It's been a while since I last wrote up something for the Ponderings section of the blog, so here it comes:
Oh yes, I am going to try and tackle the topic of memory in the Warhammer Age of Sigmar universe: what is it, how the peoples of the Eight Realms utilize it and, most importantly, the social dimensions of memory and remembrance – how they affect the societies people live in (or try to destroy in bloody conquest).
I shall write the article in a bunch of sub-headers, dividing this rather heavy topic into nicer, more bite-sized chunks:
Neat. Off we are to a rambly start!
With knowledge they gain from perceiving their surroundings and picking out details they deem important, the creature can then make decisions based on it. To save time and effort, most intelligent creatures store knowledge like this away in a safe place: they turn them into memories. This way knowledge can be archived and accessed at a later date. Brilliant! What this article is about is how this biological storaging mechanic is significant to societies, big groups of something, that the peoples of the Mortal Realms form.
"Was that shadow there before? Probably... Ah, what am I thinking! Nobody has business at the docks this time of night. Must've been my imagination."
-Jorgen Doller, an Anvilgard merchant, deceased.
In our example here, Jorgen perceives something (was that there before?), processes it (probably was), turns it into knowledge (nothing there), compares it to his previous knowledge (docks are vacant at night), then acts on the result he got out from this process (carries on with his day). Simple!
Now, what happens to the knowledge people save as memories and how accurately they are brought back from the mental archives is what we're looking into in this article. Some Azyrite scholars claim that memory is but one of the three aspects of the souls of devout sigmarites, which are three-pronged in the image of Sigmar's Holy Hammer: each is made up of understanding, memory and will.
Understanding determines what a creature understands and knows, will determines its wants and needs (based on its knowledge and understanding), whereas memory wraps these together by storaging past and current understandings, wants and needs of the creature so they can remember them. Now I urge you to follow closely, as this might get a tad bit tricky:
All these three aspects of a soul in the Mortal Realms are not only supplementing each other, but altogether contained in each other. Each is contained by each, but also all by each.
- A creature can remember that it has memory, understanding and will
- A creature understands that it understands and wants and remembers
- A creature wants that it wants and remembers and understands
- For that of its memory which it does not remember, is not in its memory
- Therefore, a creature remembers the whole of its memory
- Whatever a creature understands it knows it understands
- A creature wants whatever it wills and knows what it remembers
- A creature therefore remembers the whole of its understanding and the whole of its will
- Finally, a creature only doesn't understand things it doesn't know; but things it doesn't know it can neither remember nor want, so that doesn't really bother it
This was just a really long way of saying intelligence and will are rather tightly connected to memory.
As we have seen, memories are things a creature has either experienced or thought of, and to utilize these stoved-away bits of knowledge the creature must first recall them. With everyone's brains filled to the brim with the stuff from their life up to the present day, it can sometimes take a while to recall a specific event, experience or bit of information. The tricky thing about memory is that it's far from perfect in storaging information for the people of the Realms. This gets us to...
Forgetting as a Tool of Memory
I didn't warn you about sub-headers under sub-headers! Terribly sorry, I'll give a heads-up next time.
Anything the denizens of the Eight Realms try to recall will be imperfect, lessened, modified, even in the safety of their very own minds... or should we say especially in their own minds! Forgetting shapes the memories of any creature more than the way they remember it. When something happens to a creature, it forms a memory of the event by distilling details from its perceivings and refining those into knowledge. At first, this memory will be quite accurate to what actually happened, although it may already be coloured by the creature's own desires, previous knowledge and other subjective preferences (think of the difference between the memories a Freeguild Guard and a Crypt Ghoul might obtain from a grand feast at a Flesh-Eater Court!).
After that, the memory only gets more modified and coloured as time goes by. Details that the creature itself deemed important will persist, whereas other details might get lost in time, washed away from the memory over the years. Therefore it is quite safe to say that forgetting shapes our memories more than the act of committing something to memory itself! As a renowned Azyrite scholar Marc Augé puts it:
"Memories are crafted by oblivion as the outlines of the shore are crafted by the sea"
Now that's poetic!
Whenever a creature recalls information from its memory, it gathers the bits of dusted (and most likely already coloured) information from the depths of its mind and has to rebuild the recollection of the event again; only this time using the knowledge, desires and other preferences it has at the moment of recalling (instead, or rather, on top of those it impressed upon the memory at the time of committing the event to memory). This shows us what makes people's memories, and thus their minds and personalities, tick: perception, thought, knowledge, memory, reconstruction, recalling.
Clearly, remembering is not even about reciting fixed, set-in-stone fragments of events and experiences from one's life. It is an imaginitive reconstruction (or just a construction, in the case of false memories) built out of the creature's relation to the mass of half-organized past reactions, knowledge and experience it has stored away in its mental storehouse. This wisdom comes from another Azyrite scholar called Sir Frederic Bartlett.
Memory is therefore malleable, imperfect, fractioned and flowing. Nothing too trustworthy, but at least it allows the people of the Mortal Realms to maintain some kind of a collection of their thoughts, knowledge and experiences, which lays the groundwork for constructing each person's own identity and personality. This of course causes everyone to have their own "version", if you will, of the reality in which the peoples of the Realms live in, a version which they view through these imperfect and subjective reconstructed memories of theirs.
