[drafts and notes from April 20-21, 2021]

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“Every god is a Great God to someone,”

-Terry Pratchett, Small Gods

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The God is known to reward those for whom their inquiries are precious, which does not quite mean that he who most desires an answer will receive one. For what counts to the God is not the answer so much as the asking, and he for whom his question is most precious will frequently find its resolution in the form of a single, coherent answer to be a kind of traumatic loss, even if this is usually not understood by him. At the same time, the God is not indifferent to answers, for they remain a vital if not universal component of the broader ecosystem of sacredness over which the God holds sway. The wound that is an answer is not withheld simply because the one who questions does not understand after what he asks, or what the difference between One Who Asks and One Who Has Been Answered truly holds.

For others, for whom the question becomes a fetish, less a temple in which to dwell then a talisman through which to focus and contain all of the certainties and ambiguities of the world to a fixed, controlled point, with these the God does not walk, nor by them are the God’s blessings known, and in a cruel satire, those most dedicated to the life of the question alienate themselves in the most profane of possible ways, for their idolatry occurs in the very heights of sacrament. On these the God visits displeasure in the form of dry, lifeless facts, clinging like rust to the surface of calcified formula where once there had been the living mechanisms of a problematic. 

or so certain iconoclastic orders of philosopher monks claim

For still others, especially those for whom questions roll like a river well-fed on snowmelt, they find that in the tumbling dialectic of insight and ignorance, and on whom the God abundantly visits wisdom, there is frequently a dissonance—rarely properly wondered after, perhaps because of the devotee’s deep, unconscious instinct against futility even long after such distractions have been banished from articulated thought—between themselves and the churning activity of their minds, an alienation not unlike the relationship between the Temple and the Space which it contains, and protects, and in a very practical sense creates, but creates only insofar as the pillars and statues and sacrosanct passageways remain apart from that Space.

But the truly wise understand the the profound truth of that basic formulation so laboriously drilled into the minds of acolytes and novices, namely the Fundamental Unity between Question and Answer. 

Or, the same truth, but organized into a different (though no less primary) Noble Insight: the dialectic of the Questioning mind and the Annihilation it must pursue.

And also this: The meaning of the Supremacy of Hypothesis over Theory, and even over Truth itself.

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The name of the God is unique, in that its meaning is known but that, because no human language contains the exact part of speech to which the Cosmic Signifer belongs, it is impossible to directly articulate. The most common gloss is that the name means something like a nominal form of the infinitive “To-Question,” but how precisely this nominal formalization takes place is necessarily ambiguous—

though a more extended pronunciation of this ambiguity we shall defer for now. 

[introduce sections with epitaphs and “it is speculated”

“The Lord of Questions” is almost everywhere an acceptable epitaph,  and in fact quite convenient in that it does not attempt to come close to an accurate summation of real name, but remains safely commonplace, not unlike the various titles used in place of an actual articulation of the Tetragrammaton of the Jewish cultic. 

The Philosopher(’s) God is also common, and the Cupbearer of Eternity, in certain more esoteric circles, as well Enlightener and Veil-Breaker (break in its heterdoxical, double-sense, which is to say both destruction but also, critically, “breaking ground,” and in that sense “innitiator” or “assembler of veils,” not unlike the way in which “cleave” has come to mean the point where two things come together and/or where they break apart, and for this reason “cleave” may also be substituted in the case of more creative, even poetic translations.) Also, “Ultimate-For-Which” and “End-of-All-Things” allude to continental sense of Being In-Itself and For-Itself, and the Buberian construction of the I/Thou relationship is certainly pertinent. 

The Surgeon of Truth and Falsehood has in most places fallen out of favor as being simply too artisanal and indeed materialistic to be a really compelling epitaph for Absolute Being, but in fact this name is quite ancient, still carrying for those who can remember it connotations of the myth that, prior to the existence of Reality, when time, space, cause and effect, et al. had yet (“yet”) to come about, the God (though of course no more instantiated himself) was present and served as midwife to the birthing of All that Is and Is Not--a totality of course which included Himself. No less paradoxical, the God is known as the Master of the Four Quadrants of Knowledge (viz., that which is Known and Knowable, Knowable but Unknown, both Unknown and Unknowable, and Unknowable Yet still Known), and for this reason he is sometimes called the Lord of Paradoxes. 

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It is hypothesized life among gods is necessarily combative, aggressive, isolating to an exhaustive degree in the very midst of the cosmic bustle. The economy for souls and authority and purpose is almost always defined by broad (though occasionally contradictory) trends of decline, and in the game of devotion it is very much the follower’s market. 

