The application of this knife, the division of the world into parts and the building of this

structure, is something everybody does. All the time we are aware of millions of things
around us - these changing shapes, these burning hills, the sound of the engine, the feel of
the throttle, each rock and weed and fence post and piece of debris beside the road - aware
of these things but not really conscious of them unless there is something unusual or unless
they reflect something we are predisposed to see. We could not possibly be conscious of
these things and remember all of them because our mind would be so full of useless details
we would be unable to think. From all this awareness we must select, and what we select
and call consciousness is never the same as the awareness because the process of selection
mutates it. We take a handful of sand from the endless landscape of awareness around us
and call that handful of sand the world.
Once we have the handful of sand, the world of which we are conscious, a process of
discrimination goes to work on it. This is the knife. We divide the sand into parts. This and
that. Here and there. Black and white. Now and then. The discrimination is the division of
the conscious universe into parts.
The handful of sand looks uniform at first, but the longer we look at it the more diverse we
find it to be. Each grain of sand is different. No two are alike. Some are similar in one way,
some are similar in another way, and we can form the sand into separate piles on the basis
of this similarity and dissimilarity. Shades of color in different piles - sizes in different piles grain shapes in different piles - subtypes of grain shapes in different piles - grades of
opacity in different piles - and so on, and on, and on. You'd think the process of subdivision
and classification would come to an end somewhere, but it doesn't. It just goes on and on.
Classical understanding is concerned with the piles and the basis for sorting and
interrelating them. Romantic understanding is directed toward the handful of sand before
the sorting begins. Both are valid ways of looking at the world although irreconcilable with
each other.
What has become an urgent necessity is a way of looking at the world that does violence to
neither of these two kinds of understanding and unites them into one. Such an
understanding will not reject sand-sorting or contemplation of unsorted sand for its own
sake. Such an understanding will instead seek to direct attention to the endless landscape
from which the sand is taken. That is what Phdrus, the poor surgeon, was trying to do.
To understand what he was trying to do it's necessary to see that part of the
landscape, inseparable from it, which must be understood, is a figure in the middle of it,
sorting sand into piles. To see the landscape without seeing this figure is not to see the
landscape at all. [...]
When analytic thought, the knife, is applied to experience, something is always killed in the
process. That is fairly well understood, at least in the arts. Mark Twain's experience comes
to mind, in which, after he had mastered the analytic knowledge needed to pilot the
Mississippi River, he discovered the river had lost its beauty. Something is always killed. But
what is less noticed in the arts - something is always created too. And instead of just of

dwelling on what is killed it's important also to see what's created and to see the process as
a kind of death-birth continuity that is neither good nor bad

Part 1, Freedom
At the heart of our philosophy is the assertion that humanity is not only free, but irreducibly so. At no
time, in no situation can you be without freedom. Clearly this requires some elaboration, since
objections are easy to raise (Moon Mages have been doing it for a thousand years).
Freedom is defined in the philosophy along the lines of action and intentionality. There are, as the
priest and the seer are quick to point out, forces outside our control. You will grow hungry and have
no say in the matter, you may catch an arrow in the eye and that is the end of it. These crude facts of
Elanthia are referred to as contingency. However while contingency shapes our expressions of
freedom, it does not negate freedom.
Let us take the arrow, sailing through the air to an inevitable confrontation with our skull. The "range"
of the world constricts with every yard the arrow flies, but it never reduces our capacity to react and
intend to zero. At the end of the flight, the moment of my own death, I am still capable of creating
infinite variations on my reaction. Do I laugh at the bitter irony of it? Cry out in rage, or in fright?
Stand rigid and proud? Beseech the gods whom I have abandoned for a shot at mercy?
Examples like this can be made of any situation. The Philosophy of the Knife goes even further to
point out that our very notion of contingency's restriction is freely chosen by the man. The arrow in
my eye only limits me insofar as I have chosen not to will to die. A cell only imprisons me for the
exact length of time I will to leave it.
You will see Kigot usually refer to this concept using two words: "Terrible Freedom." Simply enough,
most men regard the concept of freedom the same way they do the Immortals: it is powerful,
frightful, and threatens to consume our world view should we stare at it. If you accept the truth of
Terrible Freedom, you are the architect of your own world. All your misery, all your faults and your
failings, are yours. You are every monstrous impulse just as you are the ever so rare moment of
genius you will readily claim.
Most men cannot accept this, and we call them cowards.
Part 2, The Other

Pretend you are a disembodied soul, floating in pure nothingness. You are conscious, but of what?
You cannot be strong, or wise, or merciful or cruel because there is nothing to be strong against, or
to be wise about. You cannot know yourself or affect the void. There is no freedom.
Let us give this poor man an unpopulated world to live on. Suddenly, a great deal of wisdom comes
to him. He knows he is strong, for he can lift a rock -- but not too strong, for the boulder still eludes
him. He can demonstrate and thus know intellect, stamina, and choose how he will make his way
through his desolate hell. But still there is something missing. Is he charming? Moral? Just?
Sadistic? He can be none of these things, for there are no other people to be moral or sadistic to. He
can only express freedom in relation to the world.
If we call the crude earth contingency, it is because freedom is contingent on it. Without some form
of resistance to "push off" of a define our lives, we can know nothing and do nothing. Freedom is not
rejection of the world, it is projecting into it.
To bring the point closer to the vernacular young Necromancers will be aware of, freedom is defined
by a choice of a Work upon the world.
Part 3, Transcendence
So far our philosophy is clean and straight forward, but only insofar as we are dealing with a single
man alone with the world. Here is our man, capable of intending and projecting out into the world...
but he is only one of countless men, spirits, and gods which have that capacity.
Let us say one man comes upon a group of other men. In his previous experiences, the first man
has come to interpret the brandishing of his knife as a symbol of militant respect -- he shows the
group that he hides nothing, that he openly displays his strength. The other men, in sharp contrast,
have taken such a thing to be a crude threat of violence upon the weak.
They are both truth, in the sense that both parties have tested and proven their interpretation of the
symbol and know it to be so, but it cannot be both truths at the same time. Somebody loses and, so
it likely happens, the lone man is driven out or killed.
Should he merely flee and not die, it happens again. The group of men are irrational, hateful people
who spurned his offering of respect; the lone man was a dangerous outlaw who did not know the
rules of the group. And so on for as long as the interaction lasts, freedom set upon freedom.
I will forgive novices for believing we banter around the idea of 'transcendence' as some ill-defined,
sublime concept, but in our truth it is very strictly defined. Transcendence is the human capacity to
successfully project upon the world and bring his Work to completion. If I use a rock as a crude axe
-- even if I merely pick it up on the broad side and regard it as a weapon without any physical
modification -- I have brought my transcendence upon the rock and made it something else.
Transcendence is extremely important between men, because it becomes a competition. If I "prove"
you are an outlaw and not a misunderstood man, we have attempted to transcend each other and I
have prevailed. You become like the rock, something I freely choose to define and, having given up

