Week Three: The History of Earth

Bare bone notes this week due to work, I will try to add more if i can. 

The Book of Enoch
(I really hate The Timeless Child).
It actually exists. 
From the Timelord's viewpoint happened after the First War in Heaven and Thermix's virus, (which Rassilon funded and possibly used Yssgaroth taint to add a third .D.N.A. strand that enabled regeneration and added several unique biological features including two hearts). So would be post the First Diaspora but not recorded in the Timelord's official history. (Maybe they thought they were fleeing the virus or were the test group and were assumed to have died off?).
Richard Burton noticed a similarity between regeneration and the Mal'akh's rapid healing. (Mal'akh healing might look enough like one of the less stated classic series regeneration effects for Burton to me mistaken? He had more knowledge then most but like the Service didn't have enough knowledge or cultural references to tell one alien group from another). (Anyone else remember a detailed Timelord biology fansite framed as Dr Holloway's report?).
Two hundred interventionalist rebels lead by someone named Azazel or Shemjaza left Gallifrey and settled on Earth marrying and breeding with local women, (so the: Anchoring/Pythia's Curse/Rassilon didn't render them infertile?) but their children were giant monsterous ambominations, (ie: The Nephilim) due to the unstable combination of: Timelord, Yssgaroth, and protohuman .D.N.A.. (The problem was probably the sheer alienness of the Yssagaorth material as the Cult of Skaro's genetically engineered soldiers were: Human, Dalek, and Timelord hybrids and were just fine).
The Timelords fight the interventionalist rebels for spreading Timelord knowledge, exiling them (?) and leaving the Mal'akh in place as part of the punishment. Azazel/Shemjasa is bound head first hanging by one leg over athe abyss for all of eternity. (Whats the abyss? The black hole in the center of the galaxy? The punishment maybe literal as Timelords regard space as irrelevant so a good place to ditch prisoners).
The interventionalist rebels are the Djinn of Arabic mythology.


Liber Sanguisugarum



Mal'akh
Linked to humanity's collective subconscious and thus deeply emebedded in human mythology, their form can be self redefined to suit the circumstances. (Simularity to the enemy: 1.Seems to be connected to their opposition's collective unconsiousness. 2.Variable forms. Though the enemy might not be able to control theirs outside of alter time environments? 3.Mysterious unknown leadership). Could the Grand Families vs. Mal'akh conflict be another resonance or model of the War?




Scarratt
Used a two part name the same as the enemy and the lesser species.
Uses a scarlet colour standard despite it's traditional exclusion. (Scarlet maybe associated with Rassilon, could be the House Forfarding/Rassilon, is the colour of the reconsituted Rassilon's .L.G.T.W. Imperatrix chapterless Gallifrey).


Xianthellipse
The enemy, (the reps?) understood the need for cultural and military diversity as if they had always fought against mass produced forces.
Robert Scarratt is considered their greatest achievement.


What did we learn about the enemy?
17.The enemy's nature and identity might be in .T.B.o.t.W. but requires figuring out.
18.May share charcateristics with the Mal'akh, (ie: Somehow connected to their opposition's collective subconsious,variable forms, and mysterious leadership). Could be to the Timelords what the Mal'akh is to the Grand Families?
19.Used two part titles.
20.Understood the need for diversity, (cultural and military) as they might have experience fighting mass produced forces before. Probably the reps rather then the leadership.

Lots more 18th/19th century aesthetics in this chapter I note, focusing on Europe and more colonial aspects. Interesting to me how other Earthly perspectives, like the earlier 14th century stuff with Vlad Tepes, or the Native American Remote colonies, come in later chapters. It perhaps suggests that this period and culture was one particularly keen on staking out its independence or was simply more attuned to the wider War concepts. Given the Faction's clear interest in these aesthetics, including making the seat of their empire map onto a gap in the culture, it make sense there'd be overlap and pushback.

The Star Chamber form a fun regression of Faction Paradox. They détourn the Faction, aping certain practices in an attempt to destroy the original, much like how the Faction does much the same with the Great Houses (the Grand Families make that point even more blatant). Makes me wonder if there's another culture with an equivalent Chamber that mocks the British one (it does remind me of Miles' Shadow Directory in CoaRP, hunting down 'Caillou', unknown cosmic horrors). I always get a slightly incompetent air from the Star Chamber, with their unsuccessful attempt to invade the Eleven Day Empire, the fact they mistake the Faction as Yssgaroth-adjacent, and the number of defectors to the Faction proper they seem to suffer.

In The Domino Affect, one of the EDAs from a period with lots of alternate timelines, a version of the Chamber surviving into the modern day form the main antagonists, ruling over a fascist Britain, stunted due to the invention of the computer being wiped out. That was actually my introduction to them, since I read the Book of the War a few months later. Together it sort of implies that the freedom of information represented by technologies like the internet is what brought the Star Chamber, with its attendant secrets and schemes, down in flames in the end.

The Mountains of the Moon entry sticks out for taking a cool approach to the concept of anomalies on maps, suggesting that errors like the mountains are impossible to find for a reason (like Anarchitects, but on a grander scale). I love analysing idea of 'the territory is not the map' in such a literal way. It cleverly reflects the way maps and other graphical representations can inform our views of the world, suggesting that these unreal places have been erased by biased ideologies in some ways, rather than never existing at all. The lines on a map can easily shift after all, and like the Eleven Day Empire, there's room in the gaps for unexpected things to grow.

Howards are “the powers far behind the throne” aren’t they? I’d peg Linnecrux for that.

This is one of my favorite sections of the book – I'm actually a little disappointed that we're getting it out of the way so early!

Why assume that Burton was mistaken? (I would caution against relying on the ROO site too much. It's a great theory, but it doesn't cite its sources reliably, and plenty of things are just made up.)

This might connect with the line from last week about Faction Paradox armour originating in an "abomination's graveyard" of Yssgaroth-tainted Great Houses. Those entries told us that no such thing existed in our timeline, so it must have been another one, accessed through the caldera – but then this week, we hear about members of the Great Houses from ancient history who apparently passed the Yssgaroth taint on to their children!

It's hard to pin down an identity for this leader "bound headfirst over the abyss for all eternity", especially without referencing concepts from future weeks. It could be an imaginative description of … the attack of ignorance? the Eremites? Umbaste?? Nothing seems to fit.

But mistaken identities are a bit of a theme this week: when the Star Chamber mistakes the Mal'akh for being connected with the Faction, are we being warned not to do the same? So maybe the easy answer of "rebels from the high place" = "interventionist Great Houses" is wrong. Maybe the leader suspended over the abyss was the Yssgaroth leader itself, banished to E-Space?

More questions than answers.

Thanks! There's a long quotation from The City of Dreadful Night in the entry you quoted above, Walking Dead, and James Thomson I also crops up in Ghost Clusters, with a comment on his macabre, obsessive lifestyle. Walking Dead also comments that he was linked to the Star Chamber by an accident of birth, so it's not his pseudonym linking him to Shelley. It says here that his parents were James Thomson 0 and Sarah Kennedy, so we're not much further forward with his actual link to the Star Chamber. But Walking Dead does remind us that he was born in 1834, the year of the attack on the Eleven-Day Empire. Could one of his blood relations have been in the battle?

I'm a little behind, still on week two, but if we follow the Grandfather's revolutionary idea of history then we can totally claim a week behind need not matter because if he can take 11 days and do whatever he wants with them, i can take a week and do whatever i want with it.