I don't have nearly enough time to spin off on what I learned and how it applies to TTDECBA, but I figure I can touch on one or two subjects this time...
on the nature of familiars
In my Google Doc of notes and plot bits for the project, I have written the following, after the train of thought I had time to pursue walking all the way to Walmart on the 19th:
FAMILIARS- research?? can a familiar be a construct? How are familiars used in real life magic? As assistants, “hey cat I’d really like some fresh wing of bat, could you go out and go hunting for me?” As actual channels for magic, like living wands/staves/apparati? What if you have a sexual relationship with your familiar? Does that strengthen the magic or weaken it? Are they normal animals? Have they been magically enhanced? Or are they of a particular magical breed, like how witches in popular fiction are human but “born” magic of a magic bloodline?
And, hey, I've done that research, and am Lazarus, come to tell you all! It turns out, in popular Puritan witchology (which I'm pretty sure is the most canonical of all the witchologies,) familiars aren't animals at all, rather demons in animal form given to a witch by the devil (because witches, man! always intercoursin' with the devil,) given as a... man, my notes are silent on the issue; I still don't know. Assistant, living stave, potential lover, whatever. Whatever they're needed to be, I suppose. Familiars provide, their services, to a witch, in return for some of her delicious delicious witchy blood to drink. Either from her finger or from some protuberance... like, some kind of witchy, protuberance. Yeah, like that. You think witches are portrayed as having warts so often because some artist stuck on how to draw a witch saw someone with a wart and thought to themselves, hmm, that could work? No, man. It's 'cause warts are blood teats. Blood teats, for familiars. And if a young lady had a wart, certainly she must have a familiar, and frequently intercourse with the devil himself!
Let's interlude about witch hunts for a bit.
bit interlude, re: witch hunts!
There were precious few witch hunts in the middle ages. Monty Python are a comedy troupe. Also, King Arthur had been dead for like 500 years by the middle ages anyway; wasn't there this thing where the historical existence of like the Round Table played into a quest in Ivanhoe or something?
We're familiar with Salem, Massachusetts, of course, the witch trials there. Note the location: Massachusetts. The new world. Puritans, that is to say Protestants. Witch hunts were mainly in the time period of the Renaissance. Witch hunts served an important historical purpose, as terrible as they were: people were friggin' paranoid back then, and needed to take it out on a common enemy. Catholics hated Protestants, Protestants hated Catholics. It was a time of high tension. We invented stories about our enemies, to keep us united as a people. We told each other they did horrible things. Cannibalism. Pedophilia. Orgies. The Black Mass, where witches road their brooms all to one place, to kiss the devil right under his tail.
Before the Renaissance, we didn't need witch hunts; the Church was already united. It was only during a time of paranoia and suspicion that we could justify bringing out the worst in us, telling ourselves it was for the greater good, if an innocent girl died, because she might have been a witch.
Of course, there have been periods of high tension since then. Remember Senator McCarthy, what his inquests were colloquially known as?
TTDECBA takes place post-Cold War. We no longer need to be afraid. We no longer have a purpose to keep us united. Our witches are becoming less real. Our need for belief in anything higher is waning. Our technology is waxing, and our magic is failing...
End of interlude.
genius is a demon
So, familiars. Demons in animal form. As to whether they can be a construct, like a stuffed doll made out of needles and clockwork, beats the hecks out of me. (See what I did there? Because I just noticed it just now myself.) Clockwork familiars, though: still a pretty neat idea?
Alright, so, your familiar, it's not an animal it's a demon. Great. But what's one of those? Turns out Western conception of "demons" has come a long and twisty way. Anyone who's ever read His Dark Materials could tell you that "daemon" is Lyra's world's name for the soul, which is kind of off-putting to those of us with more defined religious convictions (trust me, it's HDM, the really weird assaults against our notions of defined religious convictions are forthcoming!) Daemon=soul actually makes a lot more sense if you know about the ancient Greek concept, a daemon being the guardian spirit of a place, or person. So kind of like a Roman "genius," only, yeah, exactly the same? Only where does this come from, in earlier forms of the concept, so that it could have split off into our modern interpretation of demons?
Homer has the answer for us here. Greeks have gods, right? Of course right. But what is one of those? Homer differentiated between "theos" and "daemon," both as meaning god, but each word having a slightly different connotation. Theos is the personality of a god. Daemon is the activity of a god.
Demons, then, are the actions of gods. Gods themselves, true, and the god himself, or goddess herself, but as a weird metaphysical entity, the power of that god to action. A god, but not physically like the theos of that god. A god, but the servants of that god at the same time, like the way Shub-Niggurath manifests its(?)self into our dimension, bits of 'im poking through as eerie balls of light, rips in spacetime. A lot of this is my interpretation here, figuring how to reconcile this concept into the TTDECBA universe. And it fits beautifully.
Finn Michael Moone exists in a supernatural world. Supernatural, in traditional religious connotation, refers to actions of God Himself, the power of miracles, that kind of thing. There's a layer under that, Preternatural, though, which refers specifically to actions of angels. If Finn can escape from supernatural peril, can he do the same regarding preternatural peril? I'm actually not sure. Are angel's God's demons? Well, in one view of the ancient Homeric concept, the view we're using here, yes, they are. Also using, one specific conception of what an "angel" is, as well.
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