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viridiave · 5 months ago

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forced myself into a state where i can actually indulge in 8path for exactly a day and I'll probably fuck back right into the void after this. but hey. hey. if you have octopath 2.

play the update. play the update, it's like god - we were meant to love and fear it

my full notes (live reaction reenactment) on the update under the cut, SPOILERS AHEAD!

NOBLE TEAM

IT'S FUCKING REAL

I STILL CAN'T FUCKING BELIEVE IT'S REAL

HHHUH

THEIR SPRITES ARE LOWER RES BUT IT'S NOT STOPPING THEM

WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU MEAN THEY HAVE COMBO MOVES

WHAT

WHAT IN THE MOTHER OF FUCKING GOD IS THIS

FUCK EVERY POLL YOU'VE EVER SEEN ABOUT THE ORSTERRA CREW VS SOLISTIA CREW AIN'T NOBODY IS FUCKING SAFE

THEY CAN BOOST??????? HELLO???? FUCKING EXCUSE ME?????

god fucking of course Olberic has motherfucking BOLSTER DEFENSE

OPHILIA??? COUNTERS???? ELEMENTAL AND FUCKING PHYSICAL??? SINCE WHEN

OPHILIA AND ALFYN TAG-TEAM FUAOSJAKSAKSKA THEY HAVE MOTHERFUCKIGN COMBO MOVES????

OH MY GOD TRESSA AND OLBERIC TOO

MY ASS IS DEAD IT'S SO DEAD

NO OF COURSE HOLY SHIT OF FUCKING COURSE TRESSA ALSO HAS MOTHERFUCKING HIRED HELP AKJKAS

ophilia's buff rotation is interesting. i can't tell if she's going right-side down or if she's actively prioritizing certain members

WAIT THEY HAVE NEW VOICE LINES

HOLY FUCK????

i NEED to see the battle AI. show me the specs Square Enix I fucking beg you.

ALFYN'S CONCOCTS ARE SO MEAN OH MY GOD

CASTTI CAN DO FIVE AT ONCE BUT IT DOESN'T FUCKING MATTER TO ALFYN

why did i try and face them with Noble Team members too

well okay i guess. i guess we'd just be straight-up dead if i didn't have castti teme and partitio here jesus Hikari's carrying damage

too bad i never use him as DPS

TRESSA

TRESSA NO WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU MEAN YOU INCREASE DEFENSE WHEN YOU GET BROKEN

TRESSA WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU MEAN YOU'LL BUY MY FUCKING WEAPONS

WHA

WAIT YOU DIDN'T EVEN GIVE ME MONEY FOR IT I HAVE TO BUY IT BACK FROM YOU

Therion was a bad influence on her lmao

AND OLBERIC'S NOT WEAK TO STAVES RIP

WHY IS TRESSA WEAK TO STAVES

my ass is so fucking cooked

THEY HAVE FUCKING JOB CHANGES?????

OH MY GOD SCHOLAR OPHILIA IS CANON

THEY HAVE NEW MOVES I'M DEAD I'M SO FUCKING DEADDDDD

WAIT

HOLD THE FUCKING PHONE

HUNTER ALFYN

I FEEL UNREASONABLY FUCKINGVALIDATED AKSJAKSAKSKAS

oh god what are Tressa and Olberic

hOLD UP ALFYN AND HIS ARROWS WAHAHAHAHAHA WHAT THE HELLLLL

oh.

oh my god.

w. warmaster olberic

wARMASTER OLBERIC IS REAL

….NOOOOOOOO I'M SO FUCKING DEAD WARMASTER OLBERIC IS REAL IT'S OVER IT'S SO OVER I'M DEADDDDD TO HIMMMMM

sidenote: i'm writing all of this after the fact, trying VERY hard to recreate my real-time reactions. and uh. this. this made me get up from my fucking chair and scream into a pillow so loud people thought i was getting anal

I didn't

oh. wait. if. if he's real.

and Tressa's on the field.

there she is. the motherfucker herself.

RUNELORD FUCKING TRESSA

I WAS DEAD BEFORE NOW I'M IN MOTHERFUCKING SUPER HELL. THERE WAS NEVER A CHANCE

NO OH GOD HERE IT COMES TRANSFER FUCKING RUNE

WE'RE PAYING FOR OUR HUBIRS WITH BLOOD AND THE SCREAMS OF THE DAMNED

…WAIT HOLY SHIT ALFYN AND OPHILIA ARE IN THE RED

THERE'S A CHANCE

THERE'S A CHANCEEE

HIKARI'S POPPING THE FUCK OFF

oh my god of course Brand's Blade is a 1 hit KO move

i'm scared. i don't want him to wreak havoc on me i need to keep fucking breaking him -

ALFYN'S DOWN

HE WAS THE MOST DANGEROUS ONE THAT'S GOOD

OPHILIA DOWWWWWNNNNNN

ALRIGHT JUST. TIME FOR THE 2 GOD MODE TRAVELERS I GUESS

god it'd be so mean if i saved Olberic for last. but he put that on himself he has motherfucking Physical Prowess as a passive

oh no Temenos is the only thing that can kill him huh.

OF COURSE HE GOES FOR THE FUCKING MAGE EVERY TIME

WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU MEAN THE RUNES BYPASS SIDESTEP???? THEY'RE ELEMENTAL NOW????

H E L L

OH SHIT TRESSA'S IN THE RED THERE'S A FUCKING CHANCE

TRESSA'S DOWN

alright 4 travelers at full health with sidestep and defense buffs out the ass. we'll be good we'll be good we can weather olberic. thank you Prayer for Plenty

THIS FEELS MEAN I REGRET IT NOW LMAO

THAT DIDN'T KILL HIM

oh no his full buffs

WAIT NO HIRED HELP BEASTLINGS. JUST ONE MORE

FUCK YEEEEE

what

wha wha what the fuck wai

w-wait

H H U H

OPHILIA YOU WERE DEAD HOW THE FUCK DID YOU REVIVE EVERYONE WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK?????

WAS THAT JUST PHASE 1???

NOOOOO WE'RE SO DEAD

oh wait they're changing back

…oh no. they're more dangerous like this somehow

WAIT

WHAT'S HAPPENING HUH

WHY DID HE CHALLENGE HIKARI WHAT

WAIT WHY IS IT ONLY THEM

HOW LONG DOES THIS FUCKING LAST FOR?????

they're just in a cycle of countering and evading jesus

oh ok that answers tha -

TRESSA

TRESSA WHAT THE F U C K

TRESSA GIVE ME MY FUCKING MONEY BACK WHAT THE FUCK??? WHAT THE FUCK

HIRED HELP BEASTLINGS WAS THE ONLY WAY I COULD BREAK THEM THAT'S SO MEAN

oh my god i'm dead

TRESSA WHAT THE FUCKA SKAJSAKS SHE CALLED OVER THE FUCKING??? ROGUE CREW??? HOW

WHAT

WHY

WAIT

WAIT SHIT I'M JUST DEAD

…i need to lie down

ROGUE TEAM

okay rogue crew what do you have for me

i'm so scared oh my god

GOD

WAIT

THERION YOU SON OF A BITCH GIVE ME BACK MY ITEMS

THEY HAVE INCIDENTAL ATTACK???? FUCK OFFFFF

LINDE'S HERE

…OH FUCK LINDE'S HERE

WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU MEAN CYRUS CAN LOCK HIS FUCKING WEAKNESSES

god of course he's DPS in this fight. cyrus is just. too much man

of course Cyrus is weak to Swords. and Daggers apparently

WAIT WHAT

PRIMROSE???

FUCKING HELL

WELL OK PRIMROSE SAID HAPPY PRIDE MONTH SHE JUST ALLURED THRONE

O WAIT POG PRIMROSE AND THERION COMBO

OH THERE IT IS CYRUS AND H'AAN COMBO!!!

…WHY ARE THEY BOTH SO BUSTED

did

did Cyrus just. give me a weakness.

what

what the fuck

AY YO WHAT THE FUCK

yeah ok i'm dead.

i'll. i'll try again later i need to see how Noble Team plays out till the end

ALRIGHT WE'RE BACK IN THERE WHAT DO YOU HAVE FOR ME ROGUE CREW

FUCK I FORGOT THIS WAS THE FIGHT WHERE CASTTI'S USELESS

oh my god they're cooking. i feel so unsafe. Therion is even more of a little bitch than usual

ALRIGHT GOD GUESS I'LL FUCK MYSELF WE'RE DEAD IKE 5 MINUTES IN LMAOOOO

MOTHERFUCKER I FORGOT H'AANIT HAS FUCKING PATIENCE

you know what Temenos doesn't need. Salt the Wound. why the hell did I put that on him

HOW LONG DOES ALLURE LAST FOR JESUS

oh my god Ochette. Ochette's Beastly Claws are NASTY damage woah. I need to make her do that more often

WELL ALRIGHT CYRUS IF YOU'RE GONNA BE A BITCH LIKE THAT

i wonder if they had to get chris niosi back for this role or if they just. had all these extra voice lines lying around

still not over the sprite quality being so drastically different lmao

hired help Beastlings save me. save me Hired Help Beastlings

O-OH. OH NOOO…

DAMN WHY CAN'T I HAVE THIS MUCH LUCK WITH BEWILDERING GRACE???

sidestep is saving my ass right now

I love that Primrose keeps piling her buffs onto H'aanit Square Enix said happy pride

HUH

MERCHANT THERION IS REAL LMAO

…OH NO DIVINE WIND

HE JUST STOLE OUR FUCKING LICENSES AKSJAS FUCK YOU THERION

AH THERE HE IS AKSJASK SORCEROR CYRUS - WAIT WE WERE ACTUALLY INTIMIDATED BY THIS STEPHEN STRANGE LOOKING TWINK LMAO

UNFORTUNATE

STARSEER PRIMROSE OF COURSEEEEE

AND THERE'S WARRIOR H'AAN JUST TO ROUND IT OUT

GANG'S ALL HERE SQUARE ENIX HAS SPOKEN

i could say i'm surviving but. the reality is that all 11 of my plums are GONE

alright Grail of Life don't fail me now

GOD OF COURSE SHE'D TARGET PARTITIO WHO HAS THE FUCKING DIFFUSE

alright time to stall

AAAAA THERION'S DOWN THANK FUCK

AIGHT SEE YA PRIM

CYRUS DOWN. STAY DOWN.

H'AAN LEFT ALRIGHT COME AND FUCK ME UP PHASE 3

what

what the fuck

i get ophilia and the aelfric thing but what the fuck happened here

NO FUCKING WAY THERION JUST STOLE OUR EX MOVES

GODDAMNIT TEMENOS IS USELESS NOW

GODDAMNIT TEMENOS IS EVEN MORE USELESS NOW AKSJA PRIMROSE STOP TAKING HIM

oh my god what do you mean H'aanit can also Provoke all

LINDE PHYSICAL PURSUIT I'M IN HELL

and Cyrus has. delayed attacks.

…good thing i never lasted long enough to figure out if that thing 1-hit KOs JESUS

#octopath traveler #octopath traveler 2 #vir rambles about octopath yet again #this time unfiltered #no i'm never fixing these #i'm soooo not tagging everyone lmao #ot2 spoilers #octopath spoilers #crazy update right #G O D #i never touched the last one i could care less about the last one i'm SORRY AKSJAS #alright time to disappear again bye bye #if anyone's curious HELL NAH I didn't manage to beat them lmao do i look like a gamer

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auncyen · 1 year ago

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spoilers for Throne's story and Journey to Dawn

The journal pages at the flame in Crackridge are quite the mess, scattered every which way and quite a few marked on one edge with blood. The vision Partitio and Osvald receive as they rekindle the Sacred Flame explains it after Osvald recalls some conversation he overheard in town: Ori stabbed herself, but subconsciously, she must have moved the dagger toward where she carried her journal on her. She’d still injured herself, both the vision and the blood left behind make that quite clear, and it’d been enough to douse the flame (perhaps the massacre of the Kal people all those years ago counted as credit toward future evils), but the journal taking the brunt of the force let her live.

Partitio’s still a little shaken that his plucky acquaintance was not so plucky after all, nearly dead at her own hand and wanting the world to end, and Agnea and Ochette try to comfort him as the other five travelers scour the ruins for every journal page and piece together what information they can. They find roughly fifty pages. About half of them have the kind of information you’d expect in a scrivener’s journal, even if the tone of the entries is much moodier than they would have expected beforehand; the other half has hints of a conspiracy’s workings. Though there is a scrap that shows Partitio’s philanthropy as a merchant gave Ori some hope, and Temenos passes that piece onto the man with a quiet “You may want to read this”. Then he picks up another scrap, scans it for any key words–and goodness, ‘Lostseed’, ‘Claude’, ‘D’arqest’, and ‘Vide’ practically jump from the paper to seize him–and then his mind stutters on a section.

