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sowninchrist · 11 months

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We Broke His Heart - The Revelation 🕊️🌱

Glory to the Lord for continuously giving us all a new day to breathe and to give Him all the praise, honor and glory!

God has put these topic into my heart before the surgery I had; so much has happened to my health but God has been so faithful and so perfect that He has delivered me through this entire process. During this time, I told my apostle I thought I wasn’t going to live to see the next day due to hearing a voice say that my time had come to an end; to this day I’m still surprised but extremely thankful to God for everything He’s done, so much that I’ve definitely felt different and see life differently than before. Whilst the people who continue to create division in my life are still people I choose to love, with God’s revelation He gave me I asked Him for help to write this on experiences that I’ve gathered from speaking to other brothers and sister’s in Christ because as One Body and One Spirit that He’s showed me; I’ve come to see that love He always spoke about.

I always asked God to reveal to His people how we are breaking His heart. When I started my walk in Christ, one of the things I asked Him always was to show us what was hurting His heart; something that a lot of preachers say is, “worship isn’t about you” and “your entire walk is based on God, not on you” and for the most part I find that to be true, worship isn’t about us and our walk isn’t based on us; however, how we worship does and how we walk does as well; what do I mean by this? How we worship, if we have other things in our minds and if we have others sitting at the throne of our hearts and we’re worshipping God at that same moment, there’s going to be intrusive thoughts and a heart that’s not on God, God doesn’t want worship lips and a stray heart. How we walk in Christ, God doesn’t love a heart that deceives nor does He want a heart that’s not contrite, whilst you may look beautifully clean on the outside what we speak and do come from our hearts and the Word says that what’s done in secret will come to the light.

God revealed many things and how we, His people can make division because of what many believe in or what many think that is appropriate for one, only they ruin it for that same person because they want to speak for others. Unfortunately, everyone of us will fall in this area, and it’s a guarantee. However, the Lord is with us. He promises us that He never leaves us alone during trials nor tribulations; He’s not a God that watches us suffer and then comes to our aid, no no no, God is a God that wants to deliver us, He says so much through Isaiah that He will be with us through waters, through fires. God is a God who keeps His promises. Not only that so but He also says that after suffering He makes that promise that He will restore, confirm, strengthen and establish us (1 Peter 5:10). This topic doesn’t only touch on public people but also people in general like myself, like christian content creators, etc., I had to deal with a public person who blasphemed and justified what their friend said with the Bible; obliviously saying that their friend had done nothing wrong but quoted the Bible; to which many of us who were saying it was blasphemy, got called pharisees and for not having a sense of humor that even God found it funny. But I couldn’t see how God could laugh at a content creator using a soap and dramatically say the last part of when He told the Father it was finished. We all sometimes can come off like John and James when they wanted fire to strike the Samaritans for disrespecting Jesus (Luke 9:54-55), but we got to forgive and remember that not everyone has the same revelation yet, it’s about having patience with people who commit sin and realizing that you need to pray for them instead because we are called to be peacemakers, who will be called children of God

There’s good representation and bad representation and this is of a follower in Christ; I’m more than positive that there has been both good and bad representation from myself, and I’m more than gladly to speak of my tempers, my talkative persona, how I forget Scripture or where I read the Scripture, etc., and this is very serious to me personally because the Word of God is no joke and not a conversation that you should manipulate to fit your life to excuse you of wanting to do something wrong, especially when speaking to those who want to believe in God; there’s a lot of people who will ask for Bible references (I’m one of those people), I love when people can explain the Truth in simple terms because the Word has deeper meanings, but right now the bad representations that I was revealed are of those that are visibly around the world who are doing things that cause chaos around the world, I’ve stumbled upon many many people of different ages, of both genders who have definitely not shown the love of Christ to others as we should be doing. I observed this in a lot of people who claims to walk in Christ, I still remember seeing a person telling someone something very uncomfortable even for me about having joy in watching someone suffering in hell for not accepting Jesus; something that I take personal not because it was told to me but because they make people push Jesus away due to people like that. Paul has said that we must judge righteously in church and we must not do it to those outside of church, it’s a constant reminder that I make to not only myself but many people who try to evangelize online who get frustrated with nonbelievers or people of different beliefs. The worst type of those who force Jesus on others, when that’s the work of God, Paul mentions this in 1 Cor 3:7 that even though God used Paul and Apollos, it was Him who helped grow the seeds.

I’m a firm believer of the tare and wheat parable, if God told His angels that they wouldn’t be able to know who is a wheat or a tare then we the more obvious, would not know; one of my favorite verses is that we’ll know them by their fruits; when Matthew wrote this, he was talking about someone who is trying to appear as one of God’s people; nowadays many people don’t use the gift of discernment and jump to judge and those who jump to judge come from what their flesh feels, I love how when Jesus was talking to the Pharisees in John 8:15, He says they judge by the flesh but He doesn’t pass judgement on anyone and what I love about 8:16, He says that if He did, He knew they were true because He wasn’t alone, He was with the Father who had sent Him, why do I love this? Because God can see what’s in our hearts and Jesus says that what the Father shows Him, He’d do. The bad representation starts when you lack discernment and base off judgement in your flesh; there’s jokes that shouldn’t be made and then there’s comments that get thrown here and there that shouldn’t be said, sometimes people make us angry but that’s why we pray to the Holy Spirit for to help us grow the fruit of self-control; there is a huge difference in speaking righteously and speaking non-righteously (Eph 4:29). And here is the situation; when someone speaks non-righteously, for someone who is discerning; it doesn’t take long to grow disinterest. Whenever someone gets called out for speaking in the flesh and not as a follower of Christ; they get angry because they want to be right and they’re driven on a control that is no longer righteous authority; if someone were to message me saying “you’re speaking in the flesh” about a Bible verse, I’d need to look back on what verse and check what I studied was not based on my own understanding. A lot of people get mad when they get called out for speaking non-righteously; as I’ve preached to others, if we get mad over what the Word says, we’re the problem. We need to learn the difference between authority and control, as followers of Christ we aren’t meant to walk in control, we’re meant to walk in authority; Jesus didn’t leave control, He left authority.

I was interested in what God showed me about the difference in control and authority and He amazingly put a CEO to be one of the first people who explain this, the most amazing thing is, she’s a follower of Christ; she explains the difference between authority and control; we need to identify to have authority you need to know humility; this is speaking of authority with others just like He has allowed many to have when it comes to the public. Something that I love about what she wrote is that those who have humility in their hearts are aware that they needed humility to do things correctly and the amazing thing is, is that a lot of what is mentioned is spoken about division and how one way of leading can create problems; which reminded me of what I heard a pastor say, “every relationship in your life; romantically or regular relationships are reflections of your relationship with Jesus.”

CEO of Health Counseling Center, Beverly says, “Authentic leadership requires modeling the behavior we expect from others. We can’t walk in authority until we learn humility and respect for others. Many people attempt to exert authority without going through the gate of humility,” ... “This creates tension, division, and causes a breakdown in communication.”

In Proverbs 16:18-19 AMPC, “Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall — Better it is to be of a humble spirit with the meek and poor than to divide the spoil with the proud.” And I love this because in a different version only, it’s in Spanish says, in DHH, “Tras el orgullo viene el fracaso; tras la altaneria, la caida. — Mas vale humillarse con los pobres que hacerse rico con los orgullosos.” A rough translation of the Spanish word for word is, “you bring pride, there comes failure; you bring the arrogance/haughty, the fall — better to have humility with the poor than become rich with the prideful”.

Why I love this revelation is because when we have pride we’re going to fall and it’s a guarantee because it’s always going to come from the Lord, the reason I love it is because God is doing this out of protection for us to grow more to trust Him and not trust our flesh, imagine if He didn’t care to help you once you had pride, that would be very worrisome. He doesn’t want us growing pride into our hearts, especially when it comes to His Will, He permits a person who has a lot of pride to fall and it can come from friends, circles, allies, etc. Having a proud spirit and proud thoughts will only come back to you as a punishment — in Proverbs 16:19 reading different versions, it mentions that it’s better to be humble with the poor rather than to become rich like the spoiled and the reason why I love this verse is because I got the rhema, the other day, I was reading my bible and found the book of Obadiah, he was a minor prophet from the Assyrian era and in Obadiah 1:3 NLT, “You have been deceived by your own pride because you live in a rock fortress and make your home high in the mountains. ‘Who can ever reach us way up here?’ You ask boastfully.” But in CEB it says “you who say in your heart, “Who will bring me down to the ground?” The reason why I loved this is because in the topic about guarding your heart, we’re meant to guard our hearts from pride and having pride only ruins us so continuing in Obadiah 1:4 but this time in the CEV, it says, “I will still bring you down, even if you fly higher than an eagle or nest among the stars. I, the Lord, have spoken!” And in the CEB it says it like this, “Though you soar like the eagle, though your nest is set among the stars, I will bring you down from there, says the Lord.” — in this time, it was a warning from God to the Edomites about what they were doing to His people; and what I’ve realized is that people take what is of the OT as if it weren’t the same that could happen nowadays; even though the Bible was written times ago, they still manage to test the Lord that His Word He has spoken still can’t happen; our lives are reflected in the walk with Christ and the cross, thinking that God won’t speak for us even through the Word is testing that God can’t do what looks impossible to us. His warning to those that hurt His people are also found in Psalms, and anyone who thinks they won’t fall, that they can continue to hurt His people and think that they’re going to get away with it; God reminds us that He will reach anyone because we can’t escape His wrath especially when it’s about those who are against His chosen people.

The whole book is one of my new favorite because we see the Lord who is our Heavenly Father, protecting us from whoever comes against His people and the reason why I say whoever is because not everyone is part of the chosen people, this spectrum can be in and outside the church, we have this confirmation in Romans 9:8 ESV, “This means that it is not the children of the flesh who are the children of God, but the children of the promise are counted as offspring.”.

What I loved about the book of Obadiah is that God shows us that He really is watching everything, and I know there’s so many people who doubt and we as well sometimes want to dismay ourselves who are still working on growing our faith, thinking that He doesn’t see our pain but on the contrary in Obadiah 1:13-14 AMP, He speaks to our enemies, “Do not enter the gate of My people in the day of their disaster; Yes, you, do not look [with delight] on their misery in the day of their ruin, and do not loot treasures in the day of their ruin. — Do not stand at the crossroad to cut down those [of Judah] who escaped; And do not hand over [to the enemy] those [of Judah] who survive in the day of their distress.”

What I loved about the vision that God gave to Obadiah about the Edomites is about how they were acting towards their brother Judah; the reason why I loved finding this was because you can see this as well in church hurt;

I’ve spoken to a few people on instagram who have shared their experiences concerning church hurt and how they went through a lot of very saddening experiences that I was surprised had happened and unfortunately they couldn’t get the proper help because their leaders had turned the people against them, taking away the security and joy they felt in that church, this is perfectly shown what God spoke over those who hurt His people, those who instead of helping their brother, they cause pain and delight in their day of distress. These same people who delight in those who get hurt by the church will reap what they sow and unfortunately not a lot of people take this seriously, how could I possibly know that they don’t? Because there’s no fear of the Lord when people sin against their brother/sister in Christ. These people left due to the lack of support and unity that wasn’t shown to them, instead of having to be one in one Spirit and in one Body to help them, they ran from the church. So many people tried to speak to them but they kept speaking things against God for not healing their wounds, unfortunately no one could have a sound conversation about God’s mercy to them because they were so hurt due to the church’s love towards their leader and caring about the leader rather than the one sheep that they permitted to get stray due to favoritism of leader, when a whole church is guided by the head of the church to cause division, this is extremely bad because what gets ministered at the altar is what goes into the hearts of the people. — as it says in Proverbs 15:11 GW, “If Sheol and Abaddon lie open in front of the LORD how much more the human heart!” Meaning that if God can see what’s in the depths of death and destruction, He can for sure see what’s hiding in the heart of man.

