The Book of Miranda | gxg | ✔︎

Historical and Scriptural Notes

I've received a number of questions about the worldbuilding details of this book over the course of posting it, including (but not limited to) which names, places, and/or historical events were drawn from reality, and which were merely inspired by it. I find this stuff fascinating, so I figured I'd write up some of my research notes for you all!

I'll start with geography. While some of the place names in this book are made to sound tonally similar to real ones, none of them are real places. Southern Englemark is fictional, the only Dervin Channel I'm aware of is a YouTube channel, and there is no Town of Miranda. I've also been asked whether this book is set in a fictional bastardization of Europe or America. The answer is... I have no idea! It's plausible to assume either, as I ripped off historical events in both and have made no attempt to replicate real 16th Century boarding school life on either side of the Atlantic. I used the late 1700s and early 1800s as aesthetic inspiration for this world, but I play just as fast and loose with that as I do with geography. Sorry, history nerds.

Oh, and don't bother googling Every Tree Shall Cry by Crichton or the Apocryphal Cathedral in Fallen Angel by T.H. Ackerley. Neither exists.

Here's where things start to get interesting. While the Santa Clarissa Cathedral is likewise made up, inspiration for the fictional witch trials of Vries-del-Mar and Southern Englemark comes from the Salem Witch Trials in colonial Massachusetts in the early 1690s. The Sectant Expulsion, meanwhile, migrates one step closer to still-distant reality. The fictional House of Heymair is described in this book as pre-Protestant, aligning it in-world with the century just before the Protestant Reformation. That Reformation was a very real Catholic-Protestant religious uproar that took place at the end of the Middle Ages. While it was waged more in pamphlets than swords, I borrowed one detail from it that readers of this book might recognize.

One of the tenets of Protestantism that the Catholic Church hated was the notion that anyone—even common people—could read scripture and draw their own conclusions. This was backed up by the Protestants' strategic leverage of the rise of the printing press to mass-distribute their own materials to an increasingly literate population. This threatened the religious authority of Catholic priests, who opposed this democratization of Christianity. In this time, Biblical translations into commoners' languages sprang up all over. The Cult of Miranda in this novel arose among common people. This is why the Miranda Bible was written in English, not the standard Latin of the Church at the time.

What about those extra chapters in that cultist Bible? Surprise: Those are all real! The Books of Jubilees and 1, 2, and 3 Enoch all exist, though the dominant Christian and Jewish churches of today all consider them apocryphal—a fancy word for Biblically non-canonical. Contrary to logical assumption, the three books of Enoch are unrelated to one another. Various sects and denominations recognize some of these books in different parts of the world:

❖ Jubilees and 1 Enoch (sometimes referred to as "The Book of Enoch") are included in the recognized scriptures of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, and Beta Israel (Ethiopian Jews).

❖ The origins of 2 Enoch (also known as Slavonic Enoch, Slavic Enoch, or the Secrets of Enoch) are unclear, but it saw its primary use among the Bogomils, a Christian sect in 10th Century Bulgaria.

❖ Originally known as The Book of the Palaces, The Book of Rabbi Ishmael the High Priest, or The Elevation of Metatron, 3 Enoch is not recognized as canonical by any Christian or Jewish denominations.

These books have one thing in common, other than their status as apocrypha: they all mention fallen angels. This was what led me to include them in the Miranda Bible for this book. The excerpts Des reads are all real translated verses, down to the names of the fallen angels within them. The only edit I made was MSTM. This is a fictional short-form of "Mastema" with religious inspiration. In Biblical Hebrew, the theonym (proper name) of God is written as the tetragrammaton, four letters representing the consonants of the actual name. Its written and spoken use in the Jewish faith are subject to certain prohibitions due to the name's holy nature.

Because of this holiness, it's customary to omit or change letters in the tetragrammaton (or write God as G-d) to avoid invoking the name in its full—and therefore holiest—form. Judaism isn't the only religion to do this, either! Given fictional-Mastema's expressed intentions to overthrow God, then, it felt like something he would mandate among his followers. 

In the Book of Jubilees, Mastema is indeed God's designated tester of humans, with a job of corrupting and leading them astray prior to God's judgment. Details about him are murky, so I took creative liberty in picking and sticking to a single narrative about his origin story. In some scriptures, he is said to be a fallen angel (rather than a demon by origin), so one can only presume in that case that God got sick of him at some point and booted him to Hell.

There are many other research-inspired details in this book's setting, but if I went into all of them, I'd be here for a year. If you want to fall down a few of these quirky little rabbit holes yourself, look up medieval marginalia, cruciform gothic cathedrals, and the secret behind the number 666. If you're the same kind of nerd as I am, I promise you'll have fun!

Last but not least, why the female God?

Because I can, friends. Because I can.