The following is an address that was delivered by Shrirar Omaphre Idama to the Gallente National Assembly on the occasion of the one-hundredth anniversary of Gallente first-contact with the Intakis. Some maintain that the address was to have been much longer but was cut short by the Idama, while others hold that the Idama said precisely what he had intended to say (which, for an Idama, is often little). Since the time of this speech, of course, the fundamentals of Idamic law have become widely known.Ida, or the Way of the Intakis, is the ancient way (but one that is ever reborn, as the Idamas teach) that the Intakis have carried in their hearts through time and that proceeds back into the mists between their First and Second Histories.
It is in the nature of Ida itself, in its great simplicity, and in the respect that is held for it, that it has never been written down or codified into a body of law, though it is that from which all written laws of the Intakis have been produced and are pronounced. It is the living body of Ida that is important.
Because of this, it has been hard for outsiders to get a grip on just what Ida means. They may have heard some of the titles by which one Intakis may refer to another. They may have gotten a sense, on occasion, of who is a leader amongst the Intakis and who is not only to see these titles suddenly flip and their theories thrown into disarray.
It is my aim to make clear the Intaki method, to speak what, out of an abundance of respect, out of the sense that Ida is to be pulled from nature herself, the Intakis have chosen not to speak.
I, too, am Intakis, but I have heard the call for clarity in human relations and it is through the written word that others, in their great isolation, have chosen to perceive their law. I believe that it is past the time to make these things known to those who, unbeknownst to themselves, have no Law and to allow them to see with Intaki eyes, for surely their great need has met our great reluctance many times over and one or the other must turn. Let me say to my fellow Intakis that the Law as I have written it is not the Law. It will survive even these ashes. It will be reborn.
Authorized by none, then, for I have none to authorize me, I will speak...In its easiest to grasp sense, the word Ida means "to consider", "to see", or "to dwell". This is fine as far as it goes, but, to an Intakis, the word has a larger meaning and one that is not so easily pinned to that one small phrase; "to practice Logick-Wisdom", "to see around corners", "to tread between Two Worlds" — these are some of its larger connotations. It is a word that we use so as to apprehend the Law and, because it is one's very attention that gives it form — so to name our Law as well. But it should be understood that our knowledge of Ida is not restricted to what we alone have nor even to the laws of men. We detect Ida in many things — in art, in psychology, in the seasons of a planet, and even in many forms that non-Intakis have created. It is what gives us our power to comprehend.
Ida, it has been theorized by some, is the birth-child of the particular world that the Intakis grew up in. Others, more the idealists, prefer to see it the other way around: that it is the world and its Intakis that are the birth-children of Ida. What the Idamas know and teach is that this duality is itself a perfect expression of Ida.
I must first explain some of this our history...The home planet of the Intakis is both a beautiful and a harsh world. Its blazing Sun cuts a swath around its equator that makes life there possible only for those hardy or sea-based creatures who have adapted. Man has long been banished to the poles, but the polar lands on Intaki are rich, "tropical", and teeming with life, and for the Intakis there has been no greater Eden. One aspect of the Intakis' living condition is that, because of their location (the Intakis-proper are native to the North), their mighty Sun has been banished to the horizon of their world, but it winds its way there, like a beast who has been tamed (though a Great Beast it is), as the mighty, unswerving hand of a great clock.
This fact of the Sun, which produces in the polar lands a never-ending revolution of light and shadow, has drilled into the minds of the Intakis the idea that they live on the face of a mighty wheel, or of a giant compass, or upon (as they have named it) The Great Table of the Sun, and that their home comprises the very center of this world.
But there is another piece to the puzzle...Though the lands of the North are many, there is a limited vertical band in which life, especially human life, can thrive. At the lower elevations, the killer Sun and the cooling sea produce just the right paste for human survival and enjoyment. At the higher elevations, often with the added protection of steep mountains, the abundant rain forests serve to generate their own generous moisture. Elsewhere, as the slopes continue to rise or the lands stretch uncovered away from the sea, the Sun reasserts its harsh prerogatives of the equator.
Thus, though the lands are many, they are also limited, but never more so than as was imagined by those were the first to arrive on the planet, so many millennia ago. As these Ordjevi (as they are known to our history), for whom human expansion had been the highest religion, began to increase in numbers across the North, it became an issue to them as to just how much of paradise one body of humans could contain as opposed to another body of humans. Limited resources, even if falsely so-calibrated, generally means war and war the planet had — great war.
The First Histories of this time tell us that much was purposely lost, if not utterly overlooked, in the fighting. Much war breeds much war and the people eventually became blind to all but their targets, from which even the mighty forests suffered in a paradigm that valued clear lines of sight over clear levels of thinking. But in time, with exhaustion, the combatants drew away from each other and began to stake out their own lands and territories.
Now, from these early histories we have only the voices of those who did not become Intakis in body, spirit, and soul. It was these who, with the aid of existing technology (much of it preserved from the arrival), were forced to depart the North in search of a new home at the opposite pole of the world.
