The Spy or The Niche of Light
Father-mother of headless searchlight pedestrians; enjoyment brigades; da’i Sunshine Battalions (“insomnia fanatics” according to the hostile translation of Bar Huthayl); phosphorescent (nightglow) pedophiles.
Procurator of mandatory sunshine hours; emergency daylight powers; civic coffee roasters; ambient creeper beacons; all-seeing eye drops.
Regulator of bellytelly voyeurism; cornea curation credits.
His Mollitude in Middle Age means “lights-on” policies; eyelid clefting initiatives; paid blackout benefits.
His void portends deepfake journalists; patriotic camera filters; gossamer skin transplants; transparency duty; pigment rations; plexiglass ovaries.
Illustrious Supplicants:
Ghrazali — “Sight is but one of the spies of intelligence;”
Kalman Tihanyi;
Otto Röhm;
Elmer Ambrose Sperry.
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The Twins (Munis the Eunuch and Munis the Stud)
Regulator of solitary grief and threnos; communal grieving; moody moor ghosts; comedy vendettas; synchronous backstabbing; bitter number twos.
Father-Mother of mole-men killed in grain-dust explosions; grudge grinders.
Rules the germination of dule, the ‘hanging tree’ which is known to rot and shed its branches in repudiation of an unjust hanging.
Illustrious Supplicants:
Heathcliff;
The Union Leader Bint Zarush;
Metrodorus — “that the eyes of frightened and astonished people emit the stars which we call The Twins;”
La Vauguyon — who had the courage to shoot himself in the throat a second time.
Accidental Supplicants:
Origen.
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The Moon or The Blind Emissary
A kind of Sancha Panza whose gravitational influence keeps the Earth from wobbling or tilting disastrously and so smothering the temperate continents with ice.
Father-Mother of emissaries; go-betweens; moderators; sacrificial oxen; borderless bodies; bridge molecules; lungs; herd whisperers; political moderates.
Nurturer of etymological ligaments; cock pic blockers; candied class motility stimulants; regulatory codons; palate cleansers.
Rules over fractions; conversational science; repartee; intoxication; syllables; soliloquy parsers; haakiya-mimics.
Her Mollitude in Middle Age means wartime ambassadors; nattering nudniks; frugal frenemies; headless mobs; headless anarchs and demagogues.
Her void portends disease ambassadors; gonzo participation parties; invertebrate sugar babies; ormach theater, whose pathos is not due, as the critics accuse, to the lucid musculature of the headless actors or their tremulous body language but to the pity the audience feels knowing that the ormachs born and grown just before the opening curtain will be promptly recycled after the curtain drop (dropping like a redundant guillotine).
On Disease Ambassadors:
These include patient zeroes, bubonic fleas, wrath-borne disease (c.f. Yves de Kruif’s ‘Parasites Célestes’ with 46 copper plate engravings of infested angel wings).
On Participation Parties:
“One remembers few ceremonial details or the finalists, so-called, but only the shaggy dog story told by Bar Shibli to the “Ornamatti” — rude misspelling of Ornati — Elder Bar Dubayr of the 59th Civil Arrondissement (Imperial Akhua) about Outremer outworlders who crash land in an apocalyptic alien skyscraper and are eaten, after savage cubicle to cubicle combat, by feral office cannibals. Shibli’s smartass petition for inclusion in the Hezerdja Patrimonial Anecdotal Archive was unanimously rejected by the Board, 7-0.”
On Bodily Spasms:
In ‘The Augur’s Book of Bodily Spasms’ the traveler “born above the moon” and suffering from the rare combination of gout, autonomic neuropathy, and regurgitation syndrome (small intestine dysmotility also rarely augurs well) is predoomed to arrive at the central island of a certain, fertile, archipelago, no matter which direction he travels.
On that island, long before he sees through fog that thing whose very shape is evil, the traveler will smell a rancid mountain, an intestinal mass, a fecal slaw of pupal kings, blindly gnashing, wriggling, strangling, sluddering single file up and through drooling sphincter valves, each to serve their turn at ruling the world.
