esoteric-goblin

[esoteric-goblin]

"The gods' chosen" "the gods' champion" no that's the god's little wind up toy. The gods' chew toy. The gods' favorite barbie doll

[esoteric-goblin]

Making long-form webcomics is like

[esoteric-goblin]

[esoteric-goblin]

How did magicians back in the day make seals? Was there a science behind it or was it intuitive?

That's a really good question! The answer is extremely complicated!

When most people these days think of seals they think of goetic seals. But the terminology of "seals" actually comes from the idea of sealing a letter. Specifically, it refers to one of the many apocryphal versions of the story of Solomon and Ashmedai, in which king Solomon uses a signet ring with a special magical symbol on it to command demons.

Now, this is one of those biblical stories that people went absolutely nuts for. Jews, Christians, Muslims, damn near every abrahamic faith has their own take on the story, because let's be honest here it's cool as fuck.

But! The original story from the Tanakh doesn't refer to the seal at all, and focuses much more on controlling the sheyd with manacles inscribed with a secret name of God. The inherent magical power of names of God is a common trope in Jewish literature, but later versions of the tale also include greco-egyptian ideas about the inherent magical properties of language, forms, and mathematics.

So when we look at a contemporary English version of a goetic seal, we are looking at something with literally thousands of years of compiled knowledge behind it. I wouldn't necessarily call it science, or intuition, I would describe it as systematic, and narrative. Closer to how campfire stories are improved over generations as people tell and retell them.

Look at this seal of Belial:

The idea of the seal itself? That goes back to Babylonian Jewish ideas about written text having power to control supernatural entities. (Google Babylonian curse bowls if you haven't already.)

See how the letters are spaced? That's important. That goes back to neopythagorean ideas about regular polygons being fundamental building blocks of the universe.

The little crosses? Those are probably cruciforms! That's how you can tell Christians were involved at some point.

See how some of the lines of the seal end in little loops? That goes back to ptolmaic Egyptian ideas about magic. If the crosses are cruciforms, these are probably ankh-forms! You see shapes like that all over magical texts from the 2nd-6th century Mediterranean!

These symbols are the result of dozens of cultures and people and languages collectively yes-anding each other for literally thousands of years. They are DENSE with meaning.

[esoteric-goblin]

when the academic article is so good it has you giggling and kicking your feet

[esoteric-goblin]

- E. M. Forster's New Year's resolutions, written 31 December 1904

[esoteric-goblin]

Many books of the Bible that didn't make it to the official canon(s) and other incredibly important pieces of scripture and literature are only known today because they were preserved in the Ge'ez script in Ethiopia. It is very likely that there are lots of other texts dating to the earliest days of Christianity that are still to be "found", only because there aren't enough international scholars who know the Ge'ez script or work in Ethiopia. There are many, but not as much as it deserves. (Important note is that Ge'ez is both a liturgical language, like Latin, and also is a script, much like Latin or Chinese characters, used by many Ethiopian languages, but others can be written and indeed are written in Ge'ez script, this is why it has preserved such a range of literature)

Ge'ez looks like this:

ሀሎ! ይህ በአማርኛ ቋንቋ እና በግእዝ ፊደል የተጻፈ ነው! ለእርስዎ እና ለቤተሰብዎ በረከቶች!

There was briefly a very bad taste meme calling it a "demon language", with people even copypasting random religious literature in Ge'ez thus making it seem more "sinister". I won't comment on how ignorant and offensive that is.

Ge'ez is an important script and language, much like Greek or Latin, because of its connection to major religions like Christianity, Judaism and Islam. Ethiopia is a wonderful country with a deep, rich history, and is an example of how Africa has always been part of world history. But like all languages, it's also a cultural heritage on its own, worth cherising, preserving, and learning about, regardless of its importance to the rest of the world. Instead of being ignorant for a racist joke, we could always take our time and learn and appreciate such things.

[esoteric-goblin]

If posting fic online has taught me anything, it’s that I have no idea how the reader will react to anything. Nada. Zip. Zilch. Not the faintest clue.

Fics that I think I scribbled off just to get them out there get the kindest, most rapturous feedback. Fics I slaved over, agonized over, bled my soul into get a couple tepid replies. Fics I thought were me revealing the darkness and weird kink that lives in my brain, scared to even post it for fear of judgement, get, “Aaaw that’s so sweet!” replies. Baffling.

My conclusion? You just never know. You really just can’t know. When I did a workshop with 20 other writers I would try to guess what their critique of my story would be and I was right maybe 1 in 20 times. Only one other writer would have the same critique for my story that I had. And it wasn’t even always the same person.

The encouraging part about this is, if self recrimination, the fear that you know what people won’t like about your story, is holding you back, just say fuck it! You’re almost certainly wrong! All you can do is make it the best story you can for the energy you have. And yeah, sometimes that means scribbling it out in an evening and kicking it out to the void of the internet before you can change your mind or worry about editing it more than once because then you’ll never post it.

It’s all chaos, man. You don’t get to decide what the audience thinks. All you can do is create it and put it out there for them to decide.

[esoteric-goblin]

reminder to worldbuilders: don't get caught up in things that aren't important to the story you're writing, like plot and characters! instead, try to focus on what readers actually care about: detailed plate tectonics

#worldbuilding

[esoteric-goblin]

[esoteric-goblin]

Bowl Depicting a Swarm of Mice. Medium: ceramic and pigment Period: 180 BC - 500 AD. Culture: Nazca; South coast, Peru. Now on display at the Art Institute of Chicago. Illustration by Elena Izcue (1889-1970).

[esoteric-goblin]

Given how wizards are themed around higher education, with their universities and ivory towers, I wanna see more fiction that goes into their published papers.

Like, there should be massive drama in the Wizarding world about how Fantasy Wikipedia says "There's no consensus about the origins of skydoves" when in fact, there very much is, everyone knows they were created in the first or second dragon wars, and that's uncontroversial. One single wizard at the University of Towers who thinks they're an offshoot of mermaids DOES NOT MEAN IT'S AN OPEN ISSUE.

Papers that are rebuttals to other magical discoveries. Like, look, that spell just won't work, and you can't call it a "theoretical exercise" just to cover up the fact that you've not been able to cast it. You can't combine Ichthyomancy with completely unrelated elemental summonings, that's just not how magic works, in all due respect.

Thesis defense would be significantly scarier when all your reviewers can cast Everburning Fireball on your ass.

Learning Theoretical Evocation from a hungover lizardman TA at 8am, because the professor for this course has been off on the Elemental Plane of Circles for half the semester trying to finish her paper on how Centaurs predate horses rather than the other way around.

Speaking of which, the life of a wizard graduate student... You keep getting called to go on "quests" which are just overgrown research expeditions to help out some professor's project. You spent nearly a month in that damp castle capturing all the spinfrogs you could find, all to help your professor's project on the possibilities of concentrated soul essences. To this day, you still get dizzy whenever you see battlements, let alone a donjon.

#this is smth i do in my worldbuilding! #as i come up w new dimensions of arcana or bits of worldbuilding or weird phenomena or theological niches #i also frequently spawn academic debates in my head about them #maybe someday actually write some of those papers lol

[esoteric-goblin]

[esoteric-goblin]

The divine right of kings but it's a curse

[esoteric-goblin]

What are some chronic illnesses that can only occur in a fantasy setting?

[esoteric-goblin]

Love how tumblr has its own folk stories. Yeah the God of Arepo we’ve all heard the story and we all still cry about it. Yeah that one about the woman locked up for centuries finally getting free. That one about the witch who would marry anyone who could get her house key from her cat and it’s revealed she IS the cat after the narrator befriends the cat.

[esoteric-goblin]

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