Ahoc Vahado

Ahoc Vahado is one of the most prominent philosophers of Nalw, best known for his "linguistic paradigm", in which he compares people and phenomena to words. A corollary of this paradigm is that people should focus ideally on a few core skills and pursuits, and learn to master those. Vahado himself takes this to heart; aside from his philosophy, he spends most of his time, when he's not meditating on his own philosophies, creating pottery or in astronomical observations, these being the particular skills, aside from philosophy, to which he has decided to devote himself. Vahado's pottery, in fact, fetches a fair price on the market, though probably more due to its association with his fame than due to its intrinsic quality. In any case, Vahado neither sells the pottery himself, nor keeps the proceeds for his own use; his disciples carry it from his home and market it, and the money it brings in goes toward the upkeep of their schools and other institutions.

Vahado lives on a platform of land coral high up on a spine called Awal. Though he claims to prefer a simple life, over the years his followers have constructed for him a sizable villa, comprising a large oval-shaped building surrounding by a number of outbuildings. Vahado himself usually spends most of his time on the main building's roof and rarely sets foot inside, though some of his followers have summoned various guardians to keep the building safe in his absence.

Description

Ahoc Vahado is a craggy man who looks to be in his mid to late thirties but is actually well past fifty. His skin is light brown, his hair slightly darker and graying at the temples. An old scar on the left side of his head leaves his face slightly lopsided, that side of his mouth seeming canted in a perpetual smirk. His eyebrows are shaggy, his nose thin and knobby. Vahado typically wears his hair down almost to his shoulders, and sports a thin mustache and goatee.

The usual costume Vahado wears includes a knee-length tunic and sturdy leather straps wrapped around his feet in lieu of shoes. He almost always wears a superhumeral; he has several such vestments, and is seldom seen without one draped over his shoulders. He has been asked about the significance of this item, but usually answers merely that not everything has a deep meaning to it.

Philosophy

The philosophical principle Vahado is best known for is the idea that everything (and everyone) is best encapsulated as a single concept or collection of concepts, and that trying to broaden them too far dilutes them to impotence. This is often allegorized by the so-called "linguistic paradigm", likening each object and person to a particular word, and discussing that as words have only so many meanings, an object or person has only so many things it can effectively stand for or focus on.

Another of Vahado's most famous concepts is the Parable of the Mirror, an apologue constructed to make a point about the potentially illusive nature of free will. While it was never really a major component of his thinking, this parable has somehow attracted disproportionate attention from the public, and is one of the first things that most people only superficially familiar with Vahado associate with him.

History

Ahoc Vahado was born to a lower-class family in the circumspinal nation of Tharac. He was apprenticed to a potter at a young age, but never showed much interest; always a distractible child prone to spells of cogitabundity, he was already precociously beginning to develop the germs of what would become his famous philosophies. By Vahado's teen years he was already started to accrue a few followers, and there were those who predicted that he would be a great philosopher someday. They were, of course, proved right in time—and ironically Vahado spent more time on pottery after becoming recognized as a great philosopher than he ever did before.

Influence

Now one of the best known philosophers of Nalw, Ahoc Vahado has an estimated eight million disciples, and several academies dedicated to his teachings, the largest of them an institution called the Godarium in Iepelo. He is the national philosopher of Beradaland, Chale, Iepelo, Jerrefane, and Riedan, though not of his native nation of Tharac.

Putting his linguistic paradigm into practice with regards to actual languages—or so, at least, is their claim, though Vahado himself has not officially endorsed their endeavor—a coterie at the Glass School in Ogadi has developed an artificial language called Umum, designed to be free of ambiguity (with, many linguists have argued, very questionable success). Vahado has made his mark on other languages as well, in a way; distorting mirrors are in many areas called "ahocs", by association with his Parable of the Mirror—albeit rather inaptly, as aside from involving mirrors they have little to do with the parable.