“Justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought… Each person possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override.”*…
Stephen Colbert once observed that “reality has a well-known liberal bias.” And indeed, liberalism— the political/moral philosophy rooted in individual liberty, consent of the governed, and equality before the law– has been a major ideology through modern times… and, of course, the major ideology animating the founding of the United States.
But as Easten European states turn to authoritarians, Western European nations wrestle with the rise of nationalist far-right parties, and the U.S. is “steered” by MAGA using Project 2025‘s “map,” there’s a concern that liberalism’s days may be past.
Persuasion is running a series of essays on “Liberal Virtues and Values.”
The series, made possible with the generous support of the John Templeton Foundation, will make the case that liberalism has its own distinctive set of virtues and values that are capable not only of responding to the dissatisfaction that drives authoritarianism, but also of restoring faith in liberalism as an ideology worth believing in—and defending—on its own terms.
The latest installment is from Martin Gurri, who argues that Liberalism needs a new foundation (and that how we handle AI will matter fundamentally)…
That liberal democracy is in a state of terminal decline I take to be beyond dispute. Like Alice in the rabbit hole, those of us who dwell in democratic societies suffer from a nauseating sense of falling without ever landing on solid ground. The usual suspects blamed for this tumble—populism, inequality, the economy—are mere surface symptoms of an internal breakdown. We have arrived at the conclusion of a world-historical cycle. Liberal democracy is the procedural embodiment of Enlightenment ideology—and after two centuries of dominance, that ideology has lost all purchase and stands utterly exhausted.
Radical alternatives confront us. Either we reorient our system to post-Enlightenment principles or we risk staggering into the nihilist’s paradise I have called the Endarkenment.
Enlightenment philosophers placed their faith in reason and science. These are purely critical disciplines: liberal propagandists wielded criticism like a scalpel to dissect conservative laggards and utopian revolutionaries alike. Once triumphant at the “end of history,” liberal democracy turned the knife on itself—a process of self-criticism and self-doubt that has shredded its own ideals to ribbons.
The positive values inherited from the Enlightenment—equality, individualism, compassion—were always parasitic on Christianity. But Christianity, like all religions, has no place in a universe ruled by reason and science. Nietzsche long ago brought us the troubling news: the Christian God is dead. Oblivious to the implications of this calamity, liberal democracy kept marching like a cartoon character over the edge of the abyss, until the laws of moral gravity asserted themselves. So began the Great Fall.
Criticism is a force for progress so long as there are blatant irrationalities, like slavery or Jim Crow discrimination, to overcome. But under the hammer of Enlightenment ideals, modern society has been flattened, centralized, and rationalized. Deprived of obvious superstitions to debunk and totalitarian rivals to defeat, liberal democracy has been revealed in all its internal contradictions.
One such contradiction, I contend, pits the cherished principle of equality against the chosen few who actually practice reason and science: let’s call this the problem of the elites.
A second contradiction finds freedom of the press and of opinion arrayed against the need to protect objective truth: call it the problem of information.
Finally, freedom of worship and the life of the spirit collide head-on with the materialist criticism favored by Enlightenment ideology: the problem of meaning.
Each of these contradictions could prove fatal to the democratic project, but none is insoluble, and the search for solutions offers an opportunity for renewal. While there are no guarantees, we could emerge from the crisis with a better understanding of the reach and limits of equality, a more transparent information sphere, and even, it may be, a rich infusion of the transcendental into everyday life…
[Gurri unpacks each of those contradictions…]
… So what is to be done?
The first, obvious step is to move the question to the center of our shared conversations. The most capacious thinkers of the age should contemplate first principles and ultimate goals with at least as much intensity as they invest in Donald Trump or the latest economic report. There’s nothing artificial about this. Science and reason are necessary for modernity. Meaning and moral aspiration are necessary for humanity. A balance must be struck that preserves the one and gives full weight to the other.
Materialism, we must understand, is a valuable perspective for science but not a realistic appraisal of the human condition. Scientists work as if on a geometric point, abstracted from nature and indifferent to its dispositions. In reality, however, we come from nature, we are of nature, and we are far from indifferent to our place in it. Our intuitions are internal to the system: humanity’s spiritual quest is, in every sense, nature reflecting on itself. One such intuition is agency—the belief that, at the crossroads, I am free to go right or left, and I alone make the choice. Another is faith in causation. These stances are irrational, or rather pre-rational, but without them liberal democracy as well as science itself would be impossible.