Something that the Holy Spirit showed me was through a pastor that I’ve been watching ever since I started my walk in Christ, he mentioned that the hate that someone speaks causes division and when we get ministered hate, we create division and discord between one another, causing division among others is something that shows us if we want to be tares or wheat; this is why it’s important to catch ourselves and guard our mouths when it comes to speaking against people or judge in total.

This is important because when someone is teaching the Word, depending on the vocabulary being used, it could be pro-division, this is when someone has hatred against siblings in Christ, you make division, John says in 1 John 3:14 ERV, “ We know that we have left death and have come into life. We know this because we love each other as brothers and sisters. Anyone who does not love is still in death.”, but let’s not go so far, this goes for all of us who help those learn in their walk with Christ, in Romans 2:19 ERV, “You think you are a guide for people who don’t know the right way, a light for those who are in the dark.”, continuing onward God used Paul to write Romans 2:20-21 ERV, “You think you can show foolish people what is right. And you think you are a teacher for those who are just beginning to learn. You have the law, and so you think you know everything and have all truth. — You teach others, so why don't you teach yourself? You tell them not to steal, but you yourself steal.”

The reason why I love this is because as disciples we’re in a form correcting and teaching those who are beginning to walk with Jesus, how to walk; but when we grow a love for the Word and God gives the gift of teaching that’s when we can either use it for good or not use it at all. But for everyone who does use the gift, there’s a standard that if we know the Word, and we’re giving out the Word; we’re meant to live it.

Romans 2:23-24 ERV, “You are so proud that you have God's law, but you bring shame to God by breaking his law. — As the Scriptures say, "People in other nations insult God because of you.”” — the reason I love this part of the Scripture is because to get the whole context, in the book of Titus, Paul had the revelation in 2:4-5 NIV, stating, “Then they can urge the younger women to love their husbands and children, (5) to be self-controlled and pure, to be busy at home, to be kind, and to be subject to their husbands, so that no one will malign the Word of God.” The specific part that I love from verse 5 are the words “so that no one will malign the Word of God.”, the whole message of the two verses is the context that whilst the teaching mentions of wives, it doesn’t exclude to the teach that we are to live the Word so that no one can in other words blaspheme the Word, when Paul says to be imitators of God, imitators as children of God; because we are to carry out the Word because we are a reflection of the works of God.

If we’re creating division and walking in Christ, what would we be? we aren’t children of God that’s for sure, in 1 John 3:10 ERV, “So we can see who God’s children are and who the devil’s children are. These are the ones who are not God’s children: those who don’t do what is right and those who do not love their brothers and sisters in God’s family.” And as mentioned before in Proverbs 11:15, about God seeing the depths of death and destruction, He sees in the depth of the hearts; Jesus knew what was in the hearts of the Jews when He said that He wouldn’t show them signs and wonders because He knew their hearts already; in Matthew 23, He mentions the hypocrisy that the pharisees showed towards those that they were trying to convert into a Jew.

If you claim to want prosperity and unity but you show division and discord, those who hear you and see how you act and speak will receive what you say and do, if you’re teaching pro-condemnation, you’re ministering condemnation.

What comes from the mouth is something that is very delicate; Proverbs 18:21 ASV, “Death and life are in the power of the tongue; and they that love it shall eat the fruit thereof.” — What i started to notice in my walk with Christ was that people love to talk and talk but not walk the walk with Jesus, when ministering the Word from the altar and depending what you say and how you carry out the Word after the teaching to the people of God is something extremely powerful, I’ve always been hyperaware of everything; how we give the Word and how we act afterwards, shows if we truly are also learning what we’re giving out. I’ve had my own experiences when my apostle or his family members preach, I’ve grown and learned a lot about spiritual warfares and how to go about situations but the true tests are after the teachings, same with the Bible, once you close the Bible after reading a lesson God has taught you in the Bible; you’re going to be tested.

This is why we must learn the differences between control and authority, the pharisees loved having control but Jesus had authority and that’s what Jesus taught us to have. What I loved about this is that the CEO broke the two leaderships into two groups, the CEO of Health Counseling Center states the differences between authority and controlling,

Authority: Listens, helps us grow, uses our strengths, equips others, widens horizons, delegates, correction and discipline, justice (what is wrong), teaches how to make decisions, establishes boundaries, gives, listens, flows from a spirit of love

Control: Demands, stifles personal expression, takes advantage of our weaknesses, robs others of their autonomy, narrows experiences, micromanages, punishment and retribution, judgement (who is wrong), makes decisions on your behalf, trespasses across personal boundaries, takes, dictates, operates from a spirit of fear

I love how she broke this because control has a lot to do with pride, if Jesus would’ve wanted us to have control He would’ve left all under our own control. We would be self-reliant. In Philippians 2:3 in the NCV the translation says it this way, “When you do things, do not let selfishness or pride be your guide. Instead, be humble and give more honor to others than to yourselves.” — so when you allow pride and selfishness to be your guide. You’re putting your flesh first, your interests first when you let what’s carnal guide you, you’re going to fall because you’re looking out for yourself and what fits your reputation, that’s why the Word says in Proverbs 16:18, “Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.“

When the Lord speaks. What He says, will come to pass because it will happen. I have no doubt that for many this Word will come soon in His timing, could be when we’re gone or when we’re there but the Lord will carry out His Will when it comes to those who are His people that are faithful to Him.

James 1:26 GW, “If a person thinks that he is religious but can’t control his tongue, he is fooling himself. That person’s religion is worthless.”

Don’t be that person. No one should ever boast in just knowing the Word of God but can’t show the change God has done in them, that person is living in vain, in the KJV James 1:26, “If any man among you seem to be religious, and bridleth not his tongue, but deceiveth his own heart, this man's religion is vain.”

What I love about this is that the Lord has been revealing when people don’t guard their mouths; not overtaking-wise like children tend to do, no, but in speaking abusive words, defiling words, words of hatred, words that can hurt a person’s soul, words that condemn you, words that have the power to destroy someone’s life.

I was looking into the Words, “bridleth not his tongue” and loved what God gave me in both, the worldly definition and the biblical definition. The worldly definition of bridle is “the headgear used to control a horse, consisting of buckled straps to which a bit and reins are attached.” This is the Oxford Languages dictionary, it’s used to direct a horse, and it’s pretty funny because this entire time God was placing horse films in my view; without wanting, I learnt a lot about horses and the trusting and control and one of the things that stayed in my heart was that the horse knows where you’re looking, if your eyes are on an object and whether you feel nervous or confident, the horse can sense it. on whatever object you place your eyes on as the aim to get there, the horse will follow towards the place that your eyes are on, you control them with the reins; a horse can sense your emotions they reflect what you’re feeling and how can we see this in the mouth? You’re aiming to get to some place, your mouth will speak what will get you to a place or person, how you feel is how you speak, your words reflect what you feel and the reins control, when you take control of your mouth you walk like a wise man. now seeing it biblically, I love using the Strong dictionary to break down the Word when there’s a deeper meaning to a verse, in the Strong dictionary, bridleth is G5468; in Spanish the meaning is; ser el que dirige el freno — which means to be the one who directs the stop.

This goes well with Proverbs 13:3 NKJV, “He who guards his mouth preserves his life, but he who opens wide his lips shall have destruction.”

Paul mentions something very evident that we as believers should already know, in 2 Tim 3:1-5 ERV, “Remember this: There are some terrible times coming in the last days. — People will love only themselves and money. They will be proud and boast about themselves. They will abuse others with insults. They will not obey their parents. They will be ungrateful and against all that is pleasing to God. — They will have no love for others and will refuse to forgive anyone. They will talk about others to hurt them and will have no self-control. They will be cruel and hate what is good. — People will turn against their friends. They will do foolish things without thinking and will be so proud of themselves. Instead of loving God, they will love pleasure. — They will go on pretending to be devoted to God, but they will refuse to let that "devotion" change the way they live. Stay away from these people!” — and this warning isn’t so far from when Paul wrote to the church about walking with the Spirit and not walking in the flesh, as well as giving us the fruits of the Holy Spirit and reminding us to renew our minds with the Word of God.

Everything is possible with a heart that is contrite, when we truly want to change God is ready to help a willing heart. God’s Wrath is one of the most fearful fears I constantly wonder about and get sad for those who don’t have the revelation, it’s truly scary to know what end awaits those who you wish were saved.

We’re no longer living in the times where we get angry at each other over small things, where we want to get revenge by speaking and making division in the Body of Christ, we are One Spirit in Christ but whenever we cause a brother or sister to stumble, remember that that will be accounted to each and every one of us who permits it to happen.

revelation: Any careless word said in public, said in secret, any careless action done against a faithful sheep of the Lord, any condemning word and act done against them will be accounted towards those who abuse in control, those who allow and act on any sort of division to be made, will be accounted to them who are spiritually immature and lack to show the fruits of the Holy Spirit, all this will be given to us by the Lord on the last day. Being persecuted by others in Christ is a real thing that people dust off like it’s nothing but those too will give an account to the Lord, this is to those who have been in Christ the longest and still show the lack of maturity that’s needed to be face to face with the Lord.

#jesusislord #jesusisthewaythetruthandthelife #jesusitrustinyou #faith in jesus #jesusisgod #testimony #belief in jesus #jesus loves us #jesuscristo #jesusiscoming #pride #spiritual warfare

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maniculum · 1 year

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The College of Grotesque Arts -- Week Eight

For new people, I’m doing the Dungeon23 megadungeon project, basing each room on the marginalia of a different page in the 14th-century Luttrell Psalter. Previous entries in this project can be found here.

First, apologies for length. A couple things in this one got away from me, and this week’s material ended up substantially longer than the previous two combined.

Also, this is the section I was mainly thinking of when I said that this level was more labyrinthine than Level One. Either Appendix A or my dice (or, I guess, the crude sort of analog machine made by combining the two) just decided to go:

I was actually worried I was going to have to cheat to get to seven rooms — usually it’s the other way around, and I have to stop rolling & cut off various excess passages & doors because I don’t want any more rooms in this section — but we got there. Barely.

Anyway, the disaster map and everything else can be found below the cut:

Room 2.19: f.37v

Appendix A wants this room to contain a monster, some coins in invisible pottery jars, and a magic item. It also wants it to be 20x30, but I’m expanding it to 40x40 because that’s a lot of stuff and the material I’m getting from the page needs space too. And because there’s room to do that, since it’s a tiny room in a twisty little maze of passages, which looks ridiculous anyway. (I do this more often than I mention; I’m just bringing it up here because of the quantity of stuff and the egregious nonsense of this section of the map.)

The room is large, with the counters and cabinets that mark it as a dedicated laboratory space. None of the equipment is intact, and the counters/cabinets themselves are practically destroyed despite being made of stone. There are quite a lot of scorched scraps of ancient parchment notes lying around. Bits of loose stone from the counters, walls, ceiling, and floor litter the room, along with the bones of at least three people. Something went deeply wrong here.

So, the manuscript. This page is a little difficult to work with because it’s just got a couple examples of “worm/vine with face” and… this.

