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The Saga and the Seidhr Ethan Osterman
Already a fictitious past has supplanted in men’s memories that other past, of which we now know nothing certain J. L. Borges, Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius Universal history, in the most general (i.e., most abstract, i.e., most fitting) sense of the term, concerns itself only with those archetypes which we have allowed it. The ability (rather, the compulsion) to recognize categories is not without evolutionary benefit—foods of this sort are safe, creatures like that deadly, and so on—but it would be a disservice to ourselves to consider this a total analysis; the deepest recesses of the human mind cannot be explained by mere Darwinism. On such a view, we are left, for example, with the following question: why do we see patterns where there are none? I will attempt an answer, if only in the hope that its inadequacy may point towards stronger, more well articulated conclusions. From an early age—say, around the time that we first begin to form lasting memories—we acquire an almost paralyzing fear of the unknown; why else should children begin to fear the dark, or the first day of school, with such intensity that it brings them to tears? Having had a taste of certainty, its absence becomes that much more terrifying; we become drunk on the power of our own intellect; we create (as if out of thin air, as if without desperation) the grounding principles of universal order: the One of Plotinus, the assumption (by Kant) that objects must conform to our cognition, the vast conspiracies of secret