‘With the blood of D’arqest and Vide within his veins, Claude’s fate was to become the dark god’s vessel. And yet, he rejected this destiny and instead chose to pass that honor on to his offspring.’

Throné is one of his offspring.

‘The man sired countless children with countless women and set his progeny at each other’s throats–to the bloody victor goes the ultimate spoils.’

Throné was the ‘victor’ of that hellish competition, his wretched idea of a ‘self-tending’ garden.

Throné is…a vessel for the dark god Vide?

“What did you find, Temenos?” Castti asks.

“Nothing,” he says. “Nothing at all.” He makes a show of dropping the paper to the ground, carefully eyeing where it lands. “The darkness is getting to me, I think.”

This gets sympathetic noises all around. It’s been night for what, given how far they’ve traveled, should have been about three full days. Fire still provides some comfort. Holy light even more, when Temenos has had the spare energy to use it outside battle. But everyone is craving the sun’s return. The only one who hasn’t complained about it is Throné. She does miss the sun, doesn’t she?

He retrieves the scrap when no one is looking. He needs to think about this. He needs to tease out the implications.

#octopath traveler 2 #throne anguis #temenos mistral #octopath traveler 2 spoilers

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beantothemax · 1 year ago

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Ok so idk if you've seen Kiwi's recent posts but this is a variation of the Oops all Claudelettes! au. So Castti is a Lumina and Claude wants to date her specifically because a mixture of D'arqest and Lumina blood is useful for one true magic research, according to Harvey. So Castti is with him for a while (doesn't have kids with him) and eventually leaves him before joining the other travelers and moving on. Then before journey for the dawn (but after everyone's stories) then Castti and Partitio are married and it's one of those days where Castti wakes up without any memories. Except. She remembers Claude and thinks they're still together so she has this miserable ass morning trying to find Claude while Partitio is just trying to calm her down and figure out why tf she doesn't know her own name but is begging to see Claude. Also this is the first time she's woken up without memories so Partitio doesn't know what to do. Some days go by and she still hasn't gotten her memories back so Partitio writes to Throné and Temenos in case they could help but they can't really and Castti just says stuff like "wow you two look so much like Claude! Are you his siblings or smth??" and they're just so so sad being forced to think about him again because they want to help their friend. After a few more days then Castti's memories start coming back and she self isolates cause she feels so disgusted by everything she did and said while fully convinced Claude was alive and dating her. This happens a few more times (luckily Partitio now knows how to help) and only stops after journey for the dawn bc then everything evil and D'arqest related has finally been put to rest

I SEE WHY YOU WARNED ME AHEAD OF TIME. GAH

THE STUFF ABOUT CASTTI SOMETIMES WAKING UP WITHOUT HER MEMORIES COMBINED WITH HER BEING WITH CLAUDE JUST MAKES THIS. ABSOLUTE CAULDRON OF ANGST.

TEMENKS AND THRONÉ BEING FORCED TO REMEMBER CLAUDE AGAIN IF THEU WANT TO HELP CASTTI………. CASTTI ISOLATING HERSELF AGAIN!!!!!!!! BECAUSE SHE’S UPSET AT HERSELF FOR EVERYTHING SHE DID!!!!!!!!!! THROWING MYSELF AGAINST A WALL!!!!!

#asks #pie-knight #oops! all claudelets au

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dyzzythedemon · 2 years ago

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My thoughts so far on Octopath Traveler 2, a game I've been binging for 3 days straight:

Overall, it's an improvement in every way.

In the original's story(not that I'm done with all the stories in the sequel yet,) there wasn't really anything tying the characters together. They all had separate paths, and the "travel banter" was laughable at best. That stays true in this game, apart from the addition of Side Quests, where two of the 8 will pair for a sort of mini-joint story, and though there are only four thus far, I really wish there were more. I like seeing our protags interact.

The battle mechanics are improved as well, adding a new fun gauge for super moves, and individual weapon sprites, which as McBeanss pointed out, is very well done. I do feel the difficulty spike is exhausting once you get to the level 45-55 range, as nearly everything will OHKO you immediately if you're not careful. For this reason I have Throne AND Ochette(multiclassed into thief) in my party, and I suggest others do the same.

As for jobs, it's strange to me that shrines no longer give you jobs, as now you'll have to hunt NPCs down for "Job Lisences", but it's not too big an issue for me. I like that there are new secret jobs, though am a bit confused as to why they're so hidden. The inventor in particular is easy to find, hard to actually get skills for, as it requires you to search for random items in the world to progress the class. Haven't gotten any others yet.

This game thrives in it's new,(better, in my opinion,) characters, it's soundtrack, and it's ability to show real growth since OT1. I sincerely hope we get a third entry in this franchise, and I hope beyond all hope for 3 that they will WEAVE PEOPLE'S STORIES INTO EACH OTHER. I cannot stress enough how they can come up with really great individual character arcs, but all the side convos amount to is "can I touch your tail."

As for the characters themselves, I started with Ochette and thank god. she doesn't talk like jar jar binks. I love her sincerely, massive improvement for the Hunter rep. I like that you gain monsters along her route that don't leave you, as well. Temenos has to be my favorite, given that he's a WELL-WRITTEN CLERIC??? He's snarky. He's a bastard. He's hyperintelligent. He can go into the Sacred Flame Shadow Realm and Investigate your ass without even going into the building. He's written like a danganronpa trickster wasn't stuck in a franchise written by Kodaka and GOD it shows. Can't gush enough about Temenos.

For the other two whose stories I've... actually played(I'm playing this in halves.), Throne's story was a TRIP, and legit as uncomfortable as I think it was meant to be, and I haven't finished Osvald's yet, but I've done chapter 4 and it's shaping up to be something truly terrifying in the final entry.

I like Partitio, but I wish the acquisition of a ship wasn't A. locked behind a paywall and B. Locked behind him. As for the guy himself, he's great! has to be one of my favorite voices so far(except temenos, obviously.). Hikari is shaping up to have HUGE ramifications later down the line, which I'm excited for. Agnea... I'm gonna be real, she's adorable, but I don't really see what she adds? I'm sure hers will be the spiritual successor to Tressa OT1's route; sweet as sugar and spice and... pretty low on stakes, but who knows! they could easily subvert my expectaions. And as for Cassti, she's gay! I hope she finds her girlfriend soon, and I like that you can find her in another town simply labeled "Apothecary" in Partitio's route. really helps make the game feel like home.

But yeah, this game has been quite a ride. Can't wait to see how it ends! A few stories seem to be lining up lore-wise, like how Temenos' deity and the inciting force behind Ochette's story is the same; a large blue flame. I'm crossing my fingers for a big final boss including everyone once all 8 stories have been completed, but I'm not holding my breath, seeing as how the octopath devs don't really want to write ONE story, as opposed to eight(or more, if you count side missions.) I respect the style but the characters are too good not to use together. Solid 9/10 game for me so far. Idk WHAT'S up with that boy in Gravell though.

#octopath 2 #octopath traveler #ot1 #ot2 #octopath #square enix #gaming #game review #games #nintendo #switch

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riverdamien · 2 months ago

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30th Anniversary Blog!

30th Anniversary-Temenos Catholic Worker

October, 2024

3 For I passed on to you as of first importance[c] what I also received—that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures, 4 and that he was buried, and that he was raised[d] on the third day according to the scriptures, 5 and that he appeared to Cephas,[e] then to the twelve. 6 Then he appeared to more than 500 of the brothers and sisters[f] at one time, most of whom are still alive,[g] though some have fallen asleep.[h] 7 Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. 8 Last of all, as though to one born at the wrong time,[i] he appeared to me also” I Corinthians 15:3-8) (Net Bible.

------

On October 4, 1994, on Polk Street, run-down, lined with gay bars, at which young men hustled, as I had five years before in L.A., sex workers, looking to sell their bodies for money to survive.

Moving in the day before, and working as a counselor in Marin that day I walked down the street, and asked two young guys, "You hungry, you want some piazza?" And I took them into Victor’s Pizzeria and Italian Restaurant, and as Dorothy Day once said, "I began by simply listening! For thirty years, I have continued to do so!

This all began on a starry night in the hills of the Ozark around a church campfire, when I was 12, and during the final hymn, my heart was "strangely warmed", and I was called to ministry I never looked back, from that moment on, I followed Jesus, to feed his lambs! Even when I fall God brings me back, my life is following the Crucified One.

Through these years I have come to see there are many ways to God, and the words of Pope Francis, with some words added by me, are true:

"All religions are paths to reach God. They are—

to make a comparison—like different languages, different dialects,

to get there. But God is God for everyone.

If you start to fight saying 'my religion is more important than yours,

mine is true and yours isn't', where will this lead us?

There is only one God, and each of us has

a language to arrive at God.

Some are Sheik, Muslim, Hindu, Christians (LGBTQ+;) they are different ways to God."

All life is sacred, and each of us has the right to decide how our bodies are to be used; I believe each of us has the Divine Spark within us and is entitled to food, housing, and medical care.

Throughout the state of California, cities are now taking advantage of recent court rulings and are now breaking up campsites, and forcing people out of their cities.

The painful reality is people without housing are being treated as if they are nobodies, with no rights; cities are even passing laws to limit low-income people from existing within the city limits.

I hear the cries of suffering from people without housing, and I hear the ancient cries of the Hebrews in Egypt.

Dorthy Day once called our government, "A dirty rotten system", and she never cast a ballot. How right her words continue to be!

This morning as I read of the treatment of the unhoused across the state, I cried, and I vomited!

As I raised my head I heard Jesus, saying to each one of us:

31 “When[a] the Son of Man comes in his glory and all the angels with him, then he will sit on his glorious throne. 32 All[b] the nations will be assembled before him, and he will separate people one from another like a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. 33 He[c] will put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left. 34 Then the king will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who my Father blesses, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. 35 For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, 36 I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.’ 37 Then the righteous will answer him,[d] ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? 38 When[e] did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or naked and clothe you? 39 When[f] did we see you sick or in prison and visit you?’ 40 And the king will answer them,[g] ‘I tell you the truth,[h] just as you did it for one of the least of these brothers or sisters[i] of mine, you did it for me.’

41 “Then he will say[j] to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you accursed, into the eternal fire that has been prepared for the devil and his angels! 42 For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink. 43 I was a stranger and you did not receive me as a guest, naked and you did not clothe me, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.’ 44 Then they too will answer,[k] ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not give you whatever you needed?’ 45 Then he will answer them,[l] ‘I tell you the truth,[m] just as you did not do it for one of the least of these, you did not do it for me.’ 46 And these will depart into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.”[n]

And I pledge my solemn vow to do my best to follow Jesus feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, comforting the lonely, visiting those in prison, preaching, and reminding people that we are part of a kaleidoscope of colors, a rainbow of colors, all equal and welcome in God's eyes! There is a Divine Spark within each one of us, cultivate, and develop it until the reign of God grows to its fullest on earth! Deo Gratias! Thanks be to God!

=============================

30th Anniversary Celebration

Temenos Catholic Worker

Saturday, November 9, 2024

6:00 p.m.

Victor’s Pizzeria and Italian Restaurant

1411 Polk Street

San Francisco, California

“Preach the Gospel at all times, use words if necessary!”

St. Francis of Assisi

=============================

May the work of

“figuring people out”

Never replace the work of knowing people

And loving people

And giving them room

To confound

And inspire

And surprise me

---------------------------------------------------------

30th Anniversary Celebration

Victor’s Pizza

6 p.m.

November 9, 2024

WE ARE BEGGARS! WE REALLY NEED MONEY--Really Badly At the moment!

FOR FOOD, SOCKS, HARM REDUCTION AND OTHER SERVICES!

P.O. Box 642656

415-305-2124

[email protected]

pay pal

www.temenos.org

(Temenos and Dr. River seek to remain accessible to everyone. We do not endorse particular causes, political parties, or candidates, or take part in public controversies, whether religious, political or social--Our pastoral ministry is to everyone!

Temenos Catholic Worker

P.O. Box 642656

San Francisco, CA 94164

Dr. River Damien Carlos Sims, D.Min, D.S.T.

