aleph symbol with title UNSONG

Chapter 49: Terrors Of The Sun And Moon

December 4, 1993
Gulf Of Mexico

Right on cue, people noticed the sun speeding up. There were times when this would have been a cause for concern. As it was, the astronomical community just shrugged their shoulders and said “Uriel’s doing something again”, and there the matter rested.

The unplanned solar eclipse of December 4, 1993 would reach totality around 11:08 over the Pacific Ocean. The path would continue northeast, until it reached the point of longest duration of totality over the permanent hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico just after 2:30. From there it would pass over Florida before dwindling away in the North Atlantic.

“ARE YOU READY?” asked Uriel.

“Didn’t I tell you last month?” said Sohu. “We are going to rock this eclipse.”

“I AM GOING TO HAVE MICROMANAGE THE MOON FROM THIS POINT ON,” said Uriel. “IT IS VERY DIFFICULT. PLEASE DO NOT DISTURB ME UNTIL TOTALITY HAS PASSED. YOU KNOW WHAT TO DO?”

“Yeah, for the thousandth time,” said Sohu. “When the totality hits, step into Yetzirah, look through – not with – the eye – and report back.”

“YOU ARE GOOD,” said Uriel. “QUIET TIME NOW.” He started rearranging the glowing letters in front of him. It was a new moon, so Sohu couldn’t tell if the moon was wobbling in the sky or not.

Sohu took out a book – not the Torah this time, she’d been able to teleport to some bookstores and get some light reading and had developed an appetite for comics – and sat on the edge of her cloud, glancing up every few minutes to check the state of the sky.

Uriel suddenly broke out of his trance, stared right at her.

“Is everything okay?”

“YES. I JUST REMEMBERED. I FORGOT TO TELL YOU. DO NOT STARE STRAIGHT AT THE SUN. IT WILL HURT YOUR EYES.”

“Thanks, Uriel,” said Sohu, with an eye-roll, and returned to her pasttime as Uriel returned to his.

Into her head unbidden came a verse from an old poem:

The moving moon went up the sky
And nowhere did abide…

She couldn’t concentrate on the comics. She put it down on the cloud, carefully folded to the last page she had read. Another verse, this one from her kabbalistic studies:

I reign over you, sayeth the God of Justice, in whose hands the Sun is a sword, and the Moon a through thrusting fire…

The sky started to darken. Ignoring the archangel’s advice, Sohu risked a brief glance at the sun and saw a bite taken out of it.

She readied herself for trance.

The sky got darker. A few stars appeared. Now she was sure she saw the sun wobble. Uriel must be working very carefully, giving her as much time as possible for what she had to do.

She began to drift off. Moon. Yareach in Hebrew. Corresponding to the sephirah Yesod. Just as the moon reflects the light of the sun to Earth, so Yesod reflected the lights of all the other sephirot into the physical world. New moon. New Yareach. Just as New York City reflected all the peoples of the world into America. Give me your tired and poor. Alas, poor Yareach, we new him well.

She reached out to step into the thing the moon was a metaphor for.

“It looks like we’re having an eclipse party and I wasn’t invited.”

She opened her eyes, already knowing what she would see.

“A solar eclipse is a once in a lifetime event,” Thamiel told her. “And totality only lasts five minutes. I wouldn’t want you to miss it because you were spending the whole time in Yetzirah.”

Sohu very carefully backed away from him. It occurred to her that if she could get into the flying kayak, she might be able to launch it off the cloud before Thamiel could stop her, then get blown off somewhere far away by the storm.

The Lord of Demons shook his head, then reappeared in the flying kayak. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m not here to torture you. A waste, without Uriel around to watch. We’ll just stay here and watch the eclipse together. In Assiah. The physical world. It’ll be fun. Just small talk. You and me, mano a diablo. The two of us so rarely get any time alone together.”

Sohu sat back down on the cloud. “Talk,” she said.

