/lit/ - Literature

>>12928359
the satire - the word is inappropriate - of the Golden Throne is that it conflates the impossible, Christ and Hitler, with all of the mythology being activated by a death that isn't quite a death, and a second life that isn't quite a second life. the conception of this stuff is pretty fucking brilliant when you get into it, and to cap it off the role played by technology in producing this legendarium is crucial. psyker technology and the astropaths, broadcasting and media, all of the rest of it is crucial.

because the role of mythology in grounding and establishing the meaning for this new political frontier is everything. Christianity itself, historically speaking, is a wedding between the teachings of Christ and the Roman Law, and afterwards there is a fascinating process by which the neoplatonism that helps to produce it allows for the concept of heresy and excommunication afterwards. a massive psychic shift takes place: no real heresy before Christ on that scale (although there is something of an asterisk here for the death of Socrates) and no real tragedy *after* him, or at least until Nietzsche. what could be more tragic than the death of god?

well, there are a couple of possibilities for that answer, and one of which was the Thirty Years' War, along with the twentieth century, and lots of other things that would result from the collapse of this one central narrative, which to my mind has to be recapitulated today to save us from all the LARPing (the 'sacred games' that Nietzsche says, and which Girard would agree with). and the scale and extent of these things will beggar the imagination.

the point here is just to indicate the brilliance of that 40k legendarium. somewhere along the line it is possible for us to have fallen in love with the wrong gods and wind up staying with them because we cannot realize how truly captivated by them we have become, such that countenancing an alternative seems impossible. and yet when that thing happens we cannot imagine in hindsight that it would ever have been any other way, or what the fuck we were doing before. and yet we did it to ourselves the whole time. and will do it again.