Watkins Glen By Jeffrey Jones

On Sapience, Longing, and the Lack Thereof

Written by Max on August 12th, 2024.

So I was at Othercon 2024 this past weekend - and like many who attended, I came out the other side with a new piece of my identity to chew over. This essay is me chewing over my thoughts on archaeosapience, as it connects to my velociraptor paleotheriotype, and why I genuinely don’t feel like I fit the label.

One of the panels I attended and thoroughly enjoyed was “Not Humans, Still People: How Inhumanity Interacts with Personhood,” by Goratrix bani Tremere of the Draconic Wizard Workshop and Chaiya Askari-Vykos of the Treehouse System. During the panel, Goratrix and Chaiya argue that personhood is different from humanity, defining personhood as, essentially, sapience - the ability to understand oneself, to make rational choices, to comprehend the world in not only physical ways, but also the abstract and symbolic. All humans are people, but not all people are humans - nonhuman personhood is experienced by many, many alterhumans, and this is an important distinction to keep in mind.

Another panel I adored, presented by Sivaan of Candlekeep, was “Archaeosapience: To Awaken as Ancient in a Modern Age,” in which he discusses the label and the intricacies of his own experience as an archaeosapien. Once again, nonhuman sapience is a key feature here - as Sivaan writes in xyr coining essay, “[t]he “sapience” in archaeosapience exclusively refers to our awareness of our existence as ancient beings,” as opposed to an inherent connection with the species Homo sapiens. Archaeosapience does not require one to be human.

An archaeosapien is defined as “an individual whose alterhuman or nonhuman identity is intrinsically rooted in prehistory, antiquity or mythic accounts of history.” And funnily enough, here lies my personal disconnect with the term, even though I identify as a velociraptor - a prehistoric animal well known to be extinct. To experience archaeosapience requires personhood, requires sapience, an understanding of oneself as an ancient being. And this is one thing that my theriotype utterly lacks.

Now, I’m not saying that I lack sapience. I am a person, one who reads and writes and learns about the world around me. I also identify as human, separate but intertwined with my personhood, and my humanity is as important to me as my animality. Both of these core parts of myself contribute to where I stand today - as a prehistoric animal person who is, somehow, completely at home in modernity.

Throughout this essay, I’m going to refer to my raptor self in the third person - it thinks this, it wants that. I separate myself from my theriotype in this way because I do not feel like I’m myself in a mental shift. My raptorial mind is not a person, but an animal. It is incapable of understanding abstract concepts or philosophical thought, living in the physical world where it gets food, water, rest, shelter, and enrichment. This does not make it any lesser than my sapient mind - it does mean that it has a different way of understanding the world.

My raptor brain, the instinctual animal side, does not feel like it’s an animal from another era. It doesn’t even know what time is, beyond the regular cycles of day and night. It doesn’t understand common features of modern human society, like computers or elevators or money - not because those things didn’t exist back in prehistoric Asia, 75 million years ago, but because it’s an animal. I could be a gecko from the modern day and still feel the same mentally shifted apathy and confusion about the things I need to live day to day as a human being. The raptor doesn’t know or care about its status as a long-extinct relic, because as far as it’s concerned, it is alive and well, healthy and fed and comfortable in a house with people it knows.

In fact, my raptor brain doesn’t even feel attached to a habitat. Early on in my awakening, as someone who knows where velociraptors used to live in the spacetime continuum, I felt a sort of connection with deserts - I’d look at them and think, that’s like the place my species lived! This was the part of me who’s a person, putting a label to a place that I’ve never been, thinking fondly of it despite never having lived there.

The part of me that’s not a person, that knows nothing but pavement and grass and many-walled shelters keeping out the wind, looks at the desert and bristles with distaste. It doesn’t like the idea of being somewhere it doesn’t know, with sand and scorching sun and no food it knows how to catch. It knows its home territory, a place with cooling wooden floorboards and a comfortable nest of mattress and blankets and a cache of good food that never runs out, and it likes its territory. It doesn’t like the desert or understand the significance of it. It can’t comprehend the idea of wilderness enough to miss it. It doesn’t want to be wild and free, it wants to live in a building with air conditioning and clean freshwater from the sink.

As you can see, my raptor self is perfectly content to be a modern animal. How about my human self, the part of me that can think about my theriotype and know that it’s a prehistoric animal? Do I long for ancient deserts, grieve and yearn for a world I never experienced because I know it might have once been home?

Well… no. I don’t. For better or worse, my humanity feels inexorably linked to modernity, to cities, to technology. I can’t go anywhere or do anything without running into electronics. I use the internet every day of my life to learn, entertain, engage with the world around me. I couldn’t imagine living a life where I didn’t have it. There’s no disconnect from the modern day for me, no longing for the past - only the sense that I’m right where I want to be.

As a person, I’m content with where I am today. As an animal, a raptor can’t yearn for a time it has never lived.

vibe

Wexler Films, Science of Light, 1960′s

unhinged thirty days of otherkin challenge, day 1: what type of dirt would your kintype eat?

mmm... moist black soil, cakey and aromatic. maybe there's some bugs in there, maybe not!

cave bear canine // cave bear foot // cave bear upper jaw // cave bear lower jaw // partial cave bear skull // cave bear skull

unhinged 30 days of otherkin challenge

Saw someone mention doing this ages ago and I wrote up my own for fun, but then forgot about it. So, here, uhhhh have this

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rules:

- go feral

- if you're polykin, pick whatever kintype is most pertinent for each question, or the kintype you'd like to answer for

- anyone is welcome to do this, despite this being labeled for otherkin

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1. what type of dirt would your kintype eat?

2. warm or cold ocean water

3. describe a pie made from three ingredients your kintype would eat, crust included, go

4. if your kintype suddenly opened their eyes, what would they be looking at?

5. do you like sticks

5. 5 again. do you like leaves

7. does your kintype migrate

8. sleepy or awakey

9. are you smaller or larger than a breadbox

10. describe the vegetation around your kintype's feet

11. what's the most specific or unusual shift (if you experience them) you've experienced

12. what website is your kintype most like

13. hey, how's it going

14. if given a cellphone, what would your kintype do with it

15. how do you make your room/home/surroundings more suited to your kintype

16. tell me about your favorite kind of fabric…like, just in general, unrelated to your kintype(s)

17. are you bitey

18. how does your kintype feel about chia seeds

19. can your kintype knit? if not, could your kintype knit if given instructions

20. describe your kintype's skin texture in great detail

21. glossy or matte

22. wildcard, I'm getting tired of writing these

23. you hear a scratching noise around the corner, what does your kintype do

24. what's your kintype's most acute sense

25. alone in a forest with no provisions, how long does your kintype survive

26. describe your kintype as a canned vegetable

27. it's getting dark out, does your kintype sleep, wake up, or PANIC

28. how many fingers do you have and why

29. what's a really nice smell

30. has 30 days of this unhinged you further?

an update!

re: cat otherhearted-type

i've confirmed at this point that it is a heart-type, rather than a kin- or therio-type.

re: werwolf?

turns out i have a second otherhearted-type.

re: tail

this one's pretty interesting. turns out that sometimes i experience two tails at once! at the time of that original post, i was feeling my faun tail (goat-like) in a ghost shift, but a longer, lion-like tail in a visage shift. weird!

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