In the end, materialism is self-defeating. To say, “I choose to be a materialist” is to fall into an absurd fallacy. Either our bodies, which consist of matter, obey unchanging laws, or the mind, transcending matter, is capable of choice. There can be no middle ground.
Politics, in a metaphysical age, will resume its traditional place as a secondary activity—a means to an end. This will leave liberal democracy vulnerable to false prophets who are willing to trample on individual rights in pursuit of some apocalyptic scheme. The interesting question is whether the post-truth condition will make the peril greater or lesser. On the one hand, the lack of universal firewalls might make it easier for a fanatic to flood the system. Yet post-truth itself, I believe, is the strongest kind of firewall. In our fractured, eternally contested environment, the progress of any totalizing doctrine will be painfully slow. The quest for meaning and the struggle over frames of reference are, in the end, really one and the same.
We have inherited a rich and evocative spiritual vocabulary, but it belongs to a worldview thousands of years old. “King of kings,” to cite just one example, should sound archaic in a democratic age. Can we awaken the scientific world to the spirit? Is it possible to sanctify our largely instrumental relations? This shouldn’t entail a belief in fairies and goblins, or even necessarily in religion. Any good empiricist will admit that the richest human lives are lived symbolically. Can we climb the symbolic ladder to the mountaintop, where meaning and modern humanity come harmoniously together—anchoring, it may be, a loftier understanding of equality and social life, and of the sanctity of truth?
We won’t know until we try. Pessimism, let me suggest, is unwarranted. History moves in mysterious ways. We may be due for a second coming of historian Karl Jaspers’ “Axial Age”: preachers and philosophers who conceived a drastically updated transcendental vision, with the rational and the sacred, truth and meaning, reconciled with political freedom.
For 200 years, we placed society under the sway of universal principles. That’s gone with the wind. We have entered an era of radical contingency, in which even truth is indeterminate. The natural tendency is to retreat to the certainties of the past—but there’s no going back. If we hope to preserve the gains from Enlightenment society, and resolve its many contradictions, we’ll have to do so within a new and wildly unstable conceptual framework.
With the spell of the Enlightenment broken, liberal democracy will have to redefine what “created equal” means. This process could end in a rigid caste system, with the institutions in the hands of self-selected mandarins who wield the power of the state to impose their “solutions.” Preferably, and more likely given the thrust of the new technology, we’ll see a flattening of the institutions and the continued trampling by the public into the sacred spaces of politics and communication.
Equality, however understood, will be forged in the will of the citizenry rather than granted by a benevolent God. That will make it contingent like everything else, and so liable to variation and in constant need of defense. And if perfect equality is an impossible dream, eternal inequality requires impossible discipline. The current elite class, already under enormous pressure, may lose its cohesion and melt into the impermanence of the age, divided among the various schools and sects and frames of reference.
The structure of information will follow the definition of equality. The commanding heights will be control over AI. If AI development and deployment is a closed game, the elites could set themselves up as intermediaries in the oracle of an omniscient divinity. If AI is a competitive product, the public will gain the upper hand. In that case, we can expect a flowering of eccentric applications, the individualization of commerce and industry, and the final overthrow of the expert class. The information sphere will remain the mirror to our passions, divisions, and metaphysical longings. Freedom of speech, no longer “endowed by our Creator,” will become the battleground on which the question of equality is ultimately settled.
Here I finally reveal myself in my true colors. I’m an analyst. My task is to describe reality, and that’s what this essay is about. But I also lead an active life inside the world that I’m describing—and I have preferences. I see equality as a factor of opportunity, law, and human dignity, not of perfect outcomes. I think truth emerges from examining a subject from a large number of perspectives, even those that may seem disturbing or false. I hope that my story—as a person, a father, a grandfather—connects to other stories in the past and will connect to more in the future, in a pattern that is not entirely devoid of meaning. And I believe fervently in liberal democracy, because—born in Cuba—I have tasted the alternative.