#homeless #spirituality #povertyy #youth #homelessness

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larnax · 1 year ago

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Path actions ranked by how much they would ruin my day from least to most

bribe. i don't have to do anything and i get money out of it. 5000L for the location of one healing grape not so bad

inquire. well i don't get any money but it's still not that bad, also i get to talk to castti

scrutinize. well i don't get any money and if someone was save scumming so i had to stop for 20 minutes while osvald failed dice rolls to pry my spicy food preferences out of me i would be pretty annoyed but again i don't have to do anything and a successful scrutinize is just an inquire but i get to talk to osvald

purchase. i only have to sell the things i want to and i get money out of it. idk why you're trying to purchase my wallet for more than the money in my wallet but-- aw what cute puppy dog eyes, a little discount just for you my man-- wait

entreat. well at least she's cute

soothe. hey i get to save one night's worth of sleep meds hey wait a second. where did the contents of the three gold chests that take up my entire house go...

steal. losing my wallet and my singular grape leaf sucks but nobody in solistia seems to have more than like one olive's worth of cash on them at any given time

ambush. throné might be an expert but like he is knocking me unconscious and the icon implies hes using a knife. also all my stuff is gone

provoke. to be perfectly honest with you i think this one would probably ruin my week. ive never actually been attacked by 5 consecutive shadow remnants but it seems like it would hurt.

challenge. again i feel like having brand's thunder unleashed on me would suck. slightly more annoying than provoke because if he wins hikari also steals my finishing move, which, like, cmon. im townsperson #54, please dont copy my triple stab, its all i have.

mug. metatextually the fact that you dont lose reputation for this apparently means people dont have a problem with it but idk man. i would still personally rather you just stole from me instead of hitting me with triple-boosted peacock-strut elemental barrage and THEN taking all my shit

coerce. i would actually rather have the shit beaten out of me and my precious singular grape leaf stolen than have temenos force me to play a stupid minigame where he uses his empath powers to force me to give a false confession. can i fucking go home

hire. you might disagree with this being so high but even if he pays me 2000L once i do not want to be dragged around all of solistia and forced to participate in battles, again i am random townsperson #54. why am i fighting the deep one. mr partitio sir what is that large machine mr roque is piloting and why are you pointing at me and then it and saying "go get em tiger". however at least i do get paid once

befriend. sure i would love to be buddies with ochette and eat her delicious cooking but again ms ochette my 9 to 5 is standing in front of the item shop even if i get to stand behind you i still dont want to fight glacis.

allure. well at least shes cute and i get to dance???

guide. 0/10 he kidnapped me into following him because "the flame said so" dragged me around the entire continent for 80 ingame hours forced me to commit like ten human rights violations and took me to racism village. i didnt even get a tshirt

#c.paradisi #octoposting

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magzoso-tech · 5 years ago

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Thought Machine nabs $83M for a cloud-based platform that powers banking services

New Post has been published on https://magzoso.com/tech/thought-machine-nabs-83m-for-a-cloud-based-platform-that-powers-banking-services/

Thought Machine nabs $83M for a cloud-based platform that powers banking services

The world of consumer banking has seen a massive shift in the last ten years. Gone are the days where you could open an account, take out a loan, or discuss changing the terms of your banking only by visiting a physical branch. Now, you can do all this and more with a few quick taps on your phone screen — a shift that has accelerated with customers expecting and demanding even faster and more responsive banking services.

As one mark of that switch, today a startup called Thought Machine, which has built cloud-based technology that powers this new generation of services on behalf of both old and new banks, is announcing some significant funding — $83 million — a Series B that the company plans to use to continue investing in its platform and growing its customer base.

To date, Thought Machine’s customers are primarily in Europe and Asia — they include large, legacy outfits like Standard Chartered, Lloyds Banking Group, and Sweden’s SEB through to “challenger” (AKA neo-) banks like Atom Bank. Some of this financing will go towards boosting the startup’s activities in the US, including opening an office in the country later this year and moving ahead with commercial deals.

The funding is being led by Draper Esprit, with participation also from existing investors Lloyds Banking Group, IQ Capital, Backed and Playfair.

Thought Machine, which started in 2014 and now employs 300, is not disclosing its valuation but Paul Taylor, the CEO and founder, noted that the market cap is currently “increasing healthily.” In its last round, according to PitchBook estimates, the company was valued at around $143 million, which at this stage of funding puts this latest round potentially in the range of between $220 million and $320 million.

Thought Machine is not yet profitable, mainly because it is in growth mode, said Taylor. Of note, the startup has been through one major bankruptcy restructuring, although it appears that this was mainly for organisational purposes: all assets, employees and customers from one business controlled by Taylor were acquired by another.

Thought Machine’s primary product and technology is called VaultOS, a platform that contains a range of banking services — they include current/checking accounts; savings accounts; loans; credit cards and mortgages — that Thought Machine does not sell directly to consumers, but sells by way of a B2B2C model.

The services are provisioned by way of smart contracts, which allows Thought Machine and its banking customers to personalise, vary and segment the terms for each bank — and potentially for each customer of the bank.

It’s a little odd to think that there is an active market for banking services that are not built and owned by the banks themselves. After all, aren’t these the core of what banks are supposed to do?

But one way to think about it is in the context of eating out. Restaurants’ kitchens will often make in-house what they sell and serve. But in some cases, when it makes sense, even the best places will buy in (and subsequently sell) food that was crafted elsewhere. For example, a restaurant will re-sell cheese or charcuterie, and the wine is likely to come from somewhere else, too.

The same is the case for banks, whose “Crown Jewels” are in fact not the mechanics of their banking services, but their customer service, their customer lists, and their deposits. Better banking services (which may not have been built “in-house”) are key to growing these other three.

“There are all sorts of banks, and they are all trying to find niches,” said Taylor. Indeed, the startup is not the only one chasing that business. Others include Mambu, Temenos and Italy’s Edera.

In the case of the legacy banks that work with the startup, the idea is that these behemoths can migrate into the next generation of consumer banking services and banking infrastructure by cherry-picking services from the VaultOS platform.

“Banks have not kept up and are marooned on their own tech, and as each year goes by, it comes more problematic,” noted Taylor.

In the case of neobanks, Thought Machine’s pitch is that it has already built the rails to run a banking service, so a startup — “new challengers like Monzo and Revolut that are creating quite a lot of disruption in the market” (and are growing very quickly as a result) — can integrate into these to get off the ground more quickly and handle scaling with less complexity (and lower costs).

It’s not the only company providing a platform for banking services that are in turn

Taylor was new to fintech when he founded Thought Machine, but he has a notable track record in the world of tech that you could argue played a big role in his subsequent foray into banking.

Formerly an academic specialising in linguistics and engineering, his first startup, Rhetorical Systems, commercialised some of his early speech-to-text research and was later sold to Nuance in 2004.

His second entrepreneurial effort, Phonetic Arts, was another speech startup, aimed at tech that could be used in gaming interactions. In 2010, Google approached the startup to see if it wanted to work on a new speech-to-text service it was building. It ended up acquiring Phonetic Arts, and Taylor took on the role of building and launching Google Now, with that voice tech eventually making its way to Google Maps, accessibility services, the Google Assistant and other places where you speech-based interaction makes an appearance in Google products.

While he was working for years in the field, the step changes that really accelerated voice recognition and speech technology, Taylor said, were the rapid increases in computing power and data networks that “took us over the edge” in terms of what a machine could do, specifically in the cloud.

And those are the same forces, in fact, that led to consumers being able to run our banking services from smartphone apps, and for us to want and expect more personalised services overall. Taylor’s move into building and offering a platform-based service to address the need for multiple third-party banking services follows from that, and also is the natural heir to the platform model you could argue Google and other tech companies have perfected over the years.

Draper Esprit has to date built up a strong portfolio of fintech startups that includes Revolut, N26, TransferWise and Freetrade. Thought Machine’s platform approach is an obvious complement to that list. (Taylor did not disclose if any of those companies are already customers of Thought Machine’s, but if they are not, this investment could be a good way of building inroads.)

“We are delighted to be partnering with Thought Machine in this phase of their growth,” said Vinoth Jayakumar, Investment Director, Draper Esprit, in a statement. “Our investments in Revolut and N26 demonstrate how banking is undergoing a once in a generation transformation in the technology it uses and the benefit it confers to the customers of the bank. We continue to invest in our thesis of the technology layer that forms the backbone of banking. Thought Machine stands out by way of the strength of its engineering capability, and is unique in being the only company in the banking technology space that has developed a platform capable of hosting and migrating international Tier 1 banks. This allows innovative banks to expand beyond digital retail propositions to being able to run every function and type of financial transaction in the cloud.”

“We first backed Thought Machine at seed stage in 2016 and have seen it grow from a startup to a 300-person strong global scaleup with a global customer base and potential to become one of the most valuable European fintech companies,” said Max Bautin, Founding Partner of IQ Capital, in a statement. “I am delighted to continue to support Paul and the team on this journey, with an additional £15 million investment from our £100 million Growth Fund, aimed at our venture portfolio outperformers.”

#Miscellaneous

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viridiansunlight · 8 years ago

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Watchers at the Shore (Legacy)

“I’ve gazed at the Abyss, and it gazed back at me. Now what?”

The Watchers at the Shore are one of the ancient Legacies - their origins can be traced to the Awakened who first reached the Watchtowers post-Fall. Many of the even more primordial Legacies relying on the free connection between the Astral and Supernal were shocked, quickly fading as their members lost their power overnight, their remnants bonding over the shared loss of power. Recognizing that their former wisdom was now a mere mutilation of the soul, they casted it away into the newborn Abyss - hoping their vain sacrifices would at least appease it. Instead, it did shrink a bit, and the mages found themselves transformed, the void where their legacies used to be carved by the unmoving waters into new Attainments. Those were the first Watchers at the Shore, and they pledged to watch over the growing ocean of black blood, to perhaps bridge it one day.

The Gazers’ didn’t have a single origin place. In any city where humanity lived at the shore of a vast sea, they were there, contemplating similarity of the waters of the Fallen world and the primordial chaos of the Abyss, before using their insights to battle against the forces of the unmaking with knowledge, bringing the beings of the deepest darkness into light. They weren’t interested in politics, although they did join the Orders - a gesture meant only to ensure they weren’t hunted down for their suspicious practices and affiliations.

During the times of upheval surrounding the Great Refusal, the horrid practices of the Scelesti were more common, as was using the Abyssal shock troops, and the Watchers were needed more than ever - they did accept the Nameless, and later on, the Free Council amongst them, but for some time the youngest of Orders was treated with suspicion, as the veterans of the Nameless War were unsure if they won’t use the Ouroboreans’ knowledge to contact the Abyssal entities, as some of the worse of the Nameless did in the past.

Today, the relatively small Legacy still thrives, perhaps more vibrant than it ever was. The ease of travel, the need to learn, the enroaching Abyssal intrusions, all of them are refreshing the membership of the Watchers at the Shore - although, the borderline Left-Handed reputation doesn’t help their prospective students to find them, and find acceptance of their choices amongst the others, more mainstream Legacies.

(More under the cut)

Nicknames: Ouroboreans, Gazers

Origins:

Path: Any. Majority of the Watchers are Moros, Thyrsus or Mastigos, with Obrimos being vastly in minority due to incompatiblity of the Path’s symbols with that of the Legacy’s focus - ironically enough, Ouroborean Attainments use Prime.

Order: None. Watchers at the Shore are a Legacy that dances on the edge of becoming denounced as a Scelestus Legacy, but mages of all Orders, including the Seers, are welcome. Pentacle and Apostate mages still form a vast majority of the Legacy, although they keep to the periphery of the magical society, with the few Seers that worship the Gate but not want to commit to Her Prelacy use the Fishers’ Attainments as the poor substitute of the real authority of the Lone Exarch.

Background: Many prospective Gazers find their mentors after a traumatic Awakening - often, due to almost drowning at the sea, or due to a tsunami wave. Others recruit from the Astral explorers frustrated with the limits of their ken, thinking that they should plumb the mysteries of Ocean Ouroboros at the edge of the World’s Soul to perhaps, one day, traverse it and reach the Supernal, and believe that the gentler, shamanistic Legacies such as the Dreamspeakers or the Imagineers won’t get them there. Finally, a third large group is drawn from the mages who want to understand the Abyss, while not succumbing to it and still remaining in a somewhat acceptable social position in relation to the Pentacle. Many an abyssal investigator/hunter in the past walked the path of the Watcher at the Shore.

Appearance: As with similar Legacies which live halfway in the Astral, the Watchers tend to stop putting much stock in the worldly appearance, although their fondness of water means that they at least maintain basic hygiene. Still, the long beards, unshaved legs, untamed hair and clothes that look like the Gazer put them over their pyjamas are common. An unnerving calling sign of many Ouroboreans, though, is their deep, black pupils that seem to swirl with chthonic waters whenever they use their Attainments, including the very first one. Many a Sleeper had mistaken a Watcher as being on drugs as a result, a judgement that certainly was influenced by their usual clothing style and enigmatic behaviour.

Doctrine:

Prerequisites: Prime 2, Occult 2. The prospective Watcher must’ve beheld the Ocean Ouroboros in the past, before seeking tutelage, and talk about their experience with their tutor in depth - the Watchers will know if the student is merely citing someone else - it should come from the heart, rather than the mind.

Initiation: The tutor beckons for her student to arrive at the shore of the Abyss. The student has to cast one thing that burdens them - for example, a painful memory, a toxic addiction, a broken relationship - into the unmoving water, spending a Willpower point to excise it from their soul. During this process, their Supernal Gnosis touches the Ocean Ouroboros and is forever transformed, aided by the tutor’s own Gnosis to not allow the Abyss to truly take root in the new Gazer’s soul.

