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The Rhizome Arc
(Plot device based on the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze)
(Plot device based on the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze)
Far away from Pleroma, Paralipomena and most other cities that’ve come to know technology lie vast fields and forests called the Nomad Lands. Their people are believed to be the first witnesses to magic in this world, and as such their fields are considered sacred. Properly so, they worship their lands and the abundance of pushion deposits they birth—considering it their duty to maintain them. This generational connectivity has made them evolve (or at least mutate) past the limits found in the bodies of those living in the cities, in the sense that the energies they shepherd interact with them quite tangibly.
The nomads worship a Great Will they call The Rhizome (or The Great Rhizome, depending who you ask). They feel that it is everywhere, permeating through everything. But unlike the will of nature, or the classical image that we have of a will, The Rhizome is not something in itself—something ‘pure’ or isolated; it is not a space that other things cannot enter, if not all the contrary. The Rhizome is a great big mesh of interconnectivity, of lines, points, figures, lives, souls and so on. The Nomads believe they join The Rhizome upon death, and that they will be reborn into the world as something else; it is of outmost importance for them to respect other living beings as a result. When they hunt their food, they must pray so that the life of their meal passes on to their own body safely—joining the mesh that flows within them.
Some of the older Nomads not only remember their previous lives, but also the lives of whatever they’ve been in contact with—causing medical science from the cities to write them off as schizophrenic; but to their tribes, these Nomads are venerated. That being said, remembering previous lives is a virtue for the nomads, being taught to their young as a great value and goal to aspire. As one can imagine, there are also cases of those whose previous lives override the current one—or that the individual remembers too many lives to the point of not choosing a particular one. This creates a sort of singular space that oversees all of the previous lives without anchoring itself to a specific name, simulating a micro-rhizome (and thus justifying the prefix ‘Great’ to the one that permeates within all). In a related sense, Aeon users experience this more freely, with Xaphriel being the first example of a conscious intersection of previous lives—in their terminology, an Eidos or one that practices eidetic positing—with Noah following afterwards much later in his life.
The animals that live in the Nomad Lands have evolved along them in their relation to the Rhizome, thus having those that ingest them develop a closer positing. This augments their physical condition, making the nomads a very active people—hunters, in fact. Their connectivity makes it so they can experience the life they took as food, allowing them a closer proximity with their way of life. When taking a parent animal’s young and achieving the merger, the parent can see in the nomad their child, resulting in a spiritual bonding and coexistence that cannot be said for other communities of hunters. At the same time, according to a principle of the Rhizome that says one moves in the intermezzo, the nomads do not invade the new lives—leaving as silently as they entered them.
Another principle for the Rhizome that is sacred to the nomads’ culture is decentralization. Though they do have a House system, no House dominates over the other in their lands—competition, however, is encouraged. This is in respect to other principles of the Rhizome known as difference and multiplicity: the nomads respect that they’re not just one people, and that competition in their assemblage of a community is necessary for growth. Likewise with another of their principles, that of asignifying rupture, they understand that their group can break and restart again, thus enacting their first principle of connectivity. Lastly, they follow a strict principle of cartography: the idea as nomads is never to establish a structure (such as nominating a dominant House in their community), but to maintain their fluidity regardless of the threats they face as a community. All in all, they embrace their constantly mixing culture between present lives and past ones.
