Sevenfold Silence

Another quote and response from the discussions that have been going on on the LJ otherkin community. This one's from this post.

"I then got thinking about a favourite topic of mine, the topic of ‘religion’. Now, a religion that holds a special fascination for me is Hinduism and, as we all know, Hinduism is hella down with reincarnation. [...] In fact, Vishnu himself has had many incarnations on Earth, so he has in a way experienced reincarnation himself, although arguably tenuously. So, if Vishnu has had incarnations on Earth, what about other gods? [...] Now, what if a god or goddess, supposing for a moment that they are real, was to ‘come down’, as it were, and live among us mortals in a human incarnation. Would they then experience the same phenomenon as otherkin?"

In the event that this happened, sure, hie would. I guess, though, that I'd be pretty suspicious of it, for a few reasons.

Particularly in Hinduism (note: I'm not an expert) when gods incarnate on earth, particularly Vishnu, they do so for a concrete reason. They're needed, and have some purpose in the scheme of things--Vishnu, for instance, tends to incarnate to promote order and repel evil, in very concrete ways. (Think big, climactic, heroic battles.) Plenty of otherkin have "callings"--healing, protecting, the like--but I think this is an order of magnitude larger. Imagine not being incarnated to do something over the course of a lifetime, but being incarnated to do one particular thing. And everything before that is a preparation to that point. There are exceptions to this rule--Krishna's a good one; he does a lot of very varied things over the course of his incarnation--but it's a general pattern.

Second, most of these avatars, particularly in Hinduism, incarnate with a whole cluster of very obvious powers that transcend anything I've ever seen in otherkin. Slaying demons, saving the world, reconciling all opposites, ending ages, committing mass murder on a group of individuals 21 times, creating multiple copies of oneself on earth to make love to milkmaids, being able to scorch the earth with a glance...et cetera. These aren't claims being made for past lives or trueforms or astral-foo-foo nonsense; these are things that Vishnu's incarnations on earth can, according to the mythology, do. So according to the Hindu definition, if you can't pull these off, you probably aren't an avatar. (Mind you, I don't typically adhere to the hard-and-fast definitions--I have previous posts about this--but I do think they're something to take into consideration rather than rejected entirely. If you don't adhere to these definitions, why not? What alternate explanation do you have, and how reasonable is it?)

Still on the subject of refutation, I'm enormously suspicious of anyone who claims to be a reincarnated, particular god, for the same reason I'm suspicious of anyone who claims to be a reincarnated, particular fictional character--most mediakin/fickin/otakin/the like. You're THE incarnation (assuming there is a single incarnation, a whole kettle of worms in and of itself) of THE Sephiroth from Final Fantasy, really? And I'm lucky enough to meet you? I find this enormously unlikely. To put it in less-mediakin terms, I am much more willing to entertain the notion that you are a reincarnation of an elf from Middle Earth than I am to claim that you are Legolas.

Refutation aside, the subtext is potentially grating. We accept claims virtually unconditionally in the otherkin community, on the very simple grounds that these claims are, at their core, unprovable. We also treat each other in light of our identities, and take them into consideration. Subtext being: if you claim you're a god, what do you want--for me to worship you? If I don't treat you with that sort of reverence, will you claim that as the repudiation of your claims that's so scandalous in our community? Will you be offended? Will you want me to debase myself? How will I know you're not doing this for an ego-trip? Again, this doesn't really repudiate at all claims of being something divine, but it is potentially troublesome, and I think it's the subtext of a lot of the complaints about claims of being a divine entity.

The claim itself isn't outrageous, but it strains credibility for those reasons--and that's why I give the claim a critical eye.

Now, I am pretty much expecting a whole bunch of you to go ‘Wait a minute, goblins can be whatever we want them to be! There is no one way a thing should be! That would be RESTRICTING things and what if someone else wanted to be a goblin who wasn’t small, irritating or ugly???”. Well. Wouldn’t that sort of be like saying a horse can have six legs if you want it to, because saying they only have four legs is, like, restricting our creativity and stuff? I dunno, man, I’m just throwing this out there, you know?

(from a seriously pretty interesting post and line of conversation over at the LJ otherkin community)

That's an interesting point that froudgoblin brings up, although I don't really know how much I agree with it.

Ultimately I guess it's a question of philosophy, one of platonic forms. Or, alternately, "bad birds and better birds", to draw from a slightly different field. (A robin and an ostrich are both birds, but chances are you think the robin's a better example of a bird.)