This is especially problematic in the victorious, recursive way that further characterizes (it is thought) the intense paranoia or simple stress under which the deities labor, since (it is by no means a well-kept trade secret) the secret to glory and transcendence and meaning is more often than not found in distance, inaccessibility, impartiality, the grandiosity which can only feel solid when glimpsed from a great distance. This is all the more true in cases when a potential subject of reverence finds themself crowded and cluttered among many other possible idols, each of them promising, in the expansive way towards which Gods trend just as surely as our blood seeks to distribute oxygen through the body, towards All Encompassing Totality—which is to say, first, negation of the other gods, and second, a kind of casualness about that negation, since once cannot bestow on one’s rival the legitimacy of having been a viable option in their own right, but rather reduce them to a mere idol, a bitter lie or misconception, or else an attribute, merely one face among many which the Great God displays in the mysterious totality of his Ways. 

Thus gods find themselves in a precarious position, for they are selling a service which by its nature cannot be catered to clients—least of all those still shopping around—without destroying its vital essence, the indispensable alluring/unsettling quality of Inaccessibility. And so it is of little surprise that the God-In-Question should in the main remain on the outer tier of most traditions and systematic theologies through which he passes, neither monopolizing at the cost of promising too much, nor allowing himself to be cleanly categorized into an all encompassing role, and so be limited to the administration of a few scattered holy days and places and certain vital yet totally banal rituals on which a society depends but towards which it bears little to nothing in the way of real Terror and Fascination. 

And so instead of remaining bound to a clear cult or recurring, stable archetype, the God pierces through various pantheons and pantheisms, aspects and sacraments, not in any kind of fixed pattern, but contingently, unevenly, vitally. Thus he has been identified with Thoth, the self-created Egyptian God of Magic who taught the people writing, and with the Wisdom Goddess Athena, born from the head of Lord Zeus in full battle armor. The parallels between the To-Question and Christ in the sense of God-as-Logos are, of course, obvious. Various trickster figures intersect the God, as well as certain mythical and proto-mythical human beings—Yu the Engineer, who mastered the floods of the Chinese river valleys, and the philosopher Socratese, though only as a literary device, come to mind. And it remains an ongoing question of contention among both confessional and comparative theologians whether “identified” in these cases means “the same as” or “associated with,” or perhaps present in a kind of transcendent-metaphorical sense (viz. “she has always been identified with the civil rights movement”), or else “mistakenly identified,” or simply a matter of inspiration—and if inspiration, “inspired by” or “the inspiration of,” or something(s) else all together?

§ 

Temples of the God of the Question follow certain patterns, even as conceptions of the subject/object/format/raison d'etre of devotion differ wildly between and within sites of worship. Generally speaking 

§

 the Lord of Philosophy; 

 of the revelation of the God is this: the foundational unity of question and answer—or, in another (no less profound) foundational truth of the faith, this: the supremacy of hypothesis over theory, and even over truth itself. 

 contemplated 

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The temples of the God of Questions were attended by tribes of sphynxes, such that even before a priest or petitioner could enter the open air hallway which encircled the temple and offered a hushed wall of air and quiet between the courtyards, the fields and glades full of philosophers wandering the grounds picking their way through postulates and monks cultivating tiny, ancient trees in the shape of mystic glyphs, whose languages frequently underwent entire systematic reforms in the time between laying out the eventual course of the arbor’s limbs and the fulfilment of its form.

Bees split at a slower rate, maintaining position across multiple timelines...

outer meditation hall 

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worship takes the form of bringing forward questions (either for refrainment, or a state of meditative contemplation)

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…

Myths

• The other Gods twisted him into a cube

• The transgression of the serpent

• the birth of the god to a tiger

• a girl raised as a boy

• speculation of the world out of a single particle

• Material

  • temples

    • recursive

    • sphinxes, jinn, yeti/troll/satyr

    • a large statue, meditation mats, alter, fires or candles

  • monasteries, beeswax, parrot oracles

  •  other oracles speak three truths and a lie/speak in questions. an oracle may respond to a question with a different question, the answer to which will be proportionally disturbing to that individual. 

  • Thoth, Athena, Jesus as the Word, Wu the Engineer, trickster gods, 

• Theology

  • The totalists and infinitivists

  • the gender of the god

• Meta

  • “it is speculated that” or “the Lord speculated” are formulas for beginning recounting sermons and pronouncements

  •  speculated that the whole religion is just a hypothetical between two monks who mistranslated “is the existence of a question an important God”