Glaugust Challenge 3: Resurrection Magic

As you may have noted by inactivity my I am tragically blogpost-bereft, busy with other projects HOWEVER I shall be hammering out some stuff for GLAUGUST because I quite like the community and so wish to contribute in some small way as I procrastinate from doing my main work and perhaps refertilize the loam of my imagination in the doing. These will not necessarily be linked to the setting this blog has featured prior but will be reflecting my general musings on themes and aesthetics and concepts which I am drawn to. Also maybe something gameable will emerge from this.

Think of the soul as the unique conglomeration of every memory which is experienced, assembled as some spiritual second substrate layered over the physical body. A unique song where every instance is a note. Life is the continual composition of the song. Death is when it ceases because it no longer is tied to the physical world. No machinery, like a mind or eyes and hands, exists to record it. 

To bring someone back to life is to restart the song. A fragment which contains it must be obtained. A corpse is best, of course, because it is like an inert record which may yet be spun up if restored properly. The fresher the better, of course, and damage can cause parts to be missing. This is why so many undead are mad, chunks of who they were did not carry over, but they are not a new person; they are the same person they were, "missing" parts. It is the reverse of a SOMA situation; if you can perfectly replicate a copy of a dead person, the dead person really does come back to life. To them, it is as if they closed their eyes for the last time and blinked them open in some new state. 

You can also revive a person without a body. If you study a person, if you wander and inspect their childhood home, if you know their names, including the secret ones they only told their lover, or the one their father named them that they never heard again after he died, and all the other little things that made them who they are, maybe you could call them back into a new body. Usually an artificial one, or a corpse. A living thing has its own self and that would need to be removed without destroying the body (difficult, and doubly immoral).

Infants are very easy to revive. They have so little to remember. But this also makes them a valuable commodity. A human soul with almost nothing lost when you put it into the body of an artificial war homunculus will not have flashes of its former life on the side of your enemies, will not agonize over who it used to be. This is why cults and witches covet and snatch unguarded children, to sacrifice them and stuff their spirits into servitors.

People will also talk of soul-eating monsters. This is not strictly true. But a thing which erases you as it consumes you, even in part, can make it so. Your family forgets you, the traces you leave on the world fade away. Your home becomes just another house. Even if you are reborn, you come back wrong. An amnesiac broken thing. Perhaps this is how some such monsters make their servants.

A sufficiently dedicated person can accomplish the same thing. This is why powerful people strike the names of their enemies from records, make speaking of them taboo, and grind their names from their gravestones.

Resurrection done by a mortal is always flawed, even a little, because even the most empathetic and studious person can not perfectly capture everything about another. Rather, the result is always something between a traumatized partially-fragmented ego and the image the resurrectionist had in their head at the time of the rite. This is how grieving lovers create a thing which is almost like their beloved returned but not. It is how a dozen victims at gunpoint revive their tormentor into a nightmare demon. It is also how you make a god-king or a living saint. The original self becomes subsumed by what everyone bringing you back thinks you are. You might even end up a better person because of it. There are plays about manipulative schemers faking kindness to advance a wicked end, only to die midway and be brought back as the person their lies made others think they were. These are comedies, but they are also a threat. Of course, the remnant memories of their true self that persist across two different lives remain in conflict with any idealizations that warp them. If the difference is irreconcilable, the consequences can be disastrous. Flaws can be magnified or virtues enhanced, but someone made into an opposite collapses into psychosis before long, the mental corrosion making it harder and harder to bring them back. Eventually, if this is done repeatedly, only a soup of contradictions remain. 

Only God can bring you back in full. No gaps, no changes. Its divine and sublime comprehension of your entire self allows you to come back fully. This is why Its saints can perform a true resurrection; they are asking God to do the hard work, they just chant the words and pay the price. If a soul is too deformed, they cannot be resurrected whole in this world, and can only claw back into half life over and over again, changing a little each time.

The saints are also notoriously stingy with their resurrections. Only those in good standing, who have not died before their time (old age), and would stand to benefit the world upon their return are afforded this gift. It is why all manner of scoundrel often walk the other path.

Heaven is just this happening when God brings everyone back who pleased It, even restoring those warped beyond measure or blasted from existence (so it is promised). The last and true resurrection, and there shall be rejoicing forever and ever.