The breakdown of Enlightenment ideology is only the latest challenge liberal democracy has faced in my lifetime. I’m not entitled, as an analyst, to downplay the perils ahead, but I’m allowed, as an American, to have faith that they will once again be overcome…
Eminently worth reading in full: “The Search for a Post-Enlightenment Democracy”
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As we renew, we might send free-thinking birthday greetings to Henri-Benjamin Constant de Rebecque (or as he’s usually called, Benjamin Constant); he was born on this date in 1767. A French political thinker, activist, and writer on political theory and religion (whose work influenced, among many others, Sir Isaiah Berlin), Constant was a committed republican from 1795, backing the coup d’état of 18 Fructidor in1797, and the following one on 18 Brumaire, in 1799. He became the leader of the Liberal opposition in 1800, during the Consulate. Constant fell out with Napoleon, and had to flee (first to Switzerland, then to Saxony). Nonetheless, after his return to France, Constant sided with the Emperor during the Hundred Days, drafting the Charter of 1815. He became politically active again during the Bourbon Restoration and was elected to the Chamber of Deputies in 1818 (where he remained until his death in 1830). As the head of the Liberal opposition, known as Indépendants, Constant was one of the most notable orators in the Chamber, especially in his role as a proponent of the parliamentary system.
“Men argue. Nature acts.”*…
… and after Nature acts, so must we. But despite decades of warning, global emissions still aren’t falling.
As Madeleine Cuff reports, we should be springing into action…
It is now impossible for the world to limit global warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, with emissions on track to cause 2.8°C of warming by the end of the century, the UN says.
Despite increasingly urgent warnings from scientists outlining the dangers of warming above 1.5°C, global emissions aren’t yet falling and governments around the world aren’t doing anywhere near enough to decarbonise their economies.
The only way to meet the 1.5°C target now is by “overshooting” that goal in the short term, the UN said in its latest Emissions Gap report, before relying on vast amounts of global cooling, delivered via technologies such as direct air capture, in the latter half of the century.
This “lowest possible” overshoot scenario would see the global temperature rise peak at 1.7°C to 1.8°C, with a 50 per cent chance of temperatures falling back to 1.5°C by 2100. To deliver this, the world would need to cut emissions by 18 per cent by 2030, 45 per cent by 2035 and 69 per cent by 2040, relative to 2025 levels. Under current climate pledges, emissions will only fall by 5 to 8 per cent by 2030, and 11 to 15 per cent by 2035.
Many scientists are hugely sceptical that the lowest possible overshoot scenario is politically and technologically feasible, given the rapid pace of emissions cuts required and the huge volume of mechanical and natural cooling that would be needed to reduce global temperatures after 2050 to achieve it.
“We don’t know whether we can overshoot,” says Bob Watson, emeritus professor at the University of East Anglia in the UK and former chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. “We don’t know if any of those technologies are real, and so when people assume that we can meet 1.5°C or 2°C, and the assumption is based on overshooting and coming back, I think they’re in cuckoo land.”
Last year’s Emissions Gap report saw the UN warn that overshooting 1.5°C was now inevitable. This year’s analysis sets out new “overshoot pathways” designed to keep the 1.5°C goal – a political totem for many countries – on life support. It calls on nations to focus on delivering the “lowest possible” 1.5°C pathway.
“Overshoot is not surrender. We can still keep it as small and as short as possible – and bring temperatures back below 1.5 degrees by the end of the century,” UN Secretary-General António Guterres said in a statement.
But the UN’s new report makes it clear how far off track the world still is to deliver even this “limited overshoot” pathway. Current national policies put the world on track for 2.8°C of warming by the end of the century. If nations meet all their climate promises, that is lowered to 2.1°C. This is worse than last year’s projection of 1.9°C of warming, driven mainly by the US’s exit from the UN climate process.
Joeri Rogelj at Imperial College London says overshoot should be seen “as a failure that we try to rectify”. But he says there is still value in using the 1.5°C goal, rather than adopting a higher temperature goal that could be achieved without overshoot. “The target is still to limit harm to vulnerable and poor populations, and that we don’t do by resetting the target to an inadequate limit of 2°C, or 2.5°C,” he says. “In the public debate, this failure to stay within this most ambitious limit should re-emphasise the need to stay as close to it as possible.”
