What am I supposed to do with a bunch of ■■■■■■■ rocks?
This monk keeps asking me what I see, and I say it’s a bunch of ■■■■■■■ rocks then they shake their head.
People ask me what I’m doing and all I can say is well, I’m staring at a bunch of ■■■■■■■ rocks I spent the last week finding which apparently aren’t a bunch of ■■■■■■■ rocks.
Try giving that answer without the ■■■■■s, I’m pretty sure the little squares are messing up the natural language parser somehow.
Perhaps that’s part of the process? How do you know what I said if it’s censored?
Magical!
Throw them at people
“Theocracy”
Hey, want to play a fun game? It’s called, “Try to be a government while disconnected from worldly affairs.”
You try managing a substantial chunk of wealth-- especially wealth that isn’t, as such, yours– while remembering that what you’re juggling is fundamentally illusory and basically a somewhat silly game that humans made up for trading favors. Or: you try being responsible for maintaining civil order and governance without getting deeply entangled in problems and entanglements of power, relations among and between underlings, and who’s going to fix what, how, and who’s due for a promotion, and so on. Or: you try handling community earthquake preparedness and response without getting entangled in the sheer suffering a proper disaster is going to cause (or already has) and losing your perspective.
Playing “judge” and handling disputes between neighbors is maybe kind of easy mode (at least maintaining a spiritually-healthy detachment is helpful, there, even if you’re about to be exposed to a parade of worldly troubles). Also, you do of course get the occasional born administrator (or teacher, or scientist, or, well, even baker, or farmer), even in monk clans (relatively few sects practice celibacy, and in a lot of sects spiritual responsibilities are inherited), who’s more engaged in all this stuff than in the spiritual realm, but usually such a person ends up leaving active practice-- withdrawing from the monastery to live as part of the lay citizenry.
Otherwise? Look around for someone to manage utility distribution and maintenance for your community, and probably you’ll find not one monk.
And yet, here we are: rulers, for what it’s worth, of our little world-- and responsible for what remains of our people among a community of nations grown all of a sudden so very much larger than us. (The Caldari State provides a good bit of insulation from that last, which helps.) Happily, this isn’t quite as much trouble as it sounds.
The old feudal hierarchy worked, at the macro-level, something like this: nobles and peasants each had their own internal hierarchies, nobles generally on a global or at least regional scale with individual responsibilities that (for those with actual status) started at the level of a single village and ascended from there. Peasant hierarchies stayed at the village or, at most, provincial scale, with higher-level relations and decision-making left up to the nobility-- which, however, was usually not to be bothered with the day-to-day. Monks, as a kind of respected non-caste, often got looked to (usually by the peasants) to mediate when trouble came up.
When the nobility disappeared (not quite all at once, but, pretty much within a generation) from the scene, monks just kind of stepped into their place (someone needed to), but without ceasing to be monks. So really you can think of Achura as a collection of semi-autonomous communities (decreasingly so, with time and the availability of stuff with names like, “regional power grid”), governed and administrated primarily at the local level, and joined together at the higher levels by a network of monks who mostly are way more interested in talking about stuff like the nature of the universe than, like, inter-regional fishing rights. (It’s maybe a step up from people who’d rather talk and think about war, I guess?)
Weirdest. Theocracy. Ever.
So what you’re saying is that like the rocks, your words might not be your words at all, but something else that the monks want Jev to be able to read, but she’s not quite there yet?
This sounds like an absolutely amazingly crappy prior system of governance. The nobles didn’t have non-noble administrators doing things like running the day-to-day operations of everything? It seems to me like that’s exactly the kind of thing you’d quickly need if you’re a noble who, you know, likes to eat every day.
You have to make sure the household’s running smoothly. To make sure the household’s needs are met, you have someone to make sure the immediate estate is running smoothly. To make sure the estate isn’t overrun by angry mobs who resent your taxation without any provision of justice or security, you need administrators who, you know, do those things.
That whole structure should survive the removal of the nobility from the picture, just fine. If it doesn’t, you’ve got a deeply dysfunctional society to begin with, and one that should maybe pull its head out of its arse and spend less time contemplating philosophical abstracts and more time getting its crap together.
Of course you need all that stuff. (I did say my description was strictly macro-level?)
A lot of the local administration fell to, if you will, upper-division peasantry-- village leaders and so on. (That’s kind of what the local peasant hierarchy was for.) Beyond that, you have a lot of variance between localities and even individual noble estates. And of course you’ve got other entities like merchants moving in between. Then, also, being a peasant didn’t mean being totally powerless-- a village leader could, and often did, do all kinds of stuff to provide for the community and make ends meet, without necessarily needing to bother the local petty lord.
When you’ve got a nobility that’s allowed to cut you down if you annoy it, you find ways of not annoying it.
