by Daniel Quinn
Karroum. The skinless, not to be confused with their whole-skinned followers, who call themselves the Skinless.
Lokas. Weapons that, according to followers of the Khaki Bodhisattva among the Radiant, are used to inflict pain on the unenlightened during the crossing over.
Lose your head. Suffer death.
Memory-loss hysteria. A brief, localized mass delusion in which all believe that they have been struck “memory-dead.”
Never-born. See Adept.
Northern Cities. Cities of perpetual “daylight,” so-called after the far-north cities of the earth, which, at the height of the summer, experience round-the-clock sunlight.
Phantasm. An ephemeral apparition, generally odd and out of place.
Prana. In Hindu religion the “breath of life,” experienced in the Afterlife as a rosy light cascading through our bodies. It is said that in the earthly work Bengal Lancer, F. Yeats-Brown wrote: “There was a saddhi at Puri who claimed to be able to resurrect sparrows by breathing prana into them.” In Yoga, J. Hewitt wrote: “The power of the atom is Prana. Thought is Prana.… It pervades the whole universe.”
The Radiant. Members of the Afterlife’s most popular crossing religion.
Reconstruction. An earthly text assembled from the memory of the dead.
Regular. A member of the most numerous “human” component of the Afterlife population; it is thought that all who survive infancy become Regulars in the Afterlife.
Reunion. See Walling-In.
Shade. A Regular; one of the dead. The term is usually used to avoid confusion between present relationships (“my friend Paul”) and those enjoyed in life (“the shade of my friend Paul”).
The Six. Six shades, who, according to the beliefs of the Letheans, long ago achieved the state to which they aspire, that of total nirvanic oblivion.
The skinless. The Karroum (q.v.); when capitalized, the word refers to the (whole-skinned) followers of the Karroum.
Society of Fools. A large, variegated guild of entertainers.
Spontaneous (or “Street-Corner”) religion. A religion that appears or is practiced on the spur of the moment.
The staggers. The tremulous gait characteristic of the very recently deceased.
Store. An accumulation of goods free for the taking.
Tachyon. A particle that travels faster than light.
Walling-In. A ritual occasionally practiced by catacomb-dwellers. The candidate is walled into a tight-fitting niche (an act deliberately mimetic of the soul’s former imprisonment in the body) in hopes of achieving an ecstatic transformation known as Reunion.
BOOKS BY DANIEL QUINN
Ishmael
My Ishmael
Providence: The Story of a Fifty-Year Vision Quest
The Story of B
A Newcomer’s Guide to the Afterlife
(with Tom Whalen)
BOOKS BY TOM WHALEN
The Camel’s Back
Elongated Figures
Roithamer’s Universe
Winter Coat
DANIEL QUINN is the author of Ishmael, Providence, The Story of B, and My Ishmael.
TOM WHALEN teaches creative writing, literature, and film, and divides his time between New Orleans and Stuttgart, Germany. He is the author of Elongated Figures, The Camel’s Back, Roithamer’s Universe, and Winter Coat.