Before this separation, however, but after the great fighting, there was a period of relative calm, followed by one of mutual isolation, followed, finally, by one of swift and unyielding destruction...
It is said that they came in the traditional hours of sleeping, when bodies were strung up in hammocks and covered with shades or deep inside buildings where the light was low. It is said that none even awoke before they were dead (if the dead are to awaken) and that the air was silently penetrated by darts and filled with odd, sweet-smelling and sleep-inducing scents. Using the ways of the forests (for that was where they came from), these attackers, who were all naked and daubed in forest paints, worked their way in waves, killing tens of thousands, until only a few thousand of their enemies remained, enough to fill what small craft were deemed to be functional. To these the words were given: "Take your world and go."
(It is said by the Intakis that their ancestors of that time, due to the gravity of their act, were unwilling to destroy the seeds of revenge. That the South became populated, and eventually returned and established hegemony over the North, is a testament to that).
After this, the written records "fall silent" (even in the South, which suffered a harsh dispersion of its new peoples), but there is much in terms of early songs and stories that were passed down on the Intaki side and eventually recorded and collated. The first thing to understand about these works is that they were produced in a language that, prior to the separation, had never existed before, in what was, by then, the native Intaki tongue.
I won't unveil the verses or translate the phrases here, but I will present some idea of the awakening that occurred amongst the Intakis, one which led them not un-directly to their drastic act and from which they derived their very name. It is the Intakis' founding story, their primal myth, though there is no reason to think that there is anything mythological about it.
The story goes like this...In a time of great war, the people who were to become the Intakis began to believe that they could find a way through, one that could ensure that war need never happen again. Even as their brothers remained heavily engaged in the fighting, certain others, many from competing tribes, were commanded to become a legion of the spirit. This group, which consisted of five hundred dedicated souls, was directed to climb Mt. Esku (not the North's tallest mountain but the one closest to the axial pole), which had never been successfully climbed. During the whole of their endeavor, itself a war for these monks, they were to dwell (with their very toes and fingers, it is said) upon a single question: "How do I solve the problem of war?"
After much toil and many deaths, the peak was conquered and the men who had conquered it became conquered as well, by the glory of the vision that surrounded them. For (as they had also calculated) the peak of Mount Esku was the one place in the North from which could be observed a seamless horizon of ocean as the only bed for a perfectly level, ever-circling Sun.
Having not yet discovered their answer, however, these monks of war settled-in some distance below the peak in order to continue their journey but one now directed wholly inward. They began to focus on finding and fighting their faults as hard as others were fighting on the fronts of war. They spoke little, each determined to break down in himself what it was that drove him and his fellow-man to such acts of violence in the midst of a world of such plenty, a world that they could now easily view from their still-lofty perch. In rotation, each monk, on his own, would undertake the now day-long climb up to what the monks had named The Compass of Gold, where he would strip naked and, burning in the rays of an unceasing Sun, eke out his one small sliver of stone to be included in that temple's slowly burgeoning foundation.
The answer, they discovered (for the stories tell us that they all saw it in a single flash), was all around them, in everywhere that they looked. In all this plenty, in all these gifts of nature that they, in their elevation, were the ostensible lords of, what did it mean to own these things?
It meant, they realized, nothing.
It was a false category.
It was a sheen, a dancing illusion, on the eye of the mind.
"And they laughed."
It was from that sense of nothingness that they discovered the key — that Ida — to the endless creation and recreation of the human world, which, they realized, is itself Ida.
But pardon... I fear that I can say no more, for we have reached the point of the obvious... if you want it to be...But that is enough, I think.
I bow to you all.
I thank you for your time.
* * *
"If you have my point, O Esteemed One, then you have yourself." —Song of Wokan
"And they laughed." —The Idameron 158:43
* * *
NOTE: The text of the Idama's speech (which eye-witnesses say consisted of far more pages than the speech-as-given would require) has never been recovered. That we even have what we have is only due to the fact that the speech was recorded. Its textual divisions are an artifact of tradition.— Author's Note —
I wrote the above about a year and a half ago (pre-Avatar, by the way, in case you see any parallels). I hope that it might be of interest and perhaps spark some interesting debate or other thoughts about the Intakis. I do realize that I haven't properly introduced myself (this is my first post), so, for right now, let me just say that I'm happy to be here and happy to see all the interest in the role-playing aspects of EVE!
— A Small Disclaimer —
I have observed that some of what I've written butts up against other notions that may be taking root about the Intakis (and Suresha Hawke, I appreciate your efforts and results tremendously), but it wouldn't do to not throw this in the ring, I suspect. I do believe that it's far better for an overall shape to take form than for people to find themselves in their own little ghettos about what's-what, so this is my bid, one way or another, to escape such a ghetto. The key word is 'creating', though, as it does get tiresome to always float above the Intakis without getting into deep specifics on who they are.
Author
Topic: Omaphre's Speech (provided that he existed) (Read 4209 times)