An alien Robot came to me before she left to die. She sang to me the stories of how her ancient world and species ended, how she was created to travel through Time, how (in the far future) she met an essential boy named Anders, how she named herself...
The Goddess wouldn't tell me his name, this alien King who existed long before even she. (She told Anders, though, apparently. She ignored me with a lovingly mischievous grin when I pouted after she mentioned this aside, then continued speaking.) This King fought in what was called (up to a certain point in the history of this planet whose atoms have now been remade and split a billion times since) The Last War.
Grace taught me how to decipher some of the impossibly ancient script written by this King, which she produced with a holographic projector.
Joseph Smith, my dogmatic ancestor, too, was taught by God to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphics written in "Abraham's own hand" on an ancient roll of papyrus he, through happenstance, purchased along with a mummy. From this he produced the Book of Abraham, a book of scripture in the Mormon's Pearl of Great Price.
Around 1835, and this is all true without exaggeration, Joe labeled a drawing, presumably also drawn by Abraham on that papyrus, thusly (attached): "Represents God sitting upon his throne, revealing through the heavens the grand Key-words of the Priesthood; as, also, the sign of the Holy Ghost unto Abraham, in the form of a dove."
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Well, after science came to the field of archaeology and we came to understand significantly more about (what we call) "ancient" Egypt, we learned that the figure Joe assumed was his God (Elohim) is actually depicting Min, Egyptian god of fertility and "male sexual potency". That drawing is in the Mormon's canon, and carried always with good scripture-toting members.
In my time, Mormon temples are everywhere. The membership must pay ten-percent of their income in order to enter into these sacred buildings. They must also follow strict dietary, sexual, cultural, entertainment, language, and other laws to be considered worthy enough. What treasure is locked away within these spiritual safes?
In these temples, among other things, the most faithful and righteous members learn and memorize these "Key-words and tokens of the priesthood" in a ritualistic ceremony; these (what are really just [rather silly]) passwords and secret handshakes, the members believe, must one day be given by their resurrected selves to the Angel guarding the gates of Heaven.
I asked the Goddess once if in the future the Mormons ever get so confused in their logic that they start to argue that God physically appeared to Abraham, who painted Him and His huge cock in the Egyptian style. The drawing probably did not take as long as it took the Trunk to slowly inflate with thick golden ichor. So many questions, theories. Better move on. Which is what Grace did when I asked.
What the ancient alien King wrote was something like this:
When you profane the sacred, the thing is still sacred unless it was never divine originally. Profanity is culturally subjective. This is why there will always be underdogs as rebels and counterweights to the majority--we have seemingly become [programmed to / blessed to / evolved into beasts which] naturally remind ourselves as a general population to watch our willingness to be compelled to become aligned with [Truth / Tao / reality]; but true piety is objective like a wave is an object made up of shifting water molecules.
This is the alien King who saw and first spoke of the Mountain.
...
You have not existed within the time which has passed for me in between the last line and this one, but it's been a little bit. I haven't known quite how to proceed. The Mountain, the Mountain...I am not a prophet. The Goddess made that clear, confusingly. So these words must be chosen carefully.
It is like the concept of the Dao in that its objective essence cannot be described; but the Dao is an aspect of this Mountain, as Shiva is part of Krishna is a part of the Mountain. It is both completely objective but mostly and pragmatically subjective. It is unnecessary to be aware of the Mountain in order for its beauty to penetrate the souls of those who walk its peaks and valleys and caves.
And it isn't necessary for it to be described fully and at once, though that is the purpose I have unwittingly fallen into.
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"He single handedly gave a soul to the people who observed and heard the tales of his own self-ordered execution," the Robot will continue.
The stories come from the mouths of those who witnessed the end of the Last War were varied, dissonant in tone and history, but all describing one thing constant:
The King had gone forward, alone, onto the field of battle, soil soiled with the decade-long flood of blood. All he said was, Please, and they listened. There was something in his face that these hardened workers of war hadn't seen before. They had seen despair, desperation, abandonment of all value and identity; they had seen others whom they'd thought "Greater" than this young King shit themselves and run in the face of one who was clearly better than them on equalizing field of battle. They had all at one point laughed in the face of weakness and begging, numb to mercy.
