Maguek, Equestria, Orbis Harmonicus

by furrypony

Maguek, Equestria, Orbis Harmonicus

I owe the discovery of Maguek to the conjunction of a pile of broken electronics and a dusty old book. The broken electronics languished in a corner in a in Suzuki Street in Tokyo. The dusty old book is an old reprint of the Encyclopædia Britannica of 1973.

The event took place some five years ago. Daniel Ingram had had dinner with me that evening and we became lengthily engaged in a lengthy polemic concerning the composition of a series in the first person, whose narrator would be ignorant of or distort the facts, and indulge in various contradictions, which would sometimes necessitate a subsequent retcon.

From the remote corner of the room, the pile of broken electronics glittered in the light. We discovered (such a discovery is inevitable in the late hours of the night) that broken things have something monstrous about them. Then Daniel Ingram recalled that one of the heretics of Maguek had declared that the best universe is but a heap of trash, because it cannot be degraded further. I asked him the origin of this curious observation and he answered that it was reproduced in the Encyclopædia Britannica, in its article on Maguek.

The house had a set of this work. On the last pages of Volume XI we found an article on Magpie; on the first pages of Volume XII, one on Medicine, but not a word about Maguek. Daniel, a bit taken aback, consulted the Internet. In vain he exhausted all of the imaginable search terms: Magük, Meguek, Magek, Maegyuk... Before leaving, he told me that it was a region of Manchuria or of South Siberia.

I agreed with some doubt, suspecting that this undocumented country and its anonymous heretic were a fiction devised by Daniel in order to make his statement sound more profound. The fruitless sleuthing in Google Books and Internet Archive fortified my doubt.

The following day, Daniel called me from his home in Kyoto. He told me he had before him the article on Maguek, in volume XI of the encyclopedia. The heretic's name was not forthcoming, but there was a note on his doctrine, formulated in words almost identical to those he had repeated, though more verbose.

What he had recalled was: “The best universe is but a heap of trash.” The text of the encyclopedia said: “For one of those gnostics, the visible universe was but an imperfection or (more precisely) a transient phase. A random collection of decrepit things is the perfected state of the universe, in that it does not degrade further.” I told him, in all truthfulness, that I wished to see that article.

A few days later he brought it to me. The tome Daniel brought was, in fact, a Volume XI of the Encyclopædia Britannica printed in Japan. On the half-title page and the spine, the alphabetical marking (Lar-Mag) was that of our copy, but instead of 917, it contained 921 pages.These four additional pages made up the article on Maguek, which (as the reader will have noticed) was not indicated by the alphabetical marking. We later determined that there was no other difference between the volumes. Both of them (as I believe I have indicated) are local reprints of the fourteenth Encyclopædia Britannica. Daniel had acquired his copy at some sale or other.

We read the article with some care. The passage recalled by Daniel was perhaps the only surprising one. The rest of it seemed very formal, very professional, quite in keeping with the didactic, boring tone of encyclopedias.

Reading it over again, we discovered amid its rigorous prose a fundamental vagueness. Of the fourteen names which figured in the section on geography, we only confirmed three - Ulan Hot, Stanovoy, Amur - and they were referenced only ambiguously. Of the historical names, only one: the depressed poet Chiu Yuan, invoked more as a metaphor.

The note did mention the boundaries of Maguek, but its nebulous reference points were rivers and craters and mountain ranges within that same region. We read, for example, that the lowlands of Datou and the Aletemain Mountains marked the southern frontier and that on the mountains gigantic lizard-like creatures nested. All this, on the first part of page 918. In the section on history (page 920) we learned that as a result of a severe winter that created widespread famine, the leaders of the original three tribes agreed to merge their tribes, and the cave where they made the decision was later sanctified.

The section on Language and Literature was brief. Only one trait is worthy of recollection: it mentions that “Maguek” is the exonym of the place, and that its endonymic counterpart is “Equestria”.

The bibliography section listed four books which we have not yet found, though the third - Yau Goang-shiaw: Maagwo Tong Jih (1408) - seems to appear in the old catalogs of Bernard Quartich’s book shop. The first, Lesbare und lesenswerthe Bemerkungen über das Land Magrük in Mandschurei, dates from 1641 and is the work of Johannes Valentinus Andreä - a few months later, I came upon that name during a Wiki walk, and learned that it belonged to a German theologian who, in the early seventeenth century, described the imaginary community of Rosae Crucis - a community that others founded later, a realization of his design.

