knife
pen
flint steel
uisage
tilismaat
patyns
Cloves
denarius
a song
in my heart or
maybe
just an Angel's Kiss
grace from Finn
- Sorren
“Oh, Sorren my friend, what are you up to now? All these objects are objects that a man would bring on a journey, a long journey. His choice of words however is peculiar. He uses the Gaelic form for water instead of the word water. Why would he do this? Is he still so frightened that he must obfuscate even his own private diary? Patyns is a shoe made of wood with leather straps. Is he traveling to a forbidding landscape so treacherous? Denarius is an ancient Roman silver coin, worth approximately ten asses. Is he going by way of donkey? But the most obscure and interesting word he uses is Tilismaat. This word refers to a collection of Urdu Poetry written in the Persian Script. This is a simple servant? This is what a simple servant does with his spare time? How is it that such a simple servant has any spare time at all? And he asks for grace, not from the Lord, but from his pagan god, Finn MacCool. Your wizard will not protect you where you are going.”
This leaf appears to be just a short list of words. This is not poetry. This is not poetic . . .far from it. Seems like just a few random words, with a short salutation to Finn McCool at the end. What could be the purpose of such a leaf? It hardly seems like it would be worth the time and effort to prepare his quill-pen if all he wanted to do was to list a few items without explanation. What else could this be? I looked up these words for myself because I did not trust the interpretation from M.
The word tilismaat has a different meaning from the one M described. The word, as far as I can tell, is associated with the word for magic, and enchantment. In fact, this word is the word for talisman, amulet. So it would appear that Sorren is involved in the black arts after all. I wonder if M knew this? But, I must not be too quick to judgment. Perhaps I am wrong. It would not be the first time . . .nor the last.
It would not bother me to learn that Sorren was interested in magic of this kind, the kind associated with talismans and amulets. I take into consideration the historical time in which Sorren lived. Everyone, in one way or another, was touched by a brush with magic, or sorcery to use the word the Church often used, because most people believed it and were therefore highly conditioned to see its manifestations in ordinary occurrences. These people were not evil. This was a time before the Renaissance, and long before the proponents of scientific determinism lived. There was no reason to doubt the folklore passed down dealing with demons and wizards and supernaturalism, and so these stories were accepted and codified into the culture and into the unique parochial folklore.
But now, in our modern world, we have to criticize and make fun of these people, calling them stupid, ignorant, backward, and unlearned. This is because we are so much smarter, and so much better than those ignorant peasants. We study them from inside book-lined halls of learning, and we scoff. Ironically, the more we learn about the fundamental components of our universe, the more we are forced to admit our own ignorance of reality, right down to the quantum level, the Planck length, where the fundamental uncertainty is built into the very fabric of space.
How do I know this? I do not know this by any rigorous mathematical reasoning because I am not a mathematician. Instead, I act just exactly the way Sorren, and people who lived in those times did . . .I learned it from someone who did know theses mathematical conditions and then thankfully translated, and then wrote down in books. The point is: very few people alive in this time could follow the rigorous mathematical machinations that support a scientific theory, but they believe them anyway. Why? They believe them just because they were told to believe . . .just exactly like in the time of Sorren. We are now, and have always been, manipulated by a very small cross section of society, and we count ourselves lucky to be alive to see it. What is the difference between our sophisticated ignorance, and the less sophisticated ignorance of Sorren? This explanation does not explain this leaf, but I am sympathetic toward Sorren. He is planning something, and he wants to keep his mind open for faint murmuring from the gods.