So, all right. That looks like a priest who’s so mad he’s literally fuming, scolding a pair of civilians about how the Bible does not condone their Nondescript White Blobs. However, I think it’s meant to be a martyrdom; they’re probably stoning him. Which would explain why some forgotten reader of this manuscript was angry enough to smudge out their faces like that. No idea who the martyr is; the little flag on his robes is probably a clue, but I’ve got nothing. A red saltire on a white field is the Cross of St. Patrick, but looking that up tells me that this is actually a modern-era thing and can’t be traced back to medieval times. So identifying it as the Cross of St. Patrick is not actually any more helpful than identifying it as the state flag of Alabama. The stuff on his head… not sure either. It might be those flames that let you speak in tongues, but I’m not an expert on Christianity, so I’m just going to leave that alone.

Anyway, since this is what I’ve got to work with, I’ve decided this room is haunted. Which, frankly, more parts of this dungeon should be. I need to make a mental note to start doing more of that. The ghosts are Wandregisilius and Scolastica, two apprentices of Februaria who died due to a sabotaged laboratory experiment. (I won’t blame you if you’ve forgotten, but things got real bad between the wizards near the end of this place’s actual use.) Something exploded, which is why the room is so badly trashed. (Also, those names were chosen off my list as “names that sound wizardly” rather than rolling at random; the two figures in the manuscript are probably meant to both be male, but… #feminism?)

Wandregisilius and Scolastica are, unfortunately, not particularly hinged as ghosts go. Maybe it’s being stuck down here for centuries, maybe it’s something to do with how they died, maybe they’re just Like That. They react with extreme hostility to anyone entering the laboratory, and throw the broken stonework at them with surprising force. (For stats, take an incorporeal undead of your choice, give it telekinesis if it doesn’t already have the ability to throw stuff, and call it done — I know I said “ghost” earlier, but that’s just a generic term.) Wandregisilius and Scolastica don’t seem to have any kind of grasp on reality; they’re just reflexively hostile and violent at this point. If your PCs manage to subdue and speak to them somehow, they’re angry, confused, and have extremely fragmented memories. The fact that they’ve been like this for centuries is probably news to them, but they won’t remember you told them anyway.

They’re pretty certain (correctly) that they’d be able to move on to the afterlife if they, or someone else using this room, successfully completed the sabotaged experiment. However, they’re not working towards this because (1) they’re completely mad & can’t stay tethered to sanity long enough to do anything about it and (2) it’s pretty much impossible. All of the equipment is trashed, and the extremely rare materials & reagents they were using destroyed. Even if they were completely stable, they’d need a lot of expensive and hard-to-find stuff to make this work, much of which would require expeditions to far places or at least negotiation with a few highly specialized merchants… and they can’t even leave the dungeon. They’re tied to the room where they died, and while that tie is flexible — they can roam this level with some discomfort, and even go to other levels if they push themselves — the exit from the dungeon is an impermeable barrier to them.

I mentioned that there was a third body, so here goes: this was Lefwin, an adventuring cleric who tried to do an exorcism here. It didn’t go well. His equipment is still with him, including coins and at least one magic item (there you go, Appendix A — skipping the pottery jars, though).

Room 2.20: f.38r

Did the same as with 2.17 and expanded a small room to fill the available space. This roughly-triangular room with a 20-foot-high ceiling looks like someone has tried to convert it into a barn of some kind — the “ground floor” has a number of stalls around the edge, and there’s a loft of sorts over for a “second floor”.

This is, in fact, exactly what has happened. This room is the home of Anura, a lab-monkey descendant with human-level intelligence. Apparently this is the result of some kind of experimentation on her ancestors, and the intelligence gene or whatever crops up every so often in the population of monkeys that inhabit the dungeon. (If you read the Hork-Bajir Chronicles as a kid, it’s like that.) Treat Anura as an awakened monkey with a few levels apiece in rogue/expert and a martial class of your choice (not barbarian). (Also, yes, that name did come from my 13th-century name list, and yes it does mean “frog”; she named herself after a word she liked from a scrap of lab notes. I don't know if that connection existed when medieval parents were naming their daughters or if it's pure coincidence.)

Anura is a bit isolationist, but she treats the PCs with polite hospitality if they conduct themselves properly. She behaves like a yeoman farmer or minor knight. She occasionally works for the Gatekeepers as a sort of independent contractor, providing information regarding the dungeon (and access / guide services as needed) in exchange for outside goods. (Most of the Gatekeepers don’t like venturing too far out of their safe areas, but Anura grew up here and is more comfortable moving about / more familiar with the dangers.) She will likewise be willing to help the PCs for goods or money. If the PCs are strapped for cash, she’ll accept stories, songs, and other bits of culture / entertainment, but will insist on the PCs talking slowly, repeating themselves, and answering questions as they relate these things so she can transcribe while they talk. Anura knows the contents and layout of this dungeon level in detail, but her knowledge of other levels is more vague the farther down they are. It’s dangerous down there, don’t you know — she’s only ventured to the deeper levels a few times, and hasn’t been below Level Nine at all.

Some of the empty stalls are used to store Anura’s worldly possessions: you’ll find saddles sized for her, falconry gloves, and other equipment necessary for the care & husbandry of goats & owls. Luxury goods include: a selection of nice outfits tailored for her; a couple volumes of literature she’s copied or transcribed herself, along with a supply of ink, writing tools, and pens made from dungeon-sourced feathers; a book that collects several texts on hunting, falconry, & animal husbandry; and a small sack of coins. Her most expensive possession is the +3 longsword, also sized for her, which she wears on her belt at all times.

The barn, as I’m sure you’ve guessed from the image and the above description, houses a few goats in the stalls and owls in the loft. These animals are trained and domesticated; the owls are local, but the goats are purchased through the Gatekeepers. She uses these to practice the arts of hunting and falconry to the extent that she can in the dungeon — after hearing about them in stories of outside culture, she was able to order a book on the matter through the Gatekeepers and learn how to do them properly.

Room 2.21: f.38v

No Caretaker, ghost, or any other creature that was in existence while the dungeon was still a site of active research will enter this room. The doors are intact, but locked. Examining the doorframes will inform the PCs that they used to be magically warded and trapped, but someone has permanently deactivated those spells, carefully scratching out exactly the right runes and removing exactly the right material anchors for the spell. Each door has a note painted directly on it: “ONGOING PROJECT”. The notes are signed “Markewart”.

This room is very similar to Room 1.5 — the center of the room is occupied by a set of tarnished, rune-covered pillars that support some kind of magical field, and an extremely complex, very broken control device is set into the wall in the southwest corner. (The description of the control device in 1.5 can be used here as well.) There are, however, two major differences. First, someone seems to be working to fix the control device — many of the old, rusted parts seem to have been removed, and some have been replaced. Many of the parts have been labeled, and there are various notes scratched onto the wall in charcoal. There is also one note painted onto the wall: “DO NOT TOUCH” in large letters. The other major difference is that the magical effect doesn’t seem to be fully functioning as a stasis field. The stuff inside is moving. Moving very, very slowly, but still.

Inside the field is what appears to be a chunk of some other plane overlaid on our reality. On the surface, it looks like it’s all in miniature, but it gives the impression of being something vast and terrible that just appears small because you’re seeing it from very far away — even though, you know, it’s right there. This is a bit vertigo-inducing. It’s a nighttime ocean scene, the water level with the floor, where the sea is somehow both intensely tempestuous and as smooth & calm as glass. Thinking about that too much makes your brain hurt. The water is very clear, but you still can’t see the bottom; admittedly, that’s mostly because you can’t really get the right angle to look straight down, but something about it makes you certain that the water goes down for miles. (Were this scene fully, really present in this room, the water would cut through all the lower layers of the dungeon, but it is of course not.) Serpentine creatures swim through the depths, creatures that are smaller than an earthworm from your perspective but are also fearsome leviathans.

At the very center of the field is an elaborate golden palace, seeming to float on the top of the water while remaining perfectly motionless. It’s only a foot tall, but like everything else in this scene, despite looking like the world’s most intricate miniature, it weighs on the mind like a tremendous work of cyclopean architecture. There are lights in some of the windows — it’s clearly inhabited. Glowing orbs on the top of each tower cast a baleful light over the waves that may or may not exist. Equally intricate, and far tinier, are the golden boats moored along the edges of the palace. One boat is near the edge of the field, with a crew of lilliputian/brobdingnagian humanoids aboard. Their faces are too small for the PCs to make out their expressions, and the crew can’t see outside of the field at all, but were the two sides of the field able to look at each other properly, the PCs would see that the crew’s tiny faces look down on them in scorn and hatred as if they were some sort of particularly offensive insect.

Asking the Gatekeepers about this will reveal that repairing the control mechanism is indeed a project of Markewart’s, and helping him with it would probably be an excellent way to curry favor. Giving that help is pretty difficult, though — the mechanism is much more comprehensively destroyed than the one in Room 1.5, and is also sufficiently different that knowledge about one doesn’t necessarily transfer to the other. Markewart is in fact convinced that it’s impossible, but persists in making the occasional stab at it because Agnes (his boss, in case you don’t recall the Gatekeepers section from a while back) is very interested in getting access to that golden palace. (The Gatekeepers are profit-motivated — the unicorn in a similar situation on Level One isn’t as interesting to them as this room. A captive unicorn might have some value, but probably not enough to be worth the trouble. This, whatever it is, is definitely very valuable to someone.) Markewart may also share, if he thinks the PCs can help, that he’s been trying to find a way to communicate with the people inside the field — the settings the machine is stuck on block sound in both directions, and prevent the people inside from seeing outside. From their perspective, the field is a blank wall.

If the PCs somehow have intense and specific knowledge of this sort of thing, or some way to acquire said expertise, they may, through some heroic effort, figure out a way to repair the control mechanism and allow sound, sight, or even people to cross the boundary. This should, I want to emphasize, be tremendously difficult and time-consuming. (If they managed to fix the mechanism in Room 1.5, you can concede that they have experience in this area, but again, the devices are not fully analogous.) Slightly easier, but still very difficult, would be to repair the mechanism in such a way that it’s possible to turn the field off and return those inside to their proper place. Unlike in the unicorn room, there seems to be an extra layer of protection keeping someone from just breaking the pillars: what appears to be a permanent forcecage encloses the whole thing.

Just in case the PCs actually accomplish such a herculean task, here’s what they’ll find.

The Court of the Fathomless Folio

One of Februaria’s side interests was aquatic life, as is somewhat indicated by the high-magic aquarium she installed in her tower. Using the extraplanar specimen-abduction device installed in this room, she often explored the contents of the strange pockets, demiplanes, and border zones on the outskirts of the Elemental Plane of Water. Until one day she pointed it somewhere new and got this.

Februaria was not sure what she was looking at, but was an experienced enough wizard to recognize certain types of red flag, and swiftly realized she’d gone fishing and inadvertently hooked Cthulhu, metaphorically speaking. As, again, a wizard who’d been around the block enough to know these sorts of things, she was pretty sure that “just put it back where it came from and hope they didn’t notice” was not an option. She locked all the settings on her machine to keep anyone from taking the stasis field down, then systematically destroyed every part of the mechanism that would allow someone to unlock it. She put the permanent forcecage over the field, left the room, locked all the doors and destroyed the keys, put traps and wards on the doors just in case, and forbade the entire College from ever entering that room in the strongest possible terms.

This was the correct decision. Ensnaring the Fathomless Folio for even an imperceptible sliver of time in between heartbeats was already an unforgivable insult, and had she let them back out, the College of Grotesque Arts would have been destroyed shortly afterwards — rather than being torn apart by escalating interpersonal conflicts several years later.

The palace on the other side of the field is the Court of the Fathomless Folio, a rogue fae court presided over by the exiled Ishmateutha, Marchioness of the Sulphurous Depths. They are excluded from the greater Realm of Faerie due to some impenetrable fae politics, which is why they’re out in this distant border zone near the Elemental Planes, and why there have thus far been no reprisals for their kidnapping. Like other Faerie courts, you can expect them to be arrogant in their inhumanity, alien in their reasoning, casual in their cruelty, and terrible in their rage.