As for noble households, that’s … really not something I even touched on. The old aristocracy had its own practices and procedures and customs and … so on. They almost all got uplifted, along with their household retainers of whatever level and caste, though. That’s a way of life that’s just kind of outright extinct.
Right, but regional hierarchies and administration was just… removed? That sounds a lot less like ‘uplifting’ and a lot more like ‘headshotting’.
I don’t think even SuVee would claim that the Achur uplift wasn’t calculated to serve Caldari interests, Arrendis. They found a way to basically, at a stroke, demilitarize what had been a highly-militarized society. We lost our rulers, and the people who would have fought over rulership. Everyone who hadn’t already learned not to fight unwinnable wars, they took and made into Caldari (subject to the same mandatory military service as any Caldari citizen, so, well done there).
So, they took out our fighters without firing a shot. The force that would have rallied our resistance was just gone. It’d be decades before anyone would be in a position to think seriously about fighting back-- and really in the scheme of things they didn’t give us a whole lot of reason to try.
But, also…
We were an iron-age society, and the nobles ruled an empire that spanned our globe. Until the Caldari arrived a couple hundred years ago, we didn’t know there was anyone else. The Caldari were an outside-context problem, something we were totally unprepared to face. There was no way we could win, but that didn’t mean the old aristocracy wouldn’t have tried. So, rather than give the old aristocrats a chance to find their balance and decide that they-- that we all-- had to fight or perish, the Caldari basically swallowed them whole. And so the rest of us were spared.
You might notice that I don’t have a whole lot of nostalgia for the old days. … the old aristocracy gave us peace, of a kind, it’s true, but they did that by conquering our world with sword and spear, and ruthless treatment of those who resisted. In a very real way, we were their slaves. If we’re powerless now, we were just as powerless before.
Maybe this is my own perspective as a Sujui clanswoman (however disgraced), but, the Caldari basically subsumed our conquerors, along with their households, agents, and retainers, and left the Achur laity in the hands of those whose judgment they actually had historically trusted. They haven’t really bothered us much since.
I’m under no illusion that they did this primarily for our sake. They did it for their own. … but we haven’t come out so badly from it, you know?
There certainly are much worse ways of conquering a planet, aren’t there?
You could use clowns
Sounds a bit like what happened with my people.
Well, there’s some parallels. It seems however the Caldari said “We’ll make some of your dudes rich and the rest we’ll worry about in time, if they’re useful and profitable” and the Amarr said “You guys are all scum, but if you behave we’ll praise you when you shine our boots”.
The level of sophistication presented by all of you is not one I expected to encounter outside of Amarr space. I see many bright minds here and begin to understand why the reclaiming was brought to a halt, it seems I might have been fed more misinformation regarding the intellectual capabilities of heathens then I expected. Aria Jenneth. Might I inquire how Eternal Damnation features in the Achur faith?
I was never encouraged to look past the Scriptures. The taste of your religion is that of new adventure. But I must admit I fear for my eternal soul by even admitting this.
Oo. Um. Okay. … That’s come up a time or two, since I’ve lived among the Amarr.
Crime, Punishment, and the Soul
It won’t surprise much of anybody that the Achura as a people mostly do believe in an afterlife. That afterlife, in most accounts, doesn’t actually differ all that much from the living world; it’s even got a government, with various deities and greater spirits serving as government ministers, and a bureaucracy staffed by various spirits, some of them human.
Existing in that world of spirits is neither a privilege nor a punishment. It’s just what happens-- although beliefs about whether the journey is automatic, how long it is, what kind of fuel it might require, and, more generally, the overall needs of the dead vary a good deal, and are the origins of a lot of superstitions and at least one holiday. A “hungry ghost” who didn’t get enough offerings at the Ghost Festival to make the trip is widely believed to be a dangerous thing to have hanging around, since they’re believed to become desperate for energy, and unselective about where and what they take it from. Such a creature need not have been a particularly cruel person; a hungry ghost is dangerous the way a starving person is dangerous.
Arriving … well. There’s a lot of folklore about it. Some versions of the spirit world do have various punishments and pleasures meted out to the particularly wicked or good, but, actually, such beliefs aren’t as common as you might expect.
In typical Achur thought, the criminal is understood to act for his own reasons. These can be reasons we’d consider good, or not-- what’s important is that the society also has its own reasons for not wanting crimes committed. The law is enforced, not because the law is good, but because law is law, and we fear the consequences that will follow from letting people break it without retribution. A person may have done what is universally agreed to have been a great good, and have to be executed for it.
In general, it’s no different for the spirit world, though accounts differ on just what happens if you chop a ghost’s head off.
One thing we don’t really have at all is the idea of truly eternal punishment. Punishment has to be proportional to some degree, even if that proportion is over a hundred thousand to one (failing to get out the good food for a visiting dignitary bringing a thousand years in a frozen wasteland). Going too far makes a judge or sheriff a villain, the law an excuse for wanton cruelty. Then, also, as noted above, we don’t really expect justice from this world. The spirit world, again, is no different.
