2023-08-08 7:45:33 ¶ ●

# Homestuck’s Gnosticism: The World / The Wheel

Everyone knows Homestuck is “a Gnostic story”.

Wait, why does it feel like we’ve had this exact conversation before…?

> AH. SO NICE OF YOU TO JOIN ME.

If you followed along with the first post in this series, you’ll be familiar already with the Gnostic nature of Homestuck’s central conflict between the spirit world and the flesh. And even if I say so myself, I think that post is pretty definitive; if you’re ever unsure what a particular character’s motivations or end goal are, the Conflict will tell you. But what’s conspicuously absent from the post is any explanation of what actually happens in Homestuck. We’ve covered the why, but very little of the how.

I left us off on the “synonymous goals” that spring naturally from this conflict between flesh and spirit; attaining ultimate knowledge, and escaping the confines of Homestuck itself. Eagle-eyed readers probably spotted what was lying between the lines, there: the comic is called Homestuck because it’s about being stuck in a house, so the ending is about escaping the house. But what does that really look like? And how did they get in that house in the first place?

Let’s return very briefly to a quote I used in the previous post. “[Y]our ultimate self […] unlike god tiers or bubble ghosts or whatever, it really IS immortal”. Two assumptions naturally grow out of this fact. First, and probably most obvious: when John dies, he’s not really gone. The idea of him still exists out there, somewhere, and in our minds, so he still exists. Second, though: if the idea of him is eternal, John obviously didn’t start existing when he was born. So again we ask, where did he come from?

How did John get here? Where does he go? The answers to these questions are like the four sides of one hypercoin, in that Homestuck is a time loop… of a sort.

To begin to understand this, we need to reiterate what was basically “the point” of the first post: Homestuck operates on two distinct levels, a spiritual plane consisting purely of ideas, and a “literal” physical dimension. What happens on these two planes often mirrors each other, and because Homestuck itself is a work of fiction which operates in the realm of ideas, they can even intersect. But ultimately, what “literally” happens to the characters in Homestuck is not the same as the ideas the comic is expressing in its spiritual metanarrative.

The fact that a physical time loop is impossible is something Homestuck inherits from real-life physics: to put it simply, John being born can’t be the physical John from the end of his timeline, because that John would be way too old to be a baby! But ideological time loops are not only something sanctioned by Paradox Space, but essential to its very being; they are where it gets its name, after all! To repeat another lynchpin quote from the comic: there is essentially nothing new in paradox space. Any idea that seems new necessarily must have just come from somewhere else.

> “SbaHJ has the distinction of being the symbolic language of [Dave’s] subconscious.” (Homestuck: Book 3: Act 4, p. 282)

Frequently we see this expressed in the rooms representing characters’ dreams, which, as discussed, sort of transcend the character’s physical form and represent the broad ideas that characters are made of. Dave’s dreams (pictured above) are covered with drawings of Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff, characters he seemingly invented as a child after being inspired by a drawing Terezi sent to him. But Terezi’s drawing was based on Dave’s own illustrations she saw later on in his timeline; so which of them truly “invented” Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff? Neither of them did; SBaHJ exists as pure subconscious ideological matter floating through Paradox Space, only sometimes being picked up by a character’s conscious mind. Similarly, Gamzee tries to manipulate this subconscious realm when he uses his psychic powers to place a terrifying effigy of Jack Noir in John’s dreams, as punishment for the destruction of the trolls’ session. But as we know, Jack Noir only took that form because of the nightmares this doll caused! So again; neither John or Gamzee thought up the demonic clown “first”. It existed in the realm of ideas before either of them ever had the chance to invent it.

These kinds of ideological loops are the bread-and-butter of jujus. We’re told their origins are untraceable and that they can’t be destroyed, but neither of these things is really true; these superstitions exist only to obfuscate the true rule that jujus “emerge spontaneoUsly from the void.” Rather than be erased from existence, a juju can only be banished to that same void of nonexistence where disembodied ideas live, and then pulled back into the world of dreams by a prospective psychic.