The best-case scenario now is that the planet will only temporarily breach 1.5°C of warming, but current climate pledges fall way short of that hope: “UN says 1.5°C is over and world is on track for 2.8°C of global warming” [archived version], from @tinymaddie.bsky.social in @newscientist.com.
* Voltaire
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As we act to ameliorate and adapt, we might recall that it was on this date in 2015 that Hurricane Wilma made landfall in the Everglades in Florida with maximum sustained winds near 120 mph. The hurricane accelerated across south Florida and the Miami/Fort Lauderdale area, exiting the coast later the same day. There were 10 fatalities in Florida, and nearly 6 million people lost power, the most widespread power outage in Florida history. Preliminary estimates of insured losses in Florida were over $6 billion, while uninsured losses were over $12 billion.
Scientists suggest that, while climate change may not increase the total number of storms (indeed, this year’s El Nino reduced them in the Atlantic), it will intensify hurricanes, making them stronger, wetter, slower-moving, and more destructive.
“Writing headlines is a specialty”*…
… and some are better at it than others. Greg Ross at Futility Closet illustrates, with an example from kinder, gentler times…
In 1986, Michael Kinsley, editor of The New Republic, spotted the headline “Worthwhile Canadian Initiative” in the New York Times and challenged his readers to come up with a more boring one. This was a tall order: The Times head, someone said, manages to be “not only boring as a whole, but boring word by word.” Submissions included:
- “U.S. Leadership Needed” (New York Times)
- “Trade, A Two-Way Street” (New York Times)
- “Beyond the News, Larger Issues” (New York Times)
- “Thoughts at Graduation Time” (New York Times)
- “Continue Manned Flight in Space” (New York Times)
- “Chill Falls on Warming Relations Between Australia and Indonesia” (New York Times)
- “University of Rochester Decides to Keep Name” (New York Times)
- “Dramatic Changes Fail to Materialize on Hill” (Washington Post)
- “Surprises Unlikely in Indiana” (Chicago Tribune)
- “CIA Analysis Sees Soviet Economy in Need of Changes” (San Diego Union)
- “Prevent Burglary by Locking House, Detectives Urge” (Boston Globe)
- “Methodists Oppose Use of Nuclear Arms” (New York Times)
- “Economist Dies” (Wisconsin State Journal)
- “Turbulent Days for Donald D. Engen” (New York Times)
The winner was found in the New York Times science section: “Debate Goes on Over the Nature of Reality.”
“Strike Up the Bland” (TotH to @frauenfelder.bsky.social and @boingboing.net)
* legendary copy editor Bill Walsh
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As we reminisce, we might recall that it was on this date in 2022 that the Chinese Communist Party elected Xi Jinping as General Secretary for an unprecedented third term, consolidating his position as China’s paramount leader. The election broke decades of leadership succession tradition (with had limited a supreme leader to two terms) within the Communist Party. A party organ’s headline read “Xi Jinping leads CPC leadership in meeting the press.”
“Your life has a limit, but knowledge has none”*…
Kurt Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems put a cap on what we can “know” from within the logical and perceptual systems in which we live. While Gödel’s focus was trained on mathematics, his insight has seen much broader application (e.g., here).
Alexander V. Gheorghiu argues that it’s not so simple– and that what we claim as “true” is not a ceiling we are forever failing to reach but something that changes as we climb toward it…
On the evening of 8 September 1930, the German mathematician David Hilbert stepped up to a microphone in Königsberg and addressed his countrymen by radio. He was 68, recently retired, and at the height of his fame. The talk was a defense of pure reason, delivered in the city of Immanuel Kant, and it ended with two phrases that would later be carved on his tombstone: Wir müssen wissen. Wir werden wissen. We must know. We shall know.
Are certain questions closed to the human mind? Are there truths about the world that we can never know? Hilbert thought that, at least within mathematics, this could not be the case. For him, mathematics was a game played with symbols: one could fix the right axioms as rules of the game and every mathematical problem could be solved. He was wrong.