Far below the valves — as far as the hawk who soars above the Celestial Daaf is from its eidolon soaring beneath the Sea of Qaf — is a sucking hole, a converse rectum slurping (recycling?) all used-up fecal despots back into its hungry bowels.
Illustrious Supplicants:
Duc de Saint-Simon;
Tristram Shandy;
Émilie du Châtelet;
Usbek and Rica;
Robert Robert Livingston — Double R. R. Livingston.
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Mercury or The Dithering Dipygus
Father-mother of data-doms; ideas — claires et distinctes; jingos for lingo; indices of weighted whimpering; quarterly mood metrics; data-driven doldrums; scheduled spontaneity; rabbincal upspeakers; pattern makers; semantic otakus; remedial reading pulsars.
Governs deductive logic; literary science; sand-cipher generation; number magic; pattern porn; Islam (according to the heterodox author of the Picatrix); mnemonic minarets; mimesis; synecdoche.
Rules over colloquies; contract juries; jury harmonics; metrical metamorphoses; atheism; civic body mods; mindful orgies; neonatal blueprinting; scattershot body utopias.
Patron of the programmers.
Regulates the half-life of bone divination broth; the Mendelian “common sense” of the Ajami Private Diction.
His Mollitude in Middle Age means plea bargains; commutation chess; dictionary detractors (“to define is to distrust”).
His void portends convection (moroseness leading to paggro supernovas); neural petrifacts; data famine; backend scripting El Dorados; automated automation; housebroken highbrows; constipated solipsism; fin de siècle self-help seminars; Soviet Realism.
On Mood Metrics:
“My quarterly mood metrics, pending seasonal revisions, inform me that on average I committed suicide 1.28 times last Thursday afternoon.”
On Scheduled Spontaneity:
Calendar Invite. “Astonishment in 15 (or 16?!?) minute intervals every other Thursday, 3-5 PM.”
On Soviet Realism (Chanson de geste):
“And Boyar Murrogh fell to his knees upon the grass that was black with bourgeois blood, and the broken edge of Prole Tristram’s scythe lay deep-buried in his head. And anon he leapt up as he had been mad…and so fled unto his Daimler straight-six limousine, sore squealing as he went.”
His Infernal Idolaters (void worshippers):
Swinburne — “Worked with him once on a butchery project. A disappointing first contact with a man who, according to slaughterhouse gossip, claimed he had sex with an edible monkey.”
Illustrious Supplicants:
Giordano Bruno;
Francois Magendie — “eyes but no ears” empiricist, mechhead.
Apocryphal Apostates:
Disraeli or Mark Twain — “lies, damn lies, and statistics.”
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‘Awwa or The Barking Puppicules
Father-mothers of short b-ball players; bubonic fleas; sickly geniuses; undersized übermenschen; the ΦX174 virus; castrated abbesses.
Their Mollitude in Middle Age means more of the same.
Illustrious Supplicants:
Muggsy Bogues;
Antonie van Leeuwenhoek;
Héloïse — monastically castrated to appease her vengefully castrated lover Abelard;
Finland;
James Madison;
Aedes aegypti;
Giacomo Leopardi.
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Butayn or The Little Belly
Father-mother of levelheaded, cubby-minded (compartmentalizing) sex workers; premature food babies; surplus stomachs; persnickety thrill-seekers; lunchable lunch ladies; scrupulous death-wishers; diapered pensioners.
Fountain-Father of thirst traps.
Rules over regimented satiation; adultery benchmarks; budget orgasms; the ecology of pleasure; hard gemlike phlegm; charmed flip-floppers (like Descartes, ever bumbling onto the winning side); bereavement balance.
His Mollitude in Middle Age means edible Epicureans; Darwinian rhapsodies.
On Darwinian Rhapsodies (Tennyson):
“I held it truth, with him who sings, to one clear harp in divers tones, that Men may rise on stepping-stones of their dead selves to higher things.”
His void portends manic safety-freaks; fanatical hand washers; priggish pussy-parchers.