Thamiel picked up her comic. The book burst into flames in his hand, then fell in a spatter of ashes onto the cloud. “Really? Comics? We need to get you some more wholesome entertainment. Do you know what I do for fun? You know those electric fences for dogs? I find a dog with one of those electric fences, and I stand just a few feet outside with a big juicy steak. The dog runs towards me to get the steak, then gets zapped, then runs back into the fence, then tries again, gets zapped again, finally just sits on the edge of the fence while I eat the steak in front of it. It’s not the most efficient way to cause suffering, but you can’t always be all about efficiency, you need to leave some time for yourself, do you agree with that, Sohu?”

Talk. In Hebrew, d’var. Diver. Getting to the bottom of things. Differ. Resolving conflicting opinions. Differ contains di-, the prefix for two. Thamiel. Duality in God, also a two. Attempting to distract her. Another di-. Two channels. But they could become one channel…how long left in totality? Two minutes? One?

Thamiel broke off suddenly. “Oh, I see what you’re trying to do,” he said. “No! Bad Sohu!” He took his bident and drove it into her head.

Pain. Blinding, searing pain. But worse, wrongness. Impossible wrongness. Pain. Sounded like pey. Pey is a yud in a kaf. The divine spark in the human form. Pain is of the human form. But still a divine spark within, able to direct it, transcend it. In Hebrew, ke’ev. Sounds like kaf. In Hebrew pain is of the body, but in English, it recognizes that pain is only partially of the body, can be overcome. She was an English-speaker.

“I’ll kill you!” Thamiel said. “Come back, or I’ll kill you!”

Threats. In the Bible, God threatened Adam: eat of the fruit, and you will surely die. He interpreted it to mean immediate death; when Eve ate of the fruit and didn’t perish, he thought the threat was empty. But God had meant that he would become mortal, die eventually, and so he did. But it was death that allowed humanity to reach the world to come, to truly join with God. Threat. Thread. I give you the end of a golden thread, only roll it into a ball…

Sohu stepped into Yetzirah and opened her eyes.

The Comet King was in his study. But it was different now; there were some new books on the shelves, a few new tchotchkes on the desk. Father looked older. Much older. And worse. Some of the light had left his face. He was sitting in his chair and there was a book in front of him. Maps. An atlas. He was speaking to Father Ellis, also older. They were arguing about something, at first politely, then louder. Finally the Comet King turned away. Ellis looked like he wanted to say something, but all of a sudden he blinked, and when he opened his eyes again they were purest silver, and he began to hover, as if too holy to be polluted by the touch of the ground. The Comet King stayed fixed on something out of sight for a moment, then turned and saw the transformation. After a moment’s thought, he knelt.

“Metatron,” he said.

“YOU ARE LOST IN DARKNESS,” said Metatron.

“So is the moon,” said the Comet King, “and so much the worse for the darkness.”

“YET YOU BEAR WITHIN YOU THE MOST HOLY NAME, WHICH MAY NEVER BE DESECRATED.”

“I earned it,” said the Comet King. “You gave it to me.”

“NOW I AM GOING TO TAKE IT BACK.”

“You can’t take it back!”

“I CAN.”

“I need it!”

“THE EXPLICIT NAME MAY ONLY BE BORNE IN A PURE MIND.”

“I’m pure.”

The Archangel Metatron stared at him. No one, not even the Comet King, could stare down the Archangel Metatron.

“I’m angry, and I’m heartbroken, and I’m empty inside. But I’m pure.”

The Archangel Metatron did not get flustered. The Archangel Metatron did not work that way.

“THE SANCTITY OF THE NAME WILL BE PRESERVED. I WILL GIVE IT BACK TO YOU WHEN YOU ARE READY.”

“You will, will you?”

“YES.”

“How?”

“HOWEVER I WISH.”

Ellis reached out a ghostly hand and touched the Comet King’s brow. Something left him in that moment, something vast, like a note too low to hear. Then the silver left Ellis’ eyes, and he crumpled to the ground.

A ray of sunlight burst out from behind the moon.

