Swords, Sorcery, and Socialism - The Tombs of Atuan

Episode Date: September 25, 2022

The 2nd of the Earthsea Cycle by Ursula K. Le Guin. This is a wonderful story about a young woman learning how to cope with systems of oppression, hope, and how to free yourself. Please read this book if you haven't.patreon.com/swordsandsocialismFollow the show @SwordsNSocPodEmail us at [e-mail]: @Himbo_AnarchistKetho: @StupidPuma69 patreon.com/swordsandsocialismEmail: [e-mail] The Show: @SwordsNSocPodAsha: @Herbo_AnarchistKetho: @MusicalPuma69

Music Hello everyone and welcome back to Sword Sorcery in Socialism. Podcasts by the politics and themes of hiding in a genre fiction. As always I'm Darius with News Macau, as Ketho as a Go and Ketho. Nowty. Today we're talking about one of my favorite books of all time. We're talking about the tombs of Atoan. By Rislike Le Guin.

That title is already bumping. That's a great title. Your tombs of Atoan, it's great. The tombs of Atoan. Like great. The tombs of Atuan. Like, it gives you like a sense of sort of whatever called the mythological, you know, like it gives you taste to what you're in for. It's a little, yeah, it's a little spooky.

It's, I'm saying it's one of the more spooky books. She, in like her whole sort of catalog, like, so far what I've read at least. I mean, between these and like, you you know because you've read all of them or most a lot of them from the heinous cycle or whatever. This is definitely the one that has the most what I want to call it like oppressive darkness. Oh yeah I mean that's like to the setting of this point. It's inherent to the setting but like this is the only setting that she does that feels this like there's lots of danger and darkness and other books, but this one is very specifically like the tone of the entire book. Oh, yeah, is oppressive, which obviously is intentional and works wonderfully for the story she's telling.

she's telling. I read this book first when I was very young, like a young teen or something, in keeping with what seems to be a theme for me, I actually read this one before Wizard of Oversey, so I read the second book before the first one, and I loved it and then I went back and realized it was a series, which is again the same, I've had this with another book series, and also the relationship I had with the Nets the Older Public Games where I played the second one first. I realized there was a first one. Obviously very similar to Wizard of Earthsea, but it also to me sort of stands definitely stands on its own compared to Wizard. And I want to call it like the scope and it, I want to call it like the scope of the message is different in this one. Like the wizard we talked about a lot for anyone that was around that early when we did that first

first one was more like the, was the lesson of Ged, Sparrow Hawk, essentially learning how to not be shitty. Yeah, I mean, in simple terms, yeah. It was like, of course. Learn how to not do, like learn when to not act. Yeah, that's the fundamental lesson of that book is do by not do, Allah, lesson of that book is do by not do all uh uh the Dow Day Jing. The Dow Day Jing like consider the consequences of your actions and when you're unsure what you should do you probably shouldn't do anything because you can't if you can't you know try to foresee the outcomes of all the actions you could have. This book focuses a lot more on

what I will um institutions of power authority and how this gets way media into the wins like personal political beliefs. This is very much like more of a like a political polemic than wizard. Wizards like a life polemic. Yes, wizard is much like here's how to be a good person. This one is like, here's what government does to you. Here's what the system is. It's oppressive. It's a big, big block.

You got a free yourself free yourself. I mean,ressive. It's a big, big block. You got to free yourself. Free yourself. I mean, yeah, more or less, this whole story, this is the story of a young woman who from childhood is indoctrinated into a system of oppression. And then we get to follow her and I, how she learns to deal with it or not deal with it until an opportunity arises for her to realize that she doesn't that this isn't the way things have to be. And then it's just, you know, the drama is can she and, you know, her new friend Ged, can they together actually break themselves free from this power structure, from this system of slavery and oppression? From this literal, powerful structure? Quite literally. This book is like, you don't have to think about it that long to see

what things represent. You know what I mean? From like within the novel. She writes a thing and you're like, oh, okay, that represents the state. It's like, oh, shit. Oh, man, that's just represents top down hierarchical institutions. Wow. It's not that subtle, but like I don't want to be dismissive of it at all. This book is fantastic. I love this book to death. It is so well written. This is, this to me, much more than Wizards is like a great example of her writing, kind of at its best in that it's descriptive, but only as much as it needs to be. She's a short story author wearing a novelist's coat.

Yes. She is a short story writer that writes them just long enough for you to call them novels. But say this book is only like, if you don't take a look at the afterward or any of that it's by the way, which by the way, a listener, I didn't know the book had an afterward because the version of the book I have is from like 10 years before she wrote the afterward. Oh yeah, but to say, I've so I've got the copy from 2020 which has her 2012 afterward in it. I have I have a physical copy back from when I still knew how to read And it was printed in 2001. The audiobook for this is like just over four hours long. Yeah, it's not. It's nothing. Nothing. I actually, if anyone was, if anyone was particularly interested, there's a, there's a particular internet archive of sorts, you know, it's a big site with

many of things on it that you could call it the library of kinds. many of things on it that you could call it the library of kinds that you can borrow it for an hour at a time. I don't think you need to be that subtle on this podcast. Oh, that's right. That's right. Everybody knows what the archive is. So archive. Everybody.

No, that are going to go there. You can read it. No, this book. Again, this is... That's how can read it. No, this book, again, this is... That's how I read it. When I left my copy in my car over night one day, and was like, oh, I want to finish this.

So I pulled it up and read the last third of the book. So jumping back, I think this is a particularly good example of the Gr's writing style. You get an amazing feel for, I get a word that I think, I'm probably overused now because it works so well, the word vibe. You get the vibe of the place without her having, really having to tell you that much about it.

Her descriptions are as bare bones and like dark as the place she's describing. Yeah, they're bleak descriptions for a bleak setting. Uh-huh. You're sitting in the middle of this dry-ass, dusty desert, the nearest water at the walk all the way down the freaking hill for like the fact that she calls the the temple complex simply the place because there are no other places you could go yeah it is the only place it starts of like those fantasy stories where they're like oh that's the hill why cuz That's the only one. And it really is just like,

even the tombs themselves being these massive, like 20 foot tall black stones, black stones just sticking out of the ground and like haphazard sizes at angles. And you're like, oh God, that's like actually, it's like teeth like black teeth but like crooked black teeth or she doesn't even describe it that way but you get it doesn't like I think she calls them like fingers like dark fingers reaching up from the earth out of like a grave like the the throne room you know how it's like it's duck it's full of dust

and cobwebs and animal droppings and shadows and silence. That's something that you definitely get across strongly that is a place of not quiet, it's not quiet, it's silent, which is an entirely different thing to me. It's isn't the place we go to to peacefully reflect. This is a place of oppressive silence. Yeah, it is it is deathly quiet. Um, I guess, you know, for the brief synopsis, we follow the will essentially the story of a girl named Tanar, otherwise known for large part of the books as Arha. named Tanar, otherwise known for a large part of the book says Arha. She's taken from her family at like five or six. She gets indoctrinated into the sort of the cult of the nameless ones, the gods, the sort of the gods of darkness and evil and silence. She becomes their high priestess through this system of... They have essentially the same system but like the Dalai Lama has, I think.

I mean it's vaguely similar but like... We're like the day the old priest at the old high priestess dies. they mark the date and the time and then they send their people out across the land to find a girl that was born on that date and roughly that time, it has the right personality, then bring her back and she becomes the new one who's the same as the old one, the eaten one, the one whose you know life is dedicated to the nameless ones. She then you know goes through her training. You meet some of the other high priestesses who suck, specifically Castle.

The other ones, whatever. Fine, Castle, the high priestess of the God King. Castle is, I guess, the antagonist of this book, aside from the nameless ones themselves, we're honestly more of like an environmental hazard than like direct antagonists. There are also traps you've ever triggered in a D&D session.

Right. Castle is sort of your antagonist here because I mean, we can get into her. She's one that you learn after a while, doesn't actually believe in any of the gods, what she worships is power. And pretty directly. Pretty directly, I think they said directly,

she worships power. So she only does the rituals out of the necessity for them to be done because that's how she maintains power. Well, it is pretty much how everyone at that actual level of hierarchical government absolutely thinks about it. So anyone in that level of power or position objectively pretty much just thinks about it that way. You don't have to think about it that hard to see what Liguin is talking about here. You know, you get up at that top level of, you know, the hierarchy, you get some

believers, but you also attract people like Castle, who are there because that's where the power is. And the ceremony is simply ceremony. There's no power to it at all. Even like to the point where the characters think that it's quite possible, if not absolutely just what's going to happen. Castle would be looking for a way to get rid of Tainar.

entirely. So entirely remove the old hierarchy that Tainar represents. Just to get rid of the pomp and circumstance so she could just openly be in charge. In charge. Instead of being ceremonially second in charge. Yeah. Um, you know, Tainar eventually gets the opportunity for to sort of liberate herself from this oppression via the appearance of Sparrowhawk or Ged from our hero from Wizard of Earthsea. Ged has come to

find the other half of the Ring of Earth, Akbar, which is in the labyrinth of her realm somewhere. which is in the labyrinth of her realm somewhere. She traps him in there and it totally within her power to murder him or have him die. Oh yeah, she could just seal him in and just never even think about him again. And in fact, it's given many opportunities to let him to have him killed. But the point is she chooses not to and through the act of choosing not to and to keep him alive, she essentially presents herself with an opportunity to free, to become free of her slavery. Yeah. And then she and Ged have to do it together because Ged can't escape the labyrinth without

her and she can't escape the power structure without him. Like she could get out of the tomb, the physical tomb, Ged cannot, but Ged has already escaped sort of, you know, the mental elaborance, which Tadar cannot on her own. They need each other in order to accomplish this like act of liberation. Yeah. In her afterward, Ligwin refers to this as a distinction between the two kinds of power, one being power over and the other being the power too. And I'll just give you guys a little bit. The power, there's power over,

ruled dominion supremacy, mastery of slaves, authority over others, and there's power to strength, gift, skill, art, the mastery of a craft, the authority of knowledge. She mentioned to her, Ged was offered both kinds of power, Tainar was offered only one, and that she was offered only power over, not power too. So she was essentially in the, in the instance of her being born and then being raised as this priestess. She was told and given at least in a ceremonial sense, power over others, power over the slaves that the compound, power over the other priestesses, technically in a roundabout way in quotation marks, power over the God king. And more directly power over the temple complex itself, the undertume and the labyrinth.

Yes. But she was never given the power to do anything. She was never given the power to exercise any degree of will. Yeah, will or she has no agency agency. That's the word I was looking for. So no decisions on her own that because she was essentially trained to think about the nameless ones first. And to think about their decisions, so any decision she made were really just the decisions she thought they expected, which in reality were just the decisions that other people told her to make. In this story, it is essentially anytime we talk about the nameless ones, the nameless

ones are like a direct stand-in for, you know, name your system of authority and oppression. You know, be it, be it the state, be it, you know, a church or, you know, whatever. Be it, that's be it, like, even more abstract. Like, they're simply, they are, they are in the, in and of themselves, a system of control. Yeah, it's like, I would, I would say they're almost more apt for the sort of, the sort of power and control exerted simply by social ideas in a way, the things like racism, you know, misogyny, homophobia, those sorts of things.

It's social, it's social power. Social, it's socially constructed, It's social, it's socially constructed, like systems of control, patriarchy. Yes, definitely. Like, anything like that, then listen to those categories, which you can honestly use patriarchy's a blanket term because it covers like 95% of everything. But the nameless ones represent these things. And like you said, she's been raised from beginning to make decisions that she thinks would please

the nameless ones, the patriarchy. But in the end, what she is simply doing is doing what has been taught to her to make the other people around her happy and remaining powerful. It's like you're the patriarchy by doing the things you think the patriarchy wants you to do. It's very much a you will get the ceremonial power of yada yada yada as long as you, you know, continue to serve this extremely abstract thought

process really more than you can. You can see this directly in the cart real world now with, I think a lot of the more conservative white women generally. And how like a lot of times conservative like white women end up reinforcing the patriarchy against other women and against, you know, minorities, you can see it directly in the movement of turf ism. I was about to say that. That's what that's's what TERFs are. TERFs are TENAR. They think that, you know, through the position

they've given, which is one of, for a lot of them, relative wealth, you know, relative autonomy, compared to a number of other people in society, that they think the way to survive and to thrive is to reinforce these systems. And so you, but even even like totally almost antithetical to their own well being. Yeah, where

they, they've chosen to, you know, focus on, uh, don't even, can't even get started on that. Yeah, but I think that's a good cypher for it. It's a good side for for this. It is a good one. Because they are the, they're ones that have been indoctrinated into the system of patriarchy and oppression. Almost even almost even in like a reverse way where you end up in this position where instead of because because termism in a lot of ways almost inverted where it's like a lot of, because, because Turfism in a lot of ways almost inverted

where it's like a lot of, it's a lot of like your hyperpolitical, like political lesbianism and things like that where it's like, I'm a lesbian not because I love women but because I hate men. And like the mindset of men inherently being predatory and dangerous, but they're believed by being men. But in that way, they are still,

whether they know it or not, are still reinforcing, but they're actually, I know. But that's exactly what's happening because they're refusing to acknowledge that the bad things about men, and even the concept of men and women are socially constructed things.

And it's like defiant, like blanket calling all men a threat. Simultaneously is really dangerous because you start excluding whole groups of people that are also oppressed, and it refuses to acknowledge the role that patriarchy plays in making men the way they are. But it also absolves men of responsibility. Exactly. And you see, you see, Tenaar making these types of decisions. Obviously, the big one she makes, the one that, you know, she gets haunted with, is her decision to let the prisoners die. Yeah. You can tell from the writing that she doesn't want to do it. She doesn't want

to kill them. She's like, she is the knife at her hip like she could have done it herself. But she was looking for a way to like distance herself from it as well. She was looking for a way to push that responsibility onto something else. She asked her first if the slaves would cut their heads off. Yeah, and then the castles like now, these are your prisoners, do your own shit. Yeah, and she was like, okay, we'll just seal them in here.

Yeah, and then, but what she does is, this is I think telling you, she kills them in a way where she feels like she personally did not kill them. She thinks the nameless ones killed them this way. Even though she consciously knows that they starve to death or died of dehydration, in her own mind she justifies it as the deaths of these men, they were killed by the nameless ones. Her gods killed them, not her. She didn't do it.

She was only doing what she was supposed to do. But you can see that even at the start, she doesn't want to do it. And you're given hints that this is her personality, like from the beginning, like every time you see her doing anything, you can tell that she really doesn't want to be doing any of the things she's doing. And the whole book is her struggling with this idea that she knows what is expected of her and she doesn't feel like any of it is natural or any of it's a thing that she

wants. She doesn't necessarily put a word to it until the conversation with her friend that exposes her, yeah, with Depente that exposes her to alternative worldviews for the first time. Yeah, within the, within the bound to the reading, it's more accurately being exposed to the idea that you can question the power structures in your life. Yeah. The powers above you are always worth unquestionably being followed.

And it in a way it explores part of what makes Tainar in a position that's so difficult to escape. It's like the reason that her friend does not have the same hyper devotion that's been instilled in Tainar or doesn't feel the need to fake that a much hyper devotion. Yeah, is mostly just because she spent longer with her parents and her home and also like remembers life outside it. Yeah, you know, it's like she knew about life outside of it and was given up because her parents couldn't feed another mouth.

And she was like, well, if I could choose to do something else, like I would just do it. She's like, I don't want to do this the rest of my life. And that thought had never, because Tinar had been indoctrinated into the system so young, it never occurred to her that somebody could not want to do what they're doing or what they've been made to do. And so Pente is like, 100%. I'd go, she's like, I'd go be like a fisherman's wife. Yeah, I'd just go. I'd go be do anything else than this.

And Tinar was like, what do you mean? And she's like, no, why not? This sucks. I would want 100% rather do anything else than this. And then I was like, what do you mean? And she's like, no, why not? This sucks. I would want 100% rather do anything else. And then, and then the spite the fact that she's a that her friend is specifically a priest priestess of the God King, the God King. She expresses this idea that the God King seems so much more divine when he's dead. Yeah, it's very much like she's like once you meet him, you realize he's just like an overweight balding middle aged man. And there's no like divinity to him at all. And it's way easier to worship him as a divine being

once he's fucking dead. Yeah, once he's dead, I feel less weird about it. Because it's pretty weird to worship a guy who again, who just looks like every guy in town, you knew growing up. Yeah, it just looks like a dude. Which again speaks to the importance of a government system like this,

sort of the deification and the myth making. And the district. And the district. Like you have to keep the men and arms like, because if you're like the priestesses and you finally get to see them firsthand and interact with them firsthand, you go, oh, he's not a god, he's just a dude.

This was something that was done, especially in the later stages of pagan Rome, was emperors began to separate themselves entirely from ever being seen by the public. Because they always tried to deify a bunch of emperors after they died, the cult of the emperor, yada yada. But again, the only people that could ever see them as people with their closest advisors, like if you were just some fucking noble from,

you know, Galicia or whatever that wanted to come and petition the emperor, you didn't get to see him because that removes the myth. It removes the divinity that they wish you to feel upon him, which is an important part of, you know, maintaining the power structure. Yeah, because, you know, as soon as people realize, oh, he's just a guy, it's just a guy. Everyone's like, why him though? Yeah, why him though? Can he just not do that though? him though. Yeah. Why him though? Can he just not do that though? He's a guy. It's just again, it's just some like over it's just some Pudgy Middle-Age Balding guy. Uh-huh. Like

who again to be clear are most of the people that run most of the power structures we exist under right now. Yep. Balding old, not even middle- aged at this point. Most of our geography is just old It's like old balding dudes just 78 year old old dudes because thanks citizens United, I guess Yeah, and her history of the Cargill land and specifically You know, a to on is one of Is it specifically a how power and that mythologizing occur in governments. So in her little history that you learn throughout the story, you learn that the the cargo lands used to be a bunch of small petty kings,

feuding lords, chief tins, that sort of thing who all used to come to the priestess to get their disputes resolved from time to time, when the priestess of the tombs had more temporal authority. And then you started to get these guys who were like high priests of a certain temple or whatever, who I assume had some magic at the time anyway. And that's when Arithaq Bey, the wizard hero, came from the inner lands and came out here and was defeated by this priest, this high priest. And this priest, through the single act, then immediately he and his descendants embarked upon a project of myth-making. Not

it's true that he did defeat Arithoc Bay in battle, but what they then did was they leveraged that mythology into making themselves priest kings, which who then amassed more power and subjugated more lords, and then eventually they subjugated enough of the lands that they they crown themselves God emperors, you know, where they are, they themselves are divinity no longer priests of the divine of the the twin gods I think they are within this book, the twin gods, they themselves are now divine, which again it's this very clear message of like this is how power is accumulated and centralized within. And she, you know, shows it really well without telling us until later with just the age of the

temples. Like she's like, okay, so starting at the bottom you have the newest temple. I mean, she doesn't say it like this. Obviously she describes it. But it's like it's the God King's temple is the newest It also gets the most attention It gets the most Gifts against the most tribute. It's got a big shiny golden roof and Then up there on the hill Tainar's temple is in between you have the temple of the twin gods Who are the you know the twin the twin gods who's, it's a pretty good shape. Pretty well taken

care of. And then there's the nameless one's temple. What a way up on the top of the hill. That is falling apart. Falling the fuck apart. Um, so oopsies. However, it's where I want to get to something though, because even though we've been talking about the fact that, you know, like the power of the god-kingness, other stuff is clearly just constructed both socially and politically. Because obviously the God-king himself does have a lot of temporal political power. He's got the guys with swords. Yes. So it's who we actually encountered in wizards because the opening, Geds Island, the God in the opening chapter of wizards, a wizard when Geds Island of God gets invaded by like Raiders in like their red plume hats and such,

and they're, you know, that come raiding up the coast that Geds like distracts with fog. Is the red plume thing supposed to be like a Roman thing? Like a Greek thing? Like a Greek thing? I don't, maybe. I was pictured a little bit more feathery than that in my own mind.

You know, more like a red feathery plume, more than like the little like... Like my walk. In my walk. In my walk, my walk. That's just me. Maybe it's supposed to be. I was pictured in a bit more like, you know,

to mean more like a like a big like red sort of feathery type. Yeah. Like if like if you had a bunch of peacock feathers, there's something that we're right. I don't know. That's just how I pictured it. I don't remember. Plumage. I'd have to go back and read it again. But those Raiders that came to God were from, were, were Cargill, Cargill, like Emperor's Slavers, that's who they were. But what I was getting at is, so we've been talking about how she essentially deconstructs the idea that this power comes from anything, aside from comes from anything aside from the point of a sword and cultural pressure. But you learn later, the nameless ones, these oldest ones, the ones that are essentially relegated to this position of theoretical, like they're theoretically the top of the power pyramid among the gods. As the priestess is theoretically the top of the power pyramid among the gods.

As the priestess is theoretically the top of the pyramid upon the priestesses. They're theoretically up top, though no one really respects them anymore, aside from like a bit of tradition. You do learn, they do actually fucking exist though. Yeah, they're the only ones that that we have concrete evidence of being not divine, but actually exist. The nameless ones do exist. They are not a construct as like the God Emperor's divinity is. And that's, it seems like it, it would seem like a contradiction at first, but I don't think it really is because the nameless ones, as we said, represent a thing that really

does exist. And I would say, and I would say honestly, like the actions of something like the God King, that kind of reflects the purview of the nameless ones anyways. So it's like, if we're discussing the nameless ones as being an entity representing hierarchical oppression and if we even go off patriarchy here, like that's still at play in all of the rest of this kingdom here It's like it so in a way the nameless ones still are kind of supreme here in that their methods are

What permeates the whole of the cargade lands period? Yes, so even though people do not Only theoretically acknowledge their supremacy, their influence is everywhere. It's so weird. It's like, you can see that directly in the personage of God King, worshiping the God King. She's also the one that only worships naked power. But you see at the end that her mind has actually been dominated by the nameless ones for

a long time, and that she has been in the tomb, she's been in the undertune, she's been in the labyrinth. In a way, it's partly her complete lack of acknowledgement of them. Like, her complete lack of superstition and her worship of power, like, in a way, leads her to do things that piss off the nameless ones, like going down there with a light. Her lack of acknowledgement of the patriarchy leads her to reinforcing it in some ways, but also angering it in other ways by not necessarily playing along with the rules.

She's playing Pick Me. Yeah, she is. Like, and then it's surprised that the leopards eat her face. Castle, without, I think without really knowing it is playing pick me. And they do. Well, in essence, especially when you're considering Earth's seas, especially at this point in its writing, Earth's seas position on women. Not, not great. Not great. It makes sense in a way for things like for someone like castle to think, yes, I will gain power to escape this like essentially, societally imposed weakness. society imposed weakness. Yeah.

It's like helpless. Like society, society compelled helplessness almost and that her solution would be to gain power within that system. But in a way, this is LaGuins saying that's not how you do that. It's LaGuins saying that you can't escape the oppression of the patriarchy within, with by working within the patriarchy. It's definitely not a thing you can do. That's what we eat you in the end.

Yeah, that, that, that we just, ladies and gentlemen, we just thought of that right now. You believe it or not, a lot of the things we talk about, we didn't come up with an advance. We'll do some, we'll do some light discussion beforehand, but that one was out the blue. I really think of Castle essentially as the pick me that attempts to use the system, to play the system to her own advantage, in the end is eaten by it. Yeah. And the people that escape it are those that make the conscious choice to reject

Rejected to just reject it and get the hell out the maze just get out the fucking maze essentially Yeah, to leave it are the people that Escape I think this acknowledgement that the the nameless ones exist is also sort of a weird turning point for Tanara because she talks to her friend and is like, oh, maybe they don't have to worship them, maybe they don't exist. They've never actually helped me.

And I'm supposed to serve them. So maybe they don't help you because they're not capable of helping anything. Yes. And that's, you know, that's what she gets at here is, she's like, well, they've never helped me, so they're not must not be real. And she's talking to Ged and Ged is like, oh, no, no, no, no. The fucking real, they are just incapable of ever helping you. They can only harm you.

That's all they exist to do. And it's her sort of, I I guess relearning that they are real But that you can still reject them while acknowledging their existence is sort of like the turning point for her Taking the steps to leave Yeah, because he because he mentions he's like they should be acknowledged they should be you know understood as existing and being there, but under no circumstances, should it be worshipped? Yeah, so I actually wanted to read that section because I just really like it.

Yeah, that's all you read. I want to read it to you, so too bad. It's a paragraph here, maybe just a little more than a paragraph. This also speaks to me more than one way for the reasons we'll get into afterwards. Ged says, did you truly think them dead, you know better in your heart, they do not die.

They are immortal, but they are not gods. They never were. Then she looks up at him and he says, what have they ever given you, Tinar? Nothing, she whispered. They have nothing to give. They have no power of making. All their power is to darken and destroy. They cannot leave this place. They are this place. And it should be left to them.

They should not be denied nor forgotten, but neither should they be this place. And it should and it should be left to them. They should not be denied nor forgotten, but neither should they be worshipped. The earth is beautiful and bright and kindly, but that is not all. The earth is also terrible and dark and cruel. The rabbit shrieks in the green meadow, or shrieks dying in the green meadow. The mountains clench their great hands full of hidden fire. There are sharks in the sea sea and there's cruelty in men's eyes, and where men worship these things and abace themselves before them, their evil breeds, their places are made in the world where darkness gathers. Place is given over holy to the ones who we call nameless.

The ancient and holy powers of the earth before the light, the powers of dark, of the earth before the light, the powers of dark of ruin of madness. And then he finishes, there's a little bit more where he talks about castle. And then he finishes with, they exist, but they are not your masters. They never were. You are free to know, but you have broken free. Hmm. I've got a lot of the kids writing so much. He's so good. Uh, I'm so good. So that's what we're talking about here.

You have to acknowledge, I'm just going to keep saying patriarchy, because it's a really easy stand in for any of these types of systems. You can substitute one. It's like, you can substitute racism. You can substitute, you know, whatever of these systems is more, you know, you can substitute racism, you can substitute, you know, whatever of these systems is most pertinent to what you're thinking about at the time. But you can't say the patriarchy isn't real because it's never helped me, well, because it can't help you if you're a woman, it's not going to. Period. And even if you're, and even if you're a man, it might not help you.

It doesn't help you. Like help you. It's in essence, you know, yeah, it does give men a social and political and positional leg up over women in society. But at the end of the day, it's still severely harms all men. And so the step first step of liberation is acknowledging that it exists. Patriarchy is real. It's there, but it can't give you anything. And that it is also a thing that like, as he points out, is everywhere. It's not like, you know, the nameless ones exist,

and they exist the strongest where people give them power, where people worship this, or, you know, people subscribe to this system, however you want to phrase it. That is where it's the strongest. And the most you can do is acknowledge it, recognize it for what it is, and leave it, and leave it behind. You have to be taught to obey this system, but you have the choice to walk out of it. Yeah, yeah, he points out, you know, like, Tano, you were born not like you were not born a slave. And, you know, even though you were taken at an early age, you still, like, you still had to learn to be one. Now, of course, this isn't like, you know, this isn't putting blame or responsibility

for one's position on the individual. No. I mean, Tadar didn't choose to be the high priestess. Yeah. The system put her and and she didn't and she didn't you know escape it by you know pulling herself up from her bootstraps or something she escaped it through solidarity solidarity and kindness yeah she she escaped it with the help of someone else. Because it is not possible for you to escape it by yourself.

It's simply, it's, well, first of all, it's way too insidious to escape solo, but it's also just not like just feasible at all. Like if you're, if you you're gonna escape from the system, this system is what keeps this place running in a sense. And as you can say, keeps the roof up. Yeah, it keeps the roof up even if it's terrible. And it's like, so can you really escape it by yourself?

It's like what's gonna happen? You're just going to get destroyed by it. Do they be crushed or alone in the desert. So it's like, people gotta help people, you know? Mutual aid, perhaps. Perhaps, I'll be a word for it. I got the relationship between Tainar and Ged towards the end of this story is just a mutual aid

relationship in its finest, where he's like, listen, okay, you started the process, they're all gonna kill you. The world, that's all gonna collapse. We can get out of this together because I need you to get me the hell out of here because I don't know where I'm going. And you need me to get the hell out of here, because if I'm not here, the roof's gonna collapse.

So let's go. Let's get, he's like, either we die together right here, or we try to escape together. Those are our options. And you know, she has multiple sort of crises of confidence along the way, out from under the labyrinth where like, pressure gets to her, she thinks she forgets which way to go, she tries to give up multiple times. The idea is that the pressure of escaping such a system is so overwhelming that you can't

be expected to shoulder that burden by yourself. It also implies later in the chapters when her and Ged do manage to escape spoilers. Oh my God, I'm joke, I'm Gavin. But they do manage to escape and they go into the mountains and all this other stuff. But the moment where get asked, Tainar, essentially about what's eating her up, essentially what terrible thing did you do, Tainar?

It's in our hips, referencing. She's like, oh, my soul's forfeit, I'm forfeit, I've done such horrible things. I can never be forgiven. I can never achieve forgiveness. And that's part of the thing that almost traps her in the labyrinth. And then almost traps her in the mountains

and then almost traps her on the land and almost gets her to try and ask him to leave her on a fucking island in the middle of the ocean. She does it like four times. But like the one that's most immediate to her life is towards the end of the escape from the tunnels. When she like, they're honestly about to exit. And she's like, no, no, no, you just go on. Like, I can't I I don't deserve it and I Feel like there's there's something there

about the actions that you are coerced into taking By that system weighing a Lot of guilt upon you and then that guilt essentially being thrown back at you whenever you try to escape it. Yeah, how dare you leave you participated? Yeah. There's, you know, it's not clear cut. There's a there's a question here about redemption and, you know, at what point someone who took part in the system should be accepted as having escaped and bettered themselves outside of that system. And I mean, I think, I mean, I think, when, clearly, I would say argues, but I mean,

just displays in the novel, like, Castle doesn't get forgiveness. Oh, yeah. She dies. She's crushed. She's crushed by the fricking. By the two collapsing. Yeah. I would think that, Laguin would argue that Castle had long ago abandoned a path which would ever

give her a chance at redemption. Yeah. And that Tinar had not had not closed yourself off from that path of redemption, which also is not that really that wildly different from a lesson you can take from my other problematic faith, the professor, because that's like a key theme of Middle Earth. Is that everyone essentially has a shot at least gets one chance to redeem themselves, and it's whether they take it or not, that matters.

Oh, yeah. It's a big thing in Tolkien as well, is that most people, pretty much everybody gets a chance and it's whether they take or not that matters. That's why like, you know, Boramir gets to die hero and why golem's a slimy piece of shit. There's also something here, even if it's, and again, these are lesser explored ideas than the core idea of the novel. But the idea of information kind of being dangerous, it's like inherent in here to these sorts of systems, like these groups hate, like they've been kind of trained to hate sorcerers and all these

other things. And reading, they don't even read or write. Reading and writing is wrong. And then the only. It's a black art. And you know, I think Ged is emblematic of why, because Ged comes from a place where this sort of thing isn't the norm, and he's willing, capable, and able to say to, just say to you, hey, how you're doing things is really bad, actually. And you should be confident that what you're doing is not great. If you consider that maybe the thing you're doing right now is wrong. He's essentially to me like an amplified version of what her friend gets says to her,

like gives her earlier in the novel. Yeah, and it's just almost by like further removing yourself from the position where it's like She like her friend is more removed from the priestesses in the in the situation than Tainar because she wasn't taken as a baby and Brahmash into being like the sole continuation of this reincarnated thousand-year-old priestess The step back from that is she's just a normal girl

who got sent there because her parents couldn't feed her anymore. So now she's like a priestess and would rather not be there because she remembers life outside it. And then this big leap, but the next step beyond being Ged coming from a place really far away with a completely different mindset and a completely different worldview. Um, and, you know, I think especially this should be currently relevant with, um, is is the same sort of vitriolic nonsense that comes out of conservative pundits nowadays on grooming and shit.

It's like, this is the sort of thing they're actually afraid of, is what Ged helps, Tainard, like if we were gonna write this in modern language, it's like someone would accuse Ged of grooming Tainar into escaping the system. Right. Especially because Tainar is a teenager.

Yeah, I feel like, I don't, I'd have to double check, but I feel like by the time Ged comes and rescues her, she's like, I don't I'd have to double check, but I feel like by the time Ged comes and rescues her. She's like, I don't know, 18 or I think I think she's a late teen. I don't know. Might be early 20s. I don't remember. I'd have to double check. Um, cause there are like a number of time jumps. Yeah, I'd about say it's it's really unclear. Um, the last definitive age we get for her is 15, but I do know that we skip ahead from there. She doesn't start getting the secrets until she's like a woman and stuff like that. That's when she starts going into the under-tum and I'd have to double check.

But the fact that she's young is kind of important, because, you know, the others don't have the chance to escape because a lot of them, like in the case of what's her name, the antagonist in quotation marks, Castle, have been in the system so long that they like they said, the nameless ones kind of claimed her soul a long time ago. It's like a Tainar being young is important because she said less time to be indoctrinated, to be a person to have her and has a much greater chance of getting the hell out before it's too late. It makes the power of like of youth and you know avoiding those years and years of being beaten down and indoctrinated and had their propaganda, you know, slip into your mind. Falling into that idea of anarchism being a young people's idea. I mean, kind of.

Just quite all the original theorists being like, well, of the anarcho-communist variety, I suppose, anarchism has been around a long, fucking time. The European anarcho-communist tended to be a bit old, but so yeah, the, the OG, you know, Kropakim was bearded. I think it was in his 30s, though. I think Kropakim was born with that full form. The beard. That's just a Russian thing. I wouldn't understand. Yeah, it's definitely more like she's young and has the chance to build that. And even get learned this sort of thing when very young as a team. And a lot of people in the inner land and the interreach is actually in the inner lands. Yeah. They there is a ton of

hierarchical. Let me talk about that in the original Earthsees series. But like I mean, there is just like, you know, chieftains and kings and princes and stuff. Yeah, but it's not, it's not quite as cargish. No, they're not, they're not like, they're not just like enslaving people and doing human sacrifice. And in a lot of ways, I feel like it's, that's, that's Ligwin drawing on fantasy tropes. Yeah, as like a benchmark that she has to do,

as opposed to, because this is still before she really, really explored beyond that possibility. This is before she wrote the dispossessed. This came out one year after one or two years after the left-hand of darkness. So this would have come out and then the next book she would have come out. It would have been the dispossessed. So you can see at this point she was definitely like getting on to her what we know her for now.

This is really funny. It is really funny. But her three book run is left hand of darkness, the tunes of Atoon and the dispossessed. That is clearly her like, was it laying out her shit? Like, let me just make sure, but if that's true, then that's definitely like her laying out her shit. But this is, it's, it's notable that the politics, the personal politics are a lot more noticeable in this book than in Earthsea. I mean, not Earth, than in Wizard. Yeah, definitely.

And it's because like, I think it's because like starting with the left hand of darkness, this is when she starts to investigate her personal politics more openly in her literature. The left-handed darkness comes out, note that the ones who walk away from Obaloss comes out in 73. The dispossessed comes out in 74. So the ones who walk away from Obvalos came out like two years after tombs because tombs came out and so it's like her most deeply political work comes out in let's look I wish this was an order. This isn't an order for some reason, but left hand, and then you have tombs, then you have

the word for world as forest, then you have the furthest shore, and then you get into the dispossessed and the ones who walk away from Omanloss and like out of those, people don't usually think of Earthsea as the political one. Like they think of her, her science fiction is being her political stuff. And it, it is more overtly political because it science fiction. Nothing gets more overtly political. And nothing gets more overtly political because it science fiction nothing gets nothing gets more over political and nothing gets more overtly political than the fucking dispossessed yeah no nothing

she that's why that's why after that it stops like what are you gonna do wait what do you go after that how do you get more political than the dispossessed my point is like to why actually the other more tombs and the one after this further sure are still full of her politics. Oh yeah. We just have to look a little bit hard. And it's more it's it's just interesting that people don't think of her see as being the political thing. When she

was writing it in the midst of her most political run of novels ever. Yeah. And this is a deeply political writer. Yeah, and like that you shouldn't even separate these from that run of political works because they are. Yeah, that's about to say like like this is just her packaging it in a different way. Yeah, this is her putting it in the structure of these of nameless gods and you know priestess is in a wizard instead of literally just saying anarchism a lot of times in the book. But it just is like Ged is sort of the you know the spirit of anarchism in this book. Yeah, like yeah, he's he's not even really in this book as a character. He's in this book as an idea. He's essentially an idea in this book. And you know, we the reader are to our to

our like get doesn't have an arc. No, tombs of a tuwan. It's it's to know as arc. Um, get just happens to be there. Yeah, he's the inciting incident. Yeah, like I said, we in this book are tenar. You know, the state, the authority, the patriarchy, those are the nameless ones and the God king and all the other attached power structures. And so, don't, yeah, like you were saying, don't mistake these books for being non-political.

Yeah, it's like they're really not, I mean, and even Wizard, like Wizard wasn't a political at all. Like nothing is, but like it wasn't that hidden. But again, it was more life philosophy. It was more, it was more like out of all the stuff I've read of hers, it was the most straight in your face about being daoist. Oh, wizard. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Now that's potentially with the exception of the late of heaven, but

not potentially. It is with the exception of the lay that heaven. But which is either was in 1971. You got to say basically right after after. So that would have that would have had to be right after after. Yeah. It's also wild to me that like of all of her work. The one that I think that gets meamed about most often is the lay of heaven. But like no one ever actually references the work itself aside from the idea of there being a lathe. You know what I mean, you hear people joke about all put down the lathe, you're gonna bring this into existence by saying that.

Like nobody actually talks about the story itself. It's also the only one that got an adaptation that she liked. So we don't talk about how, like I looked it up and I've seen bits of it. We don't talk about how Tainar was shown in freaking Gibby's Earthsea. No, we talked about that in the Wizard of Earth the episode about how much she hated it. Now she basically got like tricked. Tainar, Tainar shows up as like a blonde hair blue eyed lady who casts magic. Which is definitively not the same. Taylor shows up as like a blonde hair blue eyed lady who casts magic.

Which is definitely not. Say say say what? Say what she she doesn't cast magic. She's like. This is this is earth see women don't use magic. Yeah. Well, she's not actually not true because there's plenty of village witches. Oh, yeah. And and again, that's something that Luguin would address.

Well, she'd spend the, after the dispossessed, she would spend the back half of her entire career contemplating and writing about. Writing Tehanu. Well, writing Tehanu, but also writing one of the stories in Tales from Earthsea, the short story collection includes one about the history of Earthsea, including a kind of the origin of the misogynistic ways of like wizards and rogue island and beginning with a

woman. So a woman and that originally and originally it wasn't gender specific but got turned into something gender specific. But again, this is stuff she all had to grapple with later in her career. And you know, some people have pointed out weird stuff about the tombs of Ahtoan. I don't feel it maybe just because I'm not like super well versed in feminist theory, like I'm really not, not as much as I should be, but like.

So the criticism is that like, oh, Tenar couldn't do anything without the help of that. Well, that's, that's a criticism. I'm, I'm sure that there are more that criticism to me falls flat because he would also be dead without her. Yeah. It is definitely a two way street on that one. And I think which I think is more reflective of her like Taoism and the fact that you need both halves to make the whole to be successful. But yeah, that is and she even talks about that in her afterward as being like

she didn't see it as a Ged being necessary for it. She just saw that well something had to be necessary to wake her up There has to be an inciting incident for her getting the hell out of here because Like everybody else is here too Yeah, she didn't see a way that to not record like wake herself up It's like because the system that she was in was not designed for people to wake themselves out of Yeah, it's not because she's a woman. It's because the way the system works So there had to be something from the outside in order to like

Awaken her and it was just easy for us like getting because it's It's get already get already exists and she'd already talked about him getting The ring news of Erica erothocbay from the tomes of a to on in her older books She didn't initially play on writing a sequel. She just kind of made stuff up. It was like, this sounds cool and it makes it seem like he's got a future ahead of him. And then she was like, oh, shit, I actually kind of want to write that. Yeah, basically, she was like, I said that as an offhand thing because it sounds cool. And then later, she was like, I actually want to see what that would be. Whoopsies.

A few other like, sort of, again, smaller, less export things that I just wanted to bring up while we're here. It's very interesting, and also a theme of the Gwen's work that these lands where people have like a god emperor and do human sacrifice and routinely get on their boats to go to other places and do slave raids, who are incredibly superstitious and patriarchal, and all these terrible, terrible things that happen in Cargod,

are the white people in Earthsea. Yeah. Unambiguously are the white people. See, a lot of, a lot of like, I feel like there are some people that I've read on They're Not great, but like some people have read on like I've read online people being like this just just makes Like it just flips the paradigm. It doesn't even the paradigm and I'm like listen I think it's hilarious shut the fuck up like I think it's hilarious. And I personally

think that L'Guin kind of did it almost as a joke. Yeah, I mean it's also not really tongue in cheek like guess what the villains in this one are the white people take that token. Well, I mean she gets to have them like it's 10 hour and the other two priestesses having a conversation when they're first learning about wizards to get to do things like when they're trying to talk about who sorcerers and wizards are they do things like oh and they have dark skin ooooh yeah they're like they're dark people and they're like the castle this unambiguously vicious and horrendous human being get to go o they're nasty dark skin and they're evil magics.

And you're like, okay, which is funny because in the first book, without in wizard, unless you're carefully reading, you can kind of miss the fact that Gets Not White. But say, it's like, now thankfully the original cover of the book, I'm currently wearing a shirt with the original cover of the book on it. But, which is sick. Yeah, it's, uh, Ged is very clearly a brown, um, as is the, uh, the cover I have of tombs of art.

That doesn't mean that she didn't have to fight publishers repeatedly multiple times. And sometimes failed. Yeah, she actually had to fight the publishers for changing Ged's skin color on the covers of the book because because they, you know, thought that the white would drop more people into buying it, which is probably true. It probably would have sold by tomes by tomes. She literally has her her white, her white slave owning characters going, people not white and then a brown guy shows up and says, Hey, have you considered not being shitty?

Have the world fucking collapses in on itself? Causes a literal and figurative earthquake by simply being brown and showing up. And he manages to spear it away the most at least symbolically important white-led image in theislative in the entire car-gad lands. Yeah, that's funny. Like completely destroys their oldest, most sacred, like religious institution, even if by that point it had fallen into like complete disrepair, complete disrepair and obscurity.

So I just wanted to point that out. Fun fact, she also does that thing where the white skinned people are like the invading barbarians in Planet of Exile, which is the first book of the heinous cycle, which I don't think that many people have read because most people skip right to left hand in the dispossessed. But when we do the heinous cycle, I'm making cathode start at the beginning.

Beginning. Because we're going to read, we're going to read Planet of Eggsyle and Rohkannon's world because I like those kind of look. I know the dispossessed is the classic. Well, listen, that'll be the last thing we do. If you ever at, but I'm going to be honest with you, if you tell me you have to go read any Lagoon book, it would be the last one I would pick to re-read. I'm going to be honest with you.

It's the just as the last one I would reread as, um, as Michael Morkock said, it's a journalistic. Like I would rather, like if even if you have to stick in the heinous cycle, I'd rather I mean obviously left hand is as good as the as you as the billing, but I would also rather read Lexi Evolution, because I like that one better. The one other thing, because this is just a topic close to my heart that I wanted to make sure I flag up here before we're done talking about the tombs of I to on. Isn't that passage I read earlier and our discussion earlier about the fact that the nameless ones do exist is also a reflection of Laguins, Taoism and a thing that echoes across a lot of Eastern religious traditions in that the world is dualistic. As a vote for anyone, it doesn't know

what that means. That means as opposed to sort of the Abrahamic view of the world is dualistic. As a poet for anyone, it doesn't know what that means. That means as opposed to sort of the Abrahamic view of the world being created perfect and good, and then evil being like introduced to it later, it is a world view that says that good and bad have essentially always existed side by side and that it is up to the people, at least in sort of my theological tradition,

is up to individual people to choose which of those two you are going to strengthen, more or less, what you choose to do, good things or what you choose to do bad things, that's kind of on you because the world has both of them. And that is very clear sort of within that passage I read earlier about get describing the nameless ones that they exist, whether you follow them or not, but that their power sort of scales with the veracity of which people follow them and ventilate them within the land that you're in. So if you're in a land where people choose to reject those things, then obviously their power wanes and you can kind of forget that they were ever a thing. But it has to be something you have to always be on guard for, because even in

wizard, Ged confronts the nameless ones or the nameless powers a couple times. His own shadow is an outgrowth of the nameless ones, as is that stone in the weird castle in the north that he almost touches, but doesn't. But, you know, for someone like me, it is nice to read a story with the represents that sort of, like, I don't know if the right word is theological, but the cosmological. I mean, I think theological is probably an appropriate word for that, because it's tied into a ton of spiritual traditions, and like you said, most of them, if not almost all of them, non-Abrahamic, which makes a lot of them,

I mean, if we're talking something like Daoism or Azureism, which makes them older. Oh, significantly. So, it's like the only weird exception that isn't, it's not dualistic, but the only weird exception I could think of within Abrahamic religions is like, Nostoc traditions.

Where they're like- They're not close. But, no, they're almost like the opposite of Abrahamic where it's like, oh, the world was good and then evil came into it. And they're more like, the world is evil and we got stuck here. I mean, they did. That's true. It's like, it's like, and we got to do good to try and get

the fuck out of it. Yeah, that's we have those weird, nasty sex. And they eventually get the stuff, like manic chiasm, which is dualistic, but in a weird, they have sort of that negative way. We're like, the world is terrible. Inherently, and you have to do something about something about it. I would say if you're talking about Abrahamic faith, so I do think we have to acknowledge that at least the early roots of Judaism are probably just roughly about as old as our ostrich. It gets really murky, depending on when you consider them like specifically becoming monotheistic.

Yeah, that's a debate. I'm not qualified to get that. Yeah, that is an extremely complex debate that anthropologists cannot figure out. Yeah, which I won't pretend to. What I'm just, what I meant is that generally, specifically coming from, you know, people that live in America, or, you know, live in the Western world. Oh, yeah, it's nice Personally to occasionally get a work That doesn't inherit even for someone myself who is a big fan of One of the guys who made a Christian infused fantasy land. Well, yeah as popular as it is fucking Tolkien it's really nice to have a dualistic non-abrahemic worldview

presented in a fantasy novel. Yeah, it's like especially presented in fantasy written by a by a white woman in 1960. 1960, 1970. Yeah. It's like what a strange source to get that from. God. I just did. Um, it's like, I mean, expect to read that in like, if it was written by someone, you know, from like Southeast Asia, um, or Persia or something. Yeah. Yeah. If we're, whether we're talking Taoism or we're talking so our ashrinism. So our ashrinism. It's like, but in the case of this,

it's just a white woman who really liked the Dow Day Jing. A lot. And again, it's a self-described atheist. Self-described atheists who really liked the Dow Day Jing. Atheist, sure, like when? Yeah, at least as I do appreciate the fact that she was never, she was never really conceited enough to call herself a dauist.

No, I mean, that's true. She was like, she's like, you know, there's philosophical dau. You know, she's like, I like that. This is like, but also mal kind of completely ruined any possibility for me learning about the actual religious doubt because that's just gone now. Yeah, I mean, if we're being personal, I have had some people ask me if that would be an actually a more accurate description

for myself would be sort of like a philosophical Zora Austrian as opposed to a like a religious one because what matters to me more about it is sort of the like moral precepts. You know what I mean? The moral code and action that's important. As opposed to the acting worship. Yeah, but I think to me that I find that to be somewhat a pedantic, occasionally sort of pedantic distinction. Yeah. And one that I just don to be somewhat pedantic, occasionally sort of pedantic distinction. Yeah. And one that I just don't have the energy to engage with particularly. I just wanted to flag up that it was nice to see that in this in a novel like this. And I enjoy it. And maybe why even resonated with me when I was like, you know, 13 and was reading this for the first time.

Good stuff. Real good stuff. Y'all should definitely read it. I mean, holy shit. So good. That's this is the funny thing. It's like you probably only listen to this because you read it. So you read it again, read it again. Listen to the other bucket. It's four hours long. If I say it doesn't take, doesn't take much. But I think that's why all we have time for for this one.

Either this is the last episode of September or second to last. I don't remember if I was releasing this one or the Michael Morkock essay first. I haven't decided yet. So whichever one it is. Thanks for listening. I hope you appreciate the other one, which of order it comes out in. Hello. As we said before coming up next month, October, it's October Spooky Month. Ooh, Kee-Mon. So we're doing dark, we're doing dark fantasy. I will, I think we're probably going to decide right now after this recording, specifically what novels that entails for spooky month.

Once we know all tweeted out, so you guys can read in advance what those ones are gonna be. November's gonna be Cyberpunk Month. We will also decide that fairly soon. We're gonna read ahead on those. Yeah. You know, follow us on social media, subscribe to the Patreon where we do Patreon episodes about non-book stuff, like movies and video games, or you know, follow us on Twitter or whatever. That's it. I don't know, I got no more plugins.

Let's follow it, let's everything. Read Ursula liquid. Yeah, just, yeah, reader. Like, I mean, we did literally almost just make this in Ursula Laguin podcast. That's true. You really could. We, I mean, we almost did in the beginning.

We almost considered doing simply a Laguin podcast because I easily couldn't have fun. But I like to throw some other things in there too. Thank you all for listening. And I'll talk to you later. Bye. Bro. listening and talk to you later. Bye. you.