That doesn’t mean there’s no reason to act properly, though.
Broadly speaking, Achur thought is long on “what happens, why,” and short on, “who deserves what.” An example of how this works out is the most widely-believed-in form of interaction between the living and dead: dreams.
In Achur folklore, and many sects’ teachings, the world of dreams is sort of a medium between our world and the spirit world. A wicked or broken person might return to trouble the living through their dreams; a more centered and benevolent one might return as a protector, guarding the dreams of the living. In either case, their role in this world is a manifestation of their moral nature. But, again, this isn’t really a change.
If this world makes moral judgments, they occur in the form of consequence. Extreme and violent acts breed extreme and violent consequence. A lost, violent person, prone to extreme behavior, creates a “hell,” becoming a nightmare. A centered, wise, and moderate person can use their wisdom to create a haven, protecting others from the “hell” of the nightmare. What’s more, in either case, the nightmare or the guardian is their own most significant victim or beneficiary: in general, wicked people are trapped in nightmare, because the nightmare is themselves, while a wise and centered person is for the most part protected from ever truly experiencing such suffering.
Of course, you do have the edge case of the sadistic and callous nightmare that is immune to the suffering it causes, even to itself. That, though, is like a different kind of creature completely: its place in this world is so different as to see pain as pleasure, suffering as succor. Whether wrapped in human skin or wandering as a disembodied cloud of cruelty, it might be a mistake to think of such a being as human. From such happenings, you get the stories of the most terrible demons: a pocket of hell, which, to its occupant, is a heaven.
But it’s normally dangerous to assume that you’re looking at such a creature.
Seekers
The Achura being basically a permanently rural society, you might expect that our leaders would be people like successful farmers and traders and fishing barons and so on, but, actually, this is where the Achur tendency towards intellectualism is most visible. Material things are transient, so wealth is something useful, but it’s not to be relied upon. The leaders of Achur society, and the origins from which most Achur capsuleers come, are collectively called “seekers,” and what they all have in common is, depending on who you ask, either a keen interest in or an actual connection to the cosmos.
The most obvious and familiar class of seekers are the Achur theocracy, the monks, who I’ve already talked about a good bit. Right now the monks are struggling a little with something they haven’t historically had to worry about too much: power and wealth complicating that whole “removal from worldly things” principle. Living off of the charity of others is an ancient monk custom, but that starts getting a little strained when the offerings are overflowing the temple and some of the larger ones are coming in with written prayers (also an ancient custom) from commercial concerns (less-customary) about how nice it would be if thus-and-such a construction contract could go to so-and-so, spirits willing. That kind of thing coming into the Sujui clan’s temple compound is almost certainly what paid for my own education and my training at academy.
The second are probably the most recognizable category to a lot of outsiders, particularly the Caldari ('cause this is the group that ends up working with R&D all the time): the inventors. Scientists generally get a lot of respect in Achur culture, but people who can seemingly pluck inspiration from the very mind of the universe itself are given special status. This might be just my own skewed perspective from having been trained as a monk, but it seems like a genuine gift of this type is a lot rarer than the people claiming it, and even for those who really do have that kind of creative genius, ego seems to get mixed up in it a lot. There’s no question they come up with some neat stuff and wield a lot of influence, though. You don’t tend to see celebrity monks, but somebody who invents something really neat is likely to end up pretty famous.
The third category is maybe the hardest to explain to people from outside the culture, because the heart of their field is pretty near universally understood by the Achura themselves to be nonsense: the stargazers (a category that can be taken to include fortune tellers generally). It’s widely understood that even if the stars did hold the secrets of our little individual human destinies, they wouldn’t likely be sharing them with humans in any comprehensible way no matter how thick the tome of astrological charts becomes. So, why would you spend a bunch of money to get an in-depth consultation with a stargazer using a bunch of arcane charts and diagrams everybody involved probably knows (but the stargazer will by no means admit) is a bunch of superstitious nonsense? Well, because all those charts and diagrams leave a tremendous amount of room for interpretation-- and that interpretation is what you’re really paying for. A full consultation by a stargazer involves a lot of research: the stargazer will want a full dossier detailing whatever the matter to be consulted on is, as well as persons involved and surrounding circumstances, all to ensure the “accuracy of the reading.” Preparations can take months, and the final reading (actually, “consultation” is probably just the right word) will tend to closely reflect the stargazer’s informed impression of the situation. A stargazer’s real service is to provide practical advice and wisdom-- and, of course, in the unlikely event that the stars really do have something important to say and all those star charts really do provide a glimpse into their shining will, you’ve got that angle covered too.
you might find tranquilety in knowing it is most likely this groups art expressing their believe. i think there is some beauti in it like there is in minmatar pattern
You know that’s not always the case on Achura you never been to my Province. So you really don’t know what a modernized indigenous city looks like