With these rules established, now we can really delve into with appreciation the ideological time loop that underpins all of Homestuck. And like all good time loops, the best place to start is at the end.

> ACT 7 (Are you tired of seeing it yet?)

Let’s not insult anyone’s intelligences here: you know and I know that Caliborn’s little house juju looks like the Homestuck logo because it is Homestuck; when he wins it from Yaldabaoth, he takes control of it, and when he sucks the heroes inside, he’s trapping them in the confines of his material world.

What’s essential to keep in mind here, though, is that the power of a juju is the power of the idea itself. It’s easiest for us to think of the word juju in Homestuck as a concrete noun, referring simply to a magical object. But the word’s real-life origins, referring more abstractly to magic or enchantment, are still relevant in this fictional framework. Lil Cal isn’t just “a juju”, but is “FILLED WITH BAD JUJU.” Magic in Homestuck has always really been about the idea that believing in something can make it real, and the purpose of all Homestuck’s dealings with chucklevoodoos and jujus is to evoke the anthropological concept of the “fetish”; an item whose power comes from human beings ascribing supernatural qualities to it. Jujus are all part of the “game” the cherubs play, with all its rules and quirks; breaking an enchantment is like breaking a rule, in that it changes nothing about the real world: you’ve just infringed upon an idea. The juju isn’t the object; the juju is the power, good or bad, ascribed to the object.

All of this is really just to say one thing: Caliborn’s home juju can’t trap the flesh versions of John and his friends; as we established, you can’t send old John back in time to become young John. But what a juju can trap is something far more important; the ideas of John and his friends. This is why it doesn’t matter if the heroes who travel back to the beginning of everything to beat Lord English while he’s still a kid are the “main” timeline versions of those heroes from some point in the future, or if the Epilogues’ version of events is truth and they’re some “irrelevant” offshoots: because all of those characters are represented by the same idea, and that’s what Caliborn puts in the box. No matter what timeline John is from, he’s from Homestuck, to Homestuck he must return, and as such Homestuck is what he must be forced to escape. Refer again back to the previous post: Caliborn can’t create or destroy, only take pure ideas and alchemise them down into a form he can control.

And that’s why Act 7 so enigmatically features two different white home-doors (above), seemingly so interconnected yet effectually unrelated. Because Act 7 takes up the hefty role of concluding two storylines simultaneously: allowing the “real”, flesh-world versions of John and his friends to escape Lord English’s reality through one door, while also concluding Homestuck’s metanarrative by setting the ideas of John and his friends free of their prison through another door.

So far, most of this is probably stuff you’d have either figured out on your own or at least heard from someone else already. And if we set aside such distractions as run-ins with radioactive imps and omnipotent dog-gods, the “whats” and “hows” of the heroes’ story are probably the easier parts of Homestuck to figure out. What’s more difficult to fully comprehend on a first pass is how Lord English himself fits into all of this.

If you’ve been following me for any stretch of time, you’ll notice in my analysis of Homestuck I’ve returned to the topic of black holes frequently. I’ve lost track of how many versions I’ve published of what I call “Black Hole Theory”. And I won’t link to any of them here, because ultimately Black Hole Theory was a corkboard to which I could pin the evidence that would eventually, piece by piece, lead us to where we are right now:

If the home juju is a white “hole” leading out of the confines of Homestuck as a story, then black holes are the doors that lead back in. An early clue to this comes in the form of Calliope’s stage in the heart of a spiral: these spirals are Calliope’s visions of black holes, which she uses as “dark pocket[s]” from which “no information can escape” - a literal description of a black hole - and that stage is the very same one Caliborn stages his story on when he takes full control of Homestuck’s narrative. The meaning here should be clear: Calliope creates black holes, and it’s the center of these black holes where stories can take place.

