MODES OF THOUGHT IN ANTERRAN LITERATURE

c667, 2nd year classics

file: 102

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Professor: So, do the— yeah, it's going, I got it, it's going, . Sorry

Raquel: Okay—

Professor: No i, I see it. Yeah, the light's on.

Raquel: Yeah, it's on, it's going.

Professor: Alright, we got it.

Professor: Okay,

thanks for that. Everyone, give it up for your very accomplished and technically savvy teacher’s assistant Raquel.

Raquel: Thank you.

Okay. Let's settle in. This is the fun part to me. It's well, actually, it's all really fun to me, which is why I teach in Terran history. But caveat preemptor, right? Go ahead and hit the lights and hit that first slide. Okay. Yeah, it's cool, right? So these carvings that we're looking at here are found in a building that's in the northwest quarter of the old city of prime a and it's hard to get a sense of the scale of this because, you know, it's dark down there and the Spotlight from the drone, but this is 25 meters across and 12 meters high.

I mean, it is huge. And as you can see, when we zoom in, go ahead and hit that second slide. Here glyphs. And these are tiny. Each character is about three quarters of an inch. So the wall is covered with carvings of over 9, 000 individual characters. And that's just one wall. And there are lots more. Lots more.

Okay, hit the lights. Nice.

Okay, so we're going to get into the writing and language subjects in a different week. Right now I want to move away from the glyphs themselves and just talk about the translation what we've learned from translating this wall so far. So we're starting with Teotia, the mother of the gods. And we talked about this for a minute last week, but this is just one example of how utterly different the Antaran culture is from any other civilization we know. It is just, it's just fucking wild. In the translations that we have, and more and more are coming in constantly, we have a lot of different creation myths and sagas.

But Teotia, is always the first, the prime mover. She is the Locus. And what's utterly unbelievable about Teotia is that she was human. This wall that we're talking about today the building that it comes from is shaped like a three sided pyramid with the top lopped off. So it has three walls. and then an open ceiling in the center.

Seemed to be a religious building. There's like a hearth like structure that's in the middle and what seems to be some sort of altar. And the carvings that we're looking at here, these are attributed to Ra Kamali, who was active in the first empire. So yeah, about 73, 000 BCE. So what's carved on the wall?

The story goes like this. Teotia lived in darkness and was sorrowful. Right? Same as the story from Mem Ehafi last week. But in this one, she falls asleep weeping. And then she wakes up in a green field with strong soil. And when she opened her eyes, the darkness was gone. And she wandered the earth, which was flat and brown and decided it was boring.

Which is very punk rock. She was bored. So she made the plants and rivers and oceans and animals to make it more interesting. Well, this is weird, too, because the word translates both as interesting and beautiful, which is linguistically awesome, right? I wish we lived in a world where interesting and beautiful were the same thing.

But Teotia didn't stop there. Every night she'd go to sleep and the world would turn dark. The phrase was the light beams would leave. And when she awoke, everything was flat and brown again. So the world like reset. So she would make the plants and the rivers and the oceans and the animals, but it wasn't sticking.

Every night she'd go to sleep. Every morning she'd wake up. and everything would be gone. So Teotia made other humans to be her children. It doesn't explain how she did this. I think we have a virgin birth situation here. In this case, a multiple virgin birth situation, because she had a litter of nine kids.

And that helped. Now the light would stay on. As long as someone was awake, what they mean is that the world that she would populate with plants and animals would stay as long as one of her and the nine children were awake. But if they all fell asleep at the same time. Everything would be wiped clean again.

It says that she did this for nine thousand nine hundred and ninety nine years.

So Teotia decides, finally, right, that they need a god. A god who would never sleep. And that way, the light would stay and the world wouldn't reset all the time. So she tore the fourth finger from her left hand. This image, as gruesome as it is, it comes back again and again. She tore the fourth finger from her left hand and sucked on it.

And when all the blood was gone out of it, she buried it in the dirt. And this is how she made Ekopaa, the Second Birth.

Now, Ekopaa is going to come back over and over again. It's kind of the equivalent of like a Kronos. It's the original god, no longer worshipped as far as we can tell, but mentioned a lot as the father of the rest of their pantheon, which we'll get into. Ekopaa. had eyes all over its body, so if some of them closed, others would still be open.

And Ekopaa watched as Teotia and her humans grew and multiplied and built their city. And Ekopaa is still watching us today. That's, that's the last line in this thing. A little spooky, but this is why the world no longer resets, is because Ekopaa with the thousands of eyes has been watching. Okay, so what do we see in this story that relates to our subject, modes of thought?

Well, okay, you know, first there's the human foremother situation. I keep bringing that up because it's just so unusual. Second, this story is built around the concept of object permanence. Do you guys know what object permanence is? For those who don't, object permanence is our ability to gauge that, say, if I'm looking at that chair, if I close my eyes, I know the chair is still there. And then when I open my eyes, it is, and I, I'm not surprised. Right. But when you play peekaboo with an infant or a little young child, they don't have object permanence yet. So you cover your face and then you pull your hands away and you go peekaboo… and they're just so surprised. They love it because they had no idea that you were still there. They did not have object permanence. So this is sort of. Really appropriate. It's the infancy of a culture, of a, of a human society in which they're going from object impermanence to object permanence. I don't know.

I think maybe When you're a kid and you don't have object permanence, maybe the world's a little bit more of a magical place.

It's fine. It's fine, everybody. The, the emergency lights kicked in. I don't know. It must be a power thing. Just, we'll call it there. Everybody, just be careful on the stairs if the emergency lights aren't on. And we'll catch up next week. Okay. Raquel, can I talk to you for a second? What

do you know about Hai Rong? Is she like a new transfer student? Or has she been around? Do you know?

Raquel: I don't know. I hadn't met her before this class.

Professor: Okay. Huh.

Raquel: You think what?

Professor: I don't know. It's just good to be careful with this.

Raquel: I could just, I could take her out for a drink or something and… I don't know if that would be helpful.

Professor: I mean, that would be great. You don't mind.

Raquel: No, not at all. I mean, she's, well …

Professor: Oh. Yeah. Well, great. Okay, here, look. Here's a few bucks.

Raquel: Oh, no, no.

Professor: No, it's on me. Please, don't spend your own money, you know? I just, if I go digging around in admissions, it's gonna wave a lot of red flags. And I just want to be sure of who's here, you know what I mean? So thank you.

Raquel: Sure thing.

Professor: Alright, it's just a friendly drink, right?

Raquel: Oh, the pleasure's all mine.

Professor: Easy, tiger.

Raquel: Ha.

Professor: Okay. Well, thank you very much. I really appreciate it.

Raquel: Oh, of course.

Modes of Thought in Anterran Literature. This podcast is made possible by Harbridge University, a grant from the National Endowment for Humanities, the Peeler Prize in Archaeological Literature, and the Harbridge Family Trust. For more information and a reading list, please visit wlfdr.com