We already accept, by virtue of living in a real world of imperfect things, that virtually nothing is a perfect example of its form. A horse is a four-legged running mammal. But Sleipnir, the eight-legged mythological horse, is still a horse. A mutant six-legged horse is still a horse. Eight Belles, the Kentucky Derby runner who broke both her legs upon crossing the finish line, couldn't run at the end before she was put down--but she was still a horse. Even though a horse is a mammal that runs.

Ultimately this is the big question of what it means to be otherkin, even bigger than "where did we come from" or "why are we here". Definitions are strange, fuzzy things. Where do they stop? Western dragons are winged scaly mythological creatures, who live in lairs and hoard gold and are secretive. Can a human being, who likes lairs and hoards shiny things and is secretive, realistically describe themselves in any sense as being a dragon? How fuzzy is the definition?

If we accept the constraint that a mutant six-legged horse isn't a horse because its external form is unhorselike, then virtually no one I know of within the otherkin community qualifies as anything special. I'm deceiving myself, because I don't have literal physical wings. The OP is deceiving herself because she's short and swarthy. Both of us are liars. Any doctor would tell us--rightly so--that we are both fully biologically human, and that's the end of that.

The otherkin movement, though, by its very nature, is based on the fact that superficiality and stereotypes and 'common wisdom' aren't the be-all end-all. If that mutant six-legged horse runs around neighing, then damn it, it's a horse. If I feel wings and a strange yearning for quiet green places and peculiar elegance, then I'm fey. If the OP feels "small, irritating, and ugly" (her wonderful, wonderful words), and connects that with a goblin-current, then the OP's a goblin. If someone else doesn't feel that, but can reasonably make a case for having a goblin-nature, then hie's a goblin, too--just a different kind.

This doesn't mean that all claims should go perfectly unquestioned. If there really isn't anything remotely goblin-like about our hypothetical wannabe, then maybe hie should step back and reconsider mightily what's up. But to risk shutting somebody out of one's phenotype, merely because they don't match the stereotype or your perceptions of it, smacks of weird hypocrisy. (Not that the OP is hypocritical.)

Hidebound checklists don't suit a subculture like ours. We don't think outside of the box; we burst violently out of the box, trample it, and bury it. Definitions are good, but they're only useful inasmuch as they're fuzzy--and denying a definition's fuzziness is, for us, a recipe for trouble.

Perusing the nonfluffypagans community on LJ, I found this in the comments, written by user misslynx:

"One interesting pattern that my partner wrote a paper about in grad school is that the depiction of fairy beings has varied considerably over time. In mediaeval accounts, they tend to be predominantly depicted as powerful, dangerous and usually malevolent - sometimes the same beings are referred to alternately as both fairies and demons. There's also a lot of emphasis on their tendency to mislead travellers, tempt them off their paths, and lead them into, at best, being lost in the wilderness, and at worst, any of a variety of horrible deaths. But as the legends move into early modern times, that image is toned down considerable, and they seem to be more trivialized than demonized. That's when you start getting accounts of "the little people", shown more as mischievous tricksters than deadly deceivers. And as the Romantic movement developed, you have more emphasis on them as beautiful but fragile remnants of a lost world of magic and wonder that had been crushed by modernization and the industrial revolution."

Two points:

First: writing as someone who identifies as otherkin and "something fey", my immediate question was "and which one's the real/best version of the fairy story?" (Oh God, shame on me for even thinking that.) To which the answer is, in my opinion, "they're all good". Personally, I detest the cute light happy Disneyfied version of fairies, and I'd be enormously suspicious of anyone who came to me insisting that was their true form, and I'd likely banish the shit out of any external spiritual entity that came my way insisting that, on the grounds that It Must Be My Mind. But I understand its cultural merit. As for the other definitions of a fairy--they're all valid. They're all slightly different, and maybe one clicks 'better' than the others for any given person, but none of them are really wrong. They all contribute in a meaningful way to the full composite image of Fairy.

I probably don't have to tell my target audience "hey! Vaguely-defined magical beings can manifest in a plethora of culturally-specific ways!" but somehow it hit me, hard. I've been thinking a lot about the nature of Fairy lately--perhaps that's why.

Second: the final definition given of what a fairy is, the Romantic-era one about beautiful fragile things from a by-gone age? Divorcing the comment entirely from fairies, that's one of the best damned definitions of otherkin I've seen. (Only, though, when you abandon all issues of identity, which you shouldn't; they're rather intrinsic to the definition of otherkin.) Still--uncanny, I think.

Mind, the people on NFP might (understandably) go apeshit when they see that I've appropriated a comment on one of their posts to add to a conversation about otherkin...