But for all the evidence we need to suggest that Lord English’s fall into a black hole leads to something more complex than just his destruction, we need not look further than conventional science:

## In the quantum world […] information cannot be created nor destroyed.

> Lisa Zyga, on the conservation of quantum information.

This rule that “ideas” are truly immortal, and that any time an idea seems to be destroyed it must have merely been transported somewhere else, holds true even in the scientific world of black hole physics. This has been played with in MS Paint Adventures before; theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking’s take on black holes was that some stuff could in fact escape a black hole, contrary to Calliope’s assertions, in the form of Hawking radiation. But Hussie’s own version of the story was always a lot more to the point: something gets sucked into the center of a black hole, it gets shot out somewhere else. In hypothetical physics this is called a white hole - no doubt you can see where this is going.

So Lord English’s final moments in Homestuck see him not destroyed, or killed, or defeated in combat in any traditional way, but sucked right back into Homestuck. What exactly does that mean?

> Homestuck, p. 8105

As long as we’re talking the power of ideas and symbols, possibly the most blatant a symbol can get is in the form of a gesture; and the thumbs-down is possibly one of the most ancient gestures there is. Dave gets one, Tavros gets one, and, so they say, even the Roman gladiators got them. This precedent makes the meaning of the gesture clear: “you’re going down.” And it makes sense, too, that Hussie, the “good author”, would signal the “evil author’s” demise in such a way. But some might question the effectiveness of the power of gesture at such a pivotal point in the comic. Are we really to believe that English’s defeat was, even in part, the result of another author merely willing him away like a tyrant doing away with an entertainer who has fallen out of favour? Or did the Hussie-character actually have some kind of plan to deal with his Hulk-like alter ego?

Of course he did.

> …now Caliborn has hijacked the property of his experiential continuum which he has reason to believe is called “the narrative”. Little does he know you recently made the shrewd decision to purchase(?) the ACT 6 ACT 6 SUPERCARTRIDGE EXPANSION PACK! Just plug it into any in-universe console port to unlock a variety of exciting new gameplay features and proceed through remaining canon unfettered, while Caliborn muddles through six new sub-sub-acts of infantile “subversive parody” targeting the very tale he inhabits, none the wiser!

To allow our heroes the chance escape their narrative prison, English isn’t just to be trapped in their old cell; it’s to be trapped within an infinitely-recursing cell, not just reliving one story over and over again but forced to live out infinitely many different stories. Not just a narrative loop; a narrative spiral. That’s what being sucked into the black hole means for Lord English.

When Roxy - the Hero of Void whose very symbol is that of the black hole - banishes Caliborn-as-Cal into the void, he becomes one of the very wandering ideas with which English plays like dolls. “Instances of [Doc Scratch] have spawned in countless universes”, and they have “never once failed to complete [their] objective”: whether he wants to or not, Lord English will always be born again. In a new universe, perhaps, maybe even in a different shape, but his role always the same. Caliborn thinks that by filling the supercartridge with special stardust and corrupting the story, he’s won, but looking at the bigger picture the truth is clear: he’s only playing by somebody else’s rules.

Just as Skaia uses lotus “seeds” to store items away for later use, and employs meteors as “Seeds” to send important elements back in time to set up the beginnings of new stories, so too are English’s cue ball “seeds” only a means of transporting his essence from one place to the other; the black hole and the Rapture are, after all, only Skaia and the Reckoning sized up to a truly macrocosmic scale. The cue ball is able to be a font of endless knowledge because it is the “white hole” at the other end of the black hole! No information can escape a black hole, and therefore there is no information that escapes Scratch’s attention – he is limited only by his “pockets of void”, which exist only to, in time, be filled, as more and more falls into these black holes like a multiversal game of billiards. Not only is this a transparent allusion to one of the most fundamental representations of the paradoxical time loop as a concept, but it is also the ultimate insult to injury: despite having lived an infinite number of lives, and being cursed to live out an infinite number more, Lord English cannot know what his fate will be until he literally falls into it. This is what forces him to lose, over and over again for eternity, while our heroes triumphantly escape Homestuck onto greener pastures.