The day before his Königsberg address, at a small academic meeting in the same city, a 24-year-old Austrian named Kurt Gödel had quietly announced that no such system for arithmetic could exist. Whatever reasonable set of rules you fix, something true must lie beyond them and thus beyond our knowledge. We can’t know. We won’t know. Gödel’s results, known as the Incompleteness Theorems, are landmark achievements of 20th-century logic. Recent work in philosophy and mathematics has begun to illuminate the gap they opened, and with it something deeper about the foundations of knowledge itself. The story begins in the same city, but two centuries earlier…
[Gheorghiu unpacks the arguments of Kant, Hilbert, and Gödel, then traces the work done since. He concludes…]
… In 2005, Tor Sandqvist, a doctoral student at Uppsala University, submitted a thesis that took up [Michael Dummett‘s]’s challenge: to justify the ordinary practices of mathematicians without any appeal to truth. Where Dummett had given the conditions a solution must satisfy, Sandqvist gave a solution. He produced a precise mathematical justification of deduction as mathematicians actually use it, grounded entirely in practices of assertion. The boxer’s fists were untied.
It was rediscovered a decade later in the Department of Computer Science at University College London, where a group of logicians recognised what Sandqvist had actually built, and developed it into a full framework on a par with the orthodox truth-conditional view. The framework now stands equal to the truth-based account, analogous to the situation after Gödel’s PhD thesis. What about mathematics? The UCL team have recently shown that the Dummett-Sandqvist framework gives a way to understand what Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems are about, and it is not the limits of knowledge.
If meaning comes from practices of assertion, then our concepts are settled only as far as our practices have settled them. A system of definitions is a kind of constitution that determines something. The US Constitution, for example, is meant to enshrine a form of democracy. But what a constitution defines answers to how it is amended.
Principia Mathematica is a constitution for arithmetic. To read it as a constitution is to assume it is consistent; otherwise, it would be nonsense. So, when we amend it by asserting that ‘Principia Mathematica is consistent,’ we are not changing the subject: the new axiom says aloud only what the practice already did. Gödel’s theorems apply afresh to the enlarged constitution: the amended system has its own unprovable truth, its own consistency it cannot certify. No amendment is the last; each faithful extension opens room for the next. To grasp a concept like arithmetic is not to survey a finished structure; it is to hold a principle for going on: a rule for laying the next stretch of line, not a map of where the line ends. Dummett called this openness indefinite extensibility.
Faithful is the word doing the work, because not every amendment is. Gödel claimed the US Constitution could deliver a dictatorship. That does not make dictatorship a form of democracy. Whatever loophole he had in mind, it would have contradicted the practices the Constitution already enshrined. An amendment can betray what a constitution defines. But it can also unfold it, drawing out what the founding commitments demanded all along. Only the second kind is what Dummett has in mind.
The constitution of our language is our current practice for public discourse. As it is extensible in this way, what we claim as ‘true’ is not a fixed structure with a ceiling we are forever failing to reach, but something that can change. Gödel’s verdict never applied to mathematics, but only to some edition of the constitution. Within the Sandqvist system, we can attend to the extension systematically. Hilbert’s words outlive his programme: Wir werden wissen. We shall know. Not because the answers are waiting at the end of a ladder, but because truth goes exactly as far as we have built the rungs…
Eminently worth reading in full: “The Ladder of Knowledge,” from @aeon.co.
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As we stand on the shoulders of giants, we might note that today is National Nut Day.
“All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream”*…
As All Saint’s Eve approaches, Karina Wilson weighs in (on her lovely blog, Horror Film History) on the remarkable series of films created by Roger Corman from the works of seasonal “hero” Edgar Allan Poe…
Corman was fond of literary adaptations, especially if the original was in the public domain. He mined Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories for some of his most memorable work between 1960 and 1964…
… In 1960 AIP execs Arkoff and Nicholson asked Roger Corman to make yet another pair of low-budget black and white horror films. He told them he had a better idea, a movie adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher. Nicholson and Arkoff initially balked at the concept, which differed wildly from their then-staple trade in monster B-pics aimed at drive-in adolescent audiences. “Where’s the monster?” asked Arkoff.
