On June 10, 2009, a user called Victor Surge posted two altered photographs on the Something Awful forums. The thread invited users to create paranormal images. Each photograph showed children in black and white. A tall, thin figure stood behind them. It wore a dark suit and had no face.
Surge supplied a caption that imitated an archival record:
one of two recovered photographs from the Stirling City Library blaze. Notable for being taken the day which fourteen children vanished.
He also gave the figure its name: Slender Man. Other users began to write its history within a week. The figure acquired a documentary-style series, games, and reports of sightings near woods. Their reports gave the invented figure a place in personal experience.
On May 31, 2014, two twelve-year-old girls took a friend into a forest in Waukesha, Wisconsin. They stabbed her nineteen times. They later told police that they wanted to become Slender Man’s proxies and prove his existence. The victim survived. The girls entered psychiatric institutions; one received a forty-year commitment.
Five years separated the caption from the attack. During that interval, people had developed the figure through words. Those words acquired a history and followers. The followers then gave them a physical consequence.
The name is the thing
The oldest accounts of creation begin with speech. Genesis says, And God said, Let there be light. John begins his Gospel with the Logos: the word or reason through which all things were made. Rabbinic tradition describes creation through twenty-two letters. Each account places language within the operation that gives a world its form.
A name makes a distinction available to more than one mind. People can repeat it after the first speaker has gone. They can preserve accounts of it and add their own. What they accumulate gives the named form persistence in their shared field. The form acquires a capacity to act that belongs to none of its makers alone. It can reach people who never met its first maker.
The rabbis described a golem that lived through a word written on its forehead. The word was emet, meaning truth. Erasing its first letter left met, meaning dead, and returned the creature to clay. The letters held the operation together. Their removal ended it.
Naming also gives a power an address. An unnamed influence can move through a person’s life without becoming an object of judgment. A name lets the person identify it. Others can then compare their experience of the same influence. The distinction that supports creation can also support resistance and banishing.
Western lodges use the term egregore for a form sustained by a group’s attention. The form begins as the group’s creation. With continued attention, it develops wants of its own that its members experience as demands. The collective formation becomes a center of spiritual agency within the shared field. Tibetan accounts describe the tulpa as a form made deliberately by one person. Both traditions describe a creation that is easier to establish than to dissolve.
A brand gives such a form legal protection. A nation supplies it with an army. The living people exceed the organization that carries their collective name. Their sovereignty begins when they can distinguish their own lives from that organization’s demands.
Surge performed the same basic operation that begins a religion, corporation, or movement. He gave a distinction a name. Other people supplied attention and history. The accumulated form eventually acted through bodies in a Wisconsin forest. Its first maker had drawn none of those bodies.
From word to world
A word can carry a perception between people. What one person receives through their body can become available to another through language. The second person receives a version shaped by their own experience. This difference gives language both its usefulness and its political force.
Whoever supplies a population’s words helps arrange its world. The words establish which distinctions people can readily make. They also establish which experiences people struggle to name. An empire therefore imposes its language, while a people resists losing its own. Ideologies begin by changing the names through which people understand their situation.
The Church fought for three centuries over worship in local languages. The language of the Mass determined how people could receive its meaning. A language supplies access to some distinctions while making others difficult to express. Wilson’s reality tunnel begins at this level, beneath an individual’s stated opinions.
Repeated words also acquire durable physical arrangements. An accepted category can become an institution. Funding gives that institution buildings and operating systems. Those arrangements train everyone who grows up within them. Each generation thus meets the accumulated work of earlier minds as part of the world itself.
Law attaches consequences to names. Money gives a portable name to value. Architecture gives an idea a body in stone. A child beneath a cathedral learns a different relation to the sky from a child beneath a tower block. The building continues to teach after its designer has died.
The Ebstorf map followed this operation. Its makers named the world’s important places before drawing their relations. Later readers inherited the resulting center and boundary. Names had arranged the world that the map made available to them.