It seems it is as they say in Hammerhal, there are three truths in the world: your truth, someone else's truth and the actual truth. Quite fitting! There are stone cold facts and there are things people "know" based on speculation, personal opinions, wishes, educated guesses, recollections (memories!) and, of course, sheer stubbornness. Whatever a singular creature might think of its own knowledge, it knows basically nothing about anything in the Eight Realms. Unless it's a Lord of Change, who might already know something about something!
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| This bloke here wields unimaginable power. Beware! |
As we have thus far established, memories are very important to people in that they are what personalities and identities are based off of. The very same applies to societies; they need identities to be something in the vastness of the multiverse. The denizens of the Realms know for a fact that for there to be a society, there needs to be individuals that make up that society; there simply isn't societies where there aren't individuals. Now, same as individuals, a society needs an identity, and that identity for individuals is formed from memories: the personal repositories of past reactions, knowledge and experiences. Societies need something similar, and so they begin by pooling together the subjective memories of the individuals that make up the society, thus creating a kind of a 'common memory'. You keeping up?
Without individuals, there are no societies. Without individual memories, there are no societies. Both actual bodies (groups of something) and pooled identities (to form the society's identity) are needed. When individuals group together, they often instinctively form an identity for the entire group by taking a good look at who they are and what they represent, then making those unifying aspects of their group the identity of the society they form. I feel some examples are needed.
Take Daughters of Khaine: they are people grouping together for some purpose, and the things the group's members all have in common are the basis of that group's identity. They are all female, aelves, love well air-conditioned clothing and worship a prophetess who claims to be able to chat to their god. Voilà! We have created an identity for something that really doesn't exist in the sense that you could eat it or touch it (trust me, orruks have tried), but it's still there. It's a society.
Another example would be the Free Peoples, inhabitants of Sigmar's reclaimed cities: this society's member base is much more diverse, and the identity of the society is built around wider and more abstract concepts than that of the Daughters. The Free Peoples all share the will to live as-long-as-possible lives, feel happy and safe, stay unstabbed and without growing extra appendages as well as to cultivate culture in the form of architecture, art and written history.
Therefore, the key (or rather, the hammer and chisel) to any society's past and thus its future is narration: societies consist of a multitude of individuals, the memories of which are all subjective and personal. Yet there is common ground within and between the peoples of the Realms, like common values and shared events, that can be forged into a grand narrative that binds a society together. Indeed, all it takes to form a strong society is but to offer the individuals a narrative that they can relate to, thus forming a group with common goals and a united purpose. Now that you know how to create societies, why not go out and make one of your own!
Ah, but I would still advice you to stay a moment longer, for I am just getting warmed up. Who fashions these grand narratives, then? Well, as these societal stories are upheld by politics, social structures, events, anniversaries, memorial occasions and grand parades, the answer would be anyone who gets to decide about such things! Oh, and also historians, as they are the keepers of the written form of any society's memories. They wield great power, and should always be treated with respect!
There is a trick to the memory of societies, same as there is to the memory of individuals. You see, whereas the average Johann the Azyrian might think that the oral history maintained by most orruk tribes across the Realms might be primitive and selective, prone to forgetting and re-inventing stuff on the fly regarding events and meanings of the past (like any individual memory), the written records of the mostly literate Azyrite academics is, in truth, just as flawed. For even though writing things down might preserve them better and aid in the recollection of the written events later on by successive generations, there's always the question of who decides what gets written down. Who decides what documents and writs are discarded in the annual cleanings of the archives and libraries? Not to mention that a few coins in the right pocket might effortlessly make legal documents, non-beneficial contracts and debt rolls disappear from the records...
It is clear that memory, be it that of an individual or an entire society, is a highly imprecise way of storaging stuff: prone to errors, erosion, mistakes, alterations and change.
The way memory itself works has a significant influence on how the denizens of the Realms perceive their life and the reality that surrounds them. It colours everything, and forms the basis for any creature to deem what is "right" and "wrong", for example. Once again, the same applies to social memory: the memory of a society shapes what is seen as "right" and "wrong" within the society's boundaries, and it dictates which events of the past are important and which are not. It also affects how these events should be remembered and how individuals should interpret them.
Take any of Sigmar's cities that were reclaimed and/or rebuilt from scratch during the Realmgate Wars: a society is formed, and it gives itself an identity based on the common ground that its members share between one another. The society forms social structures based on the needs of the group, like administration, military, economy, construction and so on; including scribes, chroniclers, historians and librarians who write everything down.
Let's say time goes on, years flow past (however each Realm measures time) and the low grind of the turning centuries rumbles in the hollowness of eons. People die, people are born, knowledge gets passed on from generation to generation. The social memory works its magic, keeping the society's common values and goals consistent across the generations of its coming and going members.
Now, to bring up an example of how a society's narrators might exercise their considerable powers in picking, choosing and altering the society's overarching narrative (and through that, the common memory of the society's past), let's say an incredibly talented human architect is involved in the founding of one of Sigmar's grand cities. The architect draws immaculate plans and directs the construction work tirelessly, producing one of the Seeds of Hope, a miracle of the post-Chaos era in itself.