2023-08-08 16:12:10 ¶ ●

does there exist any in-depth documentation of the theory that Dirk-as-Brobot intruded into Jake’s dreams via Jake’s computerised dream bed? as long as I’m comparing Dirk and Lord English’s methods of psychic manipulation it feels like the “interceding in the target’s sleep” angle is one i should be looking into

2023-08-08 16:13:41 ¶ ●

I feel that the ‘cocoons keep trolls young’ speculation was maybe missing from a post outlining the omnipresence of time loops in Homestuck but I don’t think I’ve quite managed to convince myself fully of that one yet. something to look out for on a reread

2023-08-08 16:24:04 ¶ ●

I also hope readers aren’t too disappointed by the lack of explicit references back to Gnostic text in a post titled “Homestuck’s Gnosticism”? I mostly just called it that to make it clear it was a sequel to the previous post. but it does end with a sentence about knowing stuff, which is just the English way of referring to Gnosis,

2023-08-09 7:35:43 ¶ ●

Ragey thoughts:

1. Gamzee’s role in the first half of Act 6 sneaking around the dream bubbles picking up important items is the logical next step up from plucking ideas from the void
2. Presumably taking ideas floating through the void also plays into Gamzee as a Bard, the archetype of the Hero who is “inspired” - can we elaborate outwards from that for Kurloz and Cronus somehow?
3. It occurred to me yesterday that since Caliborn’s “masterpiece” is essentially him describing the moment he confines ideas into flesh (represented by trapping the Heroes in his juju), the fact that all the figures in the story are made of clay is probably deliberately to evoke the image of creation myth. So long as we’re thinking of Rage and Hope as aspects of sealing and releasing, then, should we also be thinking of them as the Hope and Despair in the story of Pandora’s box? Hey, Jake’s favourite movie is even about a trip to the planet Pandora!

2023-08-09 11:12:58 ¶ ●

Dave and Dirk both have master craftsmen for denizens!

2023-08-11 9:05:21 ¶ ●

Lord English being unable to enter a universe without first going through a whole rigmarole of exploiting time travel to invite himself in probably has something to do with being a candy corn vampire, huh

2023-08-17 8:21:13 ¶ ●

cont. from here:

> do people really believe that when a hero goes god tier it leaves a ghost of their dead waking self wandering around the dream bubbles[?]
> if you’ve just revealed the characters we were introduced to at the start of the story have been ghosts for a dozen acts, that’s something the story actually needs to address the ramifications of […] but now that i put it into words, that’s exactly the same argument people had against The Retcon

for the first dozen or so acts, most of us probably assume that characters in Homestuck have “souls”, and that when a character dies and leaves a ghost, that’s their “soul” wandering around, disembodied. but as of commentary in Book 6, this maybe isn’t true? a ghost is a memory of someone; as per Ultimate Self, it is one interpretation of someone, just one part of a greater whole. under this schema we don’t have to worry about where a ghost “comes” from, because merely the act of observation, in that classically mysterious quantum way, allows a ghost to exist. there can be dream ghosts (like Jadesprite) and god tier ghosts (ala Remem8er) in just the same way there can be pre-retcon ghosts.

there are some analyses that need to be discarded under such an interpretation. it is no longer meaningful that we never see a single ghost of Gamzee, because Gamzee no longer needs to have “died” to have left a ghost.

meanwhile some things need to be completely rethought. if there is no “soul” - an invention of the great fanfic writer Calliope? derived from cherub folklore, and not reflective of Homestuck’s “reality”? - then what is the domain of the Heart aspect? are the twin aspects Heart and Mind both to do with interpreting? what then is the difference? does Heart deal with interpretation of the past, Mind with interpretation of the future? many opposed aspects are able to effectually “undo” each other; Light can reveal that which Void has obscured, Hope can make real the things that Rage has imagined… so by assuming that the “soul” is purely a metaphor for the idea of memory, can perhaps we take a step closer to realising this same relationship between Heart and its shadow…