Organization: The Ouroboreans are surprisingly well-connected. Many of the Astral travellers were surprised to meet a small seminar on what looked like a shoreside picnic, where the Gazers were comparing notes, checking on one another and planning investigations into chthonic mysteries. Those groupings are rarely formal, but foster the sense of familiarity and mutual help that connects the Legacy like few others do.

Theory: One of the secrets of the Ouroboreans is that they accept the common doctrine of some of the Scelesti - that all existance was ultimately born from the Abyss, and that the Supernal and it’s Fallen shadow are only a faint light floating on it’s surface. The Ocean Ouroboros, thus, is infinite in depth and scope, and the journey of the soul through the Astral is not as much upward movement, as downward, to the greatest depth - and greatest darkness.

The major difference between the Watchers and the Nefandic mages is that they don’t want to return the cosmos to the Void, but rather learn how to bridge the Ocean, observe it’s depths, and oppose the chaos of the Abyss. The Supernal might’ve been born from the dreams of the vast and uncaring Annunaki, but it’s light and order is still a more worthy ideal than the dreams of unmaking - and, the elder Watchers say, when one looks further, beyond the Abyssal Ocean, they might see the faint glimmer of Truth on the other shore - the Truth all Awakened aspire to.

Magic:

Ruling Arcanum: Prime

Yantras: Standing at the shore of a natural body of water (+1 for sweet water, +2 for saltwater); Standing at the shore of Ocean Ouroboros (+3, although only for the purposes of casting in the Astral); Using saltwater as a Sacrament, if it’s relevant to the spell’s purpose - usually contextualized as cleansing, divination or consecration (+1 if it’s just water with sea salt, +2 if it’s actual water from the sea); Presence of an Abyssal entity or phenomenon, with magic in question used to bind it, banish it, harm it or learn about it for those purposes (+2).

Oblations: Submerging in and swimming in the sea at the evening or morning hours, sitting on the shore of the Ocean Ouroboros in Astral for an hour while remaining mindful of your surroundings at all time, ritual bathing in a specifically consecrated pool with salt water.

Attainments:

First: Swimming in the Shallows.

Prerequisite: Initiation

The Watcher at the Shore gains the ability to remain in Astral while being awake in the material world. This functions exactly like a Dreamspeaker First Attainment, except the Gazer is immune to the Ecstatic Wind whilst in the Sidereal Wastes, and only in there - the Shore of the Ocean Ouroboros is as safe to them as Temenos (well, not exactly as safe, as anything that might come from the Abyss is deeply dangerous), although the rest of the Anima Mundi still requires for them to form an Amnion as usual. The Watcher needs not to spend Mana to meditate into the Astral, or pass the thereshold, and each roll on that extended action lasts merely a turn. Finally, they can instantly move from their Astral path to the Shore without the need to pass any of the Ordeals in Anima Mundi, although they need to pass Ordeals to access any other part of the Dreamtime from there.

Optional: Space 1

The rare Seers amongst the Ouroboreans call this Attainment the Parametric Vision. If the Watcher so desires, they can add this component to their Active Mage Sight as an Instant action - it never costs them Mana to do so, although it is a concious act of will, and for a good reason. The Parametric Vision unveils the influence of the Abyss on the world - the Gazers see it as erosion caused by the black, acrid waters.

Something unspoiled by the Abyss, like Artifacts or Supernal secrets would be pure and clean, but almost everything else is brackish, darkened and erode, Sleepers looking vaguely water-logged or half-drowned, and the Verges of the Abyss appearing as holes through which the endless, foul-smelling brine spews into the world. This is not a comforting sight, and the initiates’ training is partially meant to condition them to accept the true extent of the Fallen World’s corruption by the Void - but most avoid using this technique unless actively hunting an Abyssal intrusion, lest they’d forsake their hope in the world’s goodness.

Second: Stormproofing.

Prerequisite: Prime 2, Occult 3

The Watcher is considered to be constantly under the effect of Wards and Signs with Potency equal to her dots in Prime. This effect offers even greater protection against the powers of the Abyssal phenomena and Intruders - it adds the Gazer’s Prime to the relevant Resistance Attribute if the power is Withstood by that attribute, or to any relevant Clash of Wills roll if not. If the Clash of Wills already uses Prime, double this benefit instead.

Optional: Space 2

If an Abyssal Intruder or anomaly would use the Watcher’s sympathetic connections against them, they’re considered to be veiled as if by Veil Sympathy with Potency equal to their Prime dots. This also includes any magic touched by the Abyss, including any magic cast by Scelesti, but not any spell cast by another Watcher.

Third: Brave the Depths.

Prerequisites: Prime 3, Occult 3, The Watcher must’ve solved at least one Mystery involving the Abyss or the Ocean Ouroboros in the past.

Brushing against the dark waters of the Abyss brings out the worst in the most of the people - but not in the Watchers. Their commitment allows them to use one Mana to duplicate the effects of Ephemereal Enchantment, able to confine any being on the other layers of existance, as all in the Fallen World are touched by the Abyss. Against the Abyssal beings or intrusions, this effect is especially potent - each Mana spent allows the Watcher to deal Aggravated damage to their Corpus with weapons subject to this Attainment, as per the Reach effect of the spell. The wounds dealt to the Intruders manifest as cuts or bruised flowing with the acrid, dark water eating away their false flesh.

Optional: Space 3

If the Watcher’s Astral form is standing at the Shore of the Ocean Ouroboros, they may command a defeated or subjugated Abyssal intrusion or creature to leap back from the Fallen World to where they came from. This requires a point of Mana and a Willpower Point, expended as the Watcher establishes overlapping space between the borders of the World’s Soul and the location of their physical body - it appears to all onlookers as a human-sized verge into the Shore. Only the Abyssal being may leap through it, and the experience leaves the Watcher harrowed - their Astral body instantly disappears, and they gain Soul Shocked Condition. Logically, it means they cannot use any Attainments that rely on standing on the Shore as long as the Condition persists, including this one, but many Watchers see it as a worthy sacrifice.

Fourth: Dousing

Prerequisites: Prime 4, Occult 4

This is one of the powers of the Legacy that makes the other Awakened mistrustful of them. With an act of will, the Watcher can summon the weight of the Ocean Ouroboros to bear against an effect created by Supernal magic, suppressing the spell as per Supernal Dispellation, with Potency equal to Gazer’s Prime and Duration of a Scene. Against the abilities of Intruders or specific instances of malignant influences of the Abyssal Anomalies, this is a Lasting effect instead. Either way, it costs 1 Mana per effect suppressed.

Optional: Space 4

Whilst standing on the Shore, the Ouroborean can bless or curse another Awakened with Perimetric Vision. In the waking world, they make a mark on their forehead, and in the Astral, they will the merest drop of the Ocean to pass past them. This costs them 1 Mana, and is similar to the the effect of Apocalypse spell.

If the target was unwilling, or wasn’t excessively forewarned by the Watcher about the sheer extent of the Fallen World being half-drowned by the Abyss, the target suffers a Breaking Point against Understanding Wisdom, just as if she’d commited an act of Hubris. If that’s the case, the Gazer is treated as if they had commited an act of Hubris against the Falling Wisdom, with all it implies.

Most of the advanced Watchers, who want to make sure their allies will be prepared for the Abyssal intrusion, try to make their allies as ready for the bleak truth as possible, but the time isn’t always in their favour. the Ouroboreans that had fallen deep into Hubris sometimes ‘enlighten’ other mages so they’d see the extent of their Legacy’s burden, but usually this results in another Mage being merely traumatized.

Fifth: High Tide

Prerequisites: Prime 5, Occult 4. If the Ouroborean doesn’t have the Occult speciality in ‘Abyss’, ‘The Intruders’ or similar phenomena already, she must purchase it before attempting to learn the Attainment.

This is a bleak power, although used to the great effect against the beings of the Abyss. The Gazer’s Astral form must stand on the Shore, and by drawing on the connection of the death of all meaning, she supresses all Awakened magic in the area centered on her, as per Dead Zone spell. This effect doesn’t include the Legacy Attainments, including the Watcher’s own, but excluding any of the Scelestus Legacy Attainments. Powers of the Abyssal beings and all of the Abyssal phenomena are suppressed as well.

The effect lasts for a scene per 1 Mana spent, and affects everything within the radius in yards equal to Gazer’s Gnosis. Both during and after the effect concludes, the area appears to be scoured of colour, and smells faintly of brine, although the Fallen World heals this effect within a scene.

Optional: Space 5

Expending on the power of the Third Attainment, the Gazers can invoke this horrifying power, although always at a cost. Most moral Watchers would only consider using it against the beings and artifacts of the Abyss, or other most dangerous and evil things of the Fallen World, although the horror stories about the blasphemers of the Legacy who use this power selfishly make it all that harder for them to sleep at night. Most people within the Orders don’t know of this power. If they would, the Watchers would likely face much greater persecution than merely being relegated to the borders of magical society.

While invoking the Space 3 effect of Brave the Depths, instead of casting a being of the Abyss into the Ocean Ouroboros, the Watcher can let the black waters flow through the ‘window’ they create. Everything the water touches is annihilated, gone into the Void, as it usually happens when something touches the waters of the Ocean. The tide creates an eroded patch in whatever substance compromises the ‘floor’ - if it’s concrete, there wil be a hole, if it’s earth, then there will be a barren pit, salted and unable to support any life. All living creatures are annihilated, Abyssal creatures vanish and usually don’t come back again within the Watcher’s lifetime.

There’s one use that doesn’t require for the dark waters to raise through the ‘window’, however. Someone may cast something into the Ocean Ouroboros using the connection provided by the Gazer, and it works just as well as making a journey to the Shore on their own, using the same mechanics.

At any rate, opening such a window to let the Abyss through costs the Watcher 1 Mana and dot of Willpower instead of a point and causes Soul Shaken Condition in the Watcher as usual. Using this powerfor anything but the Abyssal creatures, or letting someone cast away their burdens into the Abyss is an Act of Hubris against the Falling Wisdom. The blasphemous or the desperate in the Legacy may forfeit the Willpower dot cost, instead spending a Willpopower point - but this comes from accepting the power of the Abyss instead of violently rejecting it, and results in an automatic loss of Wisdom. A mage who loses their remaining dot of Wisdom that way turns not merely into one of the Mad, but into a Qlippoth, a living, pulsating and tortured verge into the Abyss, blasting the area with the Fifth Attainment indiscriminately until they’re put down.

#viri writes #mage the awakening #watchers at the shore

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douglassmiith · 4 years ago

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Why SaaS Businesses Are In a Unique Position to Survive This Crisis

June 23, 2020 7 min read

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

At this point we are all aware of the global health crisis’ outsize impact. There have been government-imposed lockdowns, market retractions and an upheaval of social norms, and no one is quite sure how it’s all going to play out in the long-term. As my company provides M&A advisory services to a wide range of online businesses, I have had a good overview of the effects of this crisis on small- to medium-sized SaaS businesses. The effects have been varied.

SaaS businesses have been in a unique, perhaps even privileged position over the last couple of months. Many SaaS businesses operate with lean teams that are already used to remote working conditions. SaaS businesses are also (mostly) free from the supply chain issues reaping havoc on other business models, including other online business models. But to say SaaS is currently a safe haven would be an exaggeration.

Related: Building Success: Insights from 7 Leading SaaS Companies

The losers in the SaaS space

Anyone who had been planning to attend SaaS conferences this spring will have noticed the postponements and cancellations. SaaStock, like many others, has gone remote, and how well-attended these remote conferences will be is anyone’s guess. No one will argue that the loss of personal contact for many in the SaaS industry will translate to losses not just for those running these conferences, but those who depend on conferences to forge new connections and promote their established or fledgling businesses. While many SaaS businesses can survive this temporary setback, some startups may have just lost key promotional outlets in their crucial early stages.

Smaller, burgeoning SaaS business will be facing a harder time than many other SaaS businesses, as will businesses that depend on their business employees not being furloughed. The ease of downgrading monthly plans will be a major benefit to many businesses over the next few months but will hit some SaaS businesses hard.

SaaS businesses get smart

One of the great advantage of owning, running and working for or with a SaaS business is the malleability and speed with which a well-oiled SaaS can operate. Video conferencing apps, for example, have had to move quickly under strenuous conditions, but they are rising to the challenge. Zoom has already added more users to its app than it did in all of 2019. WhatsApp has quickly added group calls to its service due to the heavy demand. Temenos, the banking software company, is currently launching new SaaS propositions to help banks right now, including digital engagement technologies, “explainable AI” and more. Fender Play, a guitar tutorial app, has used the lockdown as an opportunity to onboard as many bored, isolated new subscribers as possible by offering three months of free guitar lessons. Clearly, businesses that can move quickly in a crisis could stand to benefit. And, on top of this, the reliability of the SaaS recurring revenue model will only help to prop up these businesses and reassure investors over the course of this crisis.