the metaphysical fight, it becomes a matter of contingency to which you must adapt and choose
around.
Freely choosing to dedicate oneself to transcendence, to project out into the world the will to shape
it, is what Kigot calls the fundamental Work, the first and most primal of all possible projections.
Part 4, The Immortals
All would be well enough if it ended with man. We would be in a cruel yet ultimately fair world, where
the men with the greatest wit and strength would justly transcend all others and define the human
world. Left to his own devices, a philosopher-king will rise above the bickering mass and rule it -- just
as Kigot's ghost now rules necromancy due to the Work he put out in his texts.
However, this contest is anything but fair.
The Immortals have a privileged position in the world. They are stronger than us, live longer, and
have vast supernatural powers which we cannot dream of. They transcend us and become our
contingency, literally shaping the world underneath our feet. Of course, you may argue that they
simply play the game better than us -- that they are the strongest and wisest and we are the
bickering mass.
Fair enough, but let us examine the world they have created.
While we have thus far been happy to define mere human reality and freedom -- "what does hunger
mean to us?" -- the Immortals are the creators who defined physical contingency -- "there shall be
hunger." We must shape our freedom around hunger, disease, war, earthquakes, tornadoes, and
physical decay because the gods have transcended us so absolutely and said that it is so. When
your wife dies in labor, you have the paltry freedom to choose how you will integrate this into your life
-- the gods had the freedom to make it not be.
With Terrible Freedom comes responsibility for ourselves and our Work. We are responsible for our
every flaw, and the gods are responsible for theirs. If you look at this world and find it wanting, then
the answer is simple: the Immortals do not handle their responsibility well.
Part 5, The Great Work
Here is where philosophy ends. Only informed by our wisdom and philosophy, we can do nothing but
freely choose how we wish to confront the Immortals' dominion over Elanthia. So it was for countless
years, perhaps since the very first man was created, until a very large book was found.
The Alchemy of Flesh (more properly, "Investigations Toward an Alchemy of Flesh") was not a
philosophical text, but the research notes of a Necromancer far off the beaten path. Through
practically useless but compelling proofs, he demonstrated that highly refined necromantic
procedures can create life force out of nothing -- that it is capable of divine genesis. The implications
were staggering: unlimited energy. Man self-defined at the most basic level of his organism. Nature
itself defined by his hand.

Yet even greater than its physical power, Kigot saw it for its metaphysical implications: the capacity
to transcend the Immortals and bring any Work to completion. It would be the greatest of all Works
and the men who would dedicate their lives to it the kings among men. The Triumphant.
Part 6, The Honest Knife
Terrible Freedom and the Great Work are dual-edged blades. It bears repeating that at the heart of
the philosophy is personal responsibility. You are your own monster. In our profession, this is an
extremely important consideration.
The Philosophy of the Knife is regarded as a moral philosophy more than an ontology, because he
invests hundreds of pages on the implications of our situation. It is well enough to say we are free
and possess in our grasp the ability to transcend the gods, but what good is it if we do not freely
choose to be more worthy of transcendence than the gods are?
I cannot go into the full ethical implications in such a short space, but I will touch on two core issues I
see most of the new generation failing at.
1) Responsibility. When you transcend another man, you become responsible for him. Responsibility
is not some finite value which is assigned and then forgotten -- everyone who is transcended and
transcends must accept the burden of what they have freely chosen. When you kill a man, you have
restricted his freedom to its last, finite point and assumed responsibility for everything he might have
been.
The Philosopher does not kill glibly but most importantly does not make excuses. If someone's life
must end for the Great Work, then let it be on your head. If your Work is worthy of his sacrifice, then
this will be evident to all in its completion. If the space between a man and a monster is the width of
a knife, then you dance on the blade with responsibility. To minimize the act, to take sadistic pleasure
or to perform atrocity for anything less than the Great Work is the work of the Perverse.
2) Forgiveness versus Transmutation. A Philosopher is, on the spiritual level, evil. Do not be so
cowardly as to argue you are somehow "misunderstood" or "good at heart." The Immortals
transcend us, at least for now, and in the world they have made, evilness is our contingency.
The Philosopher does not strive to be forgiven or loved. Understood is acceptable, though frankly I
would never bother. Your "redemption," if it is ever to be found, is in your Work. You are the vessel of
an alchemical transmutation, from contingency to freedom -- evil to glory. You will find solace in your
Work, or you will never find it at all. The Perverse and Redeemed, abandoning this principle, wallow
in their misery.
ontinuity that is neither good nor bad