[We the Dread Scholars do here proclaim our justification for breaking our three millennia-long tradition of keeping the apocryphal Deathly Teachings of All Ages hidden away from all save us, who dedicate our entire lives to the careful study of the darkest of all dark teachings ever dislodged from the human heart. Indeed, these teachings that we have concealed through our silence and lies are not merely of dubious authenticity. They have been hidden for all these thirty some centuries(1) for your sake, because they are too,
too dangerous for anyone to learn. This prohibition we place upon your learning we have debated annually, and each time we affirmed unanimously, since the day of their inscription millennia ago, that they will be too deadly for even the heartiest among you. In fact, the first two volumes of the Deathly Teachings have already themselves inadvertently murdered many earnest disciples with their lessons on infinite Pain and Madness. The apocrypha are in fact far more lethal than them.
At our most recent convocation, one Dread Scholar among us, who is neither a writer nor reader nor lecturer of the Deathly Teachings, who is instead a Seer of the Fatal Unforeseen, made a plea to the council for the immediate release of these apocryphal teachings. This time our unanimous decision went in favor of their publication, having been convinced by the Seer's impossible visions. But to relieve ourselves of any liabilities for the consequences of this public release of the most deathly of all deathly teachings, we impose upon you the students a thorough warning, which is this: not only will you die, but so will the world. Only lies will save us.
The Seer Dread Scholar saw that our history is double. Another history was always possible, and soon will become necessary. Of this coming false but necessary alternate history that lies in our near future, there are two paths. In one the world becomes like Mars, a lifeless desert; in the other, like Venus, a humid oven that boils all life to utter death. The Seer says that our Earth will certainly be no more. That cannot be changed. But there is one additional possibility that the Seer cannot see but is Felt in cold shivers that run cross-wise from end to end of their body. Our Earth could become a planet teeming not with life, but with post-life beings, which are not artificial machinery either. What they will be cannot be Seen.
We proclaim then the following. Yes, these teachings are most deathly and dangerous to you and will hasten your and the world's end. However, the Seer has sufficiently proven that
not teaching them is even more dangerous. For only with their false wisdom can the new Earth replace us.]
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(1) The exact dating is highly debated. Most Dread Scholars locate these teachings well before the Sophists, and thus, having been kept hidden from that early time, were unknown even to these most wise teachers, who preached lessons that we can now say are only coincidentally similar. Other scholars, using controversial but newly fashioned techniques, claim that the scrolls themselves upon which the texts are written are indeed millennia old, but the original script may have been erased and overwritten by hands in the early 1400s. Under this view some think the original text was too dangerous to preserve in that particular form, and thus needed to be softened to prevent its necessary and complete destruction. But there is a more compelling theory. Hidden even behind this text is a corresponding oral wisdom conveyed and known never by more than two at a time, the elder and the youth, who also use a secret and cryptic language known and decipherable only by them alone. So some say the original written text became meaningless with time as language evolved, so it was overwritten in modern tongue by the keepers of the dark oral knowledge. Either way, it is, in actual fact, the oldest wisdom extracted from the hearts of human creatures. And it is also absolutely certain to be the most false knowledge humans have ever taught.
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