Sohu stepped into Assiah.

Thamiel was standing directly in front of her. He was staring straight into her eyes. Then he reached out a single deformed finger and touched her on the nose.

“Boop,” he said.

Sohu’s eyes went white, and she seized.

Uriel dropped the moon.

“SOHU, ARE YOU OKAY?”

“Oh, hello Uriel, I was going to say hello, but you looked busy. Got to go now.” The Lord of Demons disappeared in a bolt of lightning.

Sohu kept seizing until the last curve of the moon came out from behind the sun. Then she fell down prone on the cloud. Uriel kept watch over her until she regained consciousness.

“ARE YOU OKAY?” he asked.

“Yes…” she said, still a little confused.

“WHAT HAPPENED?”

Sohu strained. Her forehead wrinkled. Then a look of panic fell over her face.

“I…I don’t remember. The eclipse started, and after that I don’t remember anything.”

“IT IS OKAY,” said Uriel.

“My eyes hurt.”

“YOU STARED AT THE SUN, DIDN’T YOU?”

This entry was posted in Uncategorized and tagged , . Bookmark the permalink.

105 Responses to Chapter 49: Terrors Of The Sun And Moon

  1. Daniel Blank says:

    Also:

    “I AM GOING TO HAVE MICROMANAGE THE MOON FROM THIS POINT ON,”

  2. Daniel Blank says:

    Also pasttime should have only one t.

  3. Daniel Blank says:

    Not a typo, just an observation.

    “And after that I lot the name/ I gave it back to him that holds it for us”

    Parallel with the above visit from Metatron, means the Comet King is probably alive and will get back the Explicit name. I think it might be Nemo, with Simeon’s evidence.

    • linkhyrule5 says:

      “But the Name resounds in every Word.
      You never truly lose the heMephorash.”

      “The sky started to darken. Ignoring the archangel’s advice, Sohu risked a brief glance at the sun and saw a bite taken out of it.”

      Bite of the Fruit of Knowledge…

  4. This chapter resolves something that confused me – why would The Comet King invade Hell anyway, if he lost the name?
    I’m guessing he expected to get it back at some point, when he was ready, so he went on to invade Hell anyway. But eventually he realized he wasn’t going to get it, gave up on his invasion, and broke down in complete hopelessness – which explains the man we saw in the passover chapter.

    Also interesting (but not surprising) that Metatron talks in ALL CAPS, like Uriel.

    • Pickle says:

      Possibly all angelic-form angels SOUND LIKE THAT when interacting in the world? In Chapter 20, Uriel’s dialogue was capitalized normally, but that was inside angelic society. Gadiriel wears a created shell in her appearances so far, too.

    • Sniffnoy says:

      Neil Armstrong also talks like that.

    • Aris Katsaris says:

      Why do you think that this flashforward (from Sohu’s perspective) is before the failed invasion of Hell?

      • Because it explains why the invasion failed. Also, there’s a noticeable difference between TCK here – grieving, but not in despair – to the guy in the passover chapter, who’d completely given up. This suggests that he suffered some great downfall inbetween.

  5. Daniel says:

    Backwards in error, or because of Uriel dropping things?: “until the last curve of the moon came out from behind the sun”

  6. Daniel says:

    1. I was wondering when we’d get a callback to Enochian!
    2. The Sohu vs Thamiel battle actually sheds a lot of light on why kabbalistic and Buddhist meditation styles might have similar effects.
    3. My building’s fire alarms went off at the exact moment this chapter was posted. I don’t know what that means, only that it’s not a coincidence…

  7. [Not specifically relevant to this chapter.] Call me slow on the uptake, but I just realized that there were quite a few unmanned probes that went past the moon’s orbit before Apollo 8, starting as early as 1959. Why did none of these crash into the crystal sphere surrounding the Earth?

    • Uriel actually explained this – the issue wasn’t just them going past the sphere, it was that they recited Genesis there, which reset the code of the world to its original form.

