Surpotence

As you look through the course catalogue at the Fallbrook School of Magic for new students, you see that there is one course that several of the courses you are drawn to list as a prerequisite. This course is called Surpotence: Essential Understanding for Beginner Magic Learners. 

Depending on your background, you may be more or less familiar with Surpotence, but regardless of how much you know about it, it looks like you will need to learn more in order to continue your studies of magic.

You find a listing for the course with the introductory lesson happening later in the day. You decide to go to the library to pick up any books you might need to read and the syllabus for the course. The librarian gets you set up with several thick books on the subject and the following syllabus:

Lecture 1: Introduction: A brief story of Surpotence

Lecture 2: The Cataclysm

• How it changed the planet
• Resource scarcity

Lecture 3: The Collective Trauma Response

• Patriarchal Priests
• Tribal wars
• Suppression of the collaborative impulse
• Culmination of Domination

Lecture 4: The Planetary Immune Response

• Epidemics
• Human Evolution Interventions
• The Burning Times

Lecture 5: The Collective Healing Process

• The Network
• The Frenites
• Elterian Language
• Cross-species evolution
• Restorative species evolution
• Time Travel for Ancestral Healing

You take your books to the library reading room and find a cozy nook to dig in. The introductory chapter of the first book, The Story of Surpotence, outlines the basics of how Surpotence is a disease that overcame most of humanity in ancient times after 300,000 years of living in ecological harmony. It started after an asteroid hit the planet causing cataclysmic immediate and long-term changes to the environment humans relied upon. 

Before the asteroid hit, the axis of the planet circled parallel to the axis of the sun, so weather was consistent year-round and food grew abundantly everywhere on the planet. The asteroid knocked the planetary axis off of parallel enough to change weather patterns planet-wide so that locations farther away from the equator had seasonal changes and food did not grow year-round anymore. Prey animals began migrating and so did people.  

The trauma of the cataclysm created a collective trauma response as the first few years after the asteroid strike were very difficult for all humans. They were used to having food available wherever they went year-round and easy weather that they were adapted to that never changed. After the asteroid, there were drastic weather changes, mass die-offs of food plants and animals, and many humans did not survive. 

Human tribal groups shifted from cooperative, matriarchal, ecologically harmonious communities to roving war tribes led by Patriarchal Priests violently taking over resource-rich areas to feed their people seemingly overnight.

Humanity grew in population and evolved through many epochs, all influenced by this shift towards violent domination as the primary social structure. This is how Surpotence, the uniquely human disease of violently dominating each other and all living things to ensure resource security, spread through all of humanity. It is a collective trauma response, not a natural part of human nature as many Surpotence suffers would argue.

The book demonstrates how Surpotence is not part of nature by showing how no other animals will kill off entire species or destroy their environment unless they are limited to too small an area for their population to survive in, usually by human infringement into their habitat. 

It also talks about how studies of micro-organisms in the early evolution of the planet show that populations will naturally over-consume their prey in early developmental stages and then evolve to a more cooperative ecological balance to avoid extinction. It clearly shows how advanced life forms would not have evolved into being if this were not the case, as they are simply large communities of smaller cellular organisms that live in cooperative harmony.

It also discusses how humanity prior to the planetary immune response had experienced periodic resurgences of cooperative models for social organization, but the Surpotence-afflicted majority would simply snuff them out to maintain dominance.

It wasn’t until after the Burning Times, the major planetary immune response to the overgrowth of overconsuming humans, that the human population returned to a small enough number for ecological balance to begin to restore itself. This lower number also allowed the planetary nervous system, the Mycelial Crystal Network, or the MCN, AKA the Network, to merge with more and more humans who were ready for their next phase of evolution, creating a new, ecologically harmonious species of humans called Frenites.

As you look up from the book after reading most of the introduction, you realize it’s almost time for the first lecture. You close the book and make your way there, thinking of all the questions you have about Surpotence and how understanding it better will help you learn how to use magic better.

What are your questions about Surpotence? Put them in the comments for the professor to answer.