Unsong

by Scott Alexander

  Robin waited.

  “I think it might be impossible to use the Explicit Name of God to destroy Hell,” he said all at once.

  “What?” asked Robin.

  “I tried,” said the Comet King. “Many times. Under Lake Baikal. Uriel had to stop me. Said if I did it any more I’d probably destroy the world. There were more gates than we thought. Some of them are…seem impregnable.”

  “So how are you going to destroy Hell, then?” asked Robin.

  The Comet King just looked at her hopelessly, almost like he was too terrified to speak. Then he just shook his head ‘no’.

  A moment of silence.

  “I…I thought you should be the first to know,” he said.

  “No,” said Robin, “that’s silly. You need to figure out a better way. Ask Uriel.”

  “I asked,” said the Comet King. “He said there was none.”

  “Ask Sohu. She’s been studying so hard.”

  “I asked,” said the Comet King. “She didn’t know either.”

  “Ask the Lady. Or the Chief Rabbi of Israel. Ask the Satmar Rebbe, or the Belzer Rebbe. Or ask the Pope, maybe he’ll know.”

  “I asked.”

  “Ask the Dividend Monks. Go to San Francisco and ask the collective consciousness there.”

  “I asked,” said the Comet King, and for the first time through her own confusion Robin heard the note of despair in his voice.

  “Ask the other chief rabbi! Aren’t there always two? Ask the…”

  The Comet King put his arms around Robin and whispered “I’m sorry”.

  “No. Figure something out. Can’t you just…be really evil? Then die? That has to work. It’s not even Thamiel’s law. It’s God’s.”

  “I asked Uriel,” said the Comet King. “He said it wouldn’t work. Doing evil for a greater good, because I want to save the world. It wouldn’t count.”

  “So – figure out some way to change your personality to be genuinely evil, then do evil, then die, then use the Name.”

  “You think I haven’t looked into that? Thamiel can’t be fooled that easily. God definitely can’t be fooled that easy. I promise you, Robin. I’ve thought about this. It doesn’t work.”

  Robin jerked back. “No,” she said. “This isn’t how it ends. Get yourself together. You can do this. You can do anything. That’s the point! Figure it out!”

  “They’ll be missing me in Siberia by now,” said the Comet King. “There’s still more work left to do. I need to mop up resistance, liberate the rest of Russia, liberate Canada. I want to be done before winter. I should go.”

  “You can’t go! What do I do here? What do I tell people?”

  “Nothing,” said the Comet King. “Don’t tell them anything. As far as they’re concerned we won the victory. Our army beat their army. We destroyed Yakutsk. That looks like winning. Your speech aside, so few of them think about the great work. Proclaim victory and arrange a parade. When I get back in the winter, we’ll work on what we can work on. Thamiel thinks he can make people evil? I can make them good. We can make them good. Make sure that however many souls are lost, we don’t lose a single one more. It would be a victory upon a victory. Nobody has to know about what happened at Baikal.”

  “I’ll know!” said Robin.

  “I know,” said the Comet King.

  “You can’t do this! I won’t let you! You hear me, Jala? I will not let you do this!”

  “I’ll see you when the war is over,” said the Comet King, and a bolt of reverse lightning unstruck the ground, leapt into the sky, and deposited Robin back in the peopled section of the park and Jalaketu to wherever Jalaketu was going.

  “Bad news?” asked Father Ellis, though it was a stupid question, with her face streaked with tears.

  “What did he tell you?” she asked. “Did he say what – ”

  “He found me as you started talking,” said Ellis. “Said come here from Siberia to talk to you, then didn’t tell me anything else.”

  She said nothing.

  “Bad news?” Ellis asked again.

  “If he wanted you to know,” she snapped, “he would have told you.” Then. “We need to get home. I need to think.”

  Interlude ש: Obama

  In 2008 Dick Cheney declined to pursue a third term due to his failing health. A delegation of the nation’s civic and religious leaders entered the National Archives after several days’ fasting and purification and, after lifting the Shroud upon the Constitution, declared that the proper thing to do in this sort of situation was to hold an election.