      • Sure, but IIRC everything we thought we saw past the Moon’s orbit was supposed to just be some sort of optical illusion Uriel created. My reading is that, even before the bit with Apollo 8 and reciting Genesis, the crystal sphere was still there, and it delineated the limits of our world and the familiar laws of physics. Yet we sent probes to the presumably nonexistent Mars and Venus prior to Apollo 8.

        • I think he could kinda simulate it, though.

        • MugaSofer says:

          No, I think they’re only an optical illusion created by the Crystal Spheres and angelic beings like Comet West in the original, magical world.

          In the scientific world created by Uriel, pre-crack, all that stuff genuinely was physical objects millions of miles away.

          • nipi says:

            Why would Gods version of the world be smaller than Uriels mathematical approximation of it?

            Uriel is the one that has limited processing power so I would assume that he chose to transform only what he thought important/needed – Earth and its immediate surroundings. (This raises another question: Did Gods version of Earth have a moon and what happened to it after Uriel changed things? Which moon is Uriel micromanaging?)

          • linkhyrule5 says:

            (Responding to nipi): Because space is an illusion Uriel created. Uriel’s world has a property called “space” that has a really big number next to it, but that presumably doesn’t mean much in the origin world.

  8. Sillence says:

    Uriel returns and sees something is wrong. Having seen Thamiel, why does he assume that things went wrong because Sohu looked at the sun?

  9. YumAntimatter says:

    Typo: “Thanks, Uriel,” said Sohu, with an eye-roll, and returned to her pasttime as Uriel returned to his.

    Pastime should have one t

    • YumAntimatter says:

      “I AM GOING TO HAVE MICROMANAGE THE MOON FROM THIS POINT ON,” said Uriel. “

      Missing a “to” (should be “have to micromanage”)

    • YumAntimatter says:

      She couldn’t concentrate on the comics. She put it down on the cloud…

      “Comics” is plural, “it” is singular

  10. Sniffnoy says:

    So… what was the point of the eclipse? What, exactly, was Sohu supposed to be doing with it?

    • Probably predicting her father losing the name.

      • Sniffnoy says:

        I mean, the point can have been to gather information about something, to predict something about the future, but from Uriel’s point of view, it can’t have been “to predict that the Comet King would lose the Explicit Name”; if he already knows that, there’s no point! The information they were trying to gather has to be more general.

        It could possibly be just, “to gain a vision of the future”, rather than anything more specific, but if there wasn’t anything in particular Uriel was hoping to gain information about, that raises the question of why he’s doing this now, specifically. Because only now is Sohu ready for it? That would explain why this is the first time, but then why not do it more often later? (Or maybe he does, and we just haven’t been told about it. 😛 ) Because Thamiel’s interference makes it pointless, maybe?

  11. Prime 2.0 says:

    I wonder what Thamiel is going to do with Sohu’s memory? Did he get a clue as to the Name?

    • Or maybe as to how to stop TCK’s crusade.

    • faunlike thing says:

      I don’t think he learned anything, I think he just destroyed it. He said he meant to prevent her from entering the yetzirah and acquiring the memory in the first place, and he tried to stop her, so he didn’t want to get it through her, it seems like he just didn’t want her to have it- maybe he knew what it would be in advance, or else why bother?

  12. Thecommexokid says:

    Have there been other chapters without an epigraph before?

  13. Ninmesara says:

    I don’t really understand this chapter… Uriel allows thamiel to erase Sohu’s memory (it is even ambiguous wether Uriel or Thamiel knows what Sohu saw); the characters may have gotten no actionable information with all this eclipse busines; we readers get a micro glimpse of future plot, which explains little except that TCK may have lost the name and is looking for it disguised as The Captain.

    The little glimpse into the plot is actually very weird: it turns out that Metatron not only speaks but possesses people to speak for him and steals the Name from TCK’s memory because “he is not pure” (why can’t people just write names on a piece of paper as a backup?).