Illustrious Supplicants:
Elisabeth of Bohemia.
Supplicants in Middle Age:
Lucretius;
Walter Pater;
Tennyson.
Unintended Supplicants or Illustrious Flip-Floppers:
Descartes — conscript in the Catholic Counter-Reformation army that crushed King Frederick of Bohemia’s ecumenical alliance. Later, philosophe and tutor-ustadh to Frederick’s brilliant daughter Elisabeth; inventor of Cartesian mechanics which deals the killing blow to the earthbound power of the Catholic church.
Schrodinger Supplicants:
Leibniz — but only those doppel-Leibnizes who exist in the best of multiversal worlds.
On Bereavement Balance:
“The worst part was that every time I allowed myself to mourn, the thought of her delighted me while every delightful memory doubled me over with grief.”
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The Sun or The Melting Beloved
Of celestial no-fire we are told by Mandeville that God quenched the pyre of a woman wrongfully accused with His facelight (Numbers 6:24-26), transforming the burning brands into red and white roses. In their greed for roses the townsmen, ever after, would burn all the innocent maidens they could lay their hands on, though prices remained inflated due to miracle supply volatility.
Father-Mother of ruddy lips and rubies; mannequins; Aztec heart engines; immigrant melting pots; scandal mongrels.
Rules lovey-dovey volcano divers.
Regulates mass immolation-rights; the search for the Fountain of Assisted Suicide.
Its void portends cloning fads; hermit pogroms; patois detergent agents; prosthesis sharing schedules; student smelting initiatives (character refinement); teacher amalgam funding (headcount reduction).
Illustrious Supplicants:
Hafiz;
Phaedra;
Paracelsus — “If she thinks a fire, she is fire; if she thinks of war, she becomes a war.”
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The Mechanist or The Prosthetic Star
Father-Mother of hand maestros; finger makers; artificers; spider-bees; polymerists; effigists; handmade house mud homunculi.
Regulator of metacarpal kinks; pet petters; wrist-lover subreddits.
Illustrious Supplicants:
al-Jazari;
William and Jane Morris;
Ambroise Paré;
Norbert Wiener.
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The Vitalist or The Body Star
The ‘Body Star’ is a registered large and small intestine donor to ailing white dwarves.
Father-Mother of the body politic as body-horror film; progressive dicks (leaning left).
From: The Association of Pedagogical Pathologists
To: Tinjitan Town Hall Elders
Subject: A plea for community youth center cadavers and dissection funding.
The Argument: “Most of us know less about our own bodies than the 16th-century anatomist Andreas Vesalius…”
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Shaghab or The Spider Queen
Father-Mother of spider moms; multitasking matriarchs; octuplets; asynchronous child swaddlers; asynchronous child paddlers (nuns and immigrant families mostly); all-seeing brood bosses; pediatric spider milk theory.
Regulator of multilegged brood control; filial anagrams; pupal puppet rearing; trauma hatcheries; dynastic credit scores.
Her Mollitude in Middle Age means scullery intrigue; chore contracts; buffer children; disciplinary hostage taking; sibling secession.
Her void portends family values as prison-building; parasite parenting; demilitarized middle sons; church mandated puberty; geriatric canneries; seraglio strangulation politics.
On Spider Moms:
Spins her web of self-esteem in ratio to the thickness of her paunch. Breeds spiderlings who measure all enormities of good and evil in rectal ratio to their silk-deficient buttholes.
Illustrious supplicants:
Tiberius;
Muqtadir.
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Venus or The Body of Body Language
Father-Mother of body poets; tarsa infidels; nonverbal chatterboxes; tic tutors; the lily with her cunnilingual sword; AAA lustral narrative pearls.
Ruler of epidermal jargon insemination; oratorical gesticulation; asabiyya — group feeling; international “pan” movements; carcass conglomerates; derogatory trash twerking; silent majorities; terse (amputee) gods.
Explicates the grammar of functional relationships; mass market musculature; body distortion lingo (gravitational curvature convos).
