Graves Library of Vul

Across the world, it is proposed that the soul is made up of 5 parts: personality, heart, life, name, and shadow. Each piece looks like a string according to the Hindus, Zoroastrians, and Egyptians (who believed in nine parts). Our pieces are swapped during reincarnation. These strings are affected by your genes and memes. Ultimately, though, they tie you to those with similar strings to yourself. 

It has also been said that you are the sum of your five closest friends at the time. They are also a lucky few that you are tied to via a red string that will keep you connected. No matter how different your lives become, fate will find some way to bring them and many people you meet back into your life. It can be tangled but never cut. As the Norns collaborate with the Moirae, the Weavers of Fate, to make sure of this by separating you from everyone by six degrees.

You’re one degree from your friends and family, two degrees from knowing everyone in your entire community and town, three degrees from knowing everyone in your culture and subcultures, four degrees from knowing everyone in your nation and all the cultures that make up it, five degrees from everyone in all the nations that make up this world, and six degrees or more from those in the far past and to those in the future. Maybe even less than this now that we have the World Wide Web tying our strings together and farther than they have ever been before. All to form the tapestry that is humanity for whatever lies out in the stars, or what’s above and below this reality. 

All of this said, it’s magical that just five people can shape us into our own unique selves. As our paths cross time and time again, they sew our own identities together to make us. The color of their personality dyes our string of personality, making its own hue that helps it beat to its drum. The frequency of the string of personality helps our community stitch our morals together by our string of heart. Yet to keep our hearts together, some of the stitches are covered and tied back by our strings of shadow. Funny enough, sometimes our shadow strings are adorned like velvet in our subcultures. This masking and unmasking of our hidden stitches is so that we can fit into the clothing of our culture. How well we can tie our strings together and how they affect our nation determines how we tamper and use our string of life in the limited time we have with how many people we intertwine our soul with. All of that will affect how long your string of name is, as you have the power to make that long or short, it just depends on how many people your life is tied to by your actions, good or bad. 

Either way, this will taint the string of fate that the Moirae and Norns have woven for you by your five strings and all of those that are tied to you in six degrees of separation. This string is more of a rope made by the other strings and appears as one string of an interconnecting narrative created by the spider god of stories, Anansi. Many will see the timeline that is this string and will weave its messages and philosophy into their own as a part of their patchwork of knowledge that has a small but important effect on the strings of their soul. 

Many try to string as far as they can using any means necessary to minimize the degrees of separation. Whether it be by making art, charity, discovering something new and placing their name on it, becoming a martyr for a cause greater than them, or dare I say it committing atrocities like murder, genocide, theft, and rape. A small number of these attempts do succeed as their fates become divine like the deities that wove their string of fate to begin with. 

There are those who try to only use their string of name to connect to others, like many of the one percent whose other strings are loose and are unable to connect with the common folk or to each other. The separation makes them more depraved as time goes on. Take Nero or Caligula, for example. So if you choose to make your name more well-known, it is best to be sincere and use every string in your gallery. Let your string of personality and heart shine through with every interaction. Let your work reflect your string of life, whether it be the life you lived or the life you wish to have. If you do this, your string of shadow will tie them all together and lure people to the awe of your string of name that acts as a key to the museum, that is your complexity and depth. 

While there are many who reach this goal, there are many who are more than 6 degrees away as their strings are tainted by the five closest around them (if they’re fortunate enough to have five). More than you think long to be something other than loose strings on this canvas. Toxic strings that stain their canvas with generational trauma that is tied to their genes, or verbal abuse, to tie false memes and perceptions to their psyche. These things can tie them down and make them hateful, bitter, or alone. Negativity brings negative, whether conscious or not, people with similar toxic strings and memes can begin to tie themselves to them. Making them more bitter, sad, and angry as they long to be displayed in the light and be stitched back to the human web.

 It’s our responsibility to give charity to them if they bare their soul to us. Especially when they are trying to cut ties away from humanity’s collective malice, addiction, and other toxic strings that they or others have. This can separate them from six or more degrees to one or two and affect their soul tremendously. It can give them love, hope, or a purpose, which affects others who will be affected by them, making your string as long as the strings of fate that you help grow. As we are all just six degrees away from knowing everyone in the world, and are shaped by the five closest to us all dyed different hues of the same color that is the web of humanity.