    At the same time, all this memory manipulation is starting to get worrying… How reliable is Aaron as a narrator? Who else (besides Sarah) has been messing around with his memory? As someone has said, any story with memory manipulation becomes a story about memory manipulation…

    • George says:

      They told you; the explicit name of god can only be borne in a pure mind. Paper, being not a mind, cannot bear it. For other Names, this is not the case.

      • linkhyrule5 says:

        Speaking of which, I know this entire fic is about theodicy, so I’m trying to be patient with it…

        But *dear gods*, I have never been so tempted to throw a god-slayer into this universe before. Way to be, Metatron. Way to be.

  14. MF says:

    Uriel had to expect that would happen. A solar eclipse, randomly happening? It’d draw the attention of everyone in the world of any note. It basically painted a target on his back for Thamiel. He didn’t tell Sohu about Thamiel being there, either, which implies there may be something more to things.

    Did Uriel trick Thamiel somehow? Was his “micromanaging” of the moon designed to give Sohu a specific vision and so lead Thamiel astray when he stole the memory?

    • Senjiu says:

      I was wondering why he wouldn’t wait for a natural solar eclipse. I don’t know the exact numbers but I think there’s a total solar eclipse somewhere on the world about once per year, maybe more often even.

    • linkhyrule5 says:

      More likely, Uriel just didn’t see it coming. Uriel is bad at people. People includes other angels. Anticipating other people’s movements is hard for him.

      “I want to see the future”-> “Let’s make a solar eclipse” does not then trigger the thought chain that leads to “other people may react to this.”

  15. Lambert says:

    So 3 memories stolen so far. Kinda becoming a pattern.

  16. Anonymous says:

    Sun And Moon

    Hmm…

    You know those electric fences for dogs? I find a dog with one of those electric fences, and I stand just a few feet outside with a big juicy steak. The dog runs towards me to get the steak, then gets zapped, then runs back into the fence, then tries again, gets zapped again, finally just sits on the edge of the fence while I eat the steak in front of it.

    …does this count as a Pokémon reference?

    • stavro375 says:

      I would file “Sun and Moon” under TINACBNIAC.

      I think your claim about the quoted paragraph is pushing it. The dog doesn’t have the supernatural powers that pokemon do.

  17. Nick says:

    Hey, Thamiel’s helping blind children again!

  18. Zim the Vixen says:

    Seems like Thamiel has taken a page out of Sombra’s boop, I mean, book.

  19. Shoefish says:

    No.
    Alas, poor Yareach! we new him, Horatio, a satellite of infinite regolith…

  20. Peter D says:

    but in English, it recognizes that pain is only partially of the body, can be overcome

    I do not get it: how?

    • Aegeus says:

      It’s referring to the sentence before that. In Hebrew, pain is “ke’ev” (kaf alef bet), which you collapse down to the single letter “kaf.” In English, “pain” collapses down to the single letter “pay”, which looks like the letter kaf with a yud inside it, and the yud symbolizes the divine. So in English, “pain” is something with a spark of the divine inside it, kabbalistically speaking. So by using that spark of divinity, Sohu could shrug off the pain.

      It’s a horrible, convoluted way of reasoning, but all the celestial kabbalah we’ve seen has been like that – taking a word, slicing it into individual letters, then reinterpreting those letters to mean something completely different.

      • Aran says:

        For reference:

        פ: Pay
        כ: Kaf
        י: Yod

        (It works better with serifs.)

      • Peter D says:

        Thanks! I was clearly not getting it, but now I do 🙂
        Really, it seems that celestial kabbalah is a lot like placebomancy: come up with something, no matter how far-fetched, as long as it has some resemblance of reasoning, it will work!

        • Matthias says:

          I think this is why placebomancy works. It’s been said that all human languages reflect Adam Kadmon, so constructing magic based on narrative correspondences that is really “convincing” to the universe isn’t unlike applied kabbalah. It’s just probably the closest most humans can get, which could also explain why it tends to be significantly weaker than applied kabbalah (aside from the fact that so far we’ve only seen angels and Cometspawn wield applied kabbalah).