Were the Fathomless Folio released, they would at once seek satisfaction for their imprisonment. Februaria, dead these several centuries, is not immediately available for vengeance — though certainly the Marchioness will begin negotiations with whatever presides over the afterlife Februaria landed in to acquire her soul — so they’ll start with anyone else who can be argued to be complicit. That will include (1) anyone who has ever set foot in the College of Grotesque Arts, up to the moment the Court was released, and (2) anyone descended from someone who was part of the College’s operations while it was active, or descended from their family if there is no direct line through which the sin can be inherited.

The first category is a threat to the PCs (as well as a number of adventurers who survived a trip through this dungeon, plus any sapient dungeon inhabitants, and of course all current & former members of the Gatekeepers), so it’s the most directly relevant. The second category is far more destructive in the big picture, however. Between the wizards & their apprentices, the campus staff, and the mercenaries they hired for security, the number of people involved is sizable. And given the passage of several centuries, the family trees have had quite a lot of time to branch. This category thus includes an enormous quantity of people, spread out over every level of society, almost none of whom have any idea the connection exists. This is, in short, an existential threat in a bottle, and the order of the world will be overturned if the Court is ever released.

It’s also inevitable. The fact that Februaria managed to trap the Fathomless Folio was a bizarre fluke of interplanar physics, and probably would never have worked if she were trying to do it on purpose. The only thing that’s kept them from seeking their vengeance long ago is the stasis field — there’s not much you can do when time isn’t actually moving for you. However, this has not fully worked, the fae within being sufficiently powerful to bend the rules of frozen time; the glacially slow movement one can see from the outside of the field is theoretically impossible, but it’s happening nonetheless. Even now, Ishmateutha is very slowly preparing a spell that will allow her to break the stasis field through her own power. From the perspective of the Fathomless Folio, they will have been trapped for less than two days; from the PC’s perspective, it’s still about 200 years before Ishamteutha will effect the Court’s escape.

There’s probably an oracle somewhere right this moment who is terrifyingly aware that a fae Armageddon could happen at any moment in the next couple centuries (the delay isn’t guaranteed if Markewart or someone else manages to fix the device). Anyway, um… sorry for potentially derailing your whole campaign.

If the Fathomless Folio does become something you have to deal with, I’m afraid you’ll have to do the stats yourself — it’s a substantial job, and I don’t have the time for it in this context. (I.e., in a Dungeon23 project that only a handful of people are reading, and in a scenario where, even if someone does run the dungeon, it’s extremely unlikely the PCs will end up in a situation where it’s relevant… if I ever go back and edit this after it’s done, I’ll add in a proper appendix on these folk.) Anyway, if you need to do stuff with this, I recommend you use existing stats for high-ranking faeries as a numerical reference, and maintain an ocean theme (read up on deep-sea ecosystems and maybe flip through Moby Dick). Ishmateutha herself should probably be at least close to a CR 20. Also, keep in mind that the Fathomless Folio are not going to be tiny after their escape; the fact that they appear so now really is just a trick of perspective over an interplanar vantage point.

Room 2.22: f.39r

This room feels a bit odd to the senses. To people standing inside it, it seems as though there’s a strange odor in the air, and an audible vibration, and a sensation like your hair standing on end from electricity — but if one tries to focus on any of those, it’s not actually present. It doesn’t really smell any different from the rest of the dungeon, there’s no extra noise, and your hair is right where it usually is; it just seems like these sensations are present.

There is a set of stairs going down to the next level in the northeast corner.

In the center of the room is something that has pretty obviously been added and maintained by the Gatekeepers with some effort and expense: an iron fence held up by metal spikes driven into the stone floor, forming a square in the center of the room 20 feet on a side. Within the fence, a series of long planks have been laid over the floor, completely covering whatever is under them. A sign on the fence reads “FORBIDDEN”.

If they investigate what’s under the planks, the PCs will find the Pit of Symphysy. (And if they just hop the fence and step on the planks without being really careful about it, they’ll probably fall in; the planks aren’t nailed down.) This is a deeply flawed experimental method for easily creating grotesques; the bugs were never hammered out and it shouldn’t be used. Within the pit is a strange magical field; if multiple living beings enter at once, they are fused together in a random fashion. (Drat, I’m going to have to write rules for that… see section below.) At the bottom of the pit, there are the remains of a number of unfortunate mutated bugs, mice, and bug-mice; nothing down there is currently alive, as anything trying to stay there over an extended period of time is repeatedly fused with whatever else wanders in, eventually resulting in a non-viable creature. This means that if only one PC falls in, if they can get themselves out without anything else getting in, they’ll be fine. Unless they have a familiar or something with them. (Familiars may be exempt if you so choose, since they’re already kind of merged with the mage’s soul. Mundane animal companions do not get the same consideration.) Or if you want to be really mean and make them merge with, like, a louse on their skin or something.

Incongruously, this room is also inhabited by a small flock of bluebirds. They like to perch on the fence.

The Pit of Symphysy

Any two living creatures that enter the pit are combined in a randomized fashion to form a Symphytic Grotesque. (A living being that is not a creature by the rules , e.g. a mundane plant, can be treated in whatever way makes most sense to you. I’d recommend just giving the subject a few unusual qualities based on the non-creature and skipping the tables.) If more than two creatures enter, combine the first two, then combine the result with the next one, and so forth. If the creatures enter simultaneously or in such a way that you cannot identify which order you should combine them in, randomize the order. (If you're not interested in the details, scroll until you're past the tables.) Make the following changes:

The Symphytic Grotesque’s creature type becomes Aberration.

The mass of the Symphytic Grotesque is slightly lower than the combined mass of the constituent creatures. Change the resulting creature’s size category to match the new mass if necessary, making adjustments for space, reach, height, length, and so forth in whatever manner makes sense for the resulting configuration. For reference, the maximum (typical) weight for each size category is as follows:

Fine: ⅛ pound.

Diminutive: 1 pound.

Tiny: 8 pounds.

Small: 60 pounds.

Medium: 500 pounds.

Large: 2 tons.

Huge: 16 tons.

Gargantuan: 125 tons.

Colossal: n/a

For each special ability or quality possessed by one creature and not another, roll a d4. On a 4 the ability/quality is lost.

If the creatures somehow have mutually-exclusive qualities, the one that comes from the lower-CR creature is lost. If the creatures are the same CR, both are lost.

This also applies to unusual methods of movement — flight, burrowing, &c. Adjust as necessary given the resulting configuration. (E.g. a human merged with a bird might be able to fly, but if your results indicate the wings are tiny, absent, or misplaced, then they probably can’t.)

CR adjustment: I guess you’re just going to have to go by vibes. Maybe average the two if you really need to know and don’t want to work it out?

Each time the Pit of Symphysy is used, there is a chance that the resulting creature is non-viable.

You can decide what percentage to assign based on how deadly you want this to be.

The percentage should increase if you’re merging more than two creatures.

The Symphytic Grotesque retains all memories of the constituent creatures, though it may or may not retain their intellect depending on table results. If the heads of the constituent creatures remain separate, each head retains its own memories; if they merge, the resulting head has the memories of both.

To determine the specific configuration of the resulting creature, use the following tables in the manner instructed below. (Note: Still can't figure out the best way to put tables on Tumblr, so they're images again.)

1. Designate one of the constituent creatures Creature A and the other Creature B. If you’re asked to flip a coin, heads is Creature A and tails is Creature B.

2. Roll on Table 1 (Body). If this is a creature that’s gone through the symphysy process before and got any result on this table other than “Seamlessly Merged”, roll separately for each torso.

3. If your result on Table 1 was “Seamlessly Merged”, roll on Table 2 (Heads Merged). If you got another result, roll on Table 3 (Heads Separate). Separate heads operate independently. If one of the constituent creatures already has more heads than torsos, you may choose between the following options:

Treat them as a single head that happens to be a cluster

Roll separately for each head

Roll for one head and distribute the others over the body using Table 5 (Limb Misplacement)

4. Roll on Table 4 (Limbs) once for each limb on whichever creature has more limbs. — e.g., if Creature A has four limbs and Creature B has eight limbs, you’ll roll on this table eight times. Tails count as limbs for the purpose of this table. Note that the type of limb (arm, leg, tail, &c.) is not specified in this table. After you’ve made your rolls, decide (or randomize) which limb to assign to which result. Try to maintain the same general ratio between different types of limbs as the constituent creatures, to the best of your ability. If you got anything other than “Seamlessly Merged” on Table 1 (Body), default to attaching each limb to the torso that they fit the best (e.g., human arms go on human torso, bird wings go on bird torso).

5. Roll on Table 6 (Abilities) for each of the six abilities. Subtract three from the result when rolling for Int and Wis; add three to the result when rolling for Con and Dex.

Congratulations! You now have a bouncing baby affront to the gods.

Room 2.23: f.39v

Trellis-like lattices are placed in front of each wall of this room. Another is built into the ceiling in a sort of drop-ceiling configuration. A half-dozen pillars with a similar trellis-like structure are spaced through the room.

On these trellises are a flock of flying vines. They’re similar to the biting vines in Room 2.1, but with a pair of bat-like wings on either side of their head. Their flight is somewhat clumsy, as their vine-like body trails far behind them. They’re much more mobile than biting vines; here is a set of altered stats you can use for them.

Flying Vine: CR 2; XP 800; N Medium Plant; Init -1; Senses Low-Light Vision; Perception +8

DEFENSE: AC 16, touch 9, flat-footed 16 (-1 Dex, +7 natural); hp 13 (2d8+4); Saves Fort +5, Ref -1, Will +1

OFFENSE: Speed 10 ft., climb 10 ft., fly 20 ft.; Melee bite +3 (1d6+2 plus poison); Space 5 ft.; Reach 10 ft.; Special Attacks Constrict, Poison

STATISTICS: Str 14, Dex 8, Con 14, Int 1, Wis 12, Cha 10; Base Atk +1; CMB +3; CMD 13; Feats Alertness; Skills Perception +8

SPECIAL ABILITIES:

Constrict (Ex): A Flying Vine can crush an opponent, dealing 1d6+2 bludgeoning damage, when it makes a successful grapple check (in addition to any other effects caused by a successful check, including additional damage).

Poison (Ex): A Flying Vine can poison those it attacks. A Flying Vine's bite attack will inflict a poison on its victims that has a fortitude save DC of 13, a frequency of 1/round for 6 rounds, causes 1d3 con damage, and takes two consecutive saves to cure.

Room 2.24: f.40r

There are a number of bones scattered around this room.

This is the lair of a harleon, a scaled-up and improved variant of the harcats from Room 1.27. The harleon has striking blue fur and a vine-like tail that crackles with a golden light. It is aggressive and territorial. I honestly think that covers what you need to know.

Harleon: CR 6, XP 2400; N Large Magical Beast; Init +8; Senses Low-Light Vision, Darkvision 60ft; Perception +15

DEFENSE: AC 19, touch 13, flat-footed 15 (-1 size, +4 Dex, +6 natural); hp 68 (8d10+24); Saves Fort +9, Ref +10, Will +3

OFFENSE: Speed 40 ft.; Melee bite +13 (1d8+6 plus disease) , tail lash +8 (1d8+6 plus grab and shocking grasp); Space 10 ft.; Reach 10 ft. Spell-Like Abilities (CL 8, DC 11 + spell level): At Will: Shocking Grasp; Special Attacks Disease, Grab.