Governs the organizing principle; morphogenetic child-rearing; cultural cohesiveness; electromagnetic fields; ritual ecology; mandible magic; tendon magic; the infestation of grief; autologous tear transfusion (left eye).
Organizes the color palette of qamariyya story-glass windows; hernia emojis.
Her Mollitude in Middle Age means mass hand shaking; community acquired conspiracy theories; four letter gestures; twitch tectonics; movement mores; mass democracy.
Her void portends sweat surplus; neighborly body-minders; blood man’s burden; crowd pleasers; crowd pleasures; unintended altruism; density fetish (swarm syndrome); harlequin humanism; massacre democracy.
On Massacre Democracy:
“Is it democracy when six or seven leaders can nuke the world and nuke the button and nuke the finger that pressed the button in 15 minutes, but it takes 45 minutes to drive to my local polling station?”
On Density Fetishes:
Elias Canneti points out that a culling only strengthens the crowd. Culling is a morale booster. An odds booster. The enemy has wasted energy killing one when they might have killed them all.
On Imperial Transfusion Sympathy (Blood Man’s Burden):
COIN 3rd edition Rule Book.
Pre Burden Campaign: Victory Points = (+d10 * body bags) + loge(Suppositional Body Count)
Post Burden Campaign: Victory points = loge(Suppositional Body Count) – (+d10 * body bags)
Illustrious Supplicants:
Qin Guan;
Averroes;
Galina Ulanova;
Cao Xueqin;
Spengler;
Zuhra.
Illustrious Apostates:
Isaac Babel;
Condorcet;
Kawakami Gensai.
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Saturn or The Undercover Memory Massager
Father-Mother of cranks; paranoid databases; the redacted freedom fighters called ‘Codon’; gangster-cop symbiotes; schizophrenic public keys; subcutaneous police informants; algorithmically generated historians; patchwork memory artists; surrogate baby bump bombers; cultic cat parasites; aerosol profiling preppers (COINTEL selfie powder-camera dispersal nozzles); gene phishers; programmable whistleblowers.
Governs random anarchist generators; saliva ciphers; civic cage fighting; conspiracy factories; pod people podcasts; holographic hospitals; prescription creed switching; pirated organ modeling torrents (OM6 fuzzy decompression/decomposition format); unidentified flying fucks given; historical astrology; side-hustle mass grave digging; the occultation of Imams.
Regulator of teenage swarm culture; the rigorous biochemistry of hell (“their skin regrows without miracles”); deep state mitosis; message molly; the family values vaccine; cheapfake pharmacology; penal anemia; inspiration glands; municipal gaslighting; locust (nutrition) festivals.
Obstetrician for digestive cell replacement; reproductive cannibalism; regurgitation babies; annihilation/apotheosis cultures.
On Locust (Nutrition) Festivals:
“Eat the rich. Looters will be deemed rich and added to the menu.”
On Municipal Gaslighting:
Wherein the pigs gaslight protesters by incinerating their uniforms, demolishing police stations and prisoners, repainting patrol cars and getting plastic surgery. “Police reform? What police?”
Prop Prophet of scriptural white noise.
His Mollitude in Middle Age means patriotic cannabis; orthodox bank balances; loyalty laxatives; lonely chatbot spammers; chatbot cartels; cane sugar pedigree intrigue; civic rebranding algorithms; nucleic grammar reform; laboratory cities; swarm snitching; lexicon rehab; mufti mammary mandates; the radical partisans called ‘Codon’; offshore orphan supply chain AI; fission freestate fables; ballot stuffing clones; alleged allergy seasons; counterinsurgent pollen; knockoff bankers; tranquility toothpaste (trank paste) deniers; model minority fermentation programs; redaction mania; encryption dispersal syndrome; decryption derangement disorder; monomer monetization.
His void portends afterschool cannibal programs; baby depletion crisis; strategic ovary reserve; insemination quotas; reproductive stimulus (welfare) drones; fertility viruses; organ donor (excavation) orgies; syndicate germ surveillance; incel mitosis; deepfake hurricanes; illegal alien abduction; synaptic black sites; Intersectional White Man’s Burden; the terrorist group ‘Codon’; query dementia; hydraulic despotism; the social synod; subdermal sleeper agents; genealogy brigades; crowdfunded drug wars.