Corman reassured them the house was the monster (“The house lives. The house breathes”). He was becoming more and more interested in Freudian theory and wanted the adaptation to reference psychoanalytic theory. To Corman, the dark corridors and gaping portals of the decaying mansion were unmistakably female spaces. He was fascinated by the concept that buildings (or at least movie sets) can reflect the ego and the id. Daily activities happen as normal in the sunlit upper rooms of a mansion while shapeless terrors ooze within the gloom of the basement .
If a yonicentric set wasn’t enough to draw the crowds (at least subconsciously), Corman insisted Poe stories had built-in teen appeal thanks to the efforts of English Literature teachers everywhere (“He’s read in every high school”). Corman wanted to tap into widespread familiarity with the tales and the ongoing love affair with gothic horror fuelled by television reruns of Universal movies from the 1930s. He also wanted to make more lavish movies instead of perpetually budgeting on a shoestring. Always mindful of the market, he believed a classic literary adaptation could give AIP productions more mainstream (and adult) appeal and compete with the technicolor horror films being produced by Hammer in the United Kingdom and as part of the nascent Giallo movement in Italy. Arkoff and Nicholson, fully aware of Corman’s proven ability to deliver low budget quality in a timely fashion, agreed to the experiment.
For House of Usher (1960), Corman teamed up with actor Vincent Price, whose sonorous cod-Shakespearean vowels became synonymous with the storybook theater narration that would become emblematic of this cycle. Price had supposedly sworn off making horror movies after The Fly (1958) because he claimed he couldn’t keep a straight face on set. Corman lured him back to the genre with the prospect of playing Roderick Usher, a meaty, actorly role – and the rest is history. Corman tapped screenwriter Richard Matheson, (who was doggedly building his reputation as a master of the genre) for the script, which stuck quite closely to the original, adding a romance between Philip and Madeline. House of Usher was Corman’s first foray into color movies and cost a luxurious $270,000 ($50,000 of which reportedly went to Price). The production schedule was still tight (15 days) and Corman made the most of his expensive star by framing him against production designer Daniel Haller’s skilfully scavenged yet sumptuous looking sets. The result was a commercial and critical hit, grossing $2 million that summer and elevating American International Pictures’ aesthetic beyond Poverty Row. Arkoff and Nicholson, naturally, wanted more of the same.
Between the House of Usher (1960) and The Tomb of Ligeia (1964), Corman made seven Poe-related movies for AIP. Premature Burial in 1962 featured Ray Milland in the lead role but all the others starred Vincent Price (who would go on to make The Oblong Box in 1969, for AIP but without Corman). Matheson supplied scripts for The Pit and the Pendulum (1961), Tales of Terror (1962), The Raven (1963), while his friend Charles Beaumont wrote The Premature Burial, The Haunted Palace (1963), and The Masque of the Red Death (1964). Future Academy Award winner Robert Towne (Chinatown) penned the final entry, Tomb of Ligeia.
While he relied heavily on tried-and-trusted AIP personnel, Corman tried to switch things around tonally with each movie. This ensured a different experience for the audience each time rather than simply replicating what had gone before. Tales of Terror is quite cynical, even humorous in tone and The Raven is outright comedy-horror [and noteworthy as a rung on Jack Nicholson’s climb to stardom]. The Haunted Palace isn’t even based on a Poe story – it’s actually an adaptation of H. P. Lovecraft’s The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. AIP wanted to market it as part of the cycle, so they gave it the title of one of Poe’s poems, and bookended the action with narrated lines…
Read on… “Roger Corman’s Poe Cycle (1960-1964)” from @karinalw.bsky.social.
* Edgar Allan Poe, “A Dream Within a Dream“
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As we scream, we might recall that it was on this date in 1988 that Lair of the White Worm was released in the U.S. A “supernatural comedy horror film” loosely based on the 1911 Bram Stoker novel of the same name, it was written, produced, and directed by the remarkable Ken Russell, and starred Amanda Donohoe, Hugh Grant, Catherine Oxenberg, and Peter Capaldi; it follows the residents in and around a rural English manor that are tormented by an ancient priestess after the skull of a serpent that she worships is unearthed by an archaeologist.
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