  Genesis 4:5 says that “The Lord looked with favor on Abel and his offering, but on Cain and his offering he did not look with favor.” The situation is kabbalistically reenacted every four years, when a candidate named some variant of “Cain” must lose at some stage in a US Presidential election. In 2016 it was Tim Kaine. In 2012 it was Herman Cain. In 2008 the unlucky role fell to war hero John McCain, who ran a strong race based on a platform of campaign finance reform and military leadership.

  On the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton originally looked set to sweep the national vote based on her connections and name recognition. Then things got interesting. People all around the country started talking about “hope” and “change” and “yes we can”. New political phenomenon Barack Obama inspired huge crowds wherever he went. The older, stodgier candidates were swept aside in the wave of enthusiasm at the revolution he promised.

  Me, I figured he was probably a demon.

  I mean, I’ve read enough folktales to recognize the basic arc. A mysterious tall dark stranger arrives in the capital and quickly gains the ears of the court. There’s no particular reason why anyone should like him, but everyone who listens to him can’t shake the feeling that he’s a trustworthy, intelligent figure. When he’s out of earshot, the nobles of the land plot against him, wondering how such a relative lightweight could dream of usurping their power – but as soon as he speaks to them in his smooth, calming voice, they immediately forget what they were going to do and join in the universal chorus of praise.

  And in every one of those folktales, the stranger turns out to be a demon.

  Obama laughed off people’s fears. But when his detractors asked him to produce a birth certificate, to prove that he had in fact been born, he expressed outrage and declined as a matter of principle. He said that his father had been a goat-herd from rural Kenya but was now dead – a claim which was suspiciously convenient, even ignoring the symbolic connotations of goats. He tried to prove he was a family man by showing off his daugher Malia, then categorically refused to answer questions about what kind of person would name their firstborn after the abstract concept of evil.

  Luke 10:18 says “And he said unto them, I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven.” “Lightning” in Hebrew is “barak”. Isaiah 14:14 describes Satan’s fall from “the height of the clouds”; the word for “height” in this passage, referring to Heaven, is “bama”. Thus “lightning and heaven” would be “barak o’bama”. Sure, all of the bigshot Bible scholars point out that Jesus would have been speaking in Aramaic rather than Hebrew, and that there are many terms for Heaven more common than Isaiah’s idiom, and that you would have to be a raving lunatic conspiracy theorist to make the connection. But did not Jesus say only three verses later, that “You have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children”? And that “I tell you that many prophets and kings wanted to see what you see but did not see it, and to hear what you hear but did not hear it”?

  On the other hand, the previous president had been Dick Cheney, so all of this sort of paled in comparison and Obama was elected in a landslide. Some people vaguely remembered that before it was Shrouded the Constitution had received an amendment saying something about a medical examination to make sure the president was human. But everyone agreed this would be extremely racist under the circumstances and could be skipped.

  Only a handful of scholars and kabbalists
remembered the words of the poet, who had prophecied almost eighty years before:

  And at the last from inner Egypt came

  The strange dark One to whom the fellahs bowed;

  Silent and lean and cryptically proud,

  And wrapped in fabrics Red as sunset flame.

  Throngs pressed around, frantic for his commands,

  But leaving, could not tell what they had heard:

  While through the nations spread the awestruck word

  That wild beasts followed him and licked his hands…

  Or that the same prophecy ended:

  …then, crushing what he had chanced to mould in play,

  The idiot Chaos blew Earth’s dust away.

  Chapter 57: Now Taking On Ahania’s Form…

  The word of the LORD is a great deal of research activity in this area, and probabilistic algorithms have been fruitfully applied.

  — kingjamesprogramming.tumblr.com

  Evening, May 13, 2017

  Citadel West

  Sohu asked whether I wanted to help her with the error correction process. It was the highlight of my life thus far. It was like getting asked to debate philosophy with Aristotle, or play one-on-one against Michael Jordan. Did I want to study the kabbalah with Sohu West? My heart leapt at the thought.

