The Ziggurati: On Variant Histories

May 21st, 2016

That does look like the primordial stuff of creation, doesn't it?

Our reality is a truly magnificent place. Whether inside one's very home or amongst the farthest reaches of the universe, wonder is everywhere to be found. A realm of endless possibilities, one is capable of doing just about anything they can conceive of, given enough desire and effort. This is because the future is an open book, and one's fate is never set in stone.

Pondering the nature of our reality, it's easy to ask 'what if'. Imagining the shape of things to come is relatively simple, when projecting the logical results of current trends through time. Sure, such imaginings are rarely accurate, as some tendencies are simply outside the awareness of those who would predict the future. You can see this in action simply by reading old science fiction tales.

This indicates that the nature of time itself is fluid, not at all deterministic. No matter how certain an outcome at first appears, things rarely proceed exactly as one would predict. It is difficult enough to foresee how an event will unfold even when most of the relevant variables are understood, but when you consider that everything affects everything else in some fashion, accuracy in prognostication becomes elusive.

Similarly, those attempting to understand their place in the world have often gone to great lengths to divine its origins. Many of these divinations are seeming flights of fancy, and have been invariably discounted over time as others took their place. The merit of such histories hasn't driven the adoption of new pasts, so much as the weight of whatever religions traditions promote them in the first place.

While science has ultimately created a relatively accurate, yet nonetheless imperfect history of reality as we know it, the power of faith has repeatedly insisted that the world came into being differently. In fact, numerous belief systems over the millennia have described in detail how our reality formed, usually from nothing or close to such, fanciful tales that ended in what was, for them, the modern day.

Though it would at first seem that only one such history could in fact be real, the nature of the past is just as fluid as is the future. Due the raw power of faith, all of these myths about the past were, at some point, real - even if they no longer hold true. These variant histories rest beside one another, slowly influencing the present even if no longer directly connected to such.

Thus, at some point, Odin really did forge the world from the corpse of the frost giant Ymir, and at another Yahweh really did create the world in but seven days. And so on, and so forth, back to the very beginning of human civilization. In order to find the wellspring of such variant histories, however, one's eye must wander back thousands of years, to the ancient and destroyed city of Babylon.

firebomb@obnoxiousjerk.com