Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Cheiromancer" data-source="post: 5294423" data-attributes="member: 141">Well, the heart of the story is about whether a succubus can repent. Can a creature of pure evil freely and voluntarily change her ways?  Ultimately, the story is about how far can a person can change. How they can become what they choose to be.The angels of Oronthon's heaven are not really individuals. They are submissive to the objective moral reality of Oronthon's will to such an extent that they are truly and literally self-less.The Adversary understands what could be- thus, he grasps something that is not. He tries to realize one such possibility; what is not becomes, through intellect and will, something that is. But in rejecting what is, he has also lost his own nature; the Adversary is nameless. Many, many angels follow the Adversary in rebellion. They fall; they gain their individuality, but do great violence to their own natures.Some of these fallen angels reject the trade-off. They reject both the submissive attitude of the celestial host, and the self-creation of the Adversary's followers. Perhaps they reject any system that requires such a trade-off; why should Hell be a consequence of individuality? They revolt against creation itself. These are the demons; the twice-fallen. The polar opposite of Oronthon appears in the paradigm; annihilation itself, not a thing among other things, but something that is striven for, something which is reflected among the fallen, and especially the twice-fallen. Thought and language struggles to express this reification of non-being, but perhaps it is enough to say "Nothing Becomes." The other meaning, of course, is that all is simultaneous and actual, fully real, in the mind of Oronthon. Change is illusion; it is not the case that anything becomes. That's the other meaning of "Nothing Becomes."Which is primary and most fundamental; being, or non-being? Light or darkness?  This is fundamentally the quarrel between Oronthonian and Chesnite. The Oronthonian will say that in the beginning there was light; the Chesnite says that the light appeared in darkness, and so is posterior to it and dependent upon it.But there is another complication; the Green. Neither stasis nor destruction, but the cycles of becoming. Nehael does not convert within the Oronthonian paradigm, nor yet the Chesnite. A druid converts her. She steps outside the paradigm. What is the Green?  What is its extent?  What is there that is not natural?  Even in our own time one might reject the difference between natural and artificial by observing that humans are also part of nature; anything we do, therefore, is natural. The new paradigm is opaque to the Adversary; to grasp it, he must embrace it, and, losing his self, regain a name. Hell follows in his wake. The Trees manifest fully.Orthodox Oronthonian theology cannot embrace the Green. It is rejected as paganism. Heretics see the Green as the feminine aspect of Oronthon. In the era of saizhan, where heresy is impossible, who can say? To the Chesnite, the Green is the "Cloud of False Wisdom."  The feminine aspect of the Abominable Light that is Oronthon. Under the guidance of the Sela, Oronthonianism begins to expand. But can their opposites do the same? Can a Chesnite embrace Saizhan?Wizardly magic is yet another complication. Integral to it is the notion of limitation. Political involvement is forbidden to wizards, and this limitation enables scholarship to to prosper and magic to flourish. Yet the temptation to meddle in the political order is irresistible; this changes the limitations under which magic operates. With the advent of the Claviger new restrictions came into being, and with it a (rather dark) Golden age of magic. It is not for nothing that the binding of demons is the quintessentially wizardly act. I have no idea what the new paradigm of wizardly magic consists in, but I suspect that at its heart is limitation. Something forbidden, but irresistible. And I suspect the forbidden element is related to what is Outside. The insane; what cannot be, as opposed to what is or what is not.The Green can include the Oronthonian/Chesnite dialectic. But not, I think, the madness that is Outside.  Can Dream?  I am not sure. At some level of thesis/antithesis/synthesis it seems as if the self is lost, and the question of how a succubus - how anyone- can choose against its own nature, is unasked.</blockquote>

Verification