2023-08-17 8:42:21 ¶ ● ⬀ ⬈

mmmmalo:

> lime-bloods:

> > cont. from here:

> > > do people really believe that when a hero goes god tier it leaves a ghost of their dead waking self wandering around the dream bubbles[?]
> > > if you’ve just revealed the characters we were introduced to at the start of the story have been ghosts for a dozen acts, that’s something the story actually needs to address the ramifications of […] but now that i put it into words, that’s exactly the same argument people had against The Retcon

> > for the first dozen or so acts, most of us probably assume that characters in Homestuck have “souls”, and that when a character dies and leaves a ghost, that’s their “soul” wandering around, disembodied. but as of commentary in Book 6, this maybe isn’t true? a ghost is a memory of someone; as per Ultimate Self, it is one interpretation of someone, just one part of a greater whole. under this schema we don’t have to worry about where a ghost “comes” from, because merely the act of observation, in that classically mysterious quantum way, allows a ghost to exist. there can be dream ghosts (like Jadesprite) and god tier ghosts (ala Remem8er) in just the same way there can be pre-retcon ghosts.

> > there are some analyses that need to be discarded under such an interpretation. it is no longer meaningful that we never see a single ghost of Gamzee, because Gamzee no longer needs to have “died” to have left a ghost.

> > meanwhile some things need to be completely rethought. if there is no “soul” - an invention of the great fanfic writer Calliope? derived from cherub folklore, and not reflective of Homestuck’s “reality”? - then what is the domain of the Heart aspect? are the twin aspects Heart and Mind both to do with interpreting? what then is the difference? does Heart deal with interpretation of the past, Mind with interpretation of the future? many opposed aspects are able to effectually “undo” each other; Light can reveal that which Void has obscured, Hope can make real the things that Rage has imagined… so by assuming that the “soul” is purely a metaphor for the idea of memory, can perhaps we take a step closer to realising this same relationship between Heart and its shadow…

> If ghosts are “memories”, does Gamzee not have any ghosts simply because he blotted out his name out of Calliope’s book? thereby erasing himself from a diegetic record of his existence… the history being a former ~ATH manual also gives the vague impression of crossing his name out of Death’s ledger

ooh, Gamzee’s role as a known psychic manipulator behind the scenes certainly crossed my mind, but this is a very compelling additional layer to that…

2023-08-17 8:46:49 ¶ ●

wonder if there’s anything to be squeezed out of the Kurloz/Meulin story re:chucklevoodoos as an avenue of omitting oneself from memory?

2023-08-20 7:06:51 ¶ ●

looking back over Hussie’s commentary on English and he really did double down on the comic book influences; he cites not just the Hulk but also the Lizard (another very Jekyll/Hyde inspired villain) and the Red Skull. so there’s no denying comics were on his mind

2023-08-20 7:13:24 ¶ ●

if Homestuck is a comic making commentary about comics, I wonder if there’s anything at all to Lord English being connected not just to real-life English colonialism, but also to the British Invasion movement in comics history..?

2023-08-21 4:37:43 ¶ ● ⬈

lime-bloods:

> cont. from here:

> > do people really believe that when a hero goes god tier it leaves a ghost of their dead waking self wandering around the dream bubbles[?]
> > if you’ve just revealed the characters we were introduced to at the start of the story have been ghosts for a dozen acts, that’s something the story actually needs to address the ramifications of […] but now that i put it into words, that’s exactly the same argument people had against The Retcon

> for the first dozen or so acts, most of us probably assume that characters in Homestuck have “souls”, and that when a character dies and leaves a ghost, that’s their “soul” wandering around, disembodied. but as of commentary in Book 6, this maybe isn’t true? a ghost is a memory of someone; as per Ultimate Self, it is one interpretation of someone, just one part of a greater whole. under this schema we don’t have to worry about where a ghost “comes” from, because merely the act of observation, in that classically mysterious quantum way, allows a ghost to exist. there can be dream ghosts (like Jadesprite) and god tier ghosts (ala Remem8er) in just the same way there can be pre-retcon ghosts.

