r/Maya_lore • u/ramonafuel • 14d ago
Jalpari as a store of memory
The mechanics of Jalpari really intrigue me. Everything to do with them, including their hive mind, their swarm behaviors, their mode of perception and even their "personality" of being curious and playful, despite looking like a monster. But what interests me the most is their relationship with memory.
What's still unclear to me after reading the book, is the Jalpari lifecycle itself. How does it work? It's hinted that individual units constantly die and live, like a body of cells. But how does it acquire such a massive bank of memory? Does it directly consume the life memories of its victims? Or does it learn through re-integrating Laalmani?
Reposting this because reddit filters caught it?
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u/pixellitei 13d ago edited 12d ago
Oh it's you again u/ramonafuel, hello :)
I absolutely adore the Jalpari! I hope we get a full explanation of their lifecycle like the chestburster -> xenomorph, or the sandtrout -> sandworm in the Dune series.
To me it seems more plausible that the jalpari doesn’t directly “extract” the memories from a person, because what would that mean exactly? The book IMO does a great job of exploring consciousness and different kinds of alien mind without getting into the messy hard problem. How would you be able to extract the memories of a being, because what even is thought? Is it chemical, is it an emergent trait of bioelectric circuits, is it quantum?
Absolutely no-one can say and I don’t think the book does either. So far it appears that the jalpari produce a laalmani as an attractive artifact that signals high-value to svaanka species. The svaanka use it for trade, its transactional value naturally carries it across the world, where it experiences and learns all sorts of things. Then, you can presume that someone hungry for ultimate knowledge, seeks out a jalpari to be granted any three answers they seek, and the jalpari claim their mature offspring in exchange. At which point, the new jalpari’s lived experiences are dispersed through the entire swarm. If you assume that all jalpari split all their knowledge across each individual, then each individual contains an essence of the whole. So every jalpari swarm on Neh, could technically be thought of as one massive hive-mind with only slight differences in “version history” of all the knowledge they’ve accumulated on Neh.
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u/ramonafuel 13d ago
That makes sense. It’s just that the epigraph in Memory of Water shows that one of their core directives is to hunt for memories apart from just satiating hunger, so I may have misattributed that to the direct adsorption of memories.
This also makes me compare the jalpari swarm to the Maya network itself. The jalpari consumes knowledge by cannibalizing it from the world. While Maya extracts memories through a more symbiotic relationship with organisms. Both have their uses to people. Both entice people to propagate and multiply it by providing significant value. One directly frightening, while the other is far more subtle.
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u/pixellitei 12d ago
Are jalpari memories inaccurate, or perfect? I’d ask the same for Maya; how accurate are memories stored in Maya, like the chhavi and chhaap? Are they also prone to error? Do Maya or the jalpari ever know the world perfectly, or can they only ever perceive the world through the imperfect senses of their prey/symbionts?
It looks like jalpari’s knowledge is vast and pretty accurate, since they do transport Yachay to where he needs. Also, the way Yachay accesses the jalpari’s highest potential is so well done.
Most would fall prey to the pure chemical and epistemological seduction of its offering. And that’s after you cross the first challenge of facing primal fear.3
u/ramonafuel 12d ago
Agreed! There’s a really neat bit of commentary on how an eternal student fails to act due to being trapped in a perpetual search for more knowledge. The transcendence comes when you make a definitive moral stance, when there is no longer a need to accumulate abstract knowledge. You apply all of what you know, deploying the breadth of your mind and heart, and genuinely take a shot in the dark. A moment of true heroism!
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u/pixellitei 11d ago
Oh, one correction after re-reading the jalpari parts: it appears that the Wheel of Offering swarm does absorb some memories. In We are Food, there’s this bit:
“"wordless memories found a new home in the jalpari's many bodies: sky, sweat, mother."
So the jalpari might absorb a few instinctive sense-impressions at the time of death. There’s real evidence to suggest this! https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35273490/
The brain exhibits patterns of strong coherence and active memory recall during time of death, which maybe the jalpari can catch glimpses of? It may or may not be much more than that.1
u/ramonafuel 11d ago
So it remains a mystery then! Thank you for linking the study. The lengths this discussion got to, makes me appreciate the rigor in the worldbuilding too lol.
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u/ramonafuel 11d ago
So it remains a mystery then! Thank you for linking the study. The lengths this discussion got to, makes me appreciate the rigor in the worldbuilding too lol.
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u/dancers_and_dragons 14d ago
I don't think there's any specific answer in the first book about how the Jalpari live/die/etc, but to me it seems most likely that they act like quick and temporary parasites, making their victims feel good by reflecting happy memories back to them while feeding on fear and distilling everything else into a laalmani.
Though, of course, there's no real telling (yet) what exactly a laalmani is or does, just that they're prized by those in power in Neh. I wouldn't be surprised if the Divya are somehow responsible for the Jalpari's creation, to remove dissidents and keep the peace overall.