Welcome to Maid Spin, the personal website of iklone. I write about about otaku culture as well as history, philosophy and mythology.
My interests range from anime & programming to mediaevalism & navigation. Hopefully something on this site will interest you.
I'm a devotee of the late '90s / early '00s era of anime, as well as a steadfast lover of maids. My favourite anime is Mahoromatic. I also love the works of Tomino and old Gainax.
To contact me see my contact page.
When Adam and Eve were cast out of paradise they travelled into the the plains immediately West of Eden, looking for somewhere new to live. Here they found a fertile valley through which one of the river's of Eden flowed through, and Adam built Eve a house to live in from sticks and mud, and the two subsisted of what Adam could gather from the valley. Here Eve bore Adam two sons: Cain and Abel. When they were old enough the two sons went out to find new ways to feed themselves. Cain tilled the land and planted seeds, becoming the first agriculturalist growing vegetables and herbs. Abel, on the other hand, went out and captured wild sheep from the hillsides, leading them out to pastures to graze and slaughtering them once in a while for meat, becoming the first shepherd. These two forms of natural stewardship form the basis for the dichotomy of occupations man still has today, although describing them fruitfully will require a bit more explaining.
Those, like Cain, who grow crops are fixed in one position. They till and sow and grow and reap all in the same place. These men are rooted to the land. They watch time pass over their land through the four seasons and through the various temperaments of weather, changing repeatedly back and forth in cycles of warmth and cold. For Cain space is stable and time is cyclical. Abel, on the other hand, has animals that can move. Through what we now call the process of transhumance, he moves his chattel from valley to moor to hilltop to follow the seasons. In the winter the shelter of the valley floor provides the safest place to graze, but in the summer the expanse of the higher ground provides much opportunity, and so the cramped valley floor is left for higher pastures. This annual loop means that for Abel space is cyclical while, by always following the good climate, time is stable. Abel is a man rooted in time.
As mankind advanced, the sons of Cain and Eve's third son, Seth, grew more and more diverse in their occupations, the division of their labour allowing for the advancement of what could be called a society. But still their jobs could be split in two by the medium through which each man travelled: the farmers, the craftsmen and the artisan through time; and the shepherds, the merchants and the warriors through space. Of course the third, primordial, manner of Adam still existed: that of the hunter gatherer. Adam travelled equally through time and space, following the packs of deer and fields of mushrooms. This third manner was in deed the most common in those times of what can be dubbed the "Silver Era" (for it come after the Golden Era of Eden but before the Great Deluge), because the world was abundant and unexplored. But as mankind spread out across the world, those in the central plains around the great rivers of Eden started to rely more heavily on grain and livestock. And thus three concentric rings of societies began to form: 1) the city-dwellers who rely on the agriculture of their hinterland; 2) the vagrant travelling tribes of the borderlands, living in tents and moving with the seasons; and 3) the hunter-gatherers of the periphery lived and died only on what nature provided them. But the world was not purely inhabited by one intelligent creature in those days: for giants still lived amongst men. Those of the central cities and tribes knew not to mix with giants, but the hunter-gatherers did not and interbred creating abominations and degrading the men their to barbarians, despised by the central people. Thus is the consequence of living purely in tune with nature, rather than taking man's designated role as steward of creation: corruption and loss of humanity, a truth that still holds true today.
With time the central cities two became corrupt through decadence, greed and interpersonal jealousy. Soon these vices began to show in the offerings they made to God: the rich farmers began to keep the best crops for themselves, while the humble shepherd tribes remembered that the best of their animals were for the Lord. Thus the same story as with Cain & Abel played out again, and God once again acted. He chose a humble shepherd family, that of Noah, and set him to construct an arc to save his family and two of each creature in the land. God sent the Great Deluge, destroying the Cainean civilisation and bringing mankind into the Bronze Age. From then onward, because of God's promise to the sons of Noah in his covenant, God left humanity alone to follow paths truly of their choosing, winding through history right up until the descending of God to Earth in 1AD. Mankind still lives to this day divided between those who stay stationary in space, and those who stay stationary in time. And we still see some tension between these factions. However, through the guidance of the Mosaic laws which brought in the Iron Age, humanity is now able to construct a agriculture-based society able to stave off corruption to some degree: thusly the Cainean way of life is now by far the most common way of life: there exist now only very few true nations that are nomadic, usually on the perimetres of the world. The Bedouin of Arabia, some steppe people of Northern Asia, or the Red Indian tribes still practicing transhumance in the harsh Andean climes. But we do still have many within our stationary societies that do practice an Abelean method of living, just more obtusely. Traders and merchantmen follow the seasons of the economy, soldiers follow the winds of the global zeitgeist. These such professions still have in them the air of the honest Abel, and can be used to balance out the excesses of our Cainean society which will, if left to its own devices, end in homicide.
