12 KiB
[Unsong] Chapter 57: Now Taking On Ahania's Form…
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Author: u/None *
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URL:
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Score: 41
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Created: 2017-01-29T06:54:27
Post:
Comments:
u/monkyyy0 [+17] (4 hours later)
Hey, maybe, maybe marriage isn't just a word in a universe where nothing is just a word.
Also partial confirmation of my robin=otherking theory?
u/ratanon [+6] Holy, holy is the lord of /etc/hosts (5 hours later)
Oh, definitely. And it was Ana who first pointed it out, in chapter 5.
u/Evan_Th [+3] Sunshine Regiment (11 hours later)
Partial confirmation? How?
u/monkyyy0 [+1] (11 hours later)
It requires marriage name, which the comet spawn now have
u/None [+3] (12 hours later)
[deleted]
u/NoYouTryAnother [+2] (12 hours later)
Yeah, I was unclear on it when OP posted the theory, and he never replied to why the marriage name is relevant. Best I could come up with is that without it, sharing the Explicit Name with a Robin interred in Hell would require the long reach of a (long distance-cast?) Marriage Name and umm .... Yeah, I'm pretty sure that's not it. Whatever it is, I'll be surprised if it is so direct a mechanism that today's post gives any real weight to it.
u/monkyyy0 [+5] (13 hours later)
The need to bridge the holyest holy person(with the explicit name) and someone evil enough to go to the deepest part of hell; given that glowey eyes takes knowledge of the explicit name away form the comet king, its highly unlikely your getting the name into hell by merely remembering it
u/eroticas [+1] (22 hours later)
I read that as "otherkin" and was quite confused.
u/monkyyy0 [+1] (a day later)
Well robin is an otherkin what to you think that whole bird suit chapter was about
u/RMcD94 [+1] (15 days later)
Wouldn't it be easier to marry a random convict
u/monkyyy0 [+1] (15 days later)
Shhh no logic now only faith its a story about god
u/chthonicSceptre [+14] Highly Unlikely (10 hours later)
I once read an atheist tract that asked why God didn’t prove His omniscience by putting predictions about science or technology in the Bible. The answer is that He did and they’re just not thinking kabbalistically enough to notice. Any Israeli schoolchild can open up the Book of Ezekiel and see a 6th century BC prophet describe the angels he encounters as “glowing with electricity”.
This whole book is overflowing with what I want to call "confirmation bias", but may in fact be a new type of fallacy that has yet to be taxonomized by fallacy-ologists. I've thought about it for a while but it only really came to a head in Interlude ש: Obama. Like, Obama's daughter is named Malia. The personification of evil? Well, the obvious objection is that Malia is a normal Hawaiian name, but the strong objection is that it's the Hawaiian version of Mary (presumably not evil incarnate). And the prophecy given by Lovecraft specifies that the strange dark one will wear red robes, whereas Obama wore blue.
I know, there are other counterarguments you could make, but all this really shows is that the similarity of two sets increases exponentially the more you're willing to disregard the contrary evidence.
On an unrelated note, I'm nominating Sarah for a "The ring is mine!" moment at some point before the story's over.
u/ScottAlexander [+18] (14 hours later)
The red garments are obviously meant to be interpreted symbolically as a reference to leftist philosophy.
u/Evan_Th [+6] Sunshine Regiment (16 hours later)
Unless they're a reference to the Republican Party and the Red Tribe!
u/chthonicSceptre [+3] Highly Unlikely (16 hours later)
And yet in chapter something-or-other we learn that American politics are a valid way of interpreting Kabbalah. Also, not only is Obama Sr. not from Egypt, Kenya is not adjacent to Egypt, not anywhere near Egypt really, so at no point could we say it was "inner Egypt". Going on would be belaboring the point.
u/ScottAlexander [+10] (19 hours later)
Remember that the Greeks alternately used "Libya" and "Ethiopia" to mean all of Africa. Why couldn't Lovecraft do the same with "Egypt", in which case "Inner Egypt" would be the part furthest from the Mediterreanean, eg sub-Saharan Africa.
u/chthonicSceptre [+6] Highly Unlikely (20 hours later)
I suppose there's no reason he couldn't have, apart from that that poem is titled "Nyarlathotep", and "-hotep" is an Egyptian suffix.
(I will take your word that barak o'bama is how "lightning and heaven" is pronounced in Hebrew. But, being moderately fond of linguistics, I have yet to find a language that conflates the concept of "and" and "of/from")
That isn't really the point though, I was just musing that if you're willing to accept absolutely no rigor whatsoever you can sort of prove anything; even if we're not accepting non-religious evidence, there's all kinds of alternative interpretation. Satan may quote the scripture for his own purpose and all that.
u/Fredlage [+8] (a day later)
(I hereby propose “Sofer’s Law”: the number of correspondences you can draw between any two systems increase exponentially as a function of your laxity in declaring that things represent other things.)
