[UA] Lavomancy

Greg Stolze holycrow at mindspring.com
Sat Jul 21 06:11:40 PDT 2001


>I Remain Clean By Exposing The Filth In Others:  The adept
>maintains cleanliness by soiling others.  He washes his
>hands constantly and keeps his nose out of trouble but
>gossips fiercely about other people and besmirches their
>reputations.  Physical filth inflicted on others is good
>too.

Hm... see, I read the Bit With Capitals and thought "Damn!  What a super
plot hook!  A character who's an obsessive do gooder for entirely selfish
reasons."  I had this image of someone who cleans up the dirty cops and
corrupt officials of his city (and the fallen adepts and perverse avatars)
because doing so provides her with POWER, not out of any outstanding moral
imperative.  (Or, perhaps, from both reasons.)  The paradox is that you
can't alter something without becoming altered yourself -- you can't clean
without handling filth, and you can't cleanse yourself without sending the
filth somewhere.  Perhaps the paradox of Lavomancy is that you can't ever
really create an aggregate decrease in filth.  You can only move it from
here to there.  (Of course, filth in my compost heap is a lot more
palatable than filth in my kitchen sink.)

Hm.....

-G.

If the reinstatement of capital punishment was clearly doing nothing to
reduce the number of murders in those states permitting it, it certainly
appeared to be cutting down on the number of confessions.
        -Dr. Douglas Ubelaker

www.waylay.com
www.thehungersite.com



_______________________________________________
UA mailing list
UA at lists.uchicago.edu
http://lists.uchicago.edu/mailman/listinfo/ua




More information about the UA mailing list