On Genealogy Brigades:
According to the historian Paul Johnson “accurate genealogies, secretly circulated, were a form of subversive literature.”
Illustrious Supplicants:
The Imamite Sleeper Agent (Legitimist Mole) Shalmaghani;
The Mameluke Lion Slayer Bint Hushang;
Alexander Pope;
John Dee;
Hippolytus;
The Priest Eater Bar Yaqub — in prison the Radiant Imaad, by special ecclesiastical dispensation, allows him to wear a kitschy ‘Free Bar Yaqub’ t-shirt;
Guicciardini.
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The Junction (Ménage) of Mercury and Venus:
Co-Consuls of skeptical passion projects; dating ghostbusting initiatives; defunded smash sessions; gravity entitlers; machine-mind kabbalah; relâche des sens or sensual repose; capsule demographies (ingestible nobodies or no-minder biographies).
Illustrious Supplicants:
Ada — non-binary codon coils; La Infanta de Princess of Parallelograms; The Enchantress of Number.
Mind-Body Mary Astell — the Cartesian feminist.
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The Ulemic Jupiter or The Judicial Microbe
Father-Mother of the growing power; agronomists; dry-land ecologists; union leaders; city repletion metrics; frontier farmers; urologists; charity crusaders; virologists; nuclear physicists; bioweapon engineers.
Governs the duration of empires; the biology of religious laws; famine fury conversion; handicap resource wars; DNA replication errors; gestation cycles; man-on-man colonization; housing recombination projects; the half-life of goof juice taboos; nuclear proliferation; crowd congealment velocity; the epidemiology of celibacy; virile charisms; le grande derange (“the scheduled schizophrenia and cosmetic surgery of crowds”); supermarket growth hormones; berserker feedback loops.
Regulates ancestral sperm worship; disaster damage; All-American (Chinese) welfare factories; Noah syndrome; millenarian malignancy armies; unplanned mother-parts infestation; loyalty in plague times.
On Loyalty in Plague Times(Montaigne):
“On the contrary, after that I never again left his side.”
His Mollitude in Middle Age means eruption dysfunction; earthquake fatigue and seismic hormone replacement therapy; fallopian blockouts (union and non-union); density panic.
It void portends neonatal nativism; GMO grocer guerillas; the body politic as tumescent body horror film; urban decomposition poisoning; doppelgang warfare; fertilizer wars; data nativism; database table secession; test tube baby bombers; asexually reproducing farmland; splinter sect sons; copycat viruses.
Illustrious Supplicants:
Daniel O’Connell (The Emancipator);
Norman Ernest Borlaug;
Sun Myung Moon;
Spolverini (and his sentient rice poems);
The Aneedee ultra leader Bar Sinjaq Miskeen and his peasant “Dignity Harvests”;
Peter The Hermit;
Edward Teller;
Billy Graham;
Goya.
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The Junction (Ménage) of Shaghab and Jupiter
Governs historical astrology; the physiology of law; blubbery Oversouls; the long run; board certified imposter syndrome; the broad view; anticipatory anthropology; decline and fall dogmas; the butter (churn) of wisdom; dementia debt deductions; polity mitosis; cultural organisms; roadkill geographers; Darwinian cartographers.
On Darwinian Cartographers:
“For as Geography without History seemeth a carkasse without motion; so History without Geography wandreth as a Vagrant without a certaine Habitation.”
On the Oversoul(Oswald Spengler):
“Paris called the Germans Allemands in 1814, Prussians in 1870, Boches in 1914 — in other circumstances three distinct peoples might have been supposed to be covered by these names.”
Illustrious Supplicants:
Spinoza;
Bar Hebraeus;
Emerson;
The Radical Mitochondriac Bint Hassiba Slimane;
Ibn Khaldun.
