Potherion's Inversion

The two great controversies of the Peerage of Meld were the Age of Creation argument found in discussion of the Dawn Age, and the cosmologies of the theorem of the plane and the theorem of the round world.

An ancient people was said to believe that the world was an orb floating in a glossy sea of ether.   Another group posited that the world was like one sheet, upon which the people live, and heavens were suspended over them.  The theorums of Potherion and Gigerius would go to war on the basis of these two ancient cosmologies and have been at war for millennia since.

Potherion posited that the mathematics of the world made no sense given the long standing doctrine of the world as established and codified in the philosophy of Gigerius.  Some mathematics and geometries would work under the theory of the plane, some would work with the idea of the globe, but the globe was seen as superstition, since the sun, Lucai, did not shine proportionally on all the world if the globe was seen as the truth.

Gigerius in his Lectures Comsos Hermeneutica, examined the wider world, trying to come to a substantive universal theorem.  Essentially, he sought early understanding of the order and cosmos of the world around him.  Gigerius came from Atarans, which largely held the ancient global belief, citing scripture to back the claim.  Gigerius declined the, "Mental paupery of the globalist."  His Lectures promoted the plane theory, and revealed how it was consistent with the testimony of nature and the evidence of order in the world.

Potherion, a polymath in his day, was quite excited about the expansive mathematics of his native Meld, and his geometries did not allow for the Plane Theory to be consistent.  A massive undertaking of he and his students found them walking and taking measurements and writing their findings from Meld through the Nine Cities, to Braehurt.  The Academa Potherion, his collected students and colleagues, would discover that not only did their discoveries mitigate against the prevailing science of the Lectures but did not fit the schema of the globalist either.

Potherion, taking ill from the trip, would have his chief student Anaca write his findings to Meld and to his collegue Gigerius in Atarans.  Gigerius would begin writing back to Anaca, and to Potherion and his other students, sometime charitably, sometimes abrasively.  Their combative writings would be collated by Anaca in famed Anaca's Dialogus Contentum.

As the Dialogus, as a singluar work, began to circulate in coastal cities, Potherion would worsen, growing more ill by the day.  His students, on advice from physick, would see him moved southward, away from the mountains and nearer to the coast.  The trip would be hard on him, and his health would deteriorate.  One of his students would record an event in his last days.  As Potherion sat fever sick in his room he watched a spider of some breed, given to using its web as a net, from which it would hide behind, holding the net as both camouflage and trap.  When the unsuspecting prey approached, it would launch forward, turning the flat net into a trap around the pray.  The student said he saw the glassy eyes of his master fill with wonder and he would say, "At last, the gods have given me to see!  We live not upon a goddess, nor do we nestle on her blanketed world, laid out for us.  No, we are like this fly, we are trapped within!"  His theorm would be written by his students, and would be passed about, called Potherion's Inversion.  For he did not see the world as a globe upon which we stand, but a globe in which we live.  He saw the world as a great, round orb, which we stand on the inside of, looking up into the ether and our stars buoyed within it.

His theory so angered the natural philosophers, and the priests, at its dire portents, and its terrible notion, that all is one great cage that they would rail against the texts of the Academa Potherion. Dozens of his students would be caught and beaten as they pamphleteered the Nine Cities with their findings. Potherion would never live to see the grudging acceptance of his theories decades later, as they would come to be a somewhat fashionable school of though in Noorlund.