Chapter #16A Brief Primer on the Ousiarchs by: Nostrum   The ousiarchs, are they people? you ask Kali.
Her eyebrows go up at the question.
"Well, one can meet an elephant, but the elephant is not a person," she says. "Ah, but that is nearer the opposite of what I mean." Her gaze goes distant and a little puzzled.
"The ousiarchs are remote and mysterious, knowable but not comprehendible," she says when she resumes. "To meet one of the stellar oarsmen is—one immediately understands—to glimpse but one facet of a many-faceted jewel, to see but one side of a many-sided solid. To walk but one avenue of what one suspects is an infinite city." She focuses again on you. "To call your ousiarch a 'person' is like calling a cube a 'square'. A cube is like a square, but utterly unlike it as well, for it has three dimensions rather than two. You might call a cube a 'square' when explaining it to someone else, but only if you have no other way of explaining or showing what a cube is. An ousiarch is something like a person—one senses an overwhelming personality with them—but there is no meeting of the minds."
She pauses. "Landscapes have personalities," she muses. "We speak of cheerful gardens, lonely glades, majestic mountains. The ousiarchs are rather like these. But one believes landscapes have personalities only because we project those personalities onto them. You immediately senses that the ousiarchs have personalities, and are projecting them at us."
"So are they like ... gods?"
You steel yourself against another correction from her, but she seems more pleased than not.
"No, but that is a perceptive question," she says. "The gods, you may say, are what the ousiarchs became in the imagination after they had decayed into mere persons. Glundandra, we might say, is what the virtue of kingly rule—wise, beneficent, just, and magnanimous—would be if that virtue were clothed as a person. To shake hands with Glundandra would be like shaking hands with Kingliness itself! But then the idea becomes corrupted in the imagination, and shrinks to become merely an exalted person who is kingly, and then shrivels to become merely Jove, the king of the gods who is as proud, crabbed, and spiteful as any merely human king. An Ashurbanipal squatting within a palace as vast as the sky, but who is at heart as small as his meanest subject." She snorts softly to herself.
"But the ousiarchs are not the actual ... planets?"
"No. But we call them the oarsmen of the planets, for their influence waxes and wanes and refracts with the light of the planets, and they wear the faces of the celestial lanterns when they show themselves to us. Though even that is not entirely correct. When you study with the Sages, you will learn that the faces they wear in China and East Asia are quite different from those they wear in the West."
"Why's that?"
She smiles. "As one tells a child a story suited to their imagination, so the ousiarchs suit their appearances to we children who look on them in wonder and incomprehension. It is a near certainty that nothing I teach you will be the literal truth, nor will anything the Sages teach you be the literal truth either, for the literal truth is likely entirely beyond us. But these are the ways we understand them, and it appears that these are good enough."
You are surprising yourself with your own attentiveness. "So, if they aren't planets or gods or people, what are they, exactly? At least, what do you, and the rest of the Stellae, think they are?"
"We don't know. As I say, we can only say what they are like. You are wanting something firm to hold onto," she continues, overriding your interruption. "But nothing is eternally firm, not even in science. Something may at one time be a planet, and at another time not." She gives you a very "Scotch" look as she says this.
"Yeah, but the thing didn't change," you protest. "Only what we call it."
"That is true. But what we call things affects how we see and understand them. When a thing surprises us, it changes how we see it. What is up there is what is up there." She casually points at the ceiling. "How we see it and understand it is different from what others see and understand. But this is to drift into a philosophy that leaves your hard question behind. The best I can tell you is that they are like personalities and that they are also like elements. Have you see the optical illusion of a figure that looks like a duck, and also like a rabbit?" You nod. "Which is it, really?"
"It's—" You wince as you see yourself making her point in reply. "It depends on how you look at it."
"So it is with them. I said that Glundandra is what kingliness would be if kingliness were a person. One feels the personality, but one also feels the elemental Kingliness. For the Stellae, the personality of the ousiarch dominates, and if we see them like anything, I suppose that we see them as being like—" She hesitates. "Angels, I suppose. But far more frightening and uncanny than the angels of popular imagination, which you should immediately forget if you try to think of the ousiarchs that way. For the Sages and the Akshardham—"
"Who are they?"
"You will learn more of them later. For now, let us call them the Stellae Errantes of the East, of China and India. Sister organizations and allies, all under the same influence. The Akshardham are inheritors of Jyotish astrology, while The Great Sages are inheritors of Chinese astrology. The Akshardham theory is close enough to ours that they are, perhaps, only stylistic variants on each other. For the Sages, the heavens are quite different."
"How so?"
"To begin, they differ even in conceptions of astronomy. Sol Invictus, Mercutius, Venus, Terra, Mars, Jove Pater, Saturnus, Neptunus, Caelus and Pluto—and of course, Luna," she says. "The Chinese, however, have other names for them. Shuixing, jinxing, huoxing, muxing, tuxing, tianwang xing, haiwang xing and mingwang xing. And before that, names even more ancient. Chenxing, qiming, changgeng, taibai, yinghuo, suixing and zhenxing. These are not names of gods, as they are for us."
"What are they the names of?"
"The first five refer to the classical elements, according to the Chinese: Stars of Water, Gold, Fire, Wood and Earth. The last three refer to the abodes of lords: Stars of the Heavenly King, the Sea King and the Underworld King, but these are not associated with gods. Moreover, they do not associate an ousiarch with each star, but with the blending of them. We say there are ten ousiarchs, and the conjunction of two bestows a unique blend of prodigies. The Sages would say there are fifty-five ousiarchs—though that is not their word, either—each of whom bestows a unique blend of prodigies. Hu Minquiang of the Sages, whom you will undoubtedly meet some day, calls himself a servant of Sun Tzu, the great strategist of war. We would call him an adept of Arbol and Malacandra, honored by and honoring both the ousiarch of enlightenment and the ousiarch of battle with his prodigies."
"So we think he has two ousiarchs, and he thinks he only has one? How can both of those be right?"
"Probably neither is right, as I told you. But neither can we tell that one is right and the other wrong, just as one cannot tell that the doodle is a rabbit but not a duck. It looks like one or the other, depending upon what you happen, or even choose, to see."
"I've been told my prodigies come from Sulva and Kenan ... dandra. What do the Sages say?"
She smiles. "It would only be a piece of trivia at this time to tell you the name of your master. It is quite enough to learn of the ten ousiarchs the Stellae honor. To add fifty-five atop it would be sheerest surfeit!"
She pauses, lost momentarily in thought.
"You still wish something firm to hold onto, to understand the ousiarchs?" she asks when she returns. "The simplest may be the best for now. They are the stellar oarsmen."
"You called them that before."
"It is a common salute. The planets are stars that wander, but they are never lost, for each is steered by its oarsman, without whom they would drift helplessly away into the infinite seas of darkness. So too, without their guidance, we would be stars that wander adrift."
"They tell us what to do, where to go?"
"Nay." She smiles. "There the metaphor breaks down, slightly. The common astrologers are wrong, there. We are each the captain of our own ship. But the oarsmen, they steer and right the course. Still, it is a foolish captain who listens not to the advice of a skilled pilot!"
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