          • Peter D says:

            So, anything that plays by the rules of Adam Kadmon is permitted in this game, with the difficulty that rules are kinda vague and easily twistable…
            And, of course, it all ties back to “Not in heaven”, with humans having domain over workings of the universe.

      • Warren Peace says:

        English does not have a letter called pay

  21. Yossarian says:

    I did notice that Metatron didn’t say that he will return the Name IF the Comet King becomes ready – he said he will return it WHEN the Comet King becomes ready. Hm… Either the Comet King is alive, or he would be able to use the Name even when he is dead (in Hell or Heaven)

  22. Yossarian says:

    …and yet though as I read through the Comet King – Metatron dialogue, I half expected something like this:
    “YET YOU BEAR WITHIN YOU THE MOST HOLY NAME, WHICH MAY NEVER BE DESECRATED.” – said Metatron.
    “May you violently *euphemism* in the *euphemism* orifice, you *euphemism* *euphemism* *euphemism*, said the Comet King, and then spat a wad of green phlegm on the Metatron’s robe. “You should know the difference between ‘may’ and ‘can’, and yeah, even the lowest of low CAN use the MOST HOLY NAME”

  23. R Flaum says:

    I wonder if the Cometspawn have semi-normal relationships with their mothers or whether those women are just royally screwed.

  24. Anonymous says:

    Disappointing chapter, even compared to some interludes. We learned next to nothing we couldn’t infer from the third book’s cover page. And it looks like it didn’t advance any plot in-universe either. This whole build-up in chapter 44 seems to have been for naught.

    • Walter says:

      We learned that Metatron can and does speak, that the CK knew the Name and lost it, and got a glimpse into how Thamiel operates. You have high standards if this chapter wasn’t sufficiently informative.

  25. boonerunner says:

    It appears to me that Metatron gave the explicit name to Sohu after taking it from her father. Which is why her eyes changed. But then Thamiel stole the memory from her.

    It also occurs to me that Metatron says “YOU STARED AT THE SUN, DIDN’T YOU?” after Sohu had a vision of Metatron and the Comet King. One of them is probably the “SUN”/”SON”.

    • Peter D says:

      Metatron is probably the Sun, given that

      Then the silver left Ellis’ eyes, and he crumpled to the ground.
      A ray of sunlight burst out from behind the moon.

  26. dsotm says:

    Alas, poor Yareach, we new him well.

    s/new/knew or is this a reference to kabalistic signifcance of new moon celebrations ?

    Uriel dropped the moon.

    So the unsongverse is moonless now ?

  27. Daniel Armak says:

    Even if the Comet King gets the Explicit Name back, what’s he going to do with it that he couldn’t have done during the time he already had it?

    • linkhyrule5 says:

      We don’t actually know what the Explicit Name does. (I’m kind of surprised it does *anything* helpful, since “even a pinky finger from God would destroy the universe”).

      • Sniffnoy says:

        Oh, yeah, that’s interesting — earlier people were postulating that it would restart the world, and that that’s why the Comet King never used it. But here he says that he needs it. What could be the use of it, that he needs it, yet had not yet used it (or not yet visibly used it, anyway)?

        • Maybe he has a plan for how to channel it in order to just destroy Hell, but hasn’t completed it yet, which is why he hasn’t yet used it.

        • Peter D says:

          FWIW, TCK is not beyond restarting the world if that means wiping out Hell:

          “You would do this?” the Devil asked him. His first head was seething with rage, and even the mouth of his second head had curled up into what looked like a snarl. “You would end the whole world just to save a few miles of your borders?”

          “If I thought it would come to that,” said the Comet King, “I would not have proposed the plan. The world is useful to me; I need it intact if I am to prepare for the next battle. But if you are asking, would I swear an oath that entails risking the world, and follow that oath if the time to do so ever came – then if it meant arresting the spread of Hell across the world, I would.”

