she

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See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

Sounds perfect Wahhhh, I don’t wanna

I think an overlooked aspect of white supremacy in speculative fiction (and thus in speculative fiction TTRPGs ) is the idea that humans are inherently colonialist. That slavery and cultural genocide are born out of natural, internal, immutable human drives.

Like, no. Colonialism was a uniquely white Euro-American phenomenon. War? Of course, that’s universal. Patriarchy? Basically everywhere. But the specific drive towards the enslavement, disenfranchisement, exploitation, and dehumanization of people you see as other? That’s not a human thing, that’s a product of Euro-American culture having deep-rooted problems and sicknesses that it has yet to fully excise.

tldr read Discourse on Colonialism

sci fi fantasy speculative fiction fiction rpg ttrpg ttrpgs tabletop roleplaying games roleplaying games colonialism race bigotry critical theory discourse on colonialism aime cesaire
cryptotheism

evelyn701 asked:

Follow up question after plowing through your recommendation on them as well as Philosophumena and a few articles on the Ophite Diagrams - do we know what the deal is with Leviathan in the Ophite Diagrams? I can't find any sort of precedent or theological basis among the Gnostics for the idea of Leviathan as World Soul. Is it just because Leviathan is a big snake and the Ophites/Naasennes liked snakes?

cryptotheism answered:

Serpents are one of the most symbolically dense things in gnosticism, because it was a fairly common and important symbol for the time. Everyone had Religiously Significant Snakes.

Leviathan to the Sethians, as I understand it, is akin to the idea of the firmament if the firmament was a sort of liminal aeon. Leviathan is the border where the power of Sophia ends, and the power of Ialdabaoth begins. It’s kinda the world-soul, kinda the border that defines the world-soul. Am I making sense here?

evelyn701

I think so? That part mostly makes sense to me, I’m moreso just confused about the specificity of the reference. Maybe Leviathan was a bigger idea at the time than I’m giving it credit for, but specifically referencing this one Jewish sea serpent rather than any other sea serpent (or just sea serpents in general) feels like they’re going for something specific, but I don’t know what.

Maybe they were just doing it because Leviathan is a sickass word for a sickass concept I guess… say what you will about the Gnostics (Ialdabaoth is cool and good, yall were just being mean) but they had a great sense for spiritual aesthetics lol

leviathan gnosticism gnostic sethian ophite occultism