User:Jeremygbyrne/Sylvia Roslyn La Some

Sylvia Roslyn La Some (30 November 1976 - 14 April 2023), born Sarah Ellen Bennett in Adelaide, South Australia, was the author of bestselling The Monkey Riders of Terra and the founder of Xianity.

Biography

La Some was a resident of San Francisco, California, where she studied on a partial scholarship from the San Francisco State University, from May 1995 to March 2010, relocating to Gondwana (then The Federal Republic of Nauru & Dinne) in August 2010.

La Some gained her doctorate in palaeoanthropology in 2005 (having taken a year off to travel after her MA year in 2000).

Death

La Some was stabbed to death in her St Stevens home on 14-April, 2023. Her daughter Madelaina confessed to the killing, but no prosecution was undertaken.

Monkey Riders

La Some is perhaps best known for her undergraduate syncretic pastiche of a number of "buzz theories" in developmental anthropology (including Gimbutas-inspired Riane Eisler's Chalice and Blade material, Julian Jaynes' Bicameral Mind, and the Rex Deus bloodline mythos), fictionalised as the allegorical pseudo-history The Monkey Riders (of Terra) (2006).

The book was marketed independently, and became the fifth best-selling fictional work in history within nine months of its release, when sales peaked. (It has subsequently become an unofficial cosmology for Xianity, and has been redistributed widely in electronic format.)

Development of Xianity

Over the period 2005-2007, La Some founded the religion of Xianity, itself a syncretic philosophy borrowing elements of Universal Sufism, Reform Judaism, Tenrikyo, Wicca and Christianity ^{[citation needed]} (as well as, particularly in later manifestations, pop-culture Buddhism and a variety of Polytheisms and spiritualisms). Bennett acknowledges the influence of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's ideas, and her soujourn in Shaanxi in 2000 was due at least in part to her obsession with a "lost work" of his. Ultimately, Xianity represented a conscious inversion of the paternalist Monotheism it demonised as "The Fear", and attracted both the disaffected and the criminal. At least three deaths can be specifically tied to the practices of this cult which, at its height during the mid teens, could provably claim a membership in the tens of millions.

In essence an anti-rational, primitivist ideology, Xianity specifically encouraged resort to "the Heart before the Head", a doctrine which led, perhaps inevitably, to the "Love Before Truth" dictum which characterised the movement's decline in the early twenties, and which led ultimately to its schism in 2023 and effective dissolution in the years that followed.^{[citation needed]}

Controversy

La Some was briefly controversial during the late noughties and early teens when her movement was targeted by Fundamentalist Christian groups after William V of the United Kingdom declared himself a Xianist (in his autobiographical The King With Ten Friends, Vertigo/DC 2010).

The unauthorised, posthumous publication of La Some's suppressed A Pattern Language for Liberation (2016) has been blamed^[who?] for the 2026 collapse of the Central Asian republics of Transnistria and Dagestan.

Hagiography

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Beginning in the later twenteens, a fad developed of embellishing (or illuminating) copies of the writings and sayings of Sylvia La Some with links to definitional or primary sources (especially Wikipedia). This was portrayed variously as exegesis or meditation on meaning by its adherents and pointless busy work by its many detractors, and the practice has led to a widely divergent "understanding" of many of SRL's better-known aphorisms amongst Xianist shards.

On 25 November 2024, La Some was recognised by the International Community of Sufia as a Guide, and is considered by some to be a Messenger (although not a prophet).

Bibliography

"Misapprehending Exceptionalism" (Nov, 2005)
"How the World Doesn't Work" (Dec, 2005)
The Good Bits of the Bible (Jan, 2006)
The End of the World (As We Know It) (2006) (Development brief; eBook website)
The Monkey Riders (2006) (subtitled "of Terra" in some editions)
Good Thoughts: a Science of Living Together (2007)
Xian (2008)
Rite to Life (2008)
The Good Bits of the Qur'an (2009)
The Good Bits of the Talmud (2009)
The Good Bits of the Tao Te Ching (2010)
(So You're Planning To) Live Forever (2012)
Some Time, Maybe (2015)
How I Helped Defeat America and Save the World from Democracy (2017)
Augury: Book One of the Alchemy Cycle (2018)
Alchemy: Book Two the Alchemy Cycle (2019)
Astrology: Book Three of the Alchemy Cycle (2022)

La Some also self-published a number of minor polemics, particularly during the period 2004-2008 (the secessionist pwning America: the Right-Wing Hack that Took a Nation, her semi-fictional expose of the "Saints" entitled World of Warcraft, and the James Bond slash novella A Day Like Any Other, in which Bond survives the crash of Flight 11 and escapes the North Tower on foot, for example), and subsequently issued others by virtue of her position within the Xianist movement. Four of the last five titles, with the exception of the poorly-received polemic attack on the disgraced Bush administration in 2017, are fiction: an anarchistic utopia set in a future Britain, and a loose science-fantasy trilogy based on material from her 2006 bestseller.

Movie Versions

According to the text of the first two books of the Cycle, The Monkey Riders (of Terra) (2006) was produced as an independent film (They Still Live!, 2008) and then as a thirteen-part television series (HBO's The Monkey Riders, aired 29 September–22 December, 2012). In fact, the only filmed version has been the computer-generated Alchemy, shown in a number of countries (notably Australia, New Zealand and Ireland) simultaneously, in the hour and a half preceding midday GMT on 22 December 2012. (This broadcast features in the stageplay "Alchemy".)

Trivia

In a 2011 interview with a well-read "mainstream" US news source, La Some claimed her adopted surname was not, as had been widely claimed, an anagram of "Salome" (and therefore allegedly indicative of her secret identity as the False Prophet), but a "singable surname" based on the "Do Re Mi" musical scale. In a 2023 "virtual studio" interview with New Scientist, Madelaina La Some claimed the name was in actuality an anagram of "Omelas", from a short story by Ursula K. Le Guin which apparently inspired her mother's mission to create a religious movement with which to "save the world".
La Some was nicknamed "sexsexsex" (later "suxsuxsux") from early high school, and was nominated "Most Likely to Rule the World" in her high school yearbook