Chirp! Bark! Hey!

On Sapience, Longing, and the Lack Thereof

Written by Max Biscuit-Machina on August 12th, 2024.

So I was at Othercon 2024 this past weekend - and like many who attended, I came out the other side with a new piece of my identity to chew over. This essay is me chewing over my thoughts on archaeosapience, as it connects to my velociraptor paleotheriotype, and why I genuinely don’t feel like I fit the label.

One of the panels I attended and thoroughly enjoyed was “Not Humans, Still People: How Inhumanity Interacts with Personhood,” by Goratrix bani Tremere of the Draconic Wizard Workshop and Chaiya Askari-Vykos of the Treehouse System. During the panel, Goratrix and Chaiya argue that personhood is different from humanity, defining personhood as, essentially, sapience - the ability to understand oneself, to make rational choices, to comprehend the world in not only physical ways, but also the abstract and symbolic. All humans are people, but not all people are humans - nonhuman personhood is experienced by many, many alterhumans, and this is an important distinction to keep in mind.

Another panel I adored, presented by Sivaan of Candlekeep, was “Archaeosapience: To Awaken as Ancient in a Modern Age,” in which he discusses the label and the intricacies of his own experience as an archaeosapien. Once again, nonhuman sapience is a key feature here - as Sivaan writes in xyr coining essay, “[t]he “sapience” in archaeosapience exclusively refers to our awareness of our existence as ancient beings,” as opposed to an inherent connection with the species Homo sapiens. Archaeosapience does not require one to be human.

An archaeosapien is defined as “an individual whose alterhuman or nonhuman identity is intrinsically rooted in prehistory, antiquity or mythic accounts of history.” And funnily enough, here lies my personal disconnect with the term, even though I identify as a velociraptor - a prehistoric animal well known to be extinct. To experience archaeosapience requires personhood, requires sapience, an understanding of oneself as an ancient being. And this is one thing that my theriotype utterly lacks.

Now, I’m not saying that I lack sapience. I am a person, one who reads and writes and learns about the world around me. I also identify as human, separate but intertwined with my personhood, and my humanity is as important to me as my animality. Both of these core parts of myself contribute to where I stand today - as a prehistoric animal person who is, somehow, completely at home in modernity.

Throughout this essay, I’m going to refer to my raptor self in the third person - it thinks this, it wants that. I separate myself from my theriotype in this way because I do not feel like I’m myself in a mental shift. My raptorial mind is not a person, but an animal. It is incapable of understanding abstract concepts or philosophical thought, living in the physical world where it gets food, water, rest, shelter, and enrichment. This does not make it any lesser than my sapient mind - it does mean that it has a different way of understanding the world.

My raptor brain, the instinctual animal side, does not feel like it’s an animal from another era. It doesn’t even know what time is, beyond the regular cycles of day and night. It doesn’t understand common features of modern human society, like computers or elevators or money - not because those things didn’t exist back in prehistoric Asia, 75 million years ago, but because it’s an animal. I could be a gecko from the modern day and still feel the same mentally shifted apathy and confusion about the things I need to live day to day as a human being. The raptor doesn’t know or care about its status as a long-extinct relic, because as far as it’s concerned, it is alive and well, healthy and fed and comfortable in a house with people it knows.

In fact, my raptor brain doesn’t even feel attached to a habitat. Early on in my awakening, as someone who knows where velociraptors used to live in the spacetime continuum, I felt a sort of connection with deserts - I’d look at them and think, that’s like the place my species lived! This was the part of me who’s a person, putting a label to a place that I’ve never been, thinking fondly of it despite never having lived there.

The part of me that’s not a person, that knows nothing but pavement and grass and many-walled shelters keeping out the wind, looks at the desert and bristles with distaste. It doesn’t like the idea of being somewhere it doesn’t know, with sand and scorching sun and no food it knows how to catch. It knows its home territory, a place with cooling wooden floorboards and a comfortable nest of mattress and blankets and a cache of good food that never runs out, and it likes its territory. It doesn’t like the desert or understand the significance of it. It can’t comprehend the idea of wilderness enough to miss it. It doesn’t want to be wild and free, it wants to live in a building with air conditioning and clean freshwater from the sink.

As you can see, my raptor self is perfectly content to be a modern animal. How about my human self, the part of me that can think about my theriotype and know that it’s a prehistoric animal? Do I long for ancient deserts, grieve and yearn for a world I never experienced because I know it might have once been home?

Well… no. I don’t. For better or worse, my humanity feels inexorably linked to modernity, to cities, to technology. I can’t go anywhere or do anything without running into electronics. I use the internet every day of my life to learn, entertain, engage with the world around me. I couldn’t imagine living a life where I didn’t have it. There’s no disconnect from the modern day for me, no longing for the past - only the sense that I’m right where I want to be.

As a person, I’m content with where I am today. As an animal, a raptor can’t yearn for a time it has never lived.