That weekend we visited the National Diet Library. In vain we exhausted all the indices, catalogs, electronic or non-electronic. After going through all the atlases, annuals of geographical societies, travelers' and historians' memoirs, we concluded that no one had ever been in Maguek. The following day, Goro Shimura (to whom I had mentioned this puzzling affair) noted the presence of an original set of the fourteenth Encyclopædia Britannica (apparently imported) in the underground library of Tokyo Institute of Technology. He entered and examined Volume XI. Of course, he did not find the slightest indication of Maguek.

II

Some limited and waning memory of Ingrid Nilson, a geologist of Nikomi Co., persists in the hotel at Kyoto. In her lifetime, she suffered from schizoidism, as do so many geologists; once dead, she is not even the ghost she was then. She was bony and listless and her tired oval face rarely registered any emotion. I understood she was solitary, though she seemed to manage well on her own. Every few years she would go to America, to visit (I judge from some photographs she showed us) a boulder and a few apple trees. She and her sister had entered into of of those close (the adjective is excessive) friendships that began by exchanging rock candies and poems and very soon dispensed with actual dialog. She once recounted how one year the entirety of her correspondence with her sister consisted of five games of correspondence chess and three of scrabbles...

I remember her in the hotel corridor, tired as always, a geology catalog in hand, sometimes looking at the irredeemable colors of the sky. One afternoon, we spoke of the Goldschmidt classification system of rocks. Nilson said she was working on a complete enumeration of the rocks in the Kantō Plain. She added that the task had been entrusted to her by a Norwegian, in Sapporo. We had known her for eight years and she had never mentioned her sojourn in that region... We talked of chess variants, of designing decorative patterns with hexominos (a polygon made from six squares connected at their edges), of the difference between “mineral” and “rock” (which is frequently confused by the laymen), and nothing more was said.

In the September of 2013 (we were not at the hotel), Ingrid Nilson died of appendicitis. A few days before, she had received a sealed and certified package from America. Nilson left it at the bar, where - months later - I found it. I began to leaf through it and experienced an astonished and airy feeling of vertigo, for in this is the story of Maguek and Equestria and Orbis Harmonicus. The book was written in English and contained 1001 pages. On the scratched back cover I read these curious words which were repeated on the title page: A First Encyclopedia of Equestria. Vol. XI. There was no indication of date or place. On the first page and on a leaf of silk paper that covered on one of the color plates there was stamped a blue oval with this inscription: Orbis Harmonicus.

Two years before I had discovered, in a volume of a certain reprinted encyclopedia, a superficial description of a nonexistent country; now I held in my hands a vast methodical snapshot of an unknown planet's entire history, with its architecture and its playing cards, with the dread of its mythologies and the murmur of its languages, with its winds and its seas, with its minerals and its birds and its fish, with its algebra and its history, with its cultural and metaphysical controversy. And all of it articulated, coherent, with no tone of parody or extraneous intent.

In the "Eleventh Volume" which I have mentioned, there are allusions to preceding and succeeding volumes. In an article published on arXiv which is now frequently-cited, Teiji Takagi has denied the existence of those companion volumes; Loo-Keng Hua and Shiing-shen Chern have refuted that doubt, perhaps victoriously. The fact is that up to now the most diligent inquiries have been fruitless. In vain we have upended the search engines and libraries of the two Chinas and of Japan.

Yutaka Taniyama, tired of these subordinate sleuthing procedures, proposes that we should all undertake the task of reconstructing the many and weighty tomes that are lacking: ex ungue leonem. He calculates, half in earnest and half jokingly, that a generation of Equestristas should be sufficient.

This fantastically venturesome computation brings us back to the fundamental problem: Who are the inventors of Equestria? The plural is inevitable, because the hypothesis of a lone inventor - an infinite Leibniz laboring away darkly and modestly - has been unanimously discounted. It is conjectured that this brave new world is the work of a secret society of astronomers, biologists, engineers, historians, programmers, poets, musicians, writers, illustrators, painters, anatomists, geometers... directed by an obscure genius. Individuals mastering these diverse disciplines are abundant, but not so those capable of inventiveness and less so those capable of subordinating that inventiveness to a rigorous and systematic plan. This plan is so vast that each composer's contribution is infinitesimal.