Related: Here’s How To Make Your SaaS Marketing Strategy Generate Revenue

Conveniently, some of the greatest business minds in the world are also working in SaaS, and their innovations often disseminate across the industry before leaking into the wider business world. While other businesses may struggle to keep afloat as orders and inquiries dry up, many SaaS businesses will be taking a forward-thinking approach to the post-crisis world and how their SaaS may capitalize on possible societal changes. Symptom-checking apps and contact-warning systems are one of the obvious areas for innovation, and if lockdown orders do come in waves, then non-governmental versions of these apps could appear, and subscription perks could include anything from medical advice to health insurance policy renewals.

Standard protocols to deploy

While communicating with our SaaS clients, I have noticed some standard practices that all SaaS businesses should be deploying if their services are in any way affected by the global health crisis.

1. Send out a message to your customers

You have probably noticed the recent flood of emails from businesses outlining responses to current events. While sending this style of communication to your clients might not be essential for every SaaS, many businesses that are suffering from a slowdown in customer support or outages of core services need to draw up a comprehensive email containing links to where customers can receive regular updates.

2. Build a dedicated updates page

Following from the above, a dedicated page where relevant updates to your service can be posted is highly recommended. This should be linked to from your blog, if you have one, and can be pinned to your social media accounts.

3. Create an updates banner

A banner linking to your updates page should be placed on your website’s homepage — and make it visible on any product app or interface if possible. Have you had to cancel promotion events recently, or are you scaling back your services or providing a great new offer? Put it in the banner.

4. Create a task force

Within your company, there should be at least one dedicated employee responsible for communicating updates to the rest of your employees. They should also be working to ensure that remote workers are being regularly communicated with and their needs are being met.

5. Create a centralized, internal communications channel

Put everything related to the crisis and all updates in a single communications channel – if you use Slack or Microsoft Teams, create a channel that your employees have access to and can post questions and updates in.

The future of SaaS

The crisis will affect different SaaS businesses in different ways but, as a sector, SaaS is bearing up well. We have been seeing strong interest in SaaS business acquisitions, and the future of the way we work and communicate, now more than ever, looks to be reliant on SaaS solutions. If you are interested in learning more about the current state of SaaS, I recommend signing up to some of the online versions of conferences like SaaStock; it helps to support the SaaS community too. Publications like SaaSMag (full disclosure – I help to edit this publication) can also be useful for keeping up to date.

Keep watching this space, as this is the moment that many SaaS businesses are set to come of age.

Related: 7 Best Apps to Help Your Team Thrive While Social Distancing

Website Design & SEO Delray Beach by DBL07.co

Delray Beach SEO

Via http://www.scpie.org/why-saas-businesses-are-in-a-unique-position-to-survive-this-crisis/

source https://scpie.weebly.com/blog/why-saas-businesses-are-in-a-unique-position-to-survive-this-crisis

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riichardwilson · 4 years ago

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Why SaaS Businesses Are In a Unique Position to Survive This Crisis

June 23, 2020 7 min read

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

Related: Building Success: Insights from 7 Leading SaaS Companies

The losers in the SaaS space

SaaS businesses get smart

Related: Here’s How To Make Your SaaS Marketing Strategy Generate Revenue

Standard protocols to deploy

While communicating with our SaaS clients, I have noticed some standard practices that all SaaS businesses should be deploying if their services are in any way affected by the global health crisis.

1. Send out a message to your customers

2. Build a dedicated updates page

3. Create an updates banner

4. Create a task force

5. Create a centralized, internal communications channel

The future of SaaS

Keep watching this space, as this is the moment that many SaaS businesses are set to come of age.

Related: 7 Best Apps to Help Your Team Thrive While Social Distancing

Website Design & SEO Delray Beach by DBL07.co

Delray Beach SEO

source http://www.scpie.org/why-saas-businesses-are-in-a-unique-position-to-survive-this-crisis/ source https://scpie.tumblr.com/post/621768917103394816

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scpie · 4 years ago

Text

Why SaaS Businesses Are In a Unique Position to Survive This Crisis

June 23, 2020 7 min read

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

Related: Building Success: Insights from 7 Leading SaaS Companies

The losers in the SaaS space

SaaS businesses get smart

Related: Here’s How To Make Your SaaS Marketing Strategy Generate Revenue

Standard protocols to deploy

While communicating with our SaaS clients, I have noticed some standard practices that all SaaS businesses should be deploying if their services are in any way affected by the global health crisis.

1. Send out a message to your customers

2. Build a dedicated updates page

3. Create an updates banner

4. Create a task force

5. Create a centralized, internal communications channel

The future of SaaS

Keep watching this space, as this is the moment that many SaaS businesses are set to come of age.

Related: 7 Best Apps to Help Your Team Thrive While Social Distancing

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viridiave · 1 year ago

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Spoiler-heavy thoughts about Crick and how the Game Mechanics treat Temenos’s story

So. yeah if you press ‘Keep Reading’ I should probably let you guys know that these thoughts are just a tiny bit unhinged. And again - spoiler alert! You’ve been warned!!

GAME MECHANICS AND UI

- Gonna preface THIS section by asserting that yes, not EVERY mechanic needs to be taken apart under a microscope and re-contextualized into the greater lore of the game. Not EVERYTHING has to mean something to everybody. Some of my classes in game design disagree though and honestly for the genre that Octopath Traveler is, that being a story-heavy role-playing game where the narrative is half the game, I'd say that integrating lore into the mechanics and vice-versa wouldn't hurt - in fact it ENHANCES the experience. The second game does this pretty handily through the EX Skills (the first of the skills being Divine Blessings, and the second being earned at the end of the story.) and the Latent Powers.

Okay the Latent Powers? Honestly that part's mostly for Hikari. Shadow's Hold/Light's Radiance is STILL one of the best examples of Gameplay and Story Integration that this game has

No I swear I don't have a bias for 'other selves'/'deep parts of yourself made manifest' what are you talking about -

I swear I can write an entire separate post JUST about the EX Skills. Mostly for Osvald, Castti, and mOTHERFUCKING TEMENOS AGAIN

aND THIS IS WHY I GO FUCKING BONKERS WHEN I THINK ABOUT THE DEMO VERSION OF THE GAME LIKE WHAT THE FU-

- Literally the fucking emblem for Temenos's story is a staff and a sword over the Sacred Flame like - they REALLY want you to know how important Crick is to this tale

- tHE FACT THAT CRICK IS THE ONE WHO HAS COVER. NOT EVEN HIKARI OR THE WARRIOR CLASS. IT'S CRICK - DOES THIS COUNT AS FORESHADOWING???

I'll like - write here what I should have written in the bath - and that's me being like 'oh it's because he's recklessly protective. OH SHIT IT'S BECAUSE HE'S RECKLESSLY PROTECTIVE'

I fully acknowledge that it doesn't have to be that deep. MAYBE I'm pulling stuff out of my ass. But allow me to go bonkers over Crick and his for-some-reason-worryingly-appropriate moveset

Man I wonder how bonkers I'd go over Malaya if she was allowed to throw hands. I want her to complement Castti's moveset so bad

- Also the fact that both of their kits complement each other. Crick's bulkier build was made specifically with supporting Temenos in mind.

My guy's Sacred Sword reduces the enemy's elemental defense. Wonder if that implies that the Sanctum Knights normally work with magic and/or magicians

aGAIN HE HAS FUCKING COVER which is PERFECT because early-game Temenos can and will faint if a monster blinks at him too hard

Then there's his OTHER skill Godsblade's Shield which RAISES his physical defense to SO HE CAN COVER FOR TEMENOS BETTER LIKE. AT SOME POINT I SHOULD JUST ASK WHY THEY TRIED SO HARD FOR HIM SPECIFICALLY

And I mean. It makes SENSE but I don't think any of the other helper characters really had this level of chemistry in their mechanics as these two do

Emerald and Gus both have healing moves for better survivability considering how squishy Osvald and Agnea are

And it makes sense, Temenos already has access to a healing move because he's a cleric

The thing that separates Crick from them is that neither Emerald nor Gus really have moves to further support their leads on the level that Crick does. Emerald is fast and he breaks well and Gus is clearly meant to be the DPS of Agnea's Chapter 1, but again - Crick has moves tailor-made for Temenos to go off and do his thing

You lose Pirro and Scaracci/ Rai Mei and Ritsu after the intro and none of them really complement the Throné and Hikari and vice versa as much as Crick and Temenos do with each other

The difference with them too is that they have established relationships with their lead characters prior to the story, sometimes even encountered as antagonistic forces

Pirro, Rai Mei, and Ritsu are all bosses that were once considered close comrades of Throné and Hikari

Scaracci displays mutinous traits throughout Throne's Chapter 1

Emerald subverts this by acting mutinous - which, his conflict with Osvald amounted more to a sacrifice of goodwill

He knows Osvald and how he acts even prior to the beginning of Chapter 1, so he's in this category of having an established relationship

Gus averts this completely by just being a genuinely supportive part of Agnea's life

Mechanically, you never have anything to do with these characters again past Chapter 1 - save for Rai Mei and Ritsu being bosses. Hikari's companions also play an integral narrative role in his final chapter, with Ritsu being encountered as a boss again for the final time

Crick is a subversion of all of them in that he doesn't have any direct relationship with Temenos prior to Chapter 1, and though we never use him as a helper character ever again he consistently shows up as an integral part of Temenos's story up until his death in Chapter 3: Stormhail

Weirdly Crick is also the only one out of all of them where the use of Path Actions is required more than once - Osvald has to Scrutinize Emerald at one point

AND GODDAMNIT OF COURSE THE FIRST AND LAST TANGIBLE INTERACTION WE HAVE WITH CRICK IS TO FUCKING GUIDE HIM I'M SO MAD ABOUT THIS BOOKEND IT'S SO MEAN AKSJKAS

And this in itself makes complete sense given that he has larger roles to play outside of Chapter 1 - just not in the same vein as Ritsu or Rai Mei, but the fact is that Temenos's story is VERY good at establishing and building up chemistry between its characters

bUT FOR MECHANICS WE NEVER HAVE TO USE AGAIN AFTER CHAPTER 1?? THEY WENT SO HARD AND I WANT TO KNOW WHY

- It's not as big of a deal as it looks but I also find it funny just how much fun the devs seemed to have with Crick's introduction and entry into the party - using the Path Action to fucking TROLL with him.

- ON THAT NOTE, LET ME FREAK OUT OVER GUIDE AS A PATH ACTION A LITTLE MORE

I saw a post on Reddit earlier about the 'summoning townspeople' Path Actions and it kind of shook my world a little, so I'll just put my response to it here

For a guy who makes it a point to tell people not to follow anything blindly it's INCREDIBLY hilarious to me that Temenos's Path Action is getting people to follow him blindly.

MECHANICALLY, it's because he's the designated cleric. Temenos has Guide, because Ophilia has Guide. But thematically it's interesting to think about just how antithetical it is to his central creed of doubting, and how this specifically applies to Crick.

I did go back and check and yeah - Crick's one of three individual people I was able to find over the course of the stories that has a required Path Action used on them more than once.

Malaya is one other example with Inquire, and she even one-ups him with one use of Soothe. And I'll get to HER when I get to Castti's essay - I mean infodump - because it's like. Somehow even MORE heartbreaking than this instance of Guide

While I'm here I'll also mention Roque, who also has two instances of a Path Action used on him, namely Purchase and Hire in Partitio's Chapter 5

But back to the dramatic aspect of it it's like. I really want to shake the devs because it's so mean of them to have Temenos's relationship with him begin by guiding him towards not only the cathedral but to a healthier way of thinking, and to end with Crick's fucking GHOST leading Temenos to the crucial truth that he's lost so many people to find, including Crick himself

- I won't scrutinize everything about the cleric class itself but I WILL talk about the EX Skills, because to me it's ironic just how mean they are. I'm glad that the irony isn't lost on the fanfic writers like I see you guys use these as fanfic titles - bless you all

First - Prayer for Plenty, the sequel's answer to how absolutely fucking broken Saving Grace was as a passive in the first game. Limiting it to JUST Temenos's natural moveset feels like it should be sending a message honestly - it's a way to prolong the lives of his comrades and he couldn't do that for the ones he held dear in his own story. Can't help but feel like the fact that this is the one he gets from AELFRIC'S SHRINE rubs salt in the wound - no pun intended -

Secondly is Heavenly Shine and it's like. It's a holy nuke filled with divine power that drains Temenos's magic reserves completely. He invokes Aelfric's name when he uses it to and to this day I think the reason it feels cathartic to use is because it feels like a manifestation of Temenos's wrath

Unlike Osvald's own magic kamehamehadouken nuke where he learned it out of a need to protect Elena, Temenos learns this AFTER his story - and maybe it's just my concern speaking but man I really want this to represent his sheer need to go absolutely fucking apeshit like my man is NOT in a good place after his story is done

- This is the part where I go into the tinier, 'definitely stretching this past the realm of MATTERING' details that actually have something to do with the game mechanics

Some of Temenos's class lines are reminiscent of Crick's own. We've drawn the comparison with Temenos's Sweeping Cleave line already and it's adorable

Temenos Sweeping Cleave [insert handshake emoji] Crick Sacred Slash: I'll cleave you in twain!