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Mars or The Ravishing Rick Rude
Father-mother of town founders; religious third forcers(Ecumenicists, Erasmians, Unitarians, Freemasons, Hallajians); affable dumb-doms; teambuilding sucrose chefs; techie tantrum troubleshooters; Unitarian chat aggregators; interintestinal ingénues; big dick energy humanists.
Rules all attracting powers; conciliatory circumcisions; zeal; charisma and charisms; oratory; ecumenicalism; coagulants; caking agents; commutation committees.
Regulates the average duration of panic attacks; the silent treatment; bottomless brunch diplomacy; nondenominational chromatid crossover; coagulation squads; girl-on-girl ovations; boy-on-boy mothering.
On Coagulation Squads:
“In the land of the bleeders the coagulator is king. Commercial tagline: ‘Give ’em a thicky instead of a pricky.'”
Matchmaker of conjugal volcano jumpers; affinities; cosmic eagle eggs.
On Cosmic Eagle Eggs:
As “eagle wings in the egg presuppose air,” so Newton hatches apples, stars, spooky gravitons, so soldiers are ‘Shield Bastards’ (which seems, at first, an antique metaphor) and thus the glory-name of the petcheneg swaddled in conniving god-skin fathers.
His Mollitude in Middle Age produces neighborhood coarseness; volcanic flatulators; gamesbound intimacy; religious water balloon wars; flammable papier-mâché Unitarians; intrigue, the Inquisition in every office; human resource manuals; lickspittles; Good Samaritan hiring quotas; anti-loneliness crusaders.
On Gamesbound Intimacy:
“It’s always prudent to feign a male sportsball fetish to preempt violence. The modern man still needs his Darwinian pressure valves.”
It void portends demagoguery; mob hysteria; consumption conscripts; sectarian saturation bombing; treachery templates; human service atrocity; invasive empathy algorithms; conjugal leprosy; social frankness (“drooling mouth policies”); the will to harmony; co-ed intramural crucifixion leagues; bereavement ablation surgery; estrangement exterminators.
Fear the Fox Bite. Under this star, the fox is always rabid.
Illustrious Supplicants:
Shakh-i-Nabat (The Branch of Candy);
Sulkhan-saba Orbeliani (The Book of Pleasing Lies);
Frantz Fanon;
Erasmus of Rotterdam;
Confucius.
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The Junction (Ménage) of Mars and Saturn
Presides over the annual Independence Day arms buildup; altruistic vampires (compulsive blood givers); paramilitary hedgehogs; freedom of intelligence requests; declassified youth counselors; public enemy puppet shows; anarchist pops (mango, tutti frutti, crystal moth and amatol); blackmail discounts; cute Confucian autocrats; whisker plot plots and beard graphs; fake mustache crutches; false flag self-help seminars.
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The Dragon
Intensifies good or bad luck.
Father-mother of incendiary cigars.
Rules over shipwreck bloopers; pratfalls; lottery ticket pickpockets; taxable inheritances; guest right cannibals; xenophobic antibodies.
Illustrious Supplicants:
Charles Babbage;
Ibn Battuta;
Walter Raleigh;
John Law.
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The Anti-Dragon
Intensifies good or bad fucks.
Illustrious Supplicants:
Neutral Milk Hotel;
George Sand (Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin);
Li Shizhen — compiler of snake wine aphrodisiac recipes.
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Neptune or The Tough Crack to Nut
Father-mother of placid philosophers; pixelated graphic designers; terraphobic skyscraper builders; drama-queen deniers.
Rules over restraint; molecular proportion; amino acid awareness; gamete greaser restraint; emotional field stripping; LEGO intellection.
Her void portends popular emission diets; mass market monkishness; viral asceticism; policy wonks; morality pandemics; death by stock market.
Illustrious Supplicants:
Oliver Byrne;
Montesquieu;
Bertha Crawford Hubbard;
Chris Ware;
Grotius;
Plotinus:
Owen Jones.
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Al-Bnaat or The Doubler Daughters
Doublers of all their father-mothers’ influence. Averagers of two or more incompatible adverse destinies.