At first it was thought that Maguek was a mere chaos, a whimsical exercise of the imagination; now it is known that it is a cosmos and that the intimate laws which govern it have been formulated, at least provisionally. Let it suffice for me to recall that the apparent contradictions of the Eleventh Volume are the fundamental basis for the proof that the other volumes exist, so lucid and exact is the order observed in it. The popular presses, with pardonable excess, have spread the brave new wonders of the zoology and meteorology of Equestria; since I think its golemic timber wolves and iridescent cumulonimbi perhaps do not merit publicity outside the sensationalistic headlines, I shall not dwell upon such topics.

I shall venture to request a few minutes to expound its concept of the universe. In Candide, the witty Voltaire lampooned the Leibnizian mantra “best of all possible worlds” as an obvious disregard of common sense. This dictum is entirely correct in its application to this earth, but entirely false in Equestria.

The nations of this planet are congenitally Leibnizians. Their language and the derivations of their language - art, literature, metaphysics - all presuppose Leibnizian optimalism. The world for them is not a spontaneous succession of concrete events in spacetime; it is a private experience that is different for every individual, carefully orchestrated by a god. It is pantheistic and idealistic, not atheistic and materialistic.

It is no exaggeration to state that the philosophy of Equestria comprises only one discipline: theology. All others are subordinated to it. The subject of theology in Equestria, in turn, is completely different from that of earth. Equestrians never questioned the actual existence of god - it's assumed a priori without any justification in their discourse. Nor do they question the abilities or intention of god.

It is here where I shall hastily expound upon my previous remark, “It is pantheistic and idealistic, not atheistic and materialistic”. In the encyclopedia, the detailed descriptions of the god of Equestria differs wildly from article to article, sometimes even contradicting each other inside the same paragraph. Nevertheless, there are a few core tenets that these diverse accounts always agree upon: that everything, including every individual, is but an aspect of god, like a mere wave to the totality of the ocean; that fundamentally, every individual is in a solipsistic state of existence, since for all their vividness and liveliness, the external world is merely a subjective experience fed to each individual by the god, and might as well be illusionary; that, the god is fundamentally benevolent, in that it satisfies the values of each individual, sometimes directly, sometimes obstrusely, but always within finite time.

Curiously, many accounts of this Equestrian god refers to it with such a tender endearment, that one may fancy that not too few Equestrians hold personal affections towards it. Many refer to it with the feminine pronoun, and the appellation “Celestia” is most common. I shall adopt these two conventions thenceforth.

To return to my previous thread of discourse, the central concern of their theology is not whether god exists, or whether it is benevolent and omnipotent, but rather the subject of personal teleology, namely, what is that private value which Celestia wishes to optimize.

The theodicy or complete optimalism invalidates all choice. If we explain (or evaluate) a course of action as the result of rational choice, we presuppose that there would be a difference between the choices; such volition, according to Equestrians, is a mental state which does not reflect the actual possibility of different outcomes. Every event is inevitably optimal: the mere fact of considering alternatives is an absurdity. And since the act of valuing one thing over another is based on the possibility of constructing a partial ordering over the set of alternatives, there are no value systems in Equestria, and consequently no rational choice theory. The paradoxical truth is that they do exist, and in almost uncountable number.

The fact that every choice theory is by definition an interpretation game, a Game of As If, has caused them to multiply. The ordinary and unremarkable ones, unsurprisingly, occupies the bulk of value systems. They simply value one or more of the usual aspects of life widely accepted as pleasurable, such as food, drink, sex, love, fame. However, apart from such mundane systems, there is an abundance of incredible value systems of pleasing design or sensational type. The metaphysicians of Equestria do not seek for the truth or even for approval from others, but strictly for personal consumption. They feel that rationality is a branch of fantastic literature. They know that a value system is nothing more than a frame through which their subjective experiences are a posteriori interpreted.

One of the residents of Equestria went so far as to negate evaluation: she simply declared that all possible experiences are equally worthless, and Celestia simply fed her a sort of experiential white noise. Another justified her horrendous apparent suffering by claiming that her value system is that of a metamasochist who can only be satisfied by suffering from her own masochism. Another, that the only value to satisfy in her life is to find that value system; with this aim in mind, she has devised no less than one thousand and sixty eight different theories, and spends the better part of every day compiling everything that ever happened in her life and running statistical tests on them.