STATISTICS: Str 23, Dex 19, Con 16, Int 2, Wis 12, Cha 10; Base Atk +8; CMB +15 (+19 grapple); CMD 29; Feats Ability Focus (Tail), Improved Initiative, Run, Skill Focus (Perception); Skills Acrobatics +15, Perception +15 Special Qualities: Magical Beast Traits, Part Plant

SPECIAL ABILITIES:

Disease (Ex): A Harleon’s needle-like teeth are prone to communicating disease. Pick any disease you’d like to throw at your PCs; if you don’t want to choose, filth fever is a sensible fallback.

Grab (Ex): If a Harleon hits with its tail attack, it deals normal damage and attempts to start a grapple as a free action without provoking an attack of opportunity. Grab can only be used against targets of a size Large or smaller. The Harleon has the option to conduct the grapple normally, or simply to use the part of its body it used in the grab to hold the opponent. If it chooses to do the latter, it takes a -20 penalty on its CMB check to make and maintain the grapple, but does not gain the grappled condition itself. Creatures with grab receive a +4 bonus on combat maneuver checks made to start and maintain a grapple. A Harleon may use its shocking grasp ability only when it has a target grappled.

Leap (Ex): As a move action, a Harleon can jump up to twenty feet in any direction, including straight up. This does not provoke an attack of opportunity.

Part Plant (Ex): Anything that is Part Plant has a flat 50% chance of ignoring any paralysis, poison, or stun effects. They gain +5 to any save against mind-affecting effects and sleep effects on account of their brain working a little different now. Sneak attacks on something that is Part Plant have a 10% failure chance; the organs aren’t all where they’re supposed to be. They can photosynthesize so long as their leaves are exposed to sun during the daylight hours; this cuts their food requirement in half. Their sleep requirements are also halved. Any magical effects that target plants (e.g. control plants) have a 50% chance of working on them; any effect that does damage to plants does half damage to them. To any spell or effect that checks a creature’s type, they count as a plant in addition to their original creature type.

Room 2.25: f.40v

This appears to be a long-empty storage closet. The only thing on this page besides leaves is a dude hanging out at the bottom looking unhappy about a picture of an animal, so I guess he’s what’s here. On one hand, that’s nice since this is a small room and there’s not a lot of room for stuff… on the other hand, now I have to figure out what this guy’s deal is.

Meet Avenel, a new member of the Gatekeepers. Avenel has exactly one level in an NPC class — Warrior, probably, but feel free to make him an Expert or a Commoner or something instead. He’s… basically being hazed. Some of the other Gatekeepers active on this level got him drunk and dumped him in here with nothing but a blanket (which he’s now wearing) and a note indicating it’s on him to find his way back to Room 2.26. The note also warns of some of the dangerous creatures in the area, but it’s not very clear. Whoever wrote it was semi-literate, drunk at the time, or both. Mostly it’s badly-rendered pictures of monsters with notes like “eats people” or “nope”. Avenel is particularly worried about the picture of some sort of leonine creature that reads “nearby — watch out”. (It’s the harleon in Room 2.24.) Avenel will be very grateful if the PCs can help him find his way back safely. And maybe lend him some pants.

Well, that certainly ends my streak of keeping things brief. Including two rooms with contents that required subheadings makes this one of my longest entries, I think. Drat.

Edit -- I forgot to mention:

Room 1.28

This is where the elevator room from the first level ends up if the PCs use it to descend.

#dungeon23 #college of grotesque arts #pathfinder #d&d #dnd #dungeons and dragons #medieval art #medieval #medieval creatures

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klein42kaya · 2 years

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wolint · 2 years

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SHAME-PROOF

Joshua 5:9 AMP Then the LORD said to Joshua, “This day I have rolled away the reproach (derision, ridicule) of Egypt from you.” So the name of that place is called Gilgal (rolling) to this day.

Shame is painful emotion resulting from an awareness of inadequacy or guilt, an unfortunate development that brings dishonour and causes one to be ashamed. Shame is something we feel for the actions we have done, actions done by those associated with us, or for actions done to us. Shame creates a barrier in our lives. Our shame prevents us from acting boldly and living in the defeat of past failures. The reproach of Egypt—They being uncircumcised made them like the uncircumcised Egyptians, and the uncircumcised were seen as impure by the Jews. After their circumcision, the shame or reproach of uncircumcision was rolled away. Do you have a shame-based life? What has caused you shame? Are you rooted or grounded in shame? Isaiah 54:4 says that the Lord has promised to remove the shame and dishonour from us so that we don’t remember it anymore. Further down in Isaiah 61:7, He promises to pour on us a twofold blessing to overcome every spirit of shame we experience. The promise is that we will possess double what we have lost, and we will have everlasting joy. We may have lived the kind of life that induced shame but in and through the word of God, we become shame-proof. The enemy will then no longer have anything with which to shame us. We may suffer physically, be embarrassed, and dishonoured by our conduct, be derided because of who we are or from, we may suffer contempt for whatever reason but when we take a stand on the Word of God, become rooted and grounded in God’s love, we become complete in Him. Many Christians feel that they are pathetic, they bring reproach upon themselves by accepting the world’s view of who they are, but God seeks to motivate us through divine grace—not through sin’s disgrace, according to John 3:17. God’s grace is not extended to us because we are pathetic, but because of his gracious love. Men may remind us, show, and recount our shame but Jesus covers our shame. Some use religion to make others feel pathetic while the enemy wants to enslave us with humiliation and reproach. We are no longer slaves to sin according to Romans 6:6 and cannot continue to serve sin without denying our new identity in Christ. So, as we think about the kind of self-image shame and guilt project on us, we must understand that God looks at us through the righteousness of Christ. 2 Corinthians 4:2 says when we come to Christ, we renounce and disclaim the hidden things of dishonesty and shame, things wickedness, which they want no one to know about and are ashamed to acknowledge by the manifestation of the truth of God but an open acknowledgement of what we know to be the truth of the word conceals nothing, but we are made “shame-proof” only by the Spirit of God. The Lord not only promises to roll away reproach but to afflict our persecutors with punishment in Zephaniah 3:19 and fight whatever oppresses us by turning the shame back on our oppressors and accusers. God is rolling away shame and reproach from us by His mercy. No more shame, you’ve been made shame-proof in Christ. So, allow the reproach to be rolled off. Shalom Women of light international prayer ministries.

#devotional biblestudy christianpost women's minisrty

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mimzy-writing-online · 3 years

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Hello. I had a question regarding your post about blind characters. I have a character in my WIP that must cover their eyes.. but it’s blind. He may need to tell people he is blind to explain why he covers his eyes though. I was wondering how I might write this character without offending. Thank you :)

I think I want to start by explaining the “covering blind eyes” trope and why it has become a harmful trope. I think understanding why it’s hurtful helps everyone learn how to handle it better.

I would guess that the “blind people wear sunglasses” trope comes from Hollywood for the specific reason of 1. wanting to signal to the audience that the character is obviously blind and 2. avoid breaking the suspension of disbelief by preventing the audience from catching the sighted actor look at visual stimuli (because disabled characters are almost always played by able actors).

But this changed the way the public expects to experience blindness. If watching a sighted actor wear sunglasses and say he’s blind is all the exposure to the blind community a person has had, that’s the only model of blindness they’ll recognize. If they meet a blind person in real life who doesn’t wear sunglasses, it’s going to break this built perception and cause an uncomfortable cognitive dissonance.

And then there is the common “cloudy-white blank gaze” that pops up in media. It stems from the fact that cataracts is the most common cause of blindness and the appearance of severe cataracts is a cloudy film in the eyes obscuring the iris and pupil. It can also alter what color a person’s eyes appears to be, making them appear paler and grey in the beginning and then as the cataract advances it becomes more yellow/brown and alters a person’s vision to appear more yellow tinted.

There are lots of other eye conditions that makes the eyes look visibly different. Albinism for instance affects the color and structure of the iris. Eyes might be congenitally misshapen. The muscles might be weak or not work and one or both eyes point significantly outward. Someone who was born blind and experienced no visual stimuli might also have weak muscles around their eyes because they never had a reason to focus their eyes on anything.

And unfortunately humans have the habit of feeling uncomfortable when they meet someone who looks very obviously different from the norm, whether that’s a personal style choice (hair color and style, tattoos, clothing choices) or something they can’t help (a visible disability, skin color, scars).

To the paragraph above, @gothhabiba replied with: “it's very weird & ahistorical to claim that racism or ableism are some kind of natural "human" trait.. like frankly it's apologia”

You’re right, I wasn’t thinking beyond that generalization or assumption.

Perhaps a better way to put it is: I was raised in a society where I was taught from childhood to think that there was only one kind of human being to be. White, cis, straight, abled, conservative. That’s a very western thing and that’s a thing I’m going to constantly be unlearning.

Racism and ableism and homophobia aren’t innate, that’s a western thing that was forced onto the rest of the world by colonialism. And because western media created this idea that the world is white, abled, cis, straight, and Christian-value leaning, it taught people to think that was the norm so that seeing someone different from that archetype would cause a cognitive dissonance, which causes discomfort.

And instead of working past that cognitive dissonance to learn more and realize there’s so much more to life than media taught you, society encourages you to ignore that cognitive dissonance by sticking your head in the sand-- or TV screen.

So combine these two tropes or common beliefs together and you get something a little dangerous: the idea that blind people cover their eyes because they look obviously different and they’re ashamed (or should be ashamed) of that.

And if you’re someone who’s just gone blind or who was born blind and you have little to no contact with the blind community, then this societal belief that you should be ashamed of how your eyes look becomes detrimental to your self-esteem and further builds internalized ableism.

I’ve lost count of the times I’ve read or watched a blind character cover their eyes with sunglasses because they were ashamed of how their eyes looked. And I distinctly remember a few times where a sighted friend of the character was trying to convince them to stop wearing sunglasses because there’s nothing wrong with looking different--which is true, but it plays into this fantasy of being the perfect abled ally who saves the blind character from being miserable.

In an ideal world, the character has no reason to believe looking different is a bad thing or diminishes their worth or makes people dislike them. And if they develop this belief, it’s more likely that someone more involved in the disabled community, most likely someone disabled themselves, will set them straight. Or that the character will learn to accept themselves on their own, looks included.

But there are some perfectly valid reasons for any blind person to wear sunglasses. They might have an interest in fashion and sunglasses complete the look they’re going for. They could want to protect their eyes from UV rays while they’re outside. They may experience light sensitivity and sunglasses reduces any discomfort or pain. Those are incredibly common reasons to wear sunglasses whether you’re sighted or blind.

But there are some more complicated situations.

In your words, your character must cover his eyes. You never specified why, so my primary guess is that he has some kind of power that is unpleasant or has devastating affects and the only way to prevent it is to keep his eyes covered. My primary guess stems from this post where an anon and I discussed a retelling of Medusa, a hypothetical blinding of oneself to avoid ever killing anyone ever again, and what I think I would do if I was in that scenario.

So how do you write a blind character who must cover their eyes and avoid some of the complications?

1. Your character must always have the ability to say “fuck off, it’s my business, I don’t have to tell you why I’m blind or why I cover my eyes.”

Most blind people really, really don’t want to get into the nitty-gritty of why they’re blind and how they feel about it and what it’s like being blind with a stranger they’ll never see again or a new acquaintance they don’t know well yet. You have exceptions to that rule where sure, educating the public about blindness is a thing you want to do and you’re committed to helping your community, but I still have days where I don’t want to talk about being blind or disclose my medical crap.

And if someone doesn’t respect their right to their privacy or pushes too much, the blind character is allowed to be angry, is allowed to tell them off and complain without anyone else in the situation vilifying them or saying they’re “overreacting” and “should have just disclosed private information because big deal or whatever.” If they are angry, that’s their right, and it’s not unreasonable, it doesn’t make them a bad person.