Regulator of redundant tautologies; surgery to correct the complications of surgery.
Rules over megaphones; bisected doublespeak; EDM hearing aids; moebius feedback loops; Nietzschean clockmakers; surplus sky-minders; harmonic inseminators (“her operatic daughters will burst, in vitro, from her lover’s throats”); warbling chiffchaffs; ululating fitna inciters; pulpating fitna incisors; laborer saving devices.
Illustrious Supplicants:
Hieronymus Fabricius ab Aquapendete;
Georg Ernst Stahl — mufti of molecular motive fire;
Xavier Bichat — cult of sensibility.
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Al-Aql or The Active Intellect
The stars are love; they love themselves. Like dogs, they chase their own beloved butts, revolving always back to start.
Illustrious Supplicants:
Al-Farabi;
Aquinas.
Rejected Supplicants:
All brown-nosing naturalists.
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The Seven Thrones or The Seven Exaltations of Poetry
6) ???.
Illustrious Supplicants:
Jaami.
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The Eye of Azra
“Gaze, till Gazing out of Gazing.”
— Jaami
#
Supplicatory Voyeurs:
William Hunter — author of ‘The Anatomy of the Human Gravid Uterus Exhibited in Figures’;
Marie Van Brittan Brown;
Dr. Hiromi Shinya — co-inventor of the colonoscope;
Stubbins Ffirth — membership under review. an edge case for ingesting his own digestion after failing to catch yellow fever from stealing and eating his patient’s bile;
Walter Jackson Freeman II — lobotomist, showman, unwitting devotee of Montesquieu’s dictum. “Professions appear ridiculous only in proportion to the professional gravity adopted: a doctor would be less absurd if his dress were more cheerful and if, while killing his patients, he jested pleasantly.”
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Farhad or The Hag of Darkness
Father-Mother of plastic flower mothers; obsolete genies.
Regulator of livershare apps; peer-to-peer peglegs; polyurethane perfume; pentimento pec implants.
Auctioneer of second-hand Jodorowsky poop; vivisected messiah relics; regurgitated snow droppings.
Adulterous Supplicants:
Jaami;
Shibli.
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Bittacus or The Talking Starship
Zoo keepers of emotional werewolves.
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S0-102 or The Meh and The Shrug
Recycler of thunderstones (ceraunias); abaddirs; cardiac blood fountains; funeral rites; indifferent eulogists; trash compactors.
Hobbies In Middle Age:
Supernova watching.
Retirement Reading List:
Porson’s ‘History of Human Folly’ in Five Hundred Volumes;
Adam’s ‘Defence of the Constitutions’;
Nuri’s ‘Aphorism’s For Strange Flowers’;
Bar Nadim’s ‘Patchwork Compendium’.
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Sagittarius A or The Hole in the Hole
“Nothing on nothing, all is Nothing — Enough.”
— Farid Ad-din Attar
#
Father-Mother of roundabout influencers; roundabout liberators; The Seventy-Seven Invisible (Occulted) Do-Gooders Who Keep the Nukes From Going Boom; anecdotal diplomacy; collateral puppification campaigns; sheepish caudillos.
Its Mollitude in Middle Age:
Anal-attentive free markets; domesticated generalissimo cages; pasteurized (“retired”) elder statesmen; private service communes; allegorical freedom of information tie-in novels.
Its void portends nothingness; neverness.
Illustrious No-Minders:
Nikita Khrushchev;
Stu Ungar;
Oblomov;
William Lindsay Graham — “No Address. No Phone. No Business. No Money. Retired;” Simon Bolivar.
This story was previously published in SLAB Literary Magazine.
Arreshy Young’s work was recently awarded the John Gardner Memorial Prize in Fiction (Harpur Palate) and has appeared in The Ex-Puritan, Western Humanities Review, Carousel, and Midway Journal. His favorite chapter is Chapter 8. His hot sauce of choice is forever dribbling onto his favorite page. He has maxed out his credit cards buying fresh copies from profiteering book publishers who insist on selling him the 323 other superfluous pages.
The Collidescope 