The clock is a name for the present
The most powerful shared name identifies the present: now. Until the nineteenth century, English towns set their clocks by local noon. Bristol was eleven minutes behind London. The difference caused little trouble while travel remained slow. Railways made it an operational problem.
In 1840, the Great Western Railway imposed London time along its line. A timetable required stations to share one present. By 1855, nearly every public clock in Britain kept Greenwich time. In October 1884, delegates from twenty-five nations met in Washington. They selected Greenwich as the prime meridian despite French opposition to that choice. They also recommended a universal day while preserving local or other standard time where desired.
The agreement supplied a common reference for naming the present. Adoption developed through institutions instead of placing every locality in one system at once. That system coordinated travel and also placed local rhythms under a distant standard. The headquarters of time became part of the organization of daily life.
A shared clock makes collective action possible. The same clock can place that action under another party’s control. Railway time also organizes factory shifts and school bells. Broadcast schedules and market openings gather attention at hours their participants did not choose.
A deadline can direct millions of people toward one subject at one hour. A news cycle gives their attention a common sequence. Agreement is unnecessary for this operation. Opponents can organize their lives around the same contested event. A standing conflict can therefore maintain shared attention as effectively as a festival.
Calendars also coordinate obligation and memory. The reform of 1582 changed when communities kept their promises and remembered their dead. Naming the present reaches into every other shared name. It helps determine when those names matter and what people must do about them.
The Consensus Engine describes how institutions produce this shared present. The Synchronometer examines calendars that coordinate a people with the sky. Both concern the faculty through which separate lives become capable of common action. Custody of that faculty determines whose purposes their coordination serves.
What the word cannot do
A name can acquire a body in the shared field. That body enters a world that returns consequences. The girls in Waukesha encountered this resistance through their attack. A knife injured a person. A court judged the act, and confinement followed.
The figure they served had acquired enough attention to direct their conduct. Its name supplied no exemption from the consequences of that conduct. John’s Logos also entered flesh. That flesh underwent crucifixion. Entering physical life places even a sacred form within the conditions of embodiment.
Words can organize how people receive those conditions. They can teach a population to experience a particular boundary as the limit of reality. A fence receives the name horizon. A ceiling receives the name sky. People then defend an imposed limit as part of the natural world.
Such an enclosure can persist through inherited perception. Repeated instruction maintains it even where no physical wall stands. Its inhabitants carry the boundary in what they can imagine and attempt. The Lock describes the arrangement that keeps this limit in place.
The first photographs contained a figure behind children. Five years later, children supplied the figure with an act. A name had crossed from an image into a shared history and then into a wounded body. The world answered the name through that body’s consequence.
Further reading
See The Logos and the Word, Ontogenesis, The Consensus Clock, and The Consensus Engine for the fuller treatments. The synthesis sheets How Naming Summons Binds and Banishes, How Symbols Become Egregores, and A Tale as Old as Time take the argument into particular cases. The evidence is gathered at Consensus Reality and The Transmission Chain. Reading paths through the archive: How does mind write into reality?, How does scripture become an initiatic instrument?, and How do stories become operations?.
References
Chess, Shira, and Eric Newsom. Folklore, Horror Stories, and the Slender Man: The Development of an Internet Mythology. Palgrave, 2015.
State of Wisconsin v. Morgan Geyser and v. Anissa Weier, Waukesha County Circuit Court, 2014–2017.
Idel, Moshe. Golem: Jewish Magical and Mystical Traditions on the Artificial Anthropoid. SUNY Press, 1990.
Genesis 1:3; John 1:1–14; Sefer Yetzirah 2.
Bartky, Ian R. Selling the True Time: Nineteenth-Century Timekeeping in America. Stanford University Press, 2000; and One Time Fits All: The Campaigns for Global Uniformity. Stanford, 2007. On railway time and the 1884 conference.
Wilson, Robert Anton. Quantum Psychology. New Falcon, 1990. On language and the tunnel.