2. Your character should not be ashamed of being blind or of covering their eyes. It is a part of their life, they’re used to it by now, even if they weren’t in the beginning.

The shame and internalized ableism is something that should be written about, but that’s for an own-voices story with a blind author. I don’t think an abled person will ever be able to understand how much society expects you to hate yourself and your disability because “being disabled is a tragic thing that ruins your life” and how that does affect your mental health, self esteem, your relationships with others, your medical care, and what kind of accommodations you can get.

3. It wouldn’t hurt to have a few sarcastic lines in response to uncomfortable conversations.

Stranger: so what’s with the...

Blind Character: what’s with what?

S: the... you know

BC: you’re gonna have to be a bit more specific

S: Your eyes?

BC: They’re... eyes

S: but you’re...

BC: Blind?

S: uh...

BC: yeah, I’m blind. *walks away*

Or this conversation:

S: *to some other character* so why are his eyes covered?

(author’s note: which, honestly, that’s fucking rude. At least have the guts to ask me yourself)

BC: If I look anyone in the eye they instantly perish.

*awkward silence*

BC: instantly.

Friend: It’s truly tragic

BC: *melancholic* that’s how I lost my sister. *chokes up* She was so young

Or this conversation:

S: Why are you wearing that?

BC: It’s called fashion Karen!

Or this conversation:

S: are you like... blind?

BC: yes?? why wouldn’t I be?? Wait, are you sighted? Are you one of those sighted people? You poor thing! What caused you to gain your sight? Do you have a car? A bike? Were you born sighted? What’s it like to see color? Do you miss not having to see

God, I want a chance to try that last one. I haven’t interacted with a stranger in almost a year. One day...

4. Honestly, it’d also be cool if someone’s reaction to your character covering their eyes was like, “cool sunglasses,” or “cool *insert random character, even one you made up* cosplay,” (which is ten times funnier if this character is a notable figure in modern society like an actor who people might cosplay).

5. You know, if he’s covering his eyes with some kind of blindfold, he should totally have custom blindfolds for his moods. Like, I have a mask that says “suck it up buttercup” and another that says “not today” because sometimes that’s the mood. And sometimes the mood is one of my floral masks, and sometimes the mood is my cat mask.

So, just some thoughts. I hope that helps.

Edit: a commenter said: “op, unless i'm mistaken this kind of reads like anon meant the character ISN'T blind but lies about being blind to explain covering their eyes? it seems like they made a typo on the word "isn't"”

So my original response to the question was based on the assumption that the character is blind. However,

If the character is not blind, then do not under any circumstances have them lie and say they’re blind to escape a mild inconvenience.

It’s better to have the character actually explain the situation or straight up leave the conversation or invent a more ridiculous lie than to perpetuate the very real stereotype and misconception that there are people who fake being blind and therefore it’s okay to discriminate or harass them if you even suspect they’re faking.

Do not under any circumstances perpetuate that stereotype. Do not harass someone because you don’t think they’re blind enough.

#blind character #writeblr #writing community #disabled character #writing tropes #trope talk #blindness tropes #Anonymous

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sixth-light · 4 years

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The Crusades: A Fandom Primer

Like many of you, I am very excited to see a whole lot of fic about everybody’s favourite new Crusades-era Muslim/Christian immortal warrior husbands! However, a preliminary reading indicates that fandom is a bit hazy on what actually happened during the Crusades. Or where. Or why. They’re a much-mythologised piece of history so this isn’t surprising, but at popular request – ok like five people that counts – I’m here with a fandom-oriented Crusades primer.

Please bear in mind that I’m not a historian and this primer is largely based on my notes and recollections from several undergraduate history courses I took in the mid ‘00s. I expect the field has moved on somewhat, and I welcome corrections from people with more up-to-date knowledge! There’s also this very good post by someone who is a lot less lazy about links than I am.

Where did they take place?

The Crusades, broadly, describe a series of invasions of the Eastern Mediterranean (modern Israel, Syria, Lebanon, Beirut, Jordan, Cyprus, and parts of Turkey and Greece) by (mostly) Western European armies, religiously justified by their belief that the city of Jerusalem should be part of ‘Christendom’, i.e. ruled by a Christian monarch. In the first expression of European settler colonialism, nobles from the area of modern France and Germany founded four Crusader Kingdoms (aka ‘Outremer’, ‘overseas’) – the County of Edessa, the Principality of Antioch, the Kingdom of Jerusalem, and County of Tripoli.

After a first unexpected wave of success in the First Crusade (1096-1099), which surprised everybody including the participants by conquering Jerusalem, the Crusaders were gradually driven and the last part of Outremer was lost to European control with the fall of the city of Acre in 1291. Crusades after that still nominally aimed to take Jerusalem but rarely got very far, with the Fourth Crusade famously sacking the city of Byzantium, their nominal Christian allies, in 1204. During this whole period activity that can be considered part of the ‘Crusades’ took place around the Eastern Mediterranean.

The most important thing to remember is that modern national boundaries didn’t exist in the same way; Italy, Germany, France, Spain, and the UK were not unified nations. Most of the southern Iberian peninsula (modern Spain) was ‘al-Andalus’, Muslim kingdoms ruled by nobility originally from North Africa. Sicily had been an Emirate up until very recently, when it had been conquered by Normans (Vikings with a one-century stopover in France). Italy and Germany in particular were a series of city-states and small duchies; Genoa, if you’re curious about it for some reason, ;), was a maritime power with more or less a distinct language, Genoese Ligurian (their dialect had enough of a navy to qualify). England had recently become part of the Anglo-Norman Empire, which ruled most of England (but not Wales or Scotland) and also large parts of modern France, particularly Normandy.

The Muslim world was similarly fragmented in ways that don’t correspond to modern national boundaries - there were multiple taifa states in Iberia, the Almoravid Caliphate in Morocco, the Fatimid Caliphate in Egypt, and (nominally) the Abbasid Caliphate in Baghdad, one of the great cities of the era, although the Seljuq Turks were the major power in Anatolia (modern Turkey) and what we describe as the ‘Middle East’.

The largest Christian unified power in the wider European/Mediterranean region was the Byzantine Empire, centered on the city of Constantinople (modern Istanbul), which quite fairly considered itself the direct continuation of the Roman Empire, the capital having been moved there by the Emperor Constantine in 323. In fact, the really big political and religious question of the time for Christians was who got to be considered the centre of Christendom (there was no real concept of ‘Europe’ at this point) – the Orthodox Church, the Byzantine Emperor, and the Patriarch of Constantinople in Constantinople, or the Holy Roman Emperor (er…dude in nominal charge of a lot of German and Italian principalities) and the Roman Catholic Church led by the Pope in Rome. The Orthodox Church in Constantinople and the Roman Catholic Church had agreed to disagree in 1054 in the Great Schism, so in 1096 this issue was still what you’d call fresh.

Onto this stage of East-West disagreement and the heritage of Rome crashed the Seljuq Turks, a Muslim group from Central Asia who swept through Anatolia (modern Turkey), Byzantium’s richest province, culminating in the Battle of Manzikert in 1071 which wiped out Byzantium as an independent military force. The southern provinces had fallen under Muslim rule long ago, during the era of the first Umayyad Caliphate – including Jerusalem, famous as the birthplace of Christianity and a holy site for Judaism and Islam as well, but also a fairly uninteresting provincial town. Until...

Until…what?

Here’s why all the geography matters: It is generally accepted that the First Crusade kicked off largely because Alexios I Comnenus, the then-current Byzantine Emperor, requested aid from Western Europe against the Muslim Seljuq Turks. Byzantium often recruited mercenaries from Western Europe; the Normans (aka the Vikings), who had settled Normandy and southern Italy in the past century were frequent hires. Hence those runes in the Hagia Sophia.

Meanwhile in Western Europe, the Pope – Urban II – was having difficulty with the current Emperor, and was eager to heal the Schism and establish the primacy of the Roman church. He declared that an expedition to aid the Byzantines would have the blessing of the church, and that a new kind of pilgrimage – an armed pilgrimage – was religiously acceptable, if aimed against the enemies of Christendom.

Pilgrimages (travelling to holy sites, such as churches that held saints’ relics) were a major part of European Christianity at the time and many people went on pilgrimage in their lives, so this was a familiar concept. Western Europe was also somewhat overpopulated with knights – don’t think plate armour, this is 1096, think very murderous rich men with good swords – who could always use forgiveness, on account of all the murder. The Roman Catholic church, unlike the Eastern Orthodox church, also subscribed to the concept of ‘just war’, that war could be acceptable for the right reasons. And so a whole lot of nobles from the area of modern France, Belgium, England, Germany, and Italy decided that this new Crusade thing was something they wanted in on – and they took several armies with them.

I’m going to skip over a bunch of stuff involving the People’s Crusade (a popular movement of poorer people, got literally slaughtered in Anatolia), the massacres of Jews in Eastern Europe, and a lot of battles, but the takeaway is this: Alexios probably thought he was getting mercenaries. He got a popular religious movement that, somewhat unfortunately, actually achieved its goal (Jerusalem), did next to nothing to solve his Anatolia problem, and gave a succession of Popes a convenient outlet for errant knights, nobles, and rulers: going on Crusade.

How many were there?

Official Crusades that anybody cares about: Nine, technically. Crusade-like military events that immortal soldiers might have got involved with, plus local stoushes in Outremer: way more. WAY more.

The First Crusade (1096-1099): First and original, set a frankly (heh) terrible precedent, founded the Crusader States and captured Jerusalem. Only regarded as a clash of civilisations by the Western Christians involved. For the local Muslims it was just another day at the ‘Byzantium hires Frankish mercenaries to make our lives difficult’ office.

The Crusade of 1101: Everybody who peaced out on the First Crusade hurried to prove they were actually up for it, once the remaining First Crusaders took Jerusalem. Didn’t do much.

The Second Crusade (1147-1150): The County of Edessa falls, Eleanor of Aquitaine happens (my fave), the only winners are the people who semi-accidentally conquer Lisbon (in Portugal) (but from Muslim rulers so that…counts?).

The Third Crusade (1189-1192): You all know this one because it has RICHARD THE LIONHEART and SALADIN. Much Clash of Civilisations, very Noble, did enough to keep the remaining Crusader kingdoms going but access to Jerusalem for Christian pilgrims was obtained by treaty, not conquest. Indirectly responsible for the Robin Hood mythos when Richard gets banged up in prison on the way home and is away from England for ages.

The Fourth Crusade (1202-1204): Aims for Jerusalem, ends up sacking the Eastern Orthodox city of Constantinople, just not a great time for anybody, more or less the eventual cause of the fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans in 1453.

The Fifth Crusade (1217-1221): Still going for Jerusalem, starts with Cairo instead, does not get anywhere it wants to even after allying with the Anatolian Sultanate of Rum, making the whole ‘Christians vs Muslims’ thing even murkier than it already was post the Fourth Crusade.

The Sixth Crusade (1228-1229): Somehow these things are still going. Nobody even does very much fighting. Access to Jerusalem is negotiated by treaty, yet again.

The Seventh, Eight, and Ninth Crusades: Seriously nobody cares anymore and also nobody is trying very hard. Kings have better things to do, mostly. People end up in Egypt a lot. We covered these in one lecture and I have forgotten all of it.

The Albigensian Crusade (1209-1229): Why take a three-year trip to the Holy Land to fight pagans when you can fight the ones in your own backyard (southern France), AND take their stuff? Famously the source of the probably apocryphal ‘Kill them all, God will know His own’ quote, regarding the massacre of most of a city harbouring Cathars (a Christian sect deemed heretical).