  28. hnau says:

    Huh… It’s implied that Sohu has forgotten what she saw, but it’s never actually explicitly stated. What if she’s just pretending to have forgotten? I can think of a couple possible reasons for doing so: to spare Uriel’s feelings (as he thinks he’s sparing hers), or to make sure the Comet King and his children stay a step ahead of Thamiel. Not very likely, I know, but it would explain a little more of what’s going on and why it’s significant.

  29. hnau says:

    Also, is it just me, or does Metatron look and sound a *lot* like the Right Hand of God? Are there any other cosmic entities we know that are hover-y and silver?

    I guess Gabriel from Chapter 20 also has that attribute (and Scott implied in a comment there that we shouldn’t read too much into it). So maybe this is just a feature of all archangelic entities who channel the divine light? (Except for Uriel, who apparently gets gold eyes.) Speaking of which… whatever did happen to Gabriel? It’s implied that he survived Uriel’s blocking of the divine light (as a metaphor), which means that he should have come back… and then there’s Raziel too. I have a feeling there’s a bunch more stuff from Chapter 20 that will show up again when we least expect it…

  30. Shoefish says:

    All this is well and fine but “Him who holds it for us” is Aaron.
    exhibit A)

    Aaron, who is significant among kabbalists for bearing the Shem haMephorash on his forehead

    – interlude ב

    exhibit B)
    He is inexplicably writing down the the name in this story.

    So maybe when Metatron says “you” he doesn’t mean the Comet King personally.
    This is as far as I got, if spelling the name is part of the plot and not a gimmick then it has to be the most important clue to what’s going on, the hypotheses so far are:
    Trying to give/expose the name to a large number of people.
    Encoding it for someone specific.
    Wield it himself by speaking this out loud (I don’t think this fits)

    OTOH, why does Leonard Cohen know so much of the name? is Leonard Cohen the Comet King? a good friend of?
    He’s a cohen & leonard => lion-hearted => ari[ye] ??? => and ari is kinda like aaron? I prefer to treat this as a red herring.

    • Peter D says:

      “Him” is capitalized, which would be highly unusual for a mortal like Aaron…

      You say I took the Name in vain / And after that I lost the Name / I gave it back to Him who holds it for us

      But we do have a parallel b/w Aaron losing the ensouling name and TCK losing the HaMephorash…

  31. Peter says:

    “Today’s unprecedented solar eclipse is no cause for alarm!”

  32. JJR says:

    And there goes my theory that the Tertrgrammation = Shem HaMephorash. I really liked it to, it seemed to explain so much. oh well.

  33. Seth says:

    Why would Sohu just go right back to Assiah where she had to have known Thamiel would likely be waiting for her as soon as the vision ended? That seems uncharacteristically stupid. She could have stayed in Yetzirah for a while or teleported to a safe location in Assiah, and regrouped with Uriel later.

  34. JJR says:

    It’s not the most efficient way to cause suffering, but you can’t always be all about efficiency, you need to leave some time for yourself.

    (“But the soul is still oracular; amid the temple’s grout,
    List the ominous stern shouter from the mountain top without,—
    ‘They release their vassal’s vassals who do sometimes faff about.’”)

    (“I’m not faffing about. I just want to be less than maximally evil sometimes.”)

    (“Exactly what do you think faffing about is?”)

  35. David says:

    1 byte: God bite : eye bite

  36. Stardust says:

    I began UNSONG about two weeks ago. I arrived at this chapter on the day of the eclipse. Totality was 45 minutes ago. The moon is still blocking a portion of the sun even now. This is not a coincidence because nothing is ever a coincidence.

  37. George says:

    What does it mean “pey is a yud in a kaf”?

  38. George says:

    But why is kaf is a human form?

  39. David says:

    As nothing is ever a coincidence, for me, December 4th, 1993 is the day the music died: Frank Zappa, December 21, 1940 — December 4, 1993 🙂

Leave a Reply to Stardust Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *