Oh, okay.
Well, let's start here. Starting in three sentences from now, any information I present COULD BE related to the cipher, or maybe not. Roughly speaking, every topical passage corresponds to a different element of the cipher. I am either going to tell you a story about an event that did not really happen, but could have, or I am going to tell you a story about an event that really happened but could not have. The most important thing is to understand where to start, so I will start with the story of Isis. Isis was, of course, a goddess of ancient Egypt, one with many important functions that changed over the years; but her role as it eventually crystallised centred around her position as the Queen Mother - wife of the previous, dead pharaoh, as represented by Osiris, and mother of the new pharaoh, Horus. Now, of course, the new pharaoh eventually grows old and dies and becomes Osiris, so the relationship of Isis to the pharaoh is simultaneously wife and mother, which is creepy by modern standards, but it is what it is. The reason I am telling you about Isis, though, is that Isis had a sister named Nephthys, primarily remembered as the goddess of death. Because of complicated Egyptian reasons, though, Nephthys is also the wife and mother of Horus. Perhaps they originated as the same goddess, since they have parallel roles - both are goddesses of childbirth and magic, but Isis is linked with the sun and sky while Nephthys is a goddess of night and darkness. In any case, the purpose of bringing up Isis and Nephthys is to say this: According to some myths, Osiris is the father of Nephthys' son Anubis, because Nephthys' husband, Set, is sterile. So what did Isis say to Nephthys when she found out she had slept with her husband? "Why, sis?"
Interestingly, Isis was occasionally associated by the Greeks with their virgin moon goddess Artemis, although Artemis was also often identified with other Egyptian goddesses, including the cat goddess Bast, who is sometimes Isis' daughter. However, while the Greeks seem to have associated female power, both temporal and mystical, with female virginity, i cannot say the same for the Egyptians; unlike Artemis, Isis was of course not a virgin and her power was always intertwined with erotic potential. To the ancient people, this is a conflict, but perhaps not so today; it's easy to imagine Isis, at least before actually having a child, as preserving "technical virginity" after the fashion of a modern Catholic girl. I have no more clues related to the Egyptian goddesses, so I will stop talking about Isis now. Incidentally, have you ever been to Times Square, or seen pictures? With all the billboards everywhere? I'm sure you have, it's pretty well-known. The other day I saw a photo of Kyoto, Japan, where there was some kind of concert or something going on. The thing that struck me about it, though, was that except for one sign declaring it Kyoto - in Latin letters - you would just as easily have believed it was Times Square if I had said so. The event being for tourists, all the billboards were in English. I scoured the entire photograph and there was not a single CJK character in sight. I thought to myself, man, some day only weebs are going to know Japanese. As I'm not a weeb, this isn't something I'm very concerned about, but it does seem like a loss. Anyway, that photo doesn't really have anything to do with the story, but what I was describing before reminded me of an ad I saw not that long ago, and that reminded me of the photo indirectly because I saw them in the same context. Actually, I hardly ever see ads, since I don't watch TV, and I always use adblock online. I only ever see them when I see somebody else watching TV, or of course in the case of billboards, but as I don't live near Times Square or Kyoto I don't see many of those either. That's kind of beside the point, though. What I wanted to say is, man, have television commercials gotten really weird or what? I don't even know what the point of most of these is supposed to be anymore. I guess it's just a way to say "hey, look how clever and high-status we are!", in the end. You know, the etymology of "advertisement" comes from Latin, "a turning toward" - "ad" is of course Latin for "toward", as seen in "adapt", "adept" (probably closely related words), "address" (literally 'ad-direct' in formation; the meaning as a verb, to address eg a crowd, is more historical), and so on, while "vertere", to turn, is also seen in vertical, vertex, adverse, and versus. So I guess anything that turns your eye ultimately counts as an advertisement, regardless of whether it seems to serve any purpose after having done so. Still, I'm glad I don't see more of them than I already do. It must be a really unpleasant life being one of those proles without adblock. Anyway, I actually just remembered something else I wanted to say about Isis. The Egyptians were all really committed to their gods turning into animals. Of course this is not unique in itself, as we see Zeus turning into bulls and eagles and swans and even rains of gold, which is not an animal but bespeaks a totally different fetish, all the time; but for the Egyptians this wasn't so much "just a thing gods do when they want to fuck with somebody, usually literally", but deeply symbolic. Because of her maternal role, Isis can often be represented as a sow or a cow, and in her role as a magical protector she might be a serpent or a scorpion, but one of her most prominent representations is as a kite, the falcon-like bird, not the children's toy. It's not certain exactly why that is, except that most scholars seem to think it has some connection with her role in mourning the death of her husband, Osiris.
Despite the similarity of the Greek forms of the names, though, she does not turn into an ibis - that's Thoth, god of writing and a bunch of other stuff. Ibis - ibides to the Greek - were sacred in Egypt, but the sacred ibis is a pest in many parts of the world, and the Australians have a hilarious tendency to call them nasty names like "bin chicken" or "tip turkey" because they get into trash. Thoth can also turn into a baboon, because baboons were for whatever reason perceived as wise, and like every Egyptian god mentioned thus far is associated with the moon. The Egyptians had a real hardon for the moon, let me tell you. Another moon god was Khonsu, who was also a fertility god and the protector of travellers at night, who could be invoked against attacks from wild beasts, among other things. All of the gods associated with the moon represented some aspect of it or another, but the actual visible disks of the sun and moon as objects in the sky had their own names and personifications, although they don't seem to have been as significant for the most part - except for a brief period when a particular pharaoh devoted to the personification of the visible sun, Aten, made the monotheistic worship of Aten mandatory across all Egypt and banned the other gods. This is interesting because Aten's counterpart, the physically visible moon, was Jah, whose name is strikingly similar to the name of the monotheistic deity whose worship would later spread across most of the known world. This could be nothing more than a coincidence, and probably is, but it's not impossible that there's a connection. Nevertheless, I've said all the important things, and more than a few unimportant things. I hope you'll be able to recognise the web of puns I made and work your way to the right answer by discarding what doesn't fit. End with the word.
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Topic: Signal Intelligence (player needed for a new game) (Read 4964 times)