Can we circle back to that ‘massacres of Jews’ bit? WTF?

Crusades, historically, were Not A Good Time for Jewish communities in Europe; when Christians were riled up to go and Fight The Infidel, it was a lot quicker to massacre local Jews than travel to the Holy Land. Also, then you could take their stuff. I will note here that it is VERY TACKY to use historical pogroms as backdrops for your non-Jewish main characters so keep this in mind but, like, use with extreme caution in fanfic, okay? Generally life was a lot easier for Jewish communities in Muslim-ruled states in this period, which is why so many Hispanic Jews ended up in Turkey after they were expelled from Spain.

What were they really about, then?

Historians still Have Opinions about this. Genuine religious fervour was absolutely a key motivator, especially of the First Crusade. The ability to wage war sanctioned by the Church, or to redeem your local sins by going and fighting against the pagans, was part of that, too. Control of key trade routes to the East was probably not not a part of it. The Crusader States were definitely Baby’s First Experiment With Settler Colonialism, and paved the theological and rhetorical ground for the colonisation of the Americas. But many individuals on the Christian side would absolutely have believed they were doing God’s work. The various Muslim rulers and certainly the local Christian, Jewish, and Muslim inhabitants of the Holy Land itself were mostly just getting invaded by Franks. As time wound on the Crusades became more and more political (frequently featuring intra-religious violence and inter-religious alliances) and less and less about their forever nominal goal, control of Jerusalem.

How’s Wikipedia on this?

Basically not too bad but I’m not totally confident on some of the bits about motivation (see: white supremacists love this period, ugh.)

Why did they stop?

The prospect of re-taking Jerusalem vanished entirely as the Ottoman Empire centralised and took a firm hold over most of the Levant (and made inroads into Europe, as far as Austria, taking Constantinople in 1453 and finally ending the continuous Roman Empire), the Spanish Reconquista and various intra-European conflicts (the Hundred Years’ War, for example) absorbed military attention, and then the Reformation happened and half of Europe stopped listening to the Pope and started stabbing each other over who was the right kind of Christian. But the concept lingered; white supremacists love the Crusades. Which is why it is a very good idea to be sparing with Crusader imagery around Niccolò in fanfic set in the modern era, and please for fuck’s sake stop with the ‘crugayders’ tag, Yusuf wasn’t a Crusader.

What other fun facts should I keep in mind re: Nicky | Nicolò and Joe | Yusuf?

· Genoa is not the same as Italy; Nicolò is Nicolò di Genova and would have spoken Genoese (Ligurian) and considered himself to be Genoese. Italian as a language didn’t really exist yet. The language he and Yusuf would most likely have had in common was the ‘lingua franca’ (Frankish language, literally) of the Mediterranean trading region, a pidgin based heavily on maritime Italian languages. Yusuf 300% would have thought of him as a ‘Frank’ (the generic term for Western Christians) and probably annoyed him by calling him that until at least 1200 or so.

· Yusuf is apparently from ‘Maghrib’, which I assume means al-Maghrib/the Maghreb (as his actor is IIRC of Tunisian descent), i.e. North Africa. He could have had relatives in al-Andalus (southern modern Spain), he may have spoken languages other than Arabic natively (Mozarabic or Berber), his native area had universities before Europe did. Basically: this is as useful as saying he’s ‘from Europe’, do better backstory writers.

· Taking the whole ‘Nicky used to be a priest’ backstory at face value: being a priest in 1096 looked pretty different to how it did even 200 years later. They were still working on the celibacy thing. The famous monastic orders were still forming. Some priests could and did hold lands and go to war (this wasn’t common but it happened, especially if they were nobles by birth). Nicolò di Genova would not necessarily have seen a conflict between going on Crusade and being a priest, is what I’m getting at. If he was ALSO trained as a knight, he was from a wealthy family; it took the equivalent several villages to support a knight.

· ‘Period-typical homophobia’ is going to look very different for this period. They are NOT getting beaten up for holding hands. Or sharing a bed! Or even kissing, depending on the circumstances! I am not an expert on Islamic sexual mores of the era but Christian ones were heavily on the side of ‘unsanctioned sex is bad, sanctioned (marital) sex is slightly less bad’, and there was no concept of ‘being gay’. An interfaith relationship would be in some ways more of a problem for them than the same-sex one (and in some ways less difficult to navigate than a heterosexual interfaith relationship.) The past is another country.

· Look just no more fanfics where Yusuf is trying to learn ‘Italian’ in the early twelfth century I am BEGGING you all

#the old guard #history #finally that BA gets a workout #fourteen years later

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cassandraclare · 4 years

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Hey Cassie! I love Cordelia and her connection to her Persian Middle Eastern roots. I was wondering if we would ever see something similar and have a Muslim character? Thank you for all the representation you put in you books it’s really nice to see yourself represented in a character. ❤️

I’m glad you like Cordelia! A great deal of love and research went into her and Alastair. :)

I recognize it may be frustrating for some readers to encounter a Persian/Iranian character who isn’t Muslim. I’ve written about this before here. Unfortunately, Cordelia and her family can’t be Muslim, just as Cristina couldn’t be Catholic, Will can’t be Church of England, Jem can’t be Buddhist, etc. Shadowhunters have their own religion. It’s part of what binds them together, and it’s also necessary — both to the characters, and to the concept of Shadowhunters at all. They believe all the stories are true, because I realized early on in the creation of this world that they couldn’t participate in mundane/human religions. There was no way to have the Shadowhunters be of a religion that actually exists in our world; that shut too many people out of being Shadowhunters, and made the books essentially an embrace of one religion over others. Nor could they all follow different real-life religions, without a constant ugly argument over the source of their magic — i.e. what kind of angel is Raziel? What religion does he represent? What religion does all this power they have come from? What is heaven, what are angels, what’s after death — for the Shadowhunters to function as a demon-fighting group, they need to share core beliefs about what demons and angels are. I gave them a religion that didn’t correspond to a real-life religion because I wanted to forstall that kind of infighting, both on the page and off it.

Cordelia and Alastair do come from a Muslim-majority country. But they are not Muslim. They are Shadowhunters. Cristina comes from a majority-Catholic country, but is not Catholic. She is a Shadowhunter. (There are also, of course, many non-Muslim Iranians; I knew many growing up, as my parents retained a lot of the friends they had made in Iran. Some were Jewish, some Zoroastrian, some Baháʼí. Part of what I love about Iran is that it is a tapestry of incredible history and different cultures; it’s definitely not a monolith!) This is a fundamental part of the Shadowhunter books’ world-building that has existed since the first book.

Fundamentally, Shadowhunters hold beliefs that contradict those held by every real-world religion I’m aware of. They can’t be meshed in with existing religions without compromising the tenets of those religions and I believe it is more offensive to present a warped or halfway version of a real religion than simply to say that the characters you’re writing do not practice that religion at all. This is in part why I am writing Sword Catcher, because its magic system is based on Jewish mythology — something I can’t do in the Shadowhunter books, though Judaism is my own religion.

Cordelia is a woman of color, she is biracial, she is Middle Eastern in her heritage. But she is not Muslim. I understand that Cordelia and Alastair not being Muslim means some readers will have trouble relating to them; but this was a world-building decision made long before Cordelia and Alastair were invented. I needed to present all religions, all mythology as equal, without any religion being the “only” one Shadowhunters can practice. If that means you don’t want to read about the Carstairs, I understand, and can recommend some wonderful books based on Islam-inflected fantasy instead, like Saladin Ahmed’s Throne of the Crescent Moon. However, this is not a new piece of information about Shadowhunters, or the way their world works.

I believe Islam to be a beautiful, deeply felt and peaceful religion, and while I cannot write Muslim (or Jewish or Christian or Hindu) Shadowhunters, there certainly is nothing that says there cannot be Muslim Downworlders, sighted mundanes, etc. (I have written other Muslim characters, like the Reyjavis in Magisterium, who are observant.)

I will say only one other thing, which is that I’ve received some pretty anti-Semitic asks about this specific issue of religion. I’m answering this ask because I won’t reply to asks that contain anti-Jewish content (and I will block the sender). Or asks that just say “you suck” or “Cordelia and Alastair are bad” because yeah. I mean, why bother. As a member of a minority religion myself, I can say I’ve grappled with how to respect and uplift my rarely-depicted-in-fantasy religion in these books while also making clear that all other religions are regarded equally as “all true.” (Simon, for instance, is Jewish while he is a mundane, and after he becomes a Shadowhunter, must struggle with how to reconcile his Judaism with his new beliefs which run contrary to the religion he was raised in. That is however unique to someone in Simon’s situation, and I wouldn’t feel qualified to write a character who must decide whether to discard their Muslim or Catholic heritage in order to be a Shadowhunter.)

I do not believe the people writing/and or sending me anti-Semitic comments represent my sincere Muslim readers. There are, however, kinds of anti-Semitism that are coded into certain language (especially discussing “greed”, “control of media”, “clannishness”, using the word “Zionist” instead of “Jewish”, and suggesting I must disrespect Islam or Christianity specifically because I am Jewish) that people may not always recognize for what it is. It is of course always fine to critique representation and how it’s done. (There is no such thing as perfect rep; it’s generally always going to be flawed, even if it’s something as small as a spelling error.) I would only urge not attacking the religion or ethnicity of a writer in doing so.

#the last hours #cordelia carstairs #yourfavoriterino

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traumacatholic · 2 years

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hello! i dont know if you ever had to deal with this but, i am so ashamed of showing my faith to people i know. everyone around me is not very religious and i am afraid my friends will laugh at me or being shamed by my family. im scared of being caught praying and stuff like that and i dont know how to fix it because i know i shouldn't hide my faith but also i dont feel comfortable showing it.

Hello! I'm sorry that you feel so anxious and ashamed of showing your faith. I've also went through a period of this, largely because of anxiety around being a convert and because I had actively unsupportive people in my life.

I think it's important to pinpoint whether our anxiety around showing our faith to certain people is based off of imagined rejection, or if we have actual certainty that they would reject us in some capacity because of our faith. If someone wants to exclude, mock, insult us, etc for our faith then where possible we should be trying to limit our contact with them as much as possible. We don't need to cut people out of our life for not having the same faith as us, but we shouldn't be putting ourselves in a place where people are actively hostile and disrespectful to important parts of our identity.

If people do reject you for your faith, then we can try and take comfort in the words of the Bible.

“Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you." [Matthew 5:10-12

It's an unfortunate part of life, that sometimes things that we integrate into our lifestyles can alienate others. Sometimes people will just move to respectfully distance themselves as your values come into conflict with their values. Other people will be more hostile to this, and attempt to conform you to their set of values. This can even happen when we encounter strangers - we're not always going to meet people that are open to liking us or even respecting us. And there's nothing that we can really do about this. No amount of attempting to conform, no amount of hiding ourselves, will protect us from this.

I think it's also important to know that we don't need to introduce ourselves as Catholics/Christians to everyone that we meet - the way that we live should be a form of profession of our faith. Where people can look at us and identify the values we have and where we come from from the decisions we make and the reasonings behind them. I don't generally introduce myself as Catholic to new people, I just bring it up in conversation where relevant.

Some things that worked for me confidence wise, were just beginning to share or like social media posts about the faith. And this could be as simple as sharing Christian art, sharing information about a feast day etc. I feel like these posts are really good because they can be interesting to a wider audience, but over time, it demonstrates your connection to the faith because they see you engaging with that content regularly. It also attracts Catholic followers to your social media platform, and you can engage with them that way and develop confidence in speaking publicly about your faith. These posts around art / feast days tend to create the least amount of arguments in response, so it's a good way of sharing content without having to engage in theological debate.

