Curiosity And BeingThe following document was discovered within the ruins of a deep-eastern Costan library, and is estimated to have been written by an anonymous Peregrinator during the first century ACW, before the Costan annexation by the Kharetti Empire. It has been reconstructed to the best of my abilities, but various segments of it, most notably the first half, which might have revealed more about the writer's identity or that of their town, have been lost entirely.
It is wistfully ignorant to cim the great tales of our belief are restricted to the Western continent. Because while, yes, if one was to stack up the pages of written stories regarding our Goddess in two piles, one for each half of the world, the left pile would certainly get a considerably taller tower, this can be easily attributed to the greater popution of the Primman Kingdom, and also to the greater leisure time they have in contrast to the hard-working people of Costa, which allows for more writing to be done.
Furthermore, as the one original nation of proper Peregrinationism (which those overseas supposedly call L'Absence, meaning 'the Absence'), vilges such as ours are all cribs to written accounts of encounters with the Goddess. It is noteworthy that one of the principal figures of our system, the ever-knower prophet Akenos, was raised a mere day from the study in which this is being written. It is said that from the very day in which he was born, he had many questions to ask his parents, about his creation...
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...but Akenos still had questions unanswered— and his will was as relentless as the question-answerers of town were ignorant. But not for that reason would he cease his quest of never-ending knowledge. And who is best to respond an infinity of questions than Infinity herself, ever-present, ever-listening? It was a surprisingly trivial solution — and he did not need to move much further when he thought of it. Instead, he stood on the window of his cabin's attic and proceeded to ask a simple question to the vast nothingness that surrounded him. "Pray tell, miss Absence, is there life outside this pnet we all live in? ..." Akenos would not receive a direct answer, nor a reaction from any bypassing pedestrians, but not for that would he cease his quest. So for the rest of his life, he decided that every single second not spent in necessities should be spent asking questions through the windowsill. Every day, he asked, and asked, and asked. And the question was new every time— even if the previous one never got its answers. By the time Akenos' hair had gone gray, his fingers had gone frail, and all of his peers had vanished to old age, his body refused, because respectful as he had been raised, his heart would not dare interrupt his curiosity with an arrest. So he remained inquisitive for eternity, and his body continued to age, but something beyond flesh persisted, asking away, and his questions are still heard in the wind, in the night and in the stars, and many go as far as to say the great knowers of our days, the scientists and philosophers that roam the academic streets are all infused with the remainders of Akenos' fading corporeality, while his very being remains alive in the windowsill, if invisible.
Though not all say he lived eternally! A non-negligible portion of those intrigued by his story cim (in the best interest of their own sub-ideology of Peregrinationism) he passed, but then returned to ask a question again, only to die again, and then return, entering a cycle of colpse and rise that persists like the daily wars of moons and sun. And from this myth alone came the faction believing in reincarnation, as in, the return to life of a being, in a new form, that variably preserves the user's memories, identity and behaviour.
And this hypothetical reincarnation raises new questions regarding the Peregrinatarian being: let us have a living being, for example, a rat. Our rat lives the standard life for a rat in a vilge, as in, a year, and, for whatever reason, this rat is deemed, by the Goddess, to be a special subject of her testament. This should not be considered a humorous or fantastical scenario: rats are incredibly curious, exploring beings, who merely ck the mind expansionism and body resilience of humanity. In any case, the rat explores, pys, meets new rats, and perhaps even begins to question its existence ("Why am I a rat? Why could I not be part of the great knowing titans that inhabit this gigantic city? Why roam, why steal, when we could very well trade our minuscule services for a piece of cheese?"), sharing the gospel to its peers in the form of philosophically-infused squeaks. One faithful Wednesday, the rat has become frail after roughly ten months of life and, while crossing an alley, is fatally smashed to paste by the hooves of a carriage horse. It is very tragic, but most importantly, it cuts off the rat's path short! Like Akenos, our prophet, the rat has an infinity of questions in its very essence, and the body appears interested in breaking that cycle in spite of its physical demise! The goddess then recognizes this, and grants the rat with the highly exclusive gift of a new life as a human. The true question is, then, what identity can be assigned to this infant child? That of a rat? Of a rat-boy? Or of a boy, fully? Is it not concerning to the belief of reincarnation that there has been no reports of a child's first spoken word being 'cheese'? If a rat were to reincarnate, would that not be the first word they would want to say? How come infants all eventually learn the same first word, generally 'mama', and sometimes, rarely, 'papa', and never something from their past life's catalogue of knowledge?
One can expin this discrepancy in many ways— the most disappointment of which being that, simply, one's memories, identity and personality are all 'erased' at reincarnation. This essentially means that, in terms of preservation, reincarnation is no better than nothing at all. After all, what's the point of considering reincarnating if nothing yours remains from one life to the other?
And furthermore, what could remain? What do we have that is more than our bodies? It is here that one can link together different Peregrinatarian theories, notably the notion of "soul" that many priests have subtly introduced in recent sermons.
Among the pilrs of our theory is the notion of a divine Nothingness, or the existence of certain voids that possess something despite being intangible. These include memory — which has been found to have no clear 'form' upon closer examination of the brain, dream, space, light, thought, narrative, lust, mathematics, its appended narrator, the reader to whom they serve... among a literal infinity of other things. And our Goddess, her holiness Absence, is one and every single one of them— the greatest, never-ending dy of the void.
So we return to our potentially reincarnating rodent, and we generously suppose that there is a soul within it. And when it becomes infant, while it does not preserve full memory, it preserves soul: instinct, vigour, courage, and, most of all, a connection to the Goddess that grows for every sample of its cycle. And this soul follows a yered method that starts from the flesh — as the soul should not be dissociated from the flesh fully; an intimate connection exists between the two. A path-way from flesh to identity can be traced using the following, exempry, non-exhaustive yers of the soul: Flesh, Emotion, Reaction, Sentiment, Memory, Knowledge, Opinion, Identity. Each yer depends upon the previous one. Naturally, Identity is a complex yer composed not only of Opinion, but of others, such as Love, Experience and Perception, which can be connected to the flesh in different ways. All of this to say that our soul is a grand system that, from our flesh, hormones and neurons constructs the abstract essence of our self.
The infant child grows, carries the curiosity of the rodent, and then works, ages, and ultimately dies. The man is reborn a tree, the tree is reborn a worm, the worm is reborn a rat again, the rat a cat, the cat a cyclops, and a thousand iterations ter it seems that this individual has reached a threshold of soul that carries the essence of multitudes, and so much of the Goddess resides within it that she becomes the final incarnation, an instance so pure in its nothingness that the flesh is barely holding into reality –taken a purple tint, her hue– that the name takes the shape of invention, and that her vision gains a third agent, one which views beyond the realness to which we are bound. It is a soul nourished with foresight and conceptualization. Each yer has the strongest connections, and the user's yers have become self-aware: the user is capable of reading their own soul, of understanding the systems that built her.
And so, the soul exists, in the many invisible things we possess (not to be confused with the Gestures, the many things we do, which shall be addressed in a future scripture), binding our limited flesh to the unlimited void to which we pray. And those who pray, those who read, inquire and engage in the arts enrge their soul. And those who hurt, those starved, those changed by any maise or undoing — they may lose flesh. They may very well lose fragments of their corporeality, and even, in the natural degradation of the brain, they may lose access to yers of the soul and to the most essential figments of their personality. But not for that are they lost. Soul does not vanish, nor does it degrade. It may destabilize — if its yers and their connections somehow lost their connection to the flesh. It may stagnate; if the user indulges in false idols, if distracted by carnal pleasures cking in discovery.
But the soul does not die. It will not.