  So we walked through sunless streets until we reached a building on the perimeter, right up against the stone wall of the mountain. Sarah came with me, of course, I couldn’t help that, and Sohu led us up a staircase and down a long corridor to her study. Everywhere in the citadel seemed equally dreary, lit by fluorescent lights and built to exactly the sort of utilitarian specifications you would expect of a bunker, but Sohu’s study was full of books and a big oak table, and for a moment it reminded me of a hundred libraries and synagogues and classrooms I’d been in. The life of the mind was the same everywhere.

  We started working. Usually the hardest part of these things is to add up the gematria value of all the different subsets of letters, but of course Sarah did it instantly. The second-hardest part was figuring out which chapter of the books had the equations you needed, but Sohu had a photographic memory and would think for a second, pull a volume off the fourth shelf on the far wall, open it up to chapter sixteen, and put her finger halfway down the first page.

  “Um,” I said, trying to think quickly, “maybe if we see which Goldblum subsets are invariant under a temurah transformation, we could…” But Sohu interrupted. “For a non-supernally based Name like this one, that’s equivalent to a basic transformation of phonetic triplets,” she said. “Maharaj, 1992.” And before I could ask how she even knew that applied here, Sarah announced to us that all of the phonetic triplets checked out. By that point Sohu’s attention had been lost, and on she went to the next book, the next theory. “Any corresponding Psalms?” she asked, and before I could even remember exactly how many psalms there were Sarah shook her head and said that none of them corresponded.

  “Sarah,” Sohu finally said, “how carefully did you confound Aaron’s memory?”

  “What do you mean?” Sarah asked.

  “I mean,” said Sohu, “that if someone randomly went in and switched a few letters, we would have corrected the Name twenty minutes ago, the first algorithm we tried. If someone really skilled in Kabbalah very carefully altered the Name to make sure that their victim could never correct it again, well – ” she gestured to the growing pile of books abandoned on the table ” – then it might be a little harder.”

  “I knew Aaron was a kabbalist,” said Sarah. “I didn’t want to make it too easy for him.”

  Sohu groaned.

  “Okay,” she finally said. “We’ll reconfigure the sephirot into partzufim and try it that way.” She started calculating furiously. “Lose the ayin,” she muttered to herself, “carry the tav, and…”.

  Sarah interrupted. “And it just stays the same.”

  “You know,” said Sohu. “If I wanted to confound a Name this badly, I’m not sure that I could.”

  I thought I saw a sort of triumphant grin flash over Sarah’s face, but it disappeared quickly.

  “We need some of the original building blocks back,” Sohu said. “Aaron, will you let me read your mind?”

  “You can do that?

  “I’m not good at it. What happened to you with the Drug Lord, I’m sure he was better. My father was better still. But it’s worth a try. I have a little training in chashmal.”

  The overt meaning of “chashmal” is “electricity”.

  The kabbalistic meaning is also “electricity”, but it’s complicated.

  The prophet Ezekiel described certain angels as being chashmal, or surrounded by chashmal, or radating chashmal. Nobody entirely knew what he meant, but the translators of the Septuagint ventured a guess of “amber-colored” or “amber light”. Fast forward eighteen hundred years, and the original Zionist Jews were trying to reinvent the Hebrew language and needed a word for electricity. One of them, probably a kabbalist, pointed out that the English word “electricity” is generally believed to come from the Latin word “electricus”, meaning “amber”, because amber gave off a sort of static electric charge. But other etymologists believe it comes from the Phoenician word “elekron”, meaning “shining light”. Well, Hebrew already has a word meaning both “amber” and “shining light”, and that word was chashmal. So they stuck it in as “electricity” in the first Hebrew dictionary.

  I once read an atheist tract that asked why God didn’t prove His omniscience by putting predictions about science or technology in the Bible. The answer is that He did and they’re just not thinking kabbalistically enough to notice. Any Israeli schoolchild can open up the Book of Ezekiel and see a 6th century BC prophet describe the angels he encounters as “glowing with electricity”.