From chapter 18.
u/Muskwalker [+2] (a day later)
I have yet to find a language that conflates the concept of "and" and "of/from"
The preposition |с| s "with, from" in some Slavic languages springs to mind as being in that ballpark, at least. (But isn't Hebrew 'o-' more 'or' than 'and' anyway?)
u/ratanon [+2] Holy, holy is the lord of /etc/hosts (3 days later)
But each meaning takes different case; 'of/from' takes genitive, while 'and' takes instrumental. The Proto-Slavic reconstructions are also different: *jьz versus *sъ(n). And they are different prepositions altogether in some contemporary Slavic languages, like in Czech (z versus s).
u/Muskwalker [+4] (3 days later)
You're right that diachronically it doesn't work, but synchronically... users of the language don't always have the history in front of them when making those linguistic connections.
I don't know if |с| is normally thought of by native speakers as two different words, or one word with two different constructions—like |за| and |по|, which take multiple cases for different meanings and do have a single etymology—but I wouldn't be surprised if at least some people treat it as if it were a single word with meanings perhaps related in a folk-etymological way.
(As an example with a different word, just today I learned that a pool of water and a pool of funds are apparently not related etymologically, but I've certainly considered pooling a single concept of material literally or metaphorically being collected into a mass. Conflation of concepts is certainly a thing that can happen when the sound and spelling of diverse words also fall together.)
u/absolute-black [+2] (18 hours later)
Most of east Africa was referred to as Egypt for some of history, I don’t think you should be thinking of modern borders for a kabbalistic argument
u/chthonicSceptre [+3] Highly Unlikely (18 hours later)
> modern borders don't apply to kabbalah
Counterexample: the rest of this entire story.
u/absolute-black [+2] (19 hours later)
That wasn't the point?
When you read a text written thousands of years ago talking about something even further back and it says "egypt", that doesn't refer to modern egypt, it refers to a lot of Africa, possibly including the birthplace of Obama's father. Ergo, kabbalistically, Obama is 'descended from egypt' or whatever.
Applying the modern US borders or what have you to kabbalah concepts is different from applying modern borders to the territory being referred to in the past
u/chthonicSceptre [+2] Highly Unlikely (20 hours later)
Fungi from Yuggoth was written in 1929 though, and doesn't refer to events that happened thousands of years ago.
u/absolute-black [+3] (21 hours later)
Turns out I can’t read and thought we were talking about a biblically derived line, my bad.
u/chthonicSceptre [+2] Highly Unlikely (21 hours later)
That's okay, Lovecraft is a religion unto himself.
u/chthonicSceptre [+7] Highly Unlikely (16 hours later)
And, in fact, to quote a great man,
"Such as...?"
"Such as 'The Sun is a star.' Or 'Mars is a rusty place with deserts and volcanos, like Sinai.' Or 'A body in motion tends to remain in motion.' Or--let's see now"--she quickly scribbled some numbers on a pad--" 'The Earth weighs a million million million million times as much as a child.' Or--I recognize that both of you seem to have some trouble with special relativity, but it's confirmed every day routinely in particle accelerators and cosmic rays--how about 'There are no privileged frames of reference'? Or even 'Thou shalt not travel faster than light.' anything they couldn't possible have known three thousand years ago."
"Any others?" Joss asked.
"Well, there's an indefinite number of them--or at least one for every principal of physics. Let's see... 'Heat and light hid in the smallest pebble.' Or even 'The way of the Earth is as two, but the way of the lodestone is as three.' I'm trying to suggest that the gravitational force follows an inverse square law, while the magnetic dipole force follows an inverse cube law. Or in biology"--she nodded toward der Heer, who seemed to have taken a vow of silence--"how about 'Two strands entwined is the secret of life'?"
And indeed, as she goes on, she points out that God might well have wanted to lay proof of his actions for the "wise and learned", but could just have easily left a colossal crucifix in orbit or something. The whole "electricity" thing is really weak. For instance, God Himself describes creation like so:
Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?
I do not know which Hebrew word is here translated into "foundations", but if the Zionist scholars decided that an apt translation was "the forces of gravity exerted by the Sun" or "the gradual disintegration of a pre-solar accretion disk", they would not, in fact, be plumbing the depths of knowledge evinced by the author of Job.
Edit: just for completion's sake, chashmal is used exactly twice in the Torah (IIRC, in the book of Ezekiel to describe angels, and their actions); it is not used to describe lightning, or static shocks, or brain activity in any sense. Crucially, angels in UNSONG aren't really described that way either, at least not yet.
u/blak8 [+3] (2 days later)
Apophenia.
u/CaseyAshford [+10] (36 minutes later)
The kabalistic marriage of Sohu and Aaron has some potentially disastrous implications as it means that Erica now has a potential link to the secret knowledge known only to Sohu and Uriel. If she can gain access to the kabilistic words developed by Ana and Aaron through her kabalistic marriage to Ana than it may be possible for her to gain knowledge from Sohu now that she is being added to the system.
u/monkyyy0 [+6] (4 hours later)
Also sarah has access to kabalistic books and seeing "masters" at work trying to get something she may have and has stated that her goal for the next day or so will be getting arron to marry her.
Mind reading manic super ai is coming?
edit// mind reading has to do with electricity.... sarah is probably going to be very very good at mind reading in short order
u/thecommexokid [+2] (a day later)
Clearly the whole story should be read as a parable warning against the dangers of polyamory.
u/None [+3] (a day later)
It's worse than that: Erica is kabbalistically married to Dylan Alvarez.