Reaching even further here. His lines for Lux Congerere and Sacred Effulgence also somewhat invoke Crick's declaration of 'cleaving the shadows from this world', but it's not exact and I'm just indulging

Lux Congerere: Banish the shadows from this world!

Sacred Effulgence: Aelfric, banish the shadows from this world!

I'd also be extremely remiss to NOT mention the recruitment of Ort in postgame and it physically hurts me to summon him because of the way he says 'I will avenge you, Crick!' like DUDE. Oh well at least he's grieving healthily

Sacred Slash brothers let's gooo

There's like. No way that I'll be able to fit all of this in my other thoughts about Crick that are dedicated mostly to his and Temenos's arcs so. It's like not even in a ship sense anymore even if I do think they're fruity as hell

Honestly I'm just glad to get this all out of my system EXCEPT THERE'S MORE, because Temenos's story loves to torture my brain and its themes resonate with me a bit TOO much

#octopath #octopath traveler 2 #temenos mistral #crick wellsley #vir rambles about octopath yet again #this time - FOR WAY LONGER THAN IS NECESSARY #these aren't even like half the overall thoughts i have about crick #let alone TEMENOS #i honestly don't know why it matters to me this much #it's kind of scary lmao #this is why i should talk to people more #shoutout to jae for some of the lines here because there really was no better way of putting it #temenos why are you such a STICK #ot2 spoilers

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endenogatai · 5 years ago

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Thought Machine nabs $83M for a cloud-based platform that powers banking services

The funding is being led by Draper Esprit, with participation also from existing investors Lloyds Banking Group, IQ Capital, Backed and Playfair.

Thought Machine’s primary product and technology is called Vault, a platform that contains a range of banking services — they include current/checking accounts; savings accounts; loans; credit cards and mortgages — that Thought Machine does not sell directly to consumers, but sells by way of a B2B2C model.

“Banks have not kept up and are marooned on their own tech, and as each year goes by, it comes more problematic,” noted Taylor.

It’s not the only company providing a platform for banking services that are in turn

Taylor was new to fintech when he founded Thought Machine, but he has a notable track record in the world of tech that you could argue played a big role in his subsequent foray into banking.

Formerly an academic specialising in linguistics and engineering, his first startup, Rhetorical Systems, commercialised some of his early speech-to-text research and was later sold to Nuance in 2004.

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computer-basics · 5 years ago

Link

The funding is being led by Draper Esprit, with participation also from existing investors Lloyds Banking Group, IQ Capital, Backed and Playfair.

“Banks have not kept up and are marooned on their own tech, and as each year goes by, it comes more problematic,” noted Taylor.

It’s not the only company providing a platform for banking services that are in turn

Taylor was new to fintech when he founded Thought Machine, but he has a notable track record in the world of tech that you could argue played a big role in his subsequent foray into banking.

Formerly an academic specialising in linguistics and engineering, his first startup, Rhetorical Systems, commercialised some of his early speech-to-text research and was later sold to Nuance in 2004.

https://ift.tt/goU3rj from TechCrunch https://ift.tt/39hizrV via IFTTT

#IFTTT #Blogger

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free-mormons-blog · 8 years ago

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The Circle and the Square -- Temple and Cosmos Beyond this Ignorant Present -- HUGH NIBLEY 1992

The Circle and the Square

What exists on the earth’s surface is supported, much like a troupe of actors, by countless backstage assistants. I’ve often referred to the earth as a stage, to which Joseph Smith gives us the scenario. He talked about the stagehands, forming a network that extends far behind and beyond the theater walls. The props and the stage are there, along with the stagehands. The big question is, Is there a play? Is there a plot? Is there a meaning to it all?

Surprisingly, since ancient times, only Joseph Smith has come up with any kind of a plot. When he faced the world he had nothing to go on, and everything against him; he couldn’t lose. He had something concrete to put up, while the rest of the world had none. They had the abstract, the moralistic, etc., but nothing in the way of the infinities, of the realities of the next world. Only Brother Joseph had something to offer.

Certainly the earth is not the center of the universe. This illusion has been discarded forever. Still, this crowded earth is one of those perhaps innumerable places in the cosmos where both life and consciousness flourish. Many factors united to produce and maintain the right conditions where life was generated by a concentration of mighty forces upon one relatively tiny point.

This is the center I am talking about, and it’s exactly what we read in the book of Abraham, where he says that everything is relative to the individual: the individual is the center. All distances, all times, all places are measured in terms of the “[earth] upon which thou standest” (Abraham 3:5). Its distances, its motions, etc., are not the center of anything. Moses says the same thing: “Tell me, I pray thee, why these things are so” (Moses 1:30). The Lord replies: I’m not going to. “Only an account of this earth . . . give I unto you” (Moses 1:35). You must be content with that, but remember that there are others: “Worlds without number have I created” (Moses 1:33).

“Tell me concerning this earth,” Moses returns. “Then thy servant will be content” (Moses 1:36).

So for us, the earth is the center of things, so long as we’re here.

There arises the question of whether we need a psychological center—some kind of center we can refer to. Thus we frequently quote Yeats’ famous lines: “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.”1 Our civilization is collapsing, falling apart, because there is no center; everything is loosened.

In the opening lines of the famous first of modern geography books, Ratzel begins, “Every man regards himself as the center of the universe around him.” There is a real center, but it is also relative. There is also each person’s awareness that other people have their centers too, unless you’re a solipsist, or something similar. Since there are other people, there must be other centers. For the purposes of getting together, can we agree on one center—a fictitious center, a model of some sort, and act as if that were the center?

Actually we don’t have to do that, because we have one very real center. If you traveled over the entire earth viewing the heavens, you wouldn’t come to a center, but you would find two places that looked very much alike: the center polestars, of course. They stay fixed, while all else revolves around them. Thus on the west tower of the Salt Lake Temple there is the Big Dipper, pointing up—to the polestar.2 The temple is a point of reference, a place where you take your bearings on the universe.

That’s what the word templum means. Everyone knows what a template is that you put over a map. It’s as if we put a template over the temple in Salt Lake City; most every street in the city, and every city in the state, is measured east, west, north, and south from that arbitrary point. (Certain points on the earth do seem to be particularly suited as central points—they have a special power, charm, or attraction about them.)

So are we there among the stars, or are we not? Giorgio de Santillana said we should not be too sure we aren’t.3

Our present tradition comes from the great migrations, after some kind of Golden Age, which broke up around 3500 to 3000 B.C. This was a horrible time; everything went to smash. Everything was uprooted; everyone became migrants. And, obsessed with the idea of the temple, they took it with them—though it was a different concept from the older, permanent idea. When people are uprooted, they develop two yearnings: a passion for permanence, and a zest for distance and adventure.

As we see in the Odyssey, Odysseus, who wandered for ten years, enjoyed his journey, at least with Calypso. She twitted him about it. Still he blubbered all day long to be home with his dear wife. He loved to travel, but he couldn’t wait to get home. He had to have both. It is like a French geographer’s description of the mad force of the sun and the wise force of the earth. The latter pulls you back, although you want both. This is what our ancestors documented in the great migrations.

Ancient tribal shrines of the Near East are known variously as the cutfa (“the standing place”), the mahmal (“a wagon, or something you ride in”), the markab (“a camping place”), a qubba (“dome, or navel center—something that doesn’t move, like a Navajo hogan”), a bayt (a place where you spend the night only—our words booth, abide, etc.), a Hebrew ‘arôn (“an ark or vessel, like the ark of the covenant”), and an Arabic tabut (borrowed from the Egyptian word for “chest, coffin”)—all these words designate the ancient tribal shrines.4 And they have two characteristics in common: they are dome-shaped, and they are mounted on a boxlike frame; the two come together in a substructure, merkabah, a vessel or wagon (something you ride on). The word has a great mystical meaning in the Jewish cabbalistic literature. The merkabah is the vessel by which God conveys his wisdom, whatever it might be, to whomever. Whatever its precise meaning, it was meant to provide mobility.

Two recent studies discuss the cosmic nature of the wheel, the dome-shaped shrine, or royal balde, baldekin or baldaekin, or, paradoxical as it may seem, such a symbol of supreme stability as the throne, temple, holy city and even sacred mountain. World mountains are often depicted as revolving wheels or as mounted on wheels.

That’s a strange thing. The Roman quadrata represents the four corners of the earth, and the center of everything; the Romans always drew it this way. But it’s also the picture of a wheel. The Babylonians combined the two very neatly in their cosmic design. It’s the wheel that goes round and round but never moves.

For the nomads, it’s a qubba—a dome; the Latin word is cupola: a cap, cup. It represents the dome of the heavens, and you find it everywhere as the common shape of churches. And the square church accompanies it. The dome, like a stupa in India, is mounted over a perfect cube. To the nomads the qubay, or domed red leather tent of the chief, is the qubba.

The Islamic qibla derives from a root meaning “to face, to receive, to look toward.” When a Muslim prays five times a day, what direction does he face? To Mecca—the center of the world. How does he know where the center is? In his house he has a qibla, a marker that tells the direction he must face, “by which the tribe when it camps, takes its bearings in space; the qibla itself is oriented with reference to the heavenly bodies. For the Asiatics as well as the Romans, the Royal Tent is a templum or tabernaculum.”5

The word tabernaculum is the Roman name for a quickly made booth, a “little house of boards,” something thrown up very quickly of brush, boards, blankets, or anything you might happen to have.6 The Feast of Tabernacles is the sukkôt of the Hebrew, which is the sh of the Egyptians.

It’s the same thing as the outer court of the Greek temple, the temenos, which means “temple,” “to cut”—the point at which the two lines, the cardo and the decumanus, intersect (the axis mundi).7 All space comes together at this absolute, theoretical, perfect point. It is the center of everything, which doesn’t exist. It’s like the singularity that physicists talk about today—things that are real and conceivable, but not describable. Thus it’s a device for taking our bearings on wherever we are. That’s precisely what a temple does: it puts us into the picture of time and space. It’s a sort of sacred observatory, like the tabernacle or the camp of Israel, and at the same time a kind of planetarium, a model of the cosmos.8

The temple at Jerusalem was built to accommodate the ark of the covenant. The ark, ‘arôn, could travel in a tent, because it does travel. Even when housed in Solomon’s temple, the ark had the carrying poles on it, so it could be carried around. It resembles an archaic Egyptian shrine, even to the details.

This double quality (the ever-moving center) caused much dispute among the Doctors of the Jews. Some said that a stone temple that tied down the ark, and hence the chosen people, was an abomination; others said it was the very symbol of endurance and everlasting assurance.9

The central pole of the tent (see Eliade’s work on Shamanism)10 is often identified with the pole (the polestar) of the heavens. “The tent itself is the Weltenmantel, the expanse of the firmament. Other tent poles sometimes represent the four cardinal points or the two turning points of the sun in the summer and winter solstice.”11 The tent pole theme is carried over into the pillars of the temples and palaces, even into the columns of medieval churches and the stately façades of our own public buildings.”12 Thus we all are familiar with the idea.

There are two kinds of temple architecture—the circle and the square. The earliest nine pyramids along the Nile were perfectly square. When I checked this in my pyramid texts, the symbol was drawn thus. At Gilgal twelve stones stand in a circle. Generally, the rites are said to be in the form of a circumambulation. The king goes through the land in a great circle, in his Royal Progress, the “king’s tour.” He visits one by one each holy place, to take possession of his land, something he has to do every year. When he arrives at each, he circumambulates it three times. That’s the combination: the circle and square.13

In the Pythagorean mystic, the cube represents perfect solidity; the sphere is perfect continual motion. The two must always be together; thus we find them so combined in ancient temples, and in our temple too. The Manti Temple features the square building, but it has a circular staircase. The Provo Temple has a square bottom, but is rounded off (it would have been nice had they made up their minds whether they wanted it square or round). It looks like a typical “stupa.” And of course it has a tall, round ornament at the top. There is always motion around, but also always stability in the center. It is satisfying to have it both ways.

For this reason, the temple lends itself to duplication, an important principle. The ancients often referred to it as “the spark.” We are now into the mechanics of the creation process.