No doubt there will later on be many statues, standing stones, memorial plaques and even avenues or entire buildings dedicated to the founder of the city! Great annual parades, feasts and general celebration will take place on the anniversary of the city's founding, all in the honour of the founding architect and the city itself along with its courageous population. That is social memory once again doing its magic: keeping things that the society deems important safe from the merciless attentions of time; upholding a legacy, if you will, something all the denizens of the city deem important, something that binds them together.
Well, a couple of things will happen after the revelation. First of all, the statues and memorials of the (corrupt) architect are torn down and the streets and buildings named after this worshipped figure change their names to something more appropriate. Next, the annual celebrations of the city's founding anniversary are slightly altered to leave out all mentions of the traitorous wretch who endangered the city, and more attention is focused on the brave citizens that defended their home city against impossible odds.
Just like that, a revered figure in a society's past gets knocked off its pedestal and cast out into oblivion, from The Person to a nobody. Harsh, but that's how it works!
The example here was admirably black-and-white in its morality, someone going from good to bad, but the same mechanic of structural amnesia (the process of a society altering its memories using oblivion, the act of active forgetting, as a tool to shape its identity) can also be used in more morally grey areas. Say, a society discriminates some minority group using structural amnesia: One of Sigmar's cities refuses to give shelter to a procession of thousands of sick Reclaimed, the people who endured in the Realms during the Age of Chaos, with the excuse that they cannot risk their own population contracting the disease carried by the refugees. The procession of helpless "outsiders" dies in the shadow of the city's walls over the next few weeks, their bodies are burned on great funeral pyres and that's it.
The city is definitely not celebrating the anniversary of The Time We Refused Fellow Beings Shelter, and even erecting a monumentary to the incident would be quite brave (and highly unlikely) of the city's officials. Why emphasize on one's own mistakes? It's much easier to just forget, let go of the moral pain, self-loathing and doubt. Libraries can be cleansed from any information regarding the event, the masses can be distracted with grand celebrations of happier topics and no memorials need to be raised for the deceased refugees. Oral recitations of the event die out in a couple of generations and anyone speaking up for the dead refugees' rights can be branded as a liar. Handy, isn't it? "Grimdark", you say? It definitely is.
The previous paragraph had the article's header in it, and that means we're nearing this essay's end. Let's wrap this sub-header up: social memory has a truly significant impact on the reality in which the society's members live their lives. Entire events, even epochs, can be slowly erased from the society's memory over the years by skilled narrators. The past is not a chain of events: it is a malleable, liquid body of events, meanings, symbolisms and interpretations. It is like the sea; one can never grasp the whole of it, but one can decide the shape and size of the amphoras and buckets in which one stores the most meaningful (to them) parts of it for future use.
If the story a society tells about itself works fine and makes its members feel good about themselves, nobody is likely to ask for the bits that've been left out! That's just how the realmspheres turn 'round.
Final sub-header, I promise. We have yet to wrap this entire mess up.
As we have seen during the course of this multifaceted article, memory is not so much about recalling the past as it is re-creating it. Like it has been stated many a time already, memories can be altered, they can fade and they can change, they can be given new meanings. They can easily be shaped anew every time someone needs new materials for forging the narrative of self, who they are, where they come from and where they are headed to. This makes researching bygone eras and civilizations extremely difficult and vexing. After everything we've discussed here, we can safely say that a historian's job is not the easiest of occupations.
Some might argue that history is different to this abhorrent apparatus of memory, for it is analytical and precise, it imposes critique on its sources. It does indeed, but the sources from which history draws its knowledge are themselves imperfect, are they not? The sources do not state the way things actually were back then, but how those who came later and wrote it down wanted to see it.
How about the pieces of written historical evidence themselves, books, letters, scrolls, tablets and such? The political and social reality in which they were written is long gone, lost to eons. Contemporary Azyrite scholars can't even begin to understand to which purposes and under what circumstances some ancient records were written or the events they describe were interpreted.
Another thing to consider about this argument about history is that the critical and analytical style of research is nothing but the current (and thus, bypassing) theme of how Azyrite scholars interpret their findings in their current society. Some ancient Ghyranian Jade Kingdom historian might well have purposefully interpreted the events of their society's history to the maximum glorification or honour of their leaders, or even gods, like Alarielle or Sigmar. Every piece of written records would then, of course, reflect that theme and style of committing events to the memory of their society.
This theme and style is completely unknown to anyone who tries to decipher the message and meanings of the records later on, from a different style and theme of interpretation and memorizing. The contemporary researchers and historians in Azyr value analytical approach and educated criticism when dealing with their own past, but this is simply their own atmosphere for interpretation of past events their society imposes upon them, whether they will it or not.
Heh. Past is truly a fluid and elusive thing, isn't it?
Geary, Patrick: Phantoms of Remembrance. Memory and Oblivion at the End of the First Millennium (1994).
Aldrich, Robert: Vestiges of the Colonial Empire in France. Monuments, Museums and Colonial Memories (2005).
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