5:46am February 28, 2015

Kything

I’m just going to cut and paste from Wikipedia here, editing out some of the footnotes and stuff:

Kything is derived from the Old English kythe, cýðe; a word known from both The Vespasian Psalter (c.825) and the West Saxon Gospels (c.1025). Meaning “to announce, proclaim, declare, tell, to make known in words, to manifest, to make visible”, it survived as the Scottish dialect word kythe.

The author Madeleine L'Engle used the word kythe to describe a fictional type of communication, in a sense like telepathy, found in several of the books in her Time Quartet. L'Engle reportedly discovered the term in “an old Scottish dictionary” belonging to her grandfather.

In the Time Quartet books Kything is a sort of wordless, mind-to-mind communication in which one person, in essence, almost becomes another, seeing through their eyes and feeling through their senses.
In such a frame of mind, the two people intuitively know the meaning of what the other is telling them, disregarding such things as words or pictures. The idea may be based on the concept of Oneness, which states that all that exists, is one in its source and end. Apparently, recollection and assertion of that concept puts a person “in Kythe” with that which they are concentrating on.

Kything is portrayed as a way to be present with others without regard to space, time, or relative size. Through kything, humans can be together inside a subcellular mitochondrion, as seen in A Wind in the Door, or in communication despite being centuries apart, as seen in A Swiftly Tilting Planet.

[This section deleted because spoilers for the Time Quartet. I know it’s been out forever, but I’d like people to be able to come to it in their own time and not have certain things spoiled by me just because I cut and pasted something from a Wikipedia article.]

Other uses

Catholic priest Louis M. Savary and Patricia H. Berne have created a handbook for kything as a spiritual practice, in Kything: The Art of Spiritual Presence.

Wow, it’d be interesting to read that book. Anyway, here’s the full Wikipedia page on kything, but be aware it contains spoilers for the Time Quartet.

More stuff I remembered when looking through things on Madeleine L'Engle’s writing. If I ever use the word kythe or kything, I mean something akin to the above. Anne and I seem to kythe naturally, with other parts of the world (need not be human) and with each other. My father and I spent his last several months in near-constant kything. I think my mother is still kything with him, because that’s the kind of soulmate relationship they have.

And when I use the word kything, I don’t use it exactly how it was used in the books, which are, after all, fantasy. But I mean something closely related. And I also don’t mean telepathy, which has always struck me as something altogether different. For one thing, kything requires connection to the deepest kind of Love, telepathy doesn’t. Kything seems to have more depth than telepathy, and less ability to be tampered with because it uses the heart more than the mind. These are just my own associations with the word, though.