All ancient temples rehearsed the story of the creation, and the establishment of mankind and royal government of God upon this earth. Then they moved into the heavenly sphere and the theology associated with the worlds beyond.

The order and stability of a foundation are achieved through the operation of a “spark.” The spark is sometimes defined as “a small idea.”14 This is interesting, because it reminds us of a contemporary anthropic idea. “That comes forth from God and makes all the difference between what lives and what does not.”15 This spark must go from world to world, and wherever it goes, it sets up a new center; this center in turn goes out and sets up other new centers.16

St. Augustine uses this image, interestingly, when he refers to Jerusalem. The church always fought pilgrimages to Jerusalem, because it was a vote of no confidence for Rome. There must be more than one center in the world, Augustine argued. Just as a fire sends forth sparks, and each new spark lands somewhere and starts a new fire, so did Jerusalem. Despite the fact that there were many centers, they were all the one. There is no need to be disturbed by the existence of multiple centers. Compared with it all, the worlds are but as a shadow, since it is the Spark whose light moves all material things.17

The Latin word fundamentum refers to the lump of butter in the cream you are churning.18 At first there is nothing hard, nothing firm. There’s matter out there, but it’s very thin.19 So the frog starts to churn, starts to work at it, and in time a lump forms, quite mysteriously—as anyone knows who has ever churned butter. This text reads, “The fundamentum of the world begins to take form when it is touched by a scintilla; the spark ceases and the fountain is stopped when the inhabitants transgress.”20 We find this in the vision of Zenez (Kenaz), a record discovered long after Joseph Smith wrote about a Zenos in the Book of Mormon.21

“Matter without light is inert and helpless,” says the Pistis Sophia.22 “It is the first light which reproduces the pattern of the heavenly model, wherever it touches”;23“when the rays from the worlds of light stream down to the earthly world, for awakening mortals.”24 Sometimes the column of light joins heaven to earth,” as in our Facsimile No. 2 (a very important principle), even as the divine plan is communicated to distant worlds by a spark. According to Carl Schmidt, it is the dynamics of light from one world that animates another.25 “God’s assistants, the faithful servants of Melchizedek, rescue and preserve the light particles, lest any be lost in space.”26 The spark is also called “the drop”; the Egyptians call it the prt (“drop”). It is the divine drop of light that man brought forth with him from above, the spark that reactivates bodies that have become inert by the loss of former light.27 It’s like a tiny bit of God himself. Christ calls upon the Father to send light to the apostles.

It is the ultimate particle, the ennas, which came from the Father, of those who are without beginning, emanating from the treasure house of light from which all life and power is ultimately derived. Thanks to the vivifying and organizing power of the Spark, we find throughout the cosmos an infinity of dwelling places, other worlds, kosmoi (topoi is the word always used—the “places”), either occupied or awaiting tenants. These are colonized by migrants from previously established topoi or worlds, all going back ultimately to a single original center.28

The colonizing process is called “planting,” and those spirits which bring their treasures to a new world are called “plants,” more rarely “seeds,” of their father, or “planters” in another world. For every planting goes out from a Treasure House, either as the essential material elements or as the colonizers themselves, who come from a sort of mustering-area called the “Treasure-House of Souls.” (These early Christians had quite a system.29)

With its “planting” completed, a new world is in business. A new treasury has been established from which new sparks may go forth in all directions to start the process anew in ever new spaces; God wants every man to “plant a planting,” nay, he has promised that those who keep his law may also become creators of worlds. Thus you can say there is indeed but one God who fills the immensity of space, yet we are in the act too, as potential creators of worlds.

The idea of the universal center of the race is found throughout the ancient world. It’s the scene of great events.30

At hundreds of holy shrines, each believed to mark the exact center of the universe and represented as the point at which the four corners of the earth converged [the middle omphalos]—”the navel of the earth” [the umbilicus]—one might have seen assembled at the New Year—the moment of creation, the beginning and ending of time—vast concourses of people, each thought to represent the entire human race in the place of all its ancestors and gods.31

Time and place are always coordinated. After all, if you are going to have a universal meeting of people scattered all over the realm, what do you do? You appoint a particular place for them to come to. But if they are to assemble, they must come at a particular time, in a face-to-face meeting. That’s the function of the great assembly at the New Year, the best time, because there’s no planting or reaping going on. But most dramatically, it’s when the sun reaches its lowest point and must be renewed. And we must all participate in the revival of a new year, and a new age, in bringing things to life again, and make our new oaths and covenants for a new time.

A visitor to any of these festivals would have found a market or fair in progress, the natural outcome of bringing people together from wide areas in large numbers, and the temple of the place functioning as an exchange or bank. He could have witnessed ritual contests: foot, horse, and wagon races, odd kinds of wrestling.”32

The Icelandic colony in Spanish Fork, Utah, used to celebrate Icelandic Day in that fashion, at which there was ritual wrestling. It was a type of belt wrestling that is beautifully depicted in some ancient pictures from Egypt. At such festivals there was a Troy Game, beauty contests to choose the queen, etc.33 “All came to the celebration as pilgrims, often traversing immense distances over prehistoric sacred roads.”34

During this time, the King’s Highway was sacred, and to break the peace there was a capital offense. On that free and open passage, the king’s peace prevailed, for anyone who wanted to come to the king’s presence for any purpose. And during the festival, they naturally dwelt “in booths of green boughs,” to protect them from both the heat of the sun and from showers.35 They can have no houses: it’s not a place where the living dwell. When you leave it, as we learn in Exodus and again in Leviticus, you must eat the Passover with your staff in your hand and your shoes on your feet; and there must not be any of the food left by morning. Then you must hasten away and not look back (Exodus 12:11). It’s a holy place, and when the sun rises, the holy time is over. You no longer belong there. It’s maktos, the place of the spirits, because you had been there with the spirits and others.

“What would most command a visitor’s attention to the great assembly would be the main event, the now famous ritual year-drama for the glorification of the king. In most versions of the year-drama, the king wages combat with his dark adversary of the underworld, emerging victorious after a temporary defeat from his duel with death.”36 This is beautifully set forth in the first chapter of the book of Moses. Moses is proclaimed king after he has overcome many waters of Meribah—death; therefore, God says, “I shall make you king in my place, and you shall rule over my people as if you were God.” Moses is put in God’s place. “Blessed art thou, Moses, because thou hast overcome” (cf. Exodus 7:1; Moses 1:25-26).

So it was with the devil—up and down, up and down. Satan got Moses down, but in his last breath, Moses appealed to God and was rescued. When he saw the bitterness of hell, then it was that he went down (Moses 1:12-22). But he was rescued and became the victor and it was declared, “He shall rule my people and be to them as if he were God. And they shall follow him.”

Everything comes together at a particular time and place, at the center of the universe. “The New Year was the birthday of the human race and its rites dramatized the creation of the world; all who would be found in the ‘Book of Life opened at the creation of the World’ must necessarily attend.”37 You have always had the incisi in Rome, or among our ancestors you had to have your herör, and if you were touched by the king’s arrow, you had to come to the king’s presence; anyone who didn’t come to the New Year’s celebration within three days—whether at Swansea, or at Lund, or at the great Thing in Iceland, or in a hundred different places in England—would be banished from the kingdom for three years. You were considered to be in a state of rebellion, because you didn’t come to acclaim the king. You refused to give him your voice, your acclaim.38 This was all very important. In Rome, during the time of the Republic, you had to come with your family from great distances, even from Sicily, so they could be registered again and receive the annona,39 the yearly gift, a guarantee of prosperity for the new year. If you didn’t come, your name would be struck from the list of the incisi, the huge lead tablets that swung on great, wooden poles in the temple in the capital. If your name was not on that, you were hosticus, an outlaw of the state.

That’s where the word outlaw comes from. If you did not come to the king’s presence when he summoned you, you were outside of the law, because you would not acknowledge the law. That was the case with Cain, who was thrown out.

So if you are not there, and are not found in the Book of Life, which is

opened at the creation of the World. . . . There were coronation and royal marriage rites, accompanied by a ritual representing the sowing or begetting of the human race; and the whole celebration wound up in a mighty feast in which the king as lord of abundance gave earnest of his capacity to supply his children with all the good things of the earth. The stuff for the feast was supplied by the feasters themselves, for no one came “to worship the king” without bringing his tithes and firstfruits.40

No one comes to the presence of the king empty-handed. So here they are, all coming together.

And the omphalos is a three-dimensional center, the origin of the “hierocentric idea,” coined by Eric Burrows,41 the Assyriologist who pointed out in such writings as the poem Enuma Elish what happened on the new year when all the people came together. Enuma elish means “as once above,” “as it once happened above,”42 in the beginning at the creation, when the Lord of life was challenged by the powers of darkness; and in order for the trinity to combat it, the Father begat Marduk in his own image. First Marduk slew the monster Tiamat and made the material world out of its body.43 Tiamat was the great matriarch who plotted to put her son Kingu (who is Satan) on the throne.44 They were overcome and cast out. Then Marduk placed part of the material above, part below. Between these three levels he placed a barrier—a bolt.45 “Then he went the rounds of the heavens (“around them”) and inspected the various holy places, in order to establish there an exact replica of the Apsu, the dwelling of Ea.46 So the Apsu (the abyss) is what is above, and what is below. Ea is water; the Sumerian word for temple is Esagil (Babylonian: Esagila), which is over the waters of the underworld. The idea is that he traced an exact replica of each world on the other (the Egyptian rule of three, which Gardiner tells us about). Whatever happens in this world happens above and happens below. The three levels are related.

Then the Great Lord measured the dimensions of the Apsu and established his own dwelling, his image, Esarra, which shall be his temple on this earth—as Ea is below, and the Apsu is above.47 On this earth is the Esagil (the great palace at Babylon), which has the same dimensions as the Apsu—and Anu, Enlil, and Ea (the great trinity) then occupy their dwellings.48

The Anunnaki, the spirit children who come down to earth, built the great temple of Esagil, a replica of the great abyss, the temple at the Apsu. They represented it by the ziggurat, which is over the Apsu.49

Now Enlil, Ea, and Marduk founded his dwelling, his house. After that, the Anunnaki traced for themselves their sanctuaries upon the earth at Esagil, the great temple, which is the vault of the Apsu—the dome—at which point they would come together and unite themselves. There they received their order from gods.50

This is the Babylonian hymn of the creation. The king of Babylon had to disappear each year, in order to show that he could overcome death. He would disappear in an underground vault, where he would be humiliated. A priest would slap his face until the tears ran down; he would be clothed in a mock robe and crowned with a crown of weeds. A reed would be put in his hand. Then the lord of misrule, the false king, took his place for three days.51

At the end of three days, the king emerged from the tomb triumphant to show that he had overcome death and to rule for a new year. As he came forth, a great hymn, the Enuma Elish, was intoned by all the people. In other words, they were repeating what had happened elsewhere, before—the pattern on which this particular earth was founded: “This is Babylon, the place upon this earth where you shall dwell.”52 (The same thing happened at the beginning of Egypt, much earlier.) The Enuma Elish was written about 1700 B.C., though the rites were much earlier.53

“Come here and rejoice in this play, and celebrate his feastival.”54 That sounds exactly like Deuteronomy. “They served the Zarbabu and inaugurated the festival. In the Esagil . . . all the laws were fixed, and all the destinies were determined.”55 The king would go up to the top of the ziggurat (of seven levels), to a round table which represented four possibilities.

He would cast the dice, which bore 36 possibilities, to find out what would happen each day of the year—to determine the destinies of the year, according to which quarter of the table the dice landed on.

The stations of the heavens and the earth were fixed at this place. [All time and space shall meet here.] The laws were fixed here. [Everything is determined here.] And his fathers exalted the work which he had done [and celebrated God].56

Let the son be exalted, . . . may his power be almighty, may he impose his yoke upon his enemies. Let him exercise his pastorate upon the black heads [which is what they called themselves: the true people]. Let them come to this place under his protection throughout the years. Let them repeat these rituals without ever forgetting any of his exploits [or any of his great deeds for them].57

In the Roman year rites, if there was anything non rite non recte parum solemnitatis that had not been done ritually correct, or without sufficient solemnity, the whole seven-day festival had to be run over again. It could be done as many as seven times over. Remarkably, you find the same pattern pervasively, and it’s very old.

“And let them here burn incense and receive guarantee of nourishment for the year.”58 The Arabic mathal could be translated as “a likeness” in the heavens of that which is done on the earth. What interests me now is how old this stuff is.

I spent eight months in England in 1943 and 1944 preparing for the invasion of Europe, at Grenham Lodge, not far from Avebury, near Marlborough, on the plains of England. This is one of the oldest (2600 B.C.) and largest monuments of Europe, 500 years older than Stonehenge. It’s enormous. Much excavating has been done there. On days off, I had a chance to inspect it, and I was electrified by it. I had a lot of guesses about what had happened there. Silbury Hill (Wiltshire), an artificial mound, was set up there in the place of the assembly, for the mountain of the law.