Just experiment dropping it into conversation ever so often. Share a funny story from Church or an interesting fact about Church history or a funny Saint story you came across. You don't have to tell people about when you go pray, but I'd also again say that it's normal to feel awkward if someone 'catches' us praying. I know that I always feel a bit startled if someone comes into my room when I'm attempting to pray. I think it's largely about just getting used to these things. Practice praying in your head when you're around other people, and you can slowly develop confidence in your faith this way. Maybe even invite your family to a Church celebration (maybe not a Mass, but even something like a Church BBQ or a Mass for a specific feast day). They might say no - my family are completely disinterested in the faith. But for some people they might still come along to show support even if it's not their thing.

For me, some of that shame also came from not being able to defend the faith well. I was still learning it, and I didn't have answers to people's questions (I still largely don't!). But developing a basic understanding of the faith, and learning the kinds of arguments that come up and defences to them can go a long way to strengthening our own confidence. We might not be able to win people over, and certainly not everyone that asks questions about the faith are doing so with a serious interest or desire to understand/learn, but we can still feel a lot less awkward than the times where we completely don't know an answer.

But again, I think you can comfortably live a Christian life without going out of your way to tell others. You don't need to tell others, but if they ask you if you are Christian or religious, then you should answer them honestly. If you don't feel confident telling them, then that's fine! Just don't hide it from them, and if they mock the faith around you, then maybe you can step in and go "hey, I'm actually Christian, and I don't like it when you talk about the faith in this way". People will likely pick up on your faith once they find out that you're going to Church anyway

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st-just · 3 years

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Got a theory on how socialism went from “working class idpol” to “PMC idpol”, while still claiming to be the former?

There is, as they say, a lot to unpack here.

So first of all, calling socialism ‘working class idpol’ isn’t necessarily wrong but a) phrasing it like that makes me physically cringe and b) it’s really pretty reductionist. The official Marxist doctrine isn’t that the proletariat is especially virtuous or enlightened or deserving, its that it’s exploitation is necessary to the functioning of capitalism, meaning that as capitalism becomes ever more universal workers will have both the means and motive to overthrow it. Though, like, not to say that there isn’t a lot of ‘working class idpol’ in there. If you want to get all Early Christian Heresy about it, I think that got denounced as I want to say Workerism at some point? Something like that.

(Though, like, the period of early Soviet history where people’s class histories was explicitly taken into account in court when determining how harsh a sentence to give them is just very funny in terms of ‘American conservative fever dreams that turn out to have actually happened’. I have a weird sense of humour. Though come to think of it Ascribing Class is actually a pretty useful read in terms of how identity is socially constructed and assigned from on high).

But honestly, well socialism has always been for the working class, the critique that it’s actually by a bunch of genteel delinquents cosplaying as revolutionaries is basically as old as the term. Like, ‘came from a well-to-do family, radicalized when they joined an illicit reading group in school and found Marx’ is basically a cliche of early Bolshevik biographies, and the closest to industrial labour quite a lot of them got was volunteering to teach night schools for the actual proletariat. Like, it was something of an embarrassment for a while the degree that the movement of the working class was actually composed almost entirely of professional revolutionaries and radical intelligentsia – the creation of a socialist labour movement was a deliberate and conscious project which took a decent amount of time to really work, with many (many, many, many) failures along the way. (Too radical and anti-religious and feminist and internationalist for the salt of the earth working types, you understand)

But anyway, all that’s mostly tangential, mostly to say that lawyers and teachers being strident Marxists isn’t even close to new. To at least approach answering your actual question – okay, with apologies to Barbara Ehrenreich, I really feel like ‘Professional-Managerial Class” as a term has gotten so warped by The Discourse that it’s actual use is fairly limited. Like, the Wikipedia article somehow includes ‘teachers’ and ‘nurses’ as central examples (even leaving aside accuracy if you’re a serious socialist on I feel like preemptively disavowing one of the only halfway vital sections of the American labour movement is anathema on a purely tactical level). A lot of the use is just, well, vulgar identity politics – imagining class divides based on culture and affect rather than material circumstances. And to the people the term is actually useful for – wait, have you seriously met many managers or corporate lawyers who call themselves socialists? Like, seriously? I mean, I guess so did Louis Napoleon, but I wouldn’t exactly call him central to the movement.

Alright, sorry, I’m being intentionally obtuse, here. So to answer the question I think you’re asking-

The contemporary boost in the prominence of socialism (in the discourse and in terms of number of publications, if nothing else) has been largely driven by the downwardly mobile children of relatively comfortable parents, both white collar workers and yes, of the professional-managerial class. Due to shifts in economics, culture, and government policy over the last several decades, they overwhelmingly at least attempted to get a college degree. Generally speaking, they were radicalized at least as much by the fact that the system that supported their parents has singularly failed to do so for them as by any particular points of history or theory. Once a significant number in various social circles and cultural scenes were genuinely radicalized, it just became a generally fashionable or acceptable stance to strike, and a useful vocabulary for anyone with even vaguely compatible issues or interests to articulate themselves in.

The natural and inevitable consequence of this is that the modern, western iteration of the socialist movement (such as it is) is generally expressed in the cultural vernacular of people raised as comfortable, liberal children of the American dream, or people directly reacting and responding to that culture. It also means that the focuses and idiosyncratic neuroses of the movement are going to have at least as much to do with the culture as with the ideology – such is human nature, unfortunately.

#reply #anon #political theory #socialism #in this essay I will #this is theoretically a writing blog #long #Anonymous

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samwisethewitch · 3 years

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What paganism is not

In my last post, I talked about what makes a person or a religion pagan. In this post, I’d like to clear up some common misconceptions about paganism. Some of these may seem like common sense, but I promise all of these are things people have said to my face after finding out that I identify as pagan.

So, for the record, paganism is NOT…

… a Christian heresy. As I mentioned in my last post, the traditions that modern paganism draws inspiration from predate Christianity — some of them by several thousands of years. Paganism is older than Judaism, the oldest Abrahamic religion, and may even predate the concept of monotheism. (Zoroastrianism, the first monotheistic religion, is believed to have originated about 4,000 years ago. Sumer and Egypt, two of the first civilizations, had established “pagan” religions about 6,500 and 5,000 years ago, respectively.)

To be a heretic, a person must 1.) believe in Christian dogma, and 2.) knowingly violate that dogma. Someone who is not Christian, practicing a religion that predates Christianity, cannot be a heretic.

… dark or scary. When some people hear the word “pagan,” their mind immediately goes to dark-robed cultists sacrificing babies in the woods. This idea dates back to the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, when a wave of religious and moral panic swept the United States. Some of the things targeted as threats to Christian values were: Dungeons & Dragons, metal music, and yes, paganism. (Ironically, all things I absolutely love. Take from that what you will.) The misconceptions that began in the 1980s unfortunately still haunt modern pagan communities.

I hope we can all agree that occasionally rocking out and/or playing D&D does not make someone a bad person. Neither does being pagan.

In reality, most pagans are pretty chill people, and most pagan religions have some sort of code of ethics that forbids doing unnecessary harm to others. You’re much more likely to find pagans holding a healing circle in someone’s living room than performing dark rites under a blood moon.

That’s not to say all pagans are perfect, or that bad people can’t be pagan. Every group has a few bad apples, but the actions of these individuals does not reflect the attitudes or practices of the group as a whole.

… all about sex. Another negative stereotype is that pagans are obsessed with sex and/or perform deviant sex acts are part of their religious rituals. This misconception has unfortunately resurfaced in the last few years with the rise of far-right conspiracies like the Q-anon theory. (Which I hope I don’t have to tell you is bullshit.)

While it is true that pagans are much more open about sex than, say, Christians, most pagans see sex as just a normal part of human life. Even the groups of pagans who believe sex is sacred tend to keep it behind closed doors. Some Wiccan covens do include a ritual representation of the sexual union of God and goddess in their rituals, but it’s nothing more explicit than a knife being lowered into a chalice.

Pagans aren’t more or less obsessed with sex than any other group of people, but they are generally more accepting of it. Because sex has no negative moral implications in pagan faiths, practitioners may feel more comfortable or confident in their sex lives than those who believe sex is sinful. In my mind, that’s a good thing.

… a system without ethics. Some people are attracted to paganism because they come from a strict religious background and believe that pagans can do whatever they want without consequences. This misconception can lead to frustration when they learn that pagan faiths, like all religions, have rules.

As previously mentioned, most pagans have a clearly defined moral code. It may be as simple as “harm none” or a complex system of rules and rituals. Either way, the point is that pagans follow rules, even if they may not be exactly the same rules as other religions.

… only for hippies. On the opposite side of the pop culture spectrum from the “scary cultist” stereotype is the stereotype of pagans are tree-hugging hippies. While it is true that pagans tend to care deeply about the environment, to say that all pagans are hippies would be an overstatement. There certainly are pagans who fit this stereotype, but for the most part pagans look just like everyone else. Which is to say, you can’t tell their religion just by looking at them.

… New Age. Paganism and New Age spirituality are two different things that often get confused or conflated in pop culture. The two movements are actually quite different, although some pagans may also be involved in New Age practices.

Paganism is based on pre-Christian religions from Europe and North Africa. New Age spirituality was largely inspired by alternative spiritual movements of the 19th century, such as the New Thought movement, the Theosophical Society, and spiritualism. Core New Age principles include the Law of Attraction, the belief that all humans are spiritual beings, and the idea of universal life energy.

Some of these ideas are also present in some (but not all) pagan religions, but pagans and New Agers tend to take very different approaches to spirituality even when they have similar beliefs. I like to think of it this way: pagans take a “bottom up” approach, while New Agers take a “top down” approach. For pagans, spirituality is built on daily practices, rituals, and connections with the world and the people around us. New Agers have a much more cosmic mindset and tend to view everything through the lens of their soul’s journey. (Hence the popular New Age saying, “You are not a human being having a spiritual experience. You are a spiritual being having a human experience.”)

Neither of these approaches is necessarily better than the other, but they speak to different personalities and different spiritual needs. In practice, they look very different.

If you’re interested in New Age spirituality, a series on paganism may not be of much help to you. Instead, you may want to look into books by authors like Deepak Chopra and Louise Hay.

… a way to rebel against your conservative family. In the 1990s and early 2000s, an author called Silver Ravenwolf made her name by publishing books about neopaganism marketed to teen girls. These books are extremely controversial among pagans, even today. Ravenwolf’s boooks are unfairly harsh (not to mention factually incorrect) in their depiction of Christianity, encourage readers to lie and manipulate people, and contain a lot of revisionist history. They also put paganism and witchcraft on the map as the hot new way to stick it to your parents.

I’m not saying you can’t be pagan if you’re a teenager or if you still live with your parents. (Hell, I was a teenager living at home when I first started reading about paganism.) What I am saying is that you should take an honest look at your motivations in practicing paganism. Are you genuinely attracted to pagan beliefs and values, or are you attracted to the mystery/edginess associated with it? If it’s the latter, there are lots of ways to explore the dark side without appropriating someone else’s religion.

… a trend or a phase. This is a new development that, honestly, I think is 90% Instagram’s fault. Certain influencers just make being pagan look so good. Capitalism has fully latched onto the pagan aesthetic, and you’ll find no shortage of retailers selling expensive knick-knacks for your altar.

For the record, I think experimentation is healthy. After all, the only way to find out if a religion works for you is to try it out for a while. But again, I think this comes down to intention. If you’re genuinely attracted to what pagan religions have to offer, then go for it. But if you’re more interested in posting cool photos of your altar setup, you don’t need to be pagan to do so.

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