> there are some analyses that need to be discarded under such an interpretation. it is no longer meaningful that we never see a single ghost of Gamzee, because Gamzee no longer needs to have “died” to have left a ghost.

> meanwhile some things need to be completely rethought. if there is no “soul” - an invention of the great fanfic writer Calliope? derived from cherub folklore, and not reflective of Homestuck’s “reality”? - then what is the domain of the Heart aspect? are the twin aspects Heart and Mind both to do with interpreting? what then is the difference? does Heart deal with interpretation of the past, Mind with interpretation of the future? many opposed aspects are able to effectually “undo” each other; Light can reveal that which Void has obscured, Hope can make real the things that Rage has imagined… so by assuming that the “soul” is purely a metaphor for the idea of memory, can perhaps we take a step closer to realising this same relationship between Heart and its shadow…

but nay, now i’m coming around on this again from the other side: if ghosts are memories, how can one justify two separate ghosts existing with the exact same set of memories, as Remem8er would seem to suggest happens to heroes reaching the god tiers? again the question becomes about what significance a “soul” has, if it’s just synonymous with memories. hm

2023-08-21 5:56:27 ¶ ●

in circumstances like this we might be logically expected to take the route of assuming that there is no defined soul in Homestuck and, just like in real life, we’re expected to philosophise over the meaning of the soul for ourselves. but we can’t begin to understand Dirk’s role as a prince of souls without this basic foundation…

the main clue would seem to be in Dirk’s enthusiasm for Plato, who had a very clear idea of what the soul was; but Plato’s soul was the invincible idea, which in Homestuck is called the ultimate self. and Book 6 has already given us that clue that in the dream bubbles, “memory of someone [is] linked to the truth of that person’s existence”. so we come back around to soul-as-memory.

2023-08-21 6:18:53 ¶ ● ⬈

lime-bloods:

> in circumstances like this we might be logically expected to take the route of assuming that there is no defined soul in Homestuck and, just like in real life, we’re expected to philosophise over the meaning of the soul for ourselves. but we can’t begin to understand Dirk’s role as a prince of souls without this basic foundation…

> the main clue would seem to be in Dirk’s enthusiasm for Plato, who had a very clear idea of what the soul was; but Plato’s soul was the invincible idea, which in Homestuck is called the ultimate self. and Book 6 has already given us that clue that in the dream bubbles, “memory of someone [is] linked to the truth of that person’s existence”. so we come back around to soul-as-memory.

i’m sort of overlooking forest for trees here: the very name of the event, Remem8er, is screaming at us that memory holds significance here. so why should it also be revealed in that same animation that memories are meaningless - that just because you have the memories of an event, doesn’t mean it “happened to you”?

and this is a flash about Terezi, whose very “deal” is her ability to see how perception shapes reality rather than the other way around. can we take the collapsing Mind neuron at the end of the animation as indication that events depicted are perhaps not exactly as they seem, at least in the alpha timeline?

2023-08-21 7:44:05 ¶ ●

maybe this is just me trying to justify my position in my own mind, but I can’t help but think that if every death must necessarily create a ghost, then so too should a new ghost be created every time someone goes to sleep, since these are treated as similar in essentially every effect?

2023-08-21 9:19:26 ¶ ●

wait. the quest bed ghosts appear in the flash called REMEMBER because those are experiences the main characters did have in their “current lives” but don’t remember.

CRISIS OVER!!!