Excavations have revealed that originally it was a sevenfold tower, like the towers in Babylon, or like the original pyramids (step pyramids) of Egypt, rising in seven stages.59 The author of Prehistoric Avebury, Burl, is a very conservative scholar. He abhors anything sensational. So his conclusions are very interesting. At this same time “in other parts of the British Isles people were already putting up great stone circles for ceremonies. At Stennes in the Orkneys [in Scotland halfway to the North Pole ] twelve steepling columns stood in a ring”60—as Jacob did in Israel, whenever he made a covenant (Genesis 31:45-46).

Twelve steepling columns stood in a ring. . . . In Ireland the chambered round cairn of New Grange with its quartz walls with a passage aligned towards the midwinter sunrise was placed inside a circle of over thirty massive blocks of stone. In the Lake District, source of many stone axes, people were going to splendid stone circles with names that peal like a prehistoric role of honour: Long Meg and Her Daughters, the Carles at Castlerigg, Sunken Kirk, the Grey Horses. Rites inside these sacred rings differed but in every region where there was a fair-sized population circular enclosures where the foci [notice the focus, the center points] of ceremonies, megalithic rings in the north and west, henges of earth or chalk in the stoneless areas of lowland Britain.61

That’s how they differed in form but they always have the ring, and they always do the same thing when they come together. It is vastly older than the pyramids, is beautifully done, and contains magnificent things. These did not necessarily originate from the Near East, as once was thought. Ideas worked both ways.

The point is that our ancestors were doing all this far back in time. The Beaker people didn’t come until 2100 B.C. They were the ones that built Stonehenge, though they hooked into the existing traditions, while bringing their own. In the earliest times, everybody seemed to be doing the same sort of thing, building the same kinds of structures.

Burl is very fond of comparing these things with the “Hopewell Indians of the Ohio,” a good three thousand years after. Why should this be, he asks, that they should be doing the same thing?62

“Avebury became almost a metropolitan centre to which people came from miles around to trade and to settle disputes, to worship in the marvelous stone rings that expressed the barbaric pride of the natives.”63 And the remains are not a few. There are piles of stuff to show what was going on at these places. They were all doing the same sort of thing.

More to the point:

Death and regeneration are the themes of Avebury. The presence of human bones, the pieces of stone, the red ochre, the pockets of fertile earth, the antlers, the shapes of the sarsens, the architecture of the avenues and circles, all are consistent with the belief that Avebury was intended as a temple in which, at various times of the year, the large population could gather to watch and take part in ceremonies of magic and evocation that would safeguard their lives.64

Less than a year ago I received a report from the University of Chicago, in cooperation with a university in Spain, of an excavation of the most ancient of these foundations in the world, very accurately dated to about 13,920 B.C., give or take two hundred years.65 Fourteen thousand years ago is a long time; Avebury is only 2600 B.C. And would you believe it, excavators are finding the same stuff—the same combination of stuff way back then? You can’t get away from it. Primitive man was really up to something; he had a definite idea behind what he was doing.

Gordon Childe [the great Scottish prehistorian] thought of Avebury as a cathedral, Stuart Piggot as an open sanctuary associated with a sky-god, Isobel Smith as a monument dedicated to a fertility cult whose practices included the use of stone discs, balls of chalk and human bones. Jacquetta Hawkes wrote of fertility rites involving the earth and the sun although “what those mysteries were we shall never know.” However generalised these observations there is agreement about a religious centre for fertility cults linked with the earth, the sun [the heavenly bodies in their motions], ritual objects and dead bones [i.e., with the ancestors, and scholars all agree on that]. Not many years ago Patrick Crampton went further, suggesting that Avebury was not only a temple of the powerful Earth Goddess but also a “city,” the first “capital—religious, cultural, commercial—of most of southern Britain.”66

So these concepts were very old. I myself was enormously impressed by the size of the stones, weighing sixty tons, set in a great circle 350 yards across. It was an amazing accomplishment that they dragged them to the site. It required great work, concentration, and leadership. Burl says the population of all Western Europe couldn’t have been more than forty-eight thousand people at the time. But there must have been many more than that.67

The enormous ditch around the stones is thirty feet deep, dug out by use of only deer horns.68 For ritual reasons, they could not use anything else.

I used to fly over the area frequently. You could see radiating from the site great table stones, and the great prehistoric roads that led to the site, from hundreds of miles to the north. From everywhere, people came to Avebury, nearly five thousand years ago, to celebrate the very thing we do in our temples today—the continuity of life.

We do have from this same time the actual full pyramid texts, from the tomb of Unas, who ended his rule in 2524 B.C. The Egyptians did the same things when they met at the sacred points. The reading begins with the council in heaven, followed by a dramatization; from that to the creation of the world and the coming of man; then to the fall and the redemption—all accompanied by ordinances. At that time, only the king received them, but very soon after, the nobility also did, and eventually all the people. They received their washings and anointings, their names, and the whole initiation. As the end of the Shabako Stone says, “to become glorified, a king for eternal exaltation.”69 All were supposed to do that.

The temple as the center of the universe may be a myth, but it is the most powerful myth that ever possessed the human race. Mircea Eliade has written a book on that topic, Cosmos and History: The Myth of Eternal Return, in which he deplores the fact that contemporary man has completely cut that tradition off. He says,

The chief difference between the man of the archaic and traditional societies and the man of modern societies [with reference to the place he assumes in the cosmos] with their strong imprint of Judaeo-Christianity lies in the fact that the former feels himself indissolutely connected with the Cosmos and the cosmic rhythms, whereas the latter insists that he is connected only with History.70

We now live in a technological world; let us not worry about other problems. Technology will solve all those. The other stuff is outdated. But for thousands and thousands of years, our ancestors went through those things. So let us think about it all for five minutes.

Notes

William Butler Yeats, “Second Coming,” stanza 1, lines 14-16; in Joseph Hone,

W.B. Yeats

(New York: Macmillan, 1943), 351.

2. James E. Talmage, The House of the Lord (Salt Lake City: Deseret, 1912), 178.

3. Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend, Hamlet’s Mill (Boston: Gambit, 1969), 383-86, 306-7.

4. Cf. Hugh W. Nibley, “Tenting, Toll, and Taxing,” WPQ 19 (1966): 602; reprinted in CWHN 10:35; 74, n. 15.

5. Cf. Werner Müller, Die heilige Stadt: Roma quadrata, himmlisches Jerusalem und die Mythe vom Weltnabel (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1961); and Werner Müller,Kreis und Kreuz: Untersuchungen zur sakralen Siedlung bei Italikern und Germanen (Berlin: Widukind, 1938).

6. Charlton T. Lewis, A Latin Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon, 1969), 1831.

7. Mircea Eliade, Cosmos and History: The Myth of Eternal Return (New York: Princeton University Press, 1974), 12.

8. Cf. Nibley, “Tenting, Toll, and Taxing,” 603-4; in CWHN 10:41; 76, nn. 25-26.

9. Hugh W. Nibley, “The Hierocentric State,” WPQ 4 (1951): 226-53; reprinted in CWHN 10:99-147.

10. Mircea Eliade, Le Chamanisme et les techniques archaïques de l’extase (Paris: Librairie Payot, 1951); for translation, see Willard R. Trask, tr., Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstacy (New York: Pantheon, 1964).

11. Cf. Nibley, ” Tenting. Toll, and Taxing,” 604; in CWHN 10:41; 76-77, nn. 27-29.

12. Eliade, Le Chamanisme et les techniques archaïques de l’extase; for translation, see Trask, tr., Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstacy, 260-61.

13. Nibley, “Hierocentric State,” 226-53; in CWHN 10:99-147. Cf. Eric Uphill, “Egyptian Sed-Festival Rites,” Journal of Near Eastern Studies 24 (1965): 365-83.

14. 1 Jeu 39, in Carl Schmidt, ed., The Books of Jeu and the Untitled Text in the Bruce Codex, tr. Violet MacDermot (Leiden: Brill, 1978), 88, lines 13-22.

15. Second Gnostic Work 2a-3s; 18a; see Untitled Text 1-3, in Schmidt, Books of Jeu and the Untitled Text, 226-30; cf. Hugh W. Nibley, “Treasures in the Heavens: Some Early Christian Insights into the Organizing of Worlds” DJMT 8 (Autumn/Winter 1973): 83; reprinted in CWHN 1:184.

16. Pistis Sophia I, 58, in Carl Schmidt, ed., Pistis Sophia (Leiden: Brill, 1978), 112, lines 4-25.

17. Untitled Text 2, in Schimdt, Books of Jeu and the Untitled Text, 227.

18. Cf. Lewis, Latin Dictionary, 792.

19. De Santillana and von Dechend, Hamlet’s Mill, 383; see the discussion on Amritamanthana.

20. The Vision of Kenaz, which appears in M. R. James, Apocrypha Anecdota, Texts and Studies, ed. J. A. Robinson, 10 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge Universtiy Press, 1893), 2:3:179; cf. OTP 2:342.

21. James, Apocrypha Anecdota Texts and Studies, 174-77; cf. Hugh W. Nibley, Since Cumorah (Salt Lake City: Deseret, 1967), 322-27; reprinted in CWHN 7:286-90; cf. OTP 2:341-42.

22. Pistis Sophia I, 55, in Schmidt, Pistis Sophia, 107.

23. Text 146:14-16, in Alexander Böhlig and Pahor Labib, Die koptisch-gnostische Schrift ohne Titel aus Codex II von Nag Hammadi (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1962), 39; cf. On the Origin of the World II, 98, 14-15, in NHLE, 162.

24. Ethel S. Drower, The Thousand and Twelve Questions (Berlin: Akademie, 1960), 99-100.

25. Carl Schmidt, Gnostiche Schriften in koptischer Sprache aus dem Codex Brucianus, in Texte und Untersuchungen 8/1-2 (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1892), 331.

26. Pistis Sophia I, 25, in Schmidt, Pistis Sophia, 34-35.

27. Sophia Christi 104:4-6; 119:1.

28. Untitled Text 19-20, in Schmidt, Books of Jeu and the Untitled Text, 261-63.

29. Mark Lidzbarski, Das Johannesbuch der Mandäer (Giessen: Töpelmann 1915), 60, n. 6.; cf. CWHN 1:209, n. 98.

30. Nibley, “Hierocentric State,” 226-53; in CWHN 10:99-147.

31. Ibid., 226; in CWHN 10:99.

32. Ibid.

33. Ibid.

34. Ibid., 226; in CWHN 10:99-100.

35. Ibid., 226; in CWHN 10:100.

36. Ibid.

37. Ibid.

38. Hugh W. Nibley, “The Arrow, the Hunter, and the State,” WPQ 2/3 (September 1949): 330-31; reprinted in CWHN 10:4-5.

39. Cf. fig. 15 in CWHN 10:159.

40. Nibley, “Hierocentric State,” 226-27; in CWHN 10:99-101.

41. Eric Burrows, “Some Cosmological Patterns in Babylonian Religion,” The Labyrinth, ed. Samuel H. Hooke (London: SPCK, 1935), 46-48; Nibley, “Hierocentric State,” 226-27; in CWHN 10:99-101.

42. Enuma Elish I, 1.

43. Enuma Elish, IV, 133-40.

44. Enuma Elish, V, 146-55.

45. Enuma Elish, IV, 138-46.

46. Enuma Elish, IV, 138-42.

47. Enuma Elish, IV, 142-44.

48. Enuma Elish, IV, 145-46.

49. Enuma Elish, VI, 62-64.

50. Enuma Elish, VI, 68-70.

51. François Thureau-Dangin, Rituals Accadiens (Paris: Leroux, 1921).

52. Enuma Elish VI, 72.

53. Henri Frankfort, Kingship and the Gods (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 319.

54. Enuma Elish VI, 77-78.

55. Enuma Elish, VI, 77-78.

56. Enuma Elish VI, 85.

57. Enuma Elish, VI, 106-9.

58. Enuma Elish, VI, 112-13.

59. Aubrey Burl, Prehistoric Avebury (London: Yale University Press, 1979), 131; cf. Burrows, “Some Cosmological Patterns,” 68-69.

60. Burl, Prehistoric Avebury, 140.

61. Ibid.

62. Ibid.

63. Ibid.

64. Ibid., 200.

65. L. G. Freeman and J. González Echegaray, “El Juyo: A 14,000-Year-Old Sanctuary from Northern Spain,” History of Religions 21 (August 1981): 1-19.

66. Burl, Prehistoric Avebury, 202.

67. Ibid., 178.

68. Ibid., 175-76.

69. Cf. Shabako Stone, line 64, in Miriam Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature, 3 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1943), 1:56.

70. Eliade, Cosmos and History, xiii-iv; cf. de Santillana and von Dechend, Hamlet’s Mill.

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