  Maimonides put a different gloss on these chashmal angels. He said that it was a compound word made of “chash”, silence, and “mal”, meaning speech. So these angels were actually radiating “silent speech”. Even more specific: “chash” is the root of “chashva” meaning “thought”. So the angels were radiating “thought-speech” at Ezekiel. No wonder that when future generations of kabbalists discovered the secrets of telepathy, they called it “chashmal”!

  There are deep connections here. The brain runs on electricity, each thought producing an electric impulse that jumps from cell to cell, inspiring further sparks, creating a computational web. Our minds are electric machines just as much as Sarah’s; to speak by thought is to speak by electricity. The Hebrew language encoded all of this thousands of years ago. So did the English, for that matter: our own word “speak”, derives from an older German word sprech, and the further backwards you go, the more alike “speak” and “spark” start to sound, until finally at the root of all things they converge into the primal electricity.

  I let Sohu look into my eyes, felt my defenses slowly weaken. It wasn’t the sort of overpowering invasion of the Drug Lord. A gentle teasing-apart, quiet, humble, but pushing forward like an explorer penetrating a jungle. I don’t know how long we waited there, staring at each other awkwardly, but after an indeterminate time in a pleasant trance, I was awoken by Sohu snorting. “I’m really not good at this,” she said.

  Sarah seemed just a little too happy. I started to wonder how honest she was being with me. Had she really just not bothered remembering the most important Name ever discovered? Or was she holding out?

  “Sohu,” I said, casting the dice, “there’s a way to get you into my mind easier.”

  She raised an eyebrow.

  “It’s called Sacred Kabbalistic Marriage of Minds,” I said. “Uh, SCABMOM. My friend Ana discovered it hiding in the later additions to the Gospel of John. A combination placebomantic-kabbalistic ritual. First you draw a magic circle, then you say a Name you derive from John, then you say these vows about how God is one and we are one. After that you can…”

  I wasn’t prepared for Sohu to start laughing.

  “S
acred kabbalistic marriage?” she asked, in between giggles. “Really?”

  “That’s just what my friend Ana calls it!” I said quickly, trying to defend myself. “There were parts of the text that simplified into the word ‘marriage’, but you can think of that as symbolic! It’s just this brief ritual – ”

  Sohu quieted down. “I wasn’t laughing at you,” she said. “And I already know the ritual.”

  “You do?!”

  “Yes. I, uh, I’m familiar with it. I should have thought of it myself. I’ll get supplies so we can draw the circle.”

  My head spun. She knew about SCABMOM? Then another thought. “Wait,” I said. “I’m already kabbalistically m – I’ve already done the ritual with somebody. Does that complicate things?”

  “Doubt it!” said Sohu. “Solomon had seven hundred wives, remember?” She giggled again. “Kabbalistic marriage…I’ll go get supplies.”

  She vanished in a flash of light.

  “YOU CAN’T MARRY SOHU!” Sarah shouted at me the instant Sohu disappered, tears running down her face. “YOU’RE SUPPOSED TO BE MARRYING ME!”

  Oh, right. I should have predicted this. I put my arms around her, kissed her cheek. The longer I put this off the harder it was going to be, but I wanted all four Cometspawn around when I broke the bad news. “Sarah,” I said, “this isn’t real marriage. This is just a kabbalistic ritual called marriage. It’s like how how the doges used to marry the sea, or how a businessman says he’s married to his work. It’s just a word.”

  “If it doesn’t matter, if you’ll do it with anyone, then do it with me first. Do it with me now, before she comes back.”

  “We don’t even have a magic circle.” It was the best excuse I could think of, but I didn’t want her in my mind forever. Now that I thought about it, I wasn’t sure I wanted Sohu in my mind forever either, but that couldn’t be helped.

  “When we get a magic circle, you’ll marry me, right?”

  “No, Sarah. I’m not going to perform a dangerous kabbalistic ritual with you just because it has ‘marriage’ in the name.” I barely avoided adding “get a life”. She already had – thanks to me – and look how that had turned out.