Earwa > The Unholy Consult

[TUC Spoilers] Ajokli, Gods, and Chorae

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Madness:
I was reading a Reddit thread in the past couple weeks and one of the comments made me genuinely curious: by what mechanism do we think Ajokli/Kellhus could force all the Chorae and the skin-spies to the ground in the Ark?

The P:
I haven't really thought much about the how.... The chorae are creations of Aporos, right?  That word brings to mind "aporetic."  The dictionary tells several things, but in rhetoric, it means "expressing doubt."  Perhaps that's some kind of metaphorical-made-physical device Bakker is using in that doubts are meaningless in the presence of the manifestation of a god.

But then, I think the skin spies are creatures of Techne, not Aporos, so that wouldn't hold....

And also "aporos," straight from greek is "without means" or "destitute," so I am again probably sliding down a rabbit hole of meaning.

H:

--- Quote from: The P on May 05, 2020, 03:04:59 am ---I haven't really thought much about the how.... The chorae are creations of Aporos, right?  That word brings to mind "aporetic."  The dictionary tells several things, but in rhetoric, it means "expressing doubt."  Perhaps that's some kind of metaphorical-made-physical device Bakker is using in that doubts are meaningless in the presence of the manifestation of a god.
--- End quote ---

Yeah, I think the name comes more from Aporia than anything else.  That is, the doubt, probably along something like self-referential paradoxes.

To really dive down into it, we know that Sorcery is a sort of "semantic game."  That is, it gets it's power from an ability for semantic to command "reality."  What the Mark notes though, is the incongruity of these commands with that of the "unconditioned" state.  Now, aside the issue of fully qualifying how or why speakers can/do count as conditioned where (what we might call) "nature" is "unconditioned" I think the fact of the matter is that this is the case.

From Bakker himself:

--- Quote ---The Aporos possesses a contradictory, or negative, semantics, and as such is able only to undo the positive semantics of things like the Gnosis, Psukhe, Anagogis - even the Daimos.
--- End quote ---

--- Quote ---My original idea was for the Aporos to be a 'dead and ancient' branch of the esoterics. I'm still leaning in that direction, but I find the notion of a sorcery based on a semantics of contradiction and paradox almost too juicy to resist!
--- End quote ---

--- Quote ---Personally, I've always worried that the Chorae may come across as too ad hoc, as mere narrative conveniences that allow a happy (but not very credible) balance between the sorcerous and the non-sorcerous. But in point of fact, that role came after - the Chorae developed independently. From the outset, I've looked at each of the sorcerous branches in linguistic terms, as practices where language commands, rather than conforms to, reality. So the Anagogis turns on the semantic power of figurative analogies, the Gnosis turns on the semantic power of formal generalizations, the Psukhe turns on speaker intention, and so on.

And much as language undoes itself in paradoxes, sorcery can likewise undo itself. The Aporos is this 'sorcery of paradox,' where the meanings that make sorcery possible are turned in on themselves to generate what might be called 'contradiction fields.'
--- End quote ---

What the Chorae does is enforce the sort of "unconditioned Real" via a negative semantics, which "undoes" the conditioning of a positive semantics.  The Mark already "tracks" this, in a sense, noting how paradoxically disjointed the conditioned source is from the unconditioned.  The exception, of course, is the Psuhke:

--- Quote ---Everything comes down to meaning in Eärwa. Where sorcery is representational, utilizing either the logical form (as with the Gnosis) or the material content (as with the Anagogis) of meaning to leverage transformations of reality, the Psukhe utilizes the impetus. Practitioners of the Psukhe blind themselves to see through the what and grasp the how, the pure performative kernel of meaning–the music, the passion, or as the Cishaurim call it, the ‘Water.’ As a contemporary philosopher might say, the Psukhe is noncognitive, it has no truck with warring versions of reality, which is why it possesses no Mark and remains invisible to the Few.
--- End quote ---

So, while the Mark does not track that, because it is a sort of unconditioned conditioning, the Chorae still resolves that paradox as well.  Because any and all sorcery do violate the simple rule of "Before and After."  (That is, it simply wills into existence, it breaks the usual chains of cause and effect.)

So, the question then is, what makes Ajokli (and the rest of the god's) Thaumaturgy different?

One, the hundred are not cognitive, that is, they are not minds in the way of a living mind, so like the Psuhke, it would never show a Mark and it also is non-linguistic, in the sense of harnessing impetus, rather than semantics.  What then is the difference between Psuhke and Thaumaturgy?  The answer is essentially that while the Psuhke appears continuous with The Real, Thaumaturgy simply is The Real, repurposed and continuous.  So, where a Chorae will resolve the paradox of how the Psuhke could both violate the Principle of Before and After, it has no bearing on Thaumaturgy which does not violate Before and After, because the Hundred are Eternal, so what they do has always been and always will be.

Now, this is not complete, but it's along the lines of what I think.  One issue is to resolve what I see as the nature of the Outside with Hegel's notion of language as the Dasein of Spirit and so the nature of the Hundred.  Really, I think it has to do more with notions of Identity, born of language, but not being(s) of language.  The Eternal project really...

In any case, let me cut the word salad here.

Wilshire:
I just assume Kellhus' (or Ajokli's, whichever, it doesnt matter) God magic works on chorae just fine, similar to Mimara and the Wight.

So presumably Ajoklhus casts Giga-Gravity on the room and everyone drops to the floor... Or he casts it on the chorae since they are all gripping them tightly for protection.

H:
Good point, yeah, I think what Mimara does is also "thaumaturgic" and is non-paradoxical, so Chorae have no effect there, or can even be repurposed by her (seemingly).

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