and perspectives she’s gathered up, a new big bang.

Her roles as a protector of sailors and travelers and as a guide in the pursuit of truth are usually signified in icons by having her holding navigational tools (astrolabes, star maps) and ships’ lanterns. The lantern in particular represents the ability of wisdom, observation, and critical thinking to cut through the obscuring veils of rhetoric and misinformation.

Just as Orellistia’s mythical character is a warts-and-all picture of the creative process, so Levinoxia’s is a picture of the pursuit of the truth in all its confusing, depressing, endlessly fractal murkiness. She’s heavily associated with vagary and nondistinction (the practice of Levinoxian modesty is intended to be a reminder of these very things) and stories involving her generally teach that the truth is so complicated that a mortal mind is lucky to even get close. The gentle dialectical practice she exemplifies, however, results in a very compassionate and peaceful demeanor, and those who study her as a discipline tend to think of her as an unconditional comforter and a loving guardian, albeit mischievous (but only to keep you on your toes and learning, like a sensei in an old martial arts film).

Because of the radical realism she represents, however, she lends herself to morally ambiguous interpretations and is frequently misunderstood. The Destigravitational Ecclesia in particular have been on a campaign to paint her as a destructive trickster figure and more Orellistia’s opposite than her counterbalance. Around the time the old rebellion was really getting off the ground, the Aula outlawed worship of Levinoxia entirely in response to several vestal orders coming forward to call them out on their habitual twisting of the facts. Despite this, many vestals and devotees still practice her rituals, particularly those which petition for the safety of sailors and the peaceful reincarnation of the dead. It’s very bad luck to say prayers or wear symbols associated with Gravity in space (the reasoning for this varies--the fundies say it’s because Levinoxia can’t abide the suggestion of order in her domain, the cynics usually say “lol she’s a sailor, don’t remind her that she’s got a girl back home,” the romantics say being reminded of her wife simply causes her such a pique of longing and loneliness that she forgets to do her job and will leave the ship unprotected) so for superstitious spacefarers Levinoxia is THE goddess; many of them know no other beyond a name.

Levinoxia is often depicted as older than her wife (she is, if the creation story is to be believed) or as having a young face but an age-reddened light. Although